Published 5 November 201628 November 2016 · Poetry On the Occasion of Gig Ryan’s Sixtieth Birthday Editorial team A Sapphic collaboration That it's pure, when it comes from their mouth, well I'd spend two dollars on earplugs. I'd drink milk and cider together. See a green object move around a window One of our first meetings prompted that poem writ ten in English then self-translated into Chinese ad hoc without your knowledge but No free cigarettes The little tribe approach the statue and read the inscription. I thought they were ghosts but now I've a new prescription. Wear a red sash and vote for competence Any more. Back to twenty zero zero When you called and said: Are you mad or something I, for the first time, realised someone did Care, white as she is Imprimatur before its time cons a vice— getting nostalgic for last drinks, freedom was the coincided dream she polishes like a saint at breakfast. Her massive smoke hinges through his tinder, its female fry a script that writes itself. She can hear the sharply dented air around this guy— here comes her poem. In turn, undiagnosed visions ran rampant— the penultimate hook, the cohabited skin: shipping out, keel-jammed, in search of a less public solitude. Meanwhile the basement carpark fills with liquid, spreading thin as mirror, turning; discandied images drift, open-mouthed, to the entrance. Lines come into sight. A few photos in the altogether prove nothing. Disinhibited, sure, and Nordic. Just tomboy types relaxing, taking the air: kind of genius. then that redolence died and it was natural landlords every/nowhere, like reeds, or romance and the economy wilfully obscure, a bulletin smeared Jealousy’s too bad. If our paths cross, don’t blink. At least we’ll get to share the thrill of being discreet (discrete), explicit, inviolate, imperturbable. erupting into a palm, light from a phone. space tourism going wrong, and maybe right sound of rescuing a horse from a mine shaft what, all ultimate creak / your house tortured like an albatross / where children squawk your name over / and last birds call hearing birds fall out of trees / the wings of home enfold you and lock Value this longevity paired with distance over depth; for neighbourly chitchat, insert real talk only every so often, growing lean as a poem factory birds pipe like an alarm / we lay the falcon / before the rain birds whistle and you become a statue they mate and peck on above the traffic Ranging wild from heat of the west to inner- city raining Melbourne or raining London your sun not receding like tail-light, still high- beam on the long road Go to city galleries, taking stock of culture past and present and filtered always; west to east and back again, hook turns, long straights. Swan River → Yarra. an exhortation condenses and appears with statue draperies positioned now to break magnolia tessellated silence insert routine bell Light will fasten firmly on claw and talon, and so gods will take their place inside blankness, listen hard to what comes of flowers holding: gravel road back home. gilt curlicues will be briefly permitted while protesters reveal the street’s true function building new monuments to intuition glyphic present tense At the bar you stifle a desire to spit like the camel you watched when flying out of San Francisco (missing the Bowie rerun for the second time Because if, as you have it, each poem says fuck you to the last, this one should do the same. It should throw down the gauntlet, cause discomfort, pull us into thought. and accidentally hitting nature docos which spooked you but the camel made sense, grinding molars like a day-tripper, like the people drinking behind you) And if description starts to get the better of our lump of sand, we can look once more to those strands of poems you hate. Still an apt guide for what not to do. Motor breeds a tight, dark plane where silky spills Now in, now out, an exit hesitated or phantasm suggested with broad issue, crystal hard magma. Fringe sittings outlasted lunch market a maze Choice of tones, shades—season Rosa (Luxemburg) Politics of ultramarine feeds summer She knows the orbit Feedingly we moped, but regained our sassy Once she was among us, bringing the future Swathed in the kind of brow we could only hope For. This. This happened. Crescent cut the rooftops, city of imprints Two decades plane trees half a ring but who counts Bells pre-Christmas burnt through sun—embankment stones Regards amethyst Or Orpheus, chopped head flotsam on shit creek and still he can’t stop talking—Now your thoughts on politics, please, while I wash up—A night sky, he’d show the saucepan— Pure Bane: the fire rises. Aperitifs change but the purpose of the meal remains the same. we feast on the detritus like a business like a hospital. Now show me the marks where the cut head starts self- grafting—says, ‘Look at you, making the whole room gloomy’—Yes, he checked—‘She was always shit at following orders’— Siri, we can’t assume the car isn’t packed with enough small screws to atomise a lie when the bomb detonates and the poem mewls, unslakeable thirst. If life were a rapprochement of adjectives Companion words would populate Union Street We scratch all our names on love’s carbon footprint Skirt driveways of fate. Only you can write an urban calculus Of Sydney Road madonnas in gilt-edged frames The inner north as true north Jerusalem Bel cantos equate. The poets: Michael Farrell (1 & 3) Ouyang Yu (2 & 4) Louis Armand (5 & 7) Bonny Cassidy (6 & 8) Kate Lilley (9 & 11) John Hand (10 & 12) Toby Fitch (13 & 15) Tracy Ryan (14 & 16) John Kinsella (17 & 19) Ella O’Keefe (18 & 20) Kate Fagan (21 & 23) Aden Rolfe (22 & 24) Melinda Bufton (25 & 27) Nguyen Tien Hoang (26 & 28) Lisa Gorton (29 & 31) Liam Ferney (30 & 32) Ann Vickery (33 & 34) Edited by Corey Wakeling Afterword – Corey Wakeling This poem, compiling seventeen poets’ contributions, celebrates the occasion of Australian poet Gig Ryan’s sixtieth birthday. Gig Ryan – a poet whose work cites the many philosophical and political