Saltbush (part 1)

Speaker 1 00:02

This is a Vision Australia radio podcast.

Speaker 2 00:18

On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to Emerging Writers. I'm Kate Cooper. This week, we're bringing you the first part of a recording we made of a special event in the No Wave Poetry series at the Wheatsheaf Hotel - celebrating the fourth edition of the Saltbush Review, a digital literary journal founded in 2021, based on Kaurna land in South Australia, and affiliated with the J .M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. 

This celebration of the Saltbush Review was hosted by Gemma Parker, one of the journal's founding editors, and featured readings by Sue Hazel, Jill Jones, Morgan Noonan, and Patrick Allington. This week, we bring you the introduction by Gemma Parker and readings by Sue Hazel and Jill Jones. Here is Gemma Parker. Welcome to this very special collaborative event between the Saltbush Review Literary Journal and No Wave Poetry series.

Speaker 3

Most of us live, work, love, create on Kaurna Yatta, the lands of the Kaurna people. And so I'd just like to acknowledge that these are the traditional lands of the Kaurna people. Sovereignty was never ceded, always was, and always will be Kaurna land. So this evening, we are very lucky to be able to hear from four amazing writers featured in issue four of the Saltbush Review, which was on the theme of Fracture. So for those of you who don't know the Saltbush Review, it's a literary journal based here in Adelaide. It's been running since 2021. My name is Gemma, and I'm one of the managing editors and co-founders of the Saltbush Review. And we feature fiction, nonfiction reviews and poetry. 

So I'm really excited to get into the evening. We're going to have two readings. First up, we'll have Sue Hazel and then Morgan Noonan. We'll take a break, and then we're going to hear from Jill Jones and then Patrick Allington. I'm really excited about that. Before we begin the readings, though, there are just a few thanks that I'd like to give. I'd like to thank the Saltbush Review editorial team. We have Claire Childsworth and Theodora Galanas here with us this evening. And there's also Lynne Dickens and Melanie Mayour. Lynne Dickens is the other co-founder and managing editor. And Melanie is now based in France, but this is a very cool group of people to work with. And I'm very grateful to be able to work with them. They bring such a huge passion and commitment to each issue. It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure to be involved with this team and to be working with them to bring the work into the community.

I'd also like to thank all the writers that have entrusted us with their work over the first four issues. We're very proud of every issue, and it's such an honor to be working with the writers that we're working with. I need to thank Arts SA for a generous grant that they gave us, which allowed us to pay the writers and editors for issues three and issue four. I'd also like to thank the J .M. Coetzee Center for Creative Practice, the University of Adelaide Department of English Creative Writing and Film, Liminal Literary Journal, No Way of Writers' Essay and the Weedy for their support.

We've also had amazing support from the community, not just writers, but also editors, critics and academics. We've had incredible support and really generous comments from writers that we've published at all stages of their writing careers from all over the world. The writer, Carol Milner, who was featured in issue two, sent us this lovely note when she heard about the event this evening. She said, thank you to the Soulbush Review team for selecting my short prose piece, Tea, at a time when I had ceased to believe that the work would find a home. Thanks for being the window that opened when the doors were closed. It was an absolute honor to see my work published alongside such a fabulous lineup of writers in your second edition. Enjoy the celebration.

I just wanted to read that out. It's a really lovely comment from Carol. I'd also like to thank Aidan Coleman, Heather Taylor Johnson, Dominic Symes, Anna Goldsworthy, Leah Jing, McIntosh, Angie Martin, Kate Cooper and everyone here tonight for your support of the journal. It really means a lot to us. So I'm very excited about this evening. We are incredibly proud of every issue we've published. Issue four is our latest, and this was on the theme of Fracture. There's some really amazing work, and I encourage you to go and have a look at it.

We're going to start with Sue Hazel. So Sue is working toward completion of a doctorate in creative writing through the University of Adelaide. Her thesis titled Long Pella Goodbye is an epistolary narrative based on a collection of letters sent from Papua New Guinea in 1970 and 1971. It explores the mundane, the unexpected and the challenging truths those letters reveal. Please join me in welcoming Sue.

