Doris Leadbetter, Tim Thorne
Kerry Loughrey, Bruce Roberts
wielding bags and poetic baggage
from the Tasmanian Poetry Festival.
A day's break and rushed breather
between poem and delivery
becomes the twist of highway
over the misty Sidling
the red-brown spud ground
Launceston to the East Coast
and first name familiarity
wrung from the family wagon
as correct as age and gender
might allow four caged poets
to spin each other's metre.
We catch sleep at St Helens
and while my cohorts traverse
scenery as kids might ride
channels on morning television
I fire up the first workshop
for three and their apology.
The first one up
from the coming down
of Festival
I read, declaim, enthuse;
rub minds from rhyme
until when touched they bruise.
We tour bakeries and breakers,
sway the alignment toe
of Tim's touch steering to the road
to sweet Bicheno
Beesheeno, BithenO,
cast from a caught-fish audience
in eight-ball parlour and lounge
of tourists and fisherfolk
to the local arts menagerie
who eat their fill of us and depart
I trust, replete with wine and verse
while the local druggist (legit)
proffers oysters for our throats
and Pinot from a vineyard up the track
while a politician's sibling
whose electorate is the sea
and dogs oil tenders on Bass Strait
booms loud on stranded Cats.
Wednesday begins a tourist day
of bitumen bounce and cliff top jumps
a camera stop; Hazards of the Freycinet
to opp-shops at Triabunna
in the woodchip loader's shadow
and bush through wild Buckland
stone church and tourist coach
where escapers might have prayed
for such conveyance to take them back
to the sea-level stone and molly
of Port Arthur but home nevertheless,
if not more permanent than poetry
taken midday within the walls of Risdon,
nor more modern than the brochured
penitentiary but further from the city.
And here's the irony
a stone's throw from first settlement
housing commission, pub and goal
through gates on radio-latch
two not-so innocent poets stroll
the misdemeanour of their scansion
to speak of prison verse
and argue for contemporary voice
in published and best-selling company
while tatts perform their own art
some pens find cadence of the walls
stretch time like gaps between the bars.
We sidle into the freeman's sun
from Risdon Gaol and leave its inmates
pregnant with the politics of poetry
that came without censor's scissor
and brought with it a key to thought
inside a PIece of Cake.
ABC Radio transmits our words
mountain to earth from a cell of glass
that dampens utterance.
In interview we play the duo well:
the tour, our sponsors, the publication
of my book and launch by Peter Hay
at 5.30 Pearce's Hobart Bookshop
In the Church of Latter Day Consumers
spine to spine with friends and literati
before the four of us at the Wheatsheaf
eight Pieces of Cake and a squabble
of poets and listeners feeding
seagull of jealousies in The City
already looking forward to tomorrow
night's read at Middle Pub Cygnet
where be warned, "rats skate plumbing
upon the dungeon ceiling
and urinals are in perpetual flush
above your head."
I remind myself to aim for their eyeballs
but first a workshop at Cosgrove High
with Kerry Loughrey for twenty-five
hand-picked "talented and enthusiastic"
first-thing Thursday morning
in working-class Glenorchy
where bullshit won't sell words
but might buy a line of poetry.
Cygnet is around a bend on mudflats,
home of apples, hippies, fish
and well-heeled redundancies.
The readings compete round for round
with a folk guitar and voice duo
and the rat doesn't show
but the amp is cranked full-crank
against urinal hiss and compressor
and our reading succeeds to excess.
Friday, free day before a night read
to bookshops and university
Trades Hall comrades, coffee at Retros
to New Norfolk slipping into our four-up
routine with ease at the butt-end
of lounge between kitchen and bar,
counter tea before rock band
but not locked away where we
would have been had, like poetic curio
for mature audiences only
as we are billed; for Doris with Arthur
in hand or in touch with her body?
for Tim and his history of the island's
mad ancestors or allusion to the Nufarm
drug habits of Rural Youth?
for Kerry and her definition of nations
New Zealand and Australia
Dunedin/Derwent Valley sheep?
for Bruce and the tattoo as poem
a hundred fucks a minute
not a metric foot of fucks?
for the mixed bag of audience
city and country's expectant of rhyme
and expectant of ... anything ... rain?
We leave the birdshit snow
of Mt Wellington for the tree-dead
Midlands and Northwest milking cows.
Kerry and Tim workshop
Somerset while I take Doris to home turf
to the Flowerdale Valley.
Then Wynyard where two weeks ago
eighty people turned out
for my booklaunch and reading
barely one quarter hit the Bottom Pub
for four poets in a hotel dining room
while the c & w refugees in the carpark
vomit their way from steel guitar
wary that Dylan's voice may have rested
against a Falcon utility.
The sea breeze dodges the golf club
and trips lovers from vagrant shrubs
weathering exposure on the river bank.
One more sleep, one more gig
at the Backpacker's Bar in Devonport
to good Sunday night fare
of pumpkin soup, crusty rolls and a beer.
Gone now the last Pieces of Cake
in the kathump of disconnected mike
in the last hesitant clap
in the last words of thanks:
Arts Council, Book Council
caught like a crumb from all of our
performances and the farewell bite
as though someone pinched the icing.