It’s the final day of QLD Writers Week 2011 and what a great week it has been. We have explored the big sky country of Western QLD, felt the pull of the Brisbane River, looked into the dark corners of Fortitude Valley and tasted the salt of the Pacific as it hits the headland at Byfield National Park. And finally, we walk through the landscape of Nathan Shepherdson’s mind and into the majestic Glasshouse Mountains.
Words instead of geography
Am I the wrong poet on the right bus? I don’t consider myself a poet of place. Even as a general question it’s a difficult one to answer? An Italian friend/poet/translator Massimiliano Mandorlo recently asked me to send him books by Queensland poets. In the end I took the easy way out and sent books published in Queensland by poets living in Queensland at the time of publication. Some of the poets still lived here, some didn’t. Others lived here, but were not born here, and still had very strong connections elsewhere. Only a couple were born here and still lived here.
In Italy dialect is solidly built into the language, so regional traits can be very distinctive. Matt Hetherington tells me he can pick a Queensland poem because it often mentions mangroves. I’d never thought about this myself, but did find one example in my own work:
this mangrove seed
is a four page book
full of waxy definitions
of its own green
This verse comes from my Marian Drew piece. It’s not emblematic usage more botanical metaphor. (I’d been looking at a seed while watching my son swim at Mooloolaba). Tom Shapcott still associates and is widely associated with Queensland. His most recent book is called Marcoola. His head is an archive of facts and experiences relating to Queensland. He hasn’t lived here for over 30 years, but is one of this state’s best poets.
So the question of place in my work does not have a simple answer. I am a poet living in Queensland, not a Queensland poet. (This question of course was asked by Graham Nunn who to my mind is a Queensland poet living in Queensland). I’m just as likely to be wandering around in a language or a landscape. I live at the Glasshouse Mountains. A remarkable place. Remarkable because of what they are and what they represent. If there is a place for them in my work, it’s to remind me of my insignificance. I accept that I am dust with a pulse and a temporary passport. It’s easier to witness something if you’re not there. We invent perception to invent ourselves.
Taking stock as at 9.08pm on 6th October 2011, the sum total of lines in my work describing the mountains is four. The lines are from i had a dream i was talking to Lawrie Daws on the phone:
volcanic cathedrals
encircled by the fossils of worshippers yet to be found
gargantuan punctuation
marked out in a sentence that reads the curve of the earth
This signals a type of failing in my creative process. The lines do not name the mountains. They have wonderful names – Beerwah, Ngungun, Coonowrin, Tibrogargan among others. Considering them as words instead of geography, they come from a different language, and my culture was an invading one from a different hemisphere. Now eight years after writing the poem I see a small syllabic crossover between Tibrogargan and gargantuan. The second starts where the first ends. This simple statement could apply to cultures, languages, time, individuals, or breathing. Maybe that’s where I am. Breathing too is a constant and enjoyable presence in my life, but I don’t necessarily need to describe it on a regular basis. The landscape I live in describes itself very well without my intervention. I’m pleased to be part of what I don’t belong to.
The four lines come from a long poem focussing on the painter Lawrence Daws. Perhaps in a splintered way I was supplanting my descriptive inabilities into his success? Daws has incorporated the Glasshouse Mountains into his work with profound skill and intelligence for over 30 years. However Daws acknowledges that where you are is also a metaphysical point of departure. Talking about his 1978 work View of the Himalayas from the Glasshouse Mountains, he says “This is my spot, from here I can look out and see the whole world, you know. That’s why I did (this) painting. This is a place where I can feel free to move in any direction, and react in any particular way. ….I like to be able to ramble mentally”.
In one way my poem was an attempt to understand the process of painting, but I couldn’t avoid what Daws painted. It’s not uncommon to record what something looks like, but it is uncommon to capture what it is. To work out what something is (in this case a landscape) you have to dismiss yourself in the presence of something that is virtually eternal. Daws understands the temporal nature of creativity and the thoughts required for its production. He had to become the chair he was sitting on in order to get the best view.