Speaker 4 05:55

Good evening, everyone. So good to see so many people here, and I'll add my thanks to the Saltbush Review for this extraordinary opportunity. I'm quite thrilled to be up here. Rysori, which was published in the current issue, isn't a pretty one. I suppose it's on the theme of fracture. It's called, titled, The Killer. And yes, I hadn't thought of it being on a theme of fracture, but it really is, though. I can put my name to it, and back in the early 1950s, it wasn't as much fractured as normal.

The Killer. She crouched, huddled by the Galvo wall, cramming grubby fists over her ears, with something her nose down on her knee, hating Monday afternoon. Early on would be the long half-scrapes of blade on stone, clangs as the knives went into a heavy steel bucket, and remember yours, as she grabbed the two small pails. Aluminium was staked sides and the handles thin enough to make deep purple marks on her palms, when they were loaded full. Ron snook, and she'd follow Dad's fast strides away from their warm kitchen, fast running down the backyard and careful tiptoeing.

The kids didn't wear shoes much, just for Sunday best. Picking her way through sharp gravel shards treacherous with hurt. Up the hill, past the cowyard and stable to the woolshink, to fetch the killer. Which one this week he'd tease, already knowing the scrawniest with tattered dags of wool hanging and long cloven hooves ragged, split with age. Too many days and years on hard red earth and those sharp stones bruising, tearing deep. Once she'd argue, you'd know, Dad, this one here, look at its eyes, and watch as he ran the flop down the race, whipping the gate shut to send one off. Always the tired one, sloped-shouldered, hobbling, defeated. The one just waiting to be next. 

With Scott and Rusty tied up, she'd be controlling one side of the killer's run, eagle-eyed and pacing like the dogs, guarding, watching for its last brief, hopeless pit for freedom. Down to the killing place. Was really a tank stand, four thick pine posts, clean trunks with iron sheets nailed on and a smooth concrete floor, and a long black rubber hose feeding down from the tank above for running water, or the cleaning. There was a shelf made of old boxes, thick dark timbers, nailed and stenciled grass-cossed sheep tips. Handy, just the right height. And from the board above, the chain. And the hooks. Well, she hated the next bit, hated knowing it, a tattoo of panicked, skittering hooves, fast-bleating muse of fear, sometimes a thick drowning scream, her dad hoisting, grunting, there, that's it, up you go, ah, kush, kicking, and sudden quiet. Then liquid flowing fast, splatting into the bucket, gobbing heavy, thick plops on the floor, and that smell in her nose, her mouth, all through the air, around. Blood.

Still, so many years later, she knows the smell and taste of red. No one says that about colour, but she knows. She knows that red is thick and edgy, metallic like the steel smell on a knife blade and the hammer and the saw, like the chewing taste of dull silver roofing nails, smooth like the bucket she carries cold at the killing place every Monday, and warm too, like those same kales swapping full of flabby flesh for the walk home. A killer's life gripped away, left its body. She tensed, waiting for the ten crunches. Always ten, he'd done this job so many times, that's all it took. Heavies is like cutters she could hardly lift from, hacked up through glistening white bone. Then that squelching tear of sinew, and it must have been the beast hung exposed, guts hanging, already cooling and ready for butchering. Hurry up now, the word she dreaded. 

Now she had to look, to see. Had to be there in that tiny space with the still hanging carcass and her dad in tent, and her waving the tea towel, frantically moving flies frenzied with the stench of dead and blood and meat. Out came the stomach to stand it, green with grass and bile, yards of a pink-gray slimy slipping intestine, foamy lung bags, the weighty heart stilled and dark, with that same breath smell. She stepped forward with the little buckets, every week flinching as the liver thumped into one, a lump of quivering purple-brown, and into the other two kidneys still stripping blood from thick tubes sticking out of there innards.