problems of the contemporary world, yet has the contrary aesthetic reputation of untimeliness, ambiguity, angularity, even defiance. ‘On the Occasion of Gig Ryan’s Sixtieth Birthday’ invites a transhistorically important poetic form – the Sapphic – to unnerve as well as inspire the collaborative ideas of seventeen contemporary Australian poets regarding a significant occasion and an experimental brief. That brief involved confidentiality, blind courage, generosity, and an embrace of contingency. More than the seventeen participants were invited to write for this panegyric, all of whom I knew to be admirers, friends, or readers of Ryan’s. Some poets who were solicited chose not to participate, and always with good reason. The constraint of a verse form, writing for an occasion, and collaborating blind, after all, are not for everyone. The collaboration is then limited to the editor’s knowledge, the caprices of poets’ time, capacity, and interest, and the punts of a few who wanted to see how it would turn out. Those who were Ryan’s contemporaries during her formative years are absent from the collaboration, and I welcome this lack of representation. ‘On the Occasion of Gig Ryan’s Sixtieth Birthday’ has no critical or representative mandate propelling it. It is not a retrospective. Instead, it is an engagement with the semiotics of a moment in time, and an occasion to collaborate. Moreover, the poem experiments with the occasion, rather than erecting a monument to it. This is not Ryan’s peers patting her on the back for years of service, deserving as she might be of such praise. I’m not sure that kind of gesture is in the spirit of her work. Luckily for me, as facilitator and editor, no contributor construed the collaborative occasion in such a denotative way. Anyway, I solicited poets I thought would be game for the contingency and the blindness of a collaborative moment in recognition of a poet I know many adore. There was little risk something boring would emerge, the likelihood instead being that something unwieldy would. Again, I was lucky. The work, you might agree, has surprising unity. Confidentiality was vital to the surprise, vital to a lack of anticipatory collaboration, as well as vital to the surprise for Ryan. The call was made in May this year, soliciting the submission of two Sapphic stanzas. When compiled, these stanzas would be braided consecutively with another poet’s stanzas. A contingent collaborative architecture using the Sapphic stanza – three 11-syllable lines, one 5-syllable line – purls the kinds of classical poetic histories referenced in Gig Ryan’s work with the present tense of the Sapphic. Such an experiment invokes Sappho’s paradoxical legacy: lasting significance to the fields of gender, sexuality, and politics, constituted of a poetry in shards and glimpses. To perform this collaborative experiment using the Sapphic stanza as a building block too recalls Ryan’s associates from years gone by who have experimented with the Sapphic, like John Tranter and Martin Johnston, or well-known employers of the form in literary history that we know Ryan has read, like Dryden, Swinburne, or Pound. Of course, the Sapphic also recalls Ryan’s expressed interest in Sappho herself (see: ‘after Sappho’, a translation of Fragment 31, in Pure and Applied). More interestingly, maybe, the transgressive and paradoxical heritage of the form entails contrarieties that contemporary poetry courts, and which Ryan’s work has exacerbated and enlarged. As a classical form and poetic tradition at the same time associated with radical and especially sexual politics, the Sapphic proved a meaningful building block for a panegyrical poem on the occasion of Ryan’s sixtieth. Like Gig Ryan’s poetry, the collaborative solicitation toys with an impossible harmony, a harmony of experiment and history. Fredric Jameson would call this ‘rupture’ and ‘continuity’, mutually reliant terms critical to modernity. I envisaged a hands-off kind of editorship of these fragments, letting time – the time of submission – determine the collaborative whole. The only editorial query I brought to bear on contributions was syllabic. The poem that emerges is an entity of poetic ruptures brought into strange continuity born of the happenstance of poetic collaboration. The creative achievements of this collaboration are over, and as its editor, reading it engenders great satisfaction. In many ways it is not a good panegyric, not good in the sense of a noble congratulations for a long career, or a fitting encapsulation of an oeuvre’s growing importance. Such funereally inflected tonalities would be the wrong way to acknowledge the poet at this milestone anyhow. Recent poems by Gig Ryan show us that she is implacably contemporary and a leading catalyst for literary innovation not only in Australia, but the world. Ryan is a poet to be anticipated, in other words, more so than to be remembered for past work. But past work by Ryan has been important for Australian poetry. The occasion has inspired free association as much as reflection. Like Ryan’s poetry, this poem, I think, generates its own kind of autonomy within a field of overtly contemporary references. The irreducibility of justice to the apparatus of the law, and creative possibility to the frailties of the impulse – maybe on these matters the poem and Ryan’s work meet. In this poem, it is as if the concerns of cultural and historical inheritance, and the possibility of justice, were shocked into action on this occasion of reflection and experiment. As in Ryan’s work, such concerns seem to sit boldly upon the surface. Image: Detail from Gig Ryan’s New and Selected Poems (Giramondo, 2012) Editorial team More by Editorial team › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 16 August 202416 August 2024 · Poetry pork lullaby Panda Wong but an alive pig / roots in the soil /turning it over / with its snout / softening the ground / is this a hymn 26 July 202426 July 2024 · Poetry Song of despair πO A new poem by πO