Lawrence Daws and Geoffrey Dutton were very close friends. Geoffrey Dutton also lived at the Glasshouse Mountains in his later years, near the base of Coonowrin. Here are the opening lines of a poem he wrote about that mountain:
Magma that froze
In the volcano’s throat . . .
Even geology
Turns into poetry.
Dutton moved here in October 1991. My wife and I also moved here in 1991. Unfortunately I never met Dutton. In his autobiography Dutton states simply “Working here is working in paradise”. Dutton obviously had a more straightforward relationship to this landscape than I do, as his beautiful sequence Moving to the Glasshouse Mountains attests. Perhaps either with brush or word you need to remove yourself from the landscape before there is any hope you will find (or attempt to find) yourself in it?
Twenty years later I’m still here. In geological time this is only a moment. In that moment I am still accompanied by my wife and now also accompanied by two children, four books and a dog. Inside my work-day train I am delivered to Brisbane by stainless steel envelope. I see a back-view of Tibrogargan from my house, and from the train look directly into its mythological face. The sky has it under surveillance. It’s a dark-stone mirror on which I reflect but in which I cannot be reflected.
Perhaps there is a fragment of Kierkegaard in my view when he says “Just like plunging a finger into the soil to recognise what land we’re in, I poke my finger into life: it has the odour of nothing.” I don’t see this as a negative. The magnitude of the cycle we’re a part of allows us no opportunity to compete with it.
So is the place where you are right now depicting your presence or your absence? Which would you prefer? Somewhere else could also be here if it consents to your invitation. The landscape flies over its own memories. You just happen to be in some of them.
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Postscript
In the best tradition of self-contradiction I felt dissatisfied with the fact I had only written four lines about the Glasshouse Mountains in twenty years. The mountains are an important part of my daily life. I do walk around them as an adjunct to either creating or resolving certain (or uncertain) thoughts. So I used Graham’s question as challenge to respond. Taking stock (again) as at 11.01 am on 8th October my Glasshouse image repository has increased in size but is still small. The following work was written yesterday. . .
what odour in light (glasshouse triptych)
I
what odour in light
before it was stone
a handful of mountains
purchased before memory
when clouds carried new water
or reconciled invented gas
into chemistries of licked chance
folding all as if soil
was a fresh conglomerate
of egg whites and lava
in a sunset beneath the earth
where red would not be abandoned
within an endless speech
of unmeasured violence
a temperature is set in space
with enough breath
to rehydrate an ocean
and recognise the brittle grey
where energy sufficiently departed
allows the footprint of an insect
on its death
a mountain
extends it death
and to this point
is complete time
found in a leaf
II
in what magnitude
is landscape a skin
grafted to an eye
words made over
in the wrong language
before which
i present myself
in order to be expelled
this is the place
we lift up rocks
looking for tongues
in the hope
of never finding them
i followed their names
back to the mountains
but knew without question
they would not speak to me
if i spoke to them
a mountain
has the luxury
of hiding
in its own form
and this lungless family
knitting tears into creeks
have suffered our thoughts
into farmland
III
tear holes in space
until bones
fall out of the seasons
mountains sing
in a voice
only fossils will hear
trees will burn anyway
when an ant
finds food
it finds itself
on rhyolite & trachyte
shadows divorce the sun
until they’re in love
we murder absence
with our presence
we crawl into a cave
and find silence
dining on flies
thoughts are mortar
the lifespan of an apostrophe
depends on its ability
to abbreviate more than words
landscapes occur
in the memory
of a climate
without memory
is evidence just
conceived in the fact
that it is here
following itself in to
chasing itself out of
regenerating graves
this language
is an introduced species
the mountains move
when we’re asleep
whisper their faces
onto elastic maps
that will never exist
nathan shepherdson – october 2011
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Nathan Shepherdson has won the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize twice (2004, 2006), the 2005 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Award, 2006 Newcastle Poetry Prize and 2006 Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award. His first book Sweeping the Light Back into the Mirror (UQP 2006) won the Mary Gilmore Award in 2008. In 2008 he released ’what marian drew never told me about light’ (Small Change Press) and his most recent collection, Apples with Human Skin was published in 2009 by University of Queensland Press.