The buckets always went behind the door, the post near the doorway, another tea towel spread over the bounty, and she was back to endlessly waving, hopelessly moving, a dark myriad buzzing loud and intent on feast. There would be the punching, fisting hard between the sheen of boy's skin and the muscle-lined body. Her dad grunting and thrusting deep to separate them and leave nothing but a hunk of meat split and hanging, with its four legs sticking out, useless. She had to watch the fabric waving, not too close to swipe her dad, but close enough and fast enough to keep those flies off the carcass. The white, red street, uninvolved, unmoving lump, central to the ritual.

Cracking and crunching came next. She could hardly bear hearing as the legs were snapped broken, hacked off and thrown into the dog-bucket. Then the head still wooey, eyes staring dull, pained to infinity, ears limp soft, mouth gaping a last silent cry with its few ground-and-green teeth leering at her. She could sense the end coming now, his gradual removal from making this slaughter. His body eased, stood relaxed. He pulled a white bag, an old bed-sheet doubled over with its side sewn, to cover up the sorry nudity he'd created, then pulled and tied tight the drawstring.

The bee's tongue there, or not, alone. [?Abstun] thanks, look off you go now, and she'd have her bounty and tiptoe, careful again, to the house. The buckets went into the fridge and with them a small sigh. Lamb's fry for breakfast tomorrow. She did not like lamb's fry. Butchering followed in the morning cool before the fliers came. Dad hoisted the carcass off its hooks and shouldered it down to the block not far from the house. A huge lump of tree-trunk weathered grey, spread with sheets of newspaper. The pans waited, the tomber-walk gleamed sharp, and her mum took over. Hack, hack, hack, through bone and muscle and meat, a wrench over her knee broke more joints and fast, clean cuffs stopped through, separating loin and leg-roasts.

The week's meat, speckled with torn strips of bloody newsprint piled on a trays and fast into that fridge, away from the heat and fliers gathering above and around. Strips of fat and sinews, shoulder-blade bones, ribs, tongue and eyeballs, the heart, brains and tripe, all filled the backups to overflowing. She coddled them down to the dog-fridge in the shearer's cottage, fish-scraps, and the dogs bounded about barking and slobbering, and cake.

Speaker 3 13:29

That was amazing. Thank you, Sue. I've heard Sue read a couple of times now, and every single time, it's such a privilege to hear her voice and get to be part of the world that she depicts. 

Next, we'll hear from Jill Jones. Jill lives on unceded Ghana land. Her latest book is Acrobat Music, New and Selected Poems, which was shortlisted for the 2024 John Bray Poetry Prize and longlisted for the 2024 ALS Gold Medal. In introducing Jill, Gemma highlighted that her books have won a number of awards, including the Wesley Michelle Wright Prize, the Victorian Premieres Prize for Poetry, the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize and the Mary Gilmore Award. Jill has published widely in Periodicals in Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, the UK and the USA. 

Speaker 2

Gemma explained to the audience that Jill's writing currently explores intersections and hauntings of bodies and sexuality and the uncanny materiality of the everyday.

Speaker 3 15:14

Jill currently writes and teaches freelance and previously worked as an academic, arts administrator, journalist and book editor. An entry on Jill's work was included in the current edition of the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English. Here is Jill Jones.

Speaker 5 15:33

Thank you, Gemma, and thank you to all the verse involved in the Saltbush Review. I think it's been great to see all those issues coming through and so many wonderful writers from here, as well as all around the world. So that's great. Normally I do poetry, but this is a lyric essay so it's both poetry and prose. It has a series of footnotes but I'm going to do them up front because it probably makes no sense in reading it out. And it's related to some of the ideas that Gemma mentioned in the intro that I'm working on about ghosts and doubles, displacements and the uncanny, what's been lost but still haunts. 

So it's about the ancient poet Sappho. So I hope that some of you know who she was or you're going to find out. But more besides, it contains gaps, ellipses, brackets, given that much of Sappho's poetry exists only in fragments or quotes by others. I will try to enact these as I read But Did Men Not Work Now Also - one of Sappho's most famous poems contains the repeated phrase "some say" or something similar as well as "I say". So I echo that through the piece... just so you know.

Some of the versions of Suffo's poems particularly from Fragment 31, it's a famous fragment. Fancy being a famous fragment. They're my versions based on much better versions because I know no Greek and translations by well-known scholars and poets. But I also quote from Dion Rael's version of Fragment 147 and another as the epigraph fits from the Loeb classical library. The quotes in the title To Perish of Delights taken from Dickinson. I also quote a phrase from Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, Destroyer and Maker and a phrase the marvelous journey from Constantine Cavafy's poem Ithaca which refers to of course the Odyssey as well as his own sense of displacement as a Greek living in Egypt and as a homosexual man.

I also use the Greek word nostos which means among other things return, and is usually used in reference to the Odyssey. The piece is actually in 13 parts, but no I did not call it 13 Ways of Looking at Sappho. It's quite long, but I might try and miss out some of the bits. 

To Perish of Delight and Erotics of Fragments. As the sweet apple reddens on the bow-top, on the top of the topmost bough, the apple-gatherers have forgotten it. No, they have not forgotten it entirely, but they could not reach it, so that's Sappho. 

1. Sappho is not known to us, not really. She is a fragment, an idea, a sight out of which ripples many ideas. She is a wave, broken, as a never-changing shawl, a dispersal. Most likely she was one woman, a lesbian, that is, someone of the island of Lesbos, from the city of Mytilene in the eastern Mediterranean. Possibly a lover of women, an aristocrat, living in archaic Greek times, may be also an exile sent for a while to a Greek colony in Sicily. Let's say she was... someone. Let's say she wrote lyrics, songs for the liar, composing for a single voice, the intimate. And yes, for the choir, the celebration, ancient authors speak of her, let's say, as the tenth muse.

2. Sappho is a beautiful metaphor, metaphoro, as something carried across. The sublime, the erotic, the lost lesbian fragment, a woman singing about love and the intimate, the daily and nightly, everyday work and diversion, the arts of women, while looking many ways, let's say, looking east into Asia Minor, a woman at sea, of the Middle Sea.

3. This is three words. All that is left of Suffer, the moment, its economy, its shards. Wherein does she demonstrate her supreme excellence, asks that early close reader, pseudo -longina skin on this sublime, through the skill, he says, with which she selects and binds together the most striking and vehement circumstances of passion. And he says, to the skill in how the whole combines, or let's say, coheres. But to cohere can be to stick together the various broken parts. However, who was on Gynas anyway, almost nothing whole remains of her poems.

4. What is missing from Sappho is what we cannot miss. We may want it, desire it, but we never know it, only the intensity of remains and ruptures. It is likely only 650 lines of her poem survive, mostly as fragments on scraps of papyrus, or as quoted in a few phrases or lines by later classical authors. I hear a voice asking, who was Suffer on any line? 

5. I wanted ancient sex, if not its mysteries, not to have it, but know it, it? No, the immeasurable ways of bodies, desire of recognition may be, or what coheres or carries over, or loosens. But it is now too modern. Is sex ever too modern, or simply present in the brief ecstasy of being outside myself, beside myself? Now, this is Sappho. It seems my tongue is broken, a delicate fire flashes along my skin, my eyes have lost their sight, and my ears are drumming, that's fragment thirty-one, from it. That clear and terrible moment, the body breaks out of itself, Sappho again. A cold, sweat grips me, trembling seizes me, I am greener than grass, and I have died almost, it seems to me. 

6. To be with the other or with the gods, enthusiasmus, is this liberation or obliteration, as her lines had been obliterated by human hand and time decay. Her Greek was a vernacular, Asiatic aeolic, sometimes called lesbian aeolic. Volta Benjamin says, the task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect which produces in it the echoes of the original, and I say, add an echo that has shattered before it returns.

All translation is another lovely lie, destroyer and preserver. How translations part, depart, loosen, do not stick, and wind blows away the scraps, and yet another voice echoes. And you'll excuse this slightly longer version into translation, but it probably has perhaps any joke in here.

Scholar H. Zellner says, given the ambiguity of the line that I rendered above about green grass, there are at least three possible translations of the original analytic phrase, he says, I am paler than grass, I am greener than grass, I am more moist than grass. Anne Carson, poet Anne Carson, chooses green, and so does Zellner, arguing for metaphor rather than more literal at this point of Sappho's poem, taking into account descriptions in other texts, such as green fear of her merit warriors in battle, etc. Mary Barnard, another translator, chooses paler. I choose green as above, these are experts, not me. But moist is also attractive, of course, and possible always. 

7. To get lost in the poem's trance. Once again Love, or Eros, as it is in the original Greek, that loosener of limbs, bittersweet and inescapable, crawling thing, that's Diane Rael's translation of fragment 147, or part thereof. Eros, some say, was son of chaos, or even that he predated chaos as primordial desire. Here is the ecstasy and chaos of gone speech, dash, bilips, bracket, space, a punctuation of absences, an archaic alphabet of seas, islands, waves, writing on sand, escape, exile, nostos, the sudden wave of joy, of Eros, is pleasure and pain, what happens in the fishes of love. We know this because we enact this, hands and tongues, words and bodies, longing and its gaps, broken syllables, scrappy pain, how to return, and the word often translated as bittersweet in Sappho is actually sweet bitter, according to Bonin Popfon. So where does translation get us? 

8. Here we find the bricolage of love, a desire of wanting to be filled, yet, yet, gap as form and meaning, love and poetry never complete, always calling. 

And I'll leave out the bit about HD... 

The risks will always remain, never truly empty but filled by each one who comes with their desire for connection, but her poems aren't doors, there are no rooms in Sappho's house left standing, no enclosures, yet, no, yet, Sappho's poems never quite arrive and so we can fall in love with them now continually, their gaps as invitations, havens, apertures, breaches, huge empty horizons, with a few intensely shaped landmarks and shapes of cloud.

10. Such an amplitude, is it enough, where we can stretch out, waiting for the lover with these shreds, songs in the wind, just heard, maybe overheard, like the fabrications that those liars tell, where every afterwards is ambiguous.

11. We simply do not know her, who Sappho was, we want to know that desire becoming, us becoming, with the past before us, empty and full, interpreted, misunderstood. 

12. Making something new again is not the original poem, like a version, sorry about that, resounding in the distance or hearing what we want to or need to hear, between, as the arc of an echo, the rustle of crumbling papyrus, torn, creased and twisted. 

13. All that is left, I say, the ghost of a moment, its condensation, what was there gone, its economy, an intensity of remains, nostos, the marvellous journey. Let's say what I make of the gone, what I hear through fractures in shadows, each reading looking for the holy gap.
And I end on a famous quote from Zafo. I say, in another time, someone will remember us. Thank you. 

Speaker 2

You've been listening to Emerging Writers, this week featuring readings by Sue Hazel and Jill Jones as part of the special event in the No Wave poetry series at the Wheat Chief Hotel in October 2024 celebrating The Saltbush Review, a digital literary journal.

28:02

This event was hosted by one of the founding editors of The Saltbush Review, Gemma Parker. You can find out more about the journal and read the incredible range of creative contributions at saltbushreview.com.

Emerging Writers, this week here on Vision Australia Radio, VA Radio on Digital, online at varadio.org and also on Vision Australia Radio podcasts where you can catch up on earlier episodes. 

And before we go, congratulations to Shannon Burns on being awarded the 2024 South Australian Premieres Literary Award for the best overall published work. Shannon was a guest on our Emerging Writers programme in November 2023 and you can find both parts of our interview with Shannon on the Vision Australia Radio podcast site. Thanks for listening to this Vision Australia Radio Podcast. Don't forget to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Visit varadio.org for more.

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