I don’t believe Australia exists, though I’ve been there twice. An opening line I’ll regret.
Words are better than people. They are easier to catalogue. Slower to disappear.
What we want to make happen when we write is suspect—Wherefore bother, Milord—hovers inside the very ink of the pen.
How the ink was made—how the pen was made. Shards of words, back there...
Belief in the sentence is scant, faith in objects a scam, subjects soon exhausted, ambition corrupt...
I hate it when I’m giving a reading and someone in the audience makes that little moaning sound.
As if life were cute and thoughtful. That’s what failure sounds like.
But endlessly fixing the last poem is a way to invite the next one...
Then here comes the next poem carrying too many things—its nouns keep dropping...
I try to help the next poem carry a few of its things—and end up carrying everything for it again.
Of course by then the poem as “poem” has vanished.
When writing I don’t agree that it is possible or even ethical to finish the logic of the syntax.
To round it home—to finish my shift—seems like learning a jargon to get along at work or at home.
As if I were indentured to Time Ltd itself—as if I were chained inside an Alphabet Machine...
If this notebook dither doesn’t become “a piece” it can stay as just me writing. Stay going...
If I chop it off, clean it up, find somewhere to offer it, let it be read—am I no longer a brigand...
With circular arrows, I am thinking about Australia this morning. End of first section.
.
In 2009, my first trip there, I took a train from Sydney to the Hawkesbury River to meet Robert Adamson.
I didn’t know much about him, nor he about me, but I had written, and he had given directions.
When I got off the train, he was waiting at the station for me, sitting in his car. I see a dull better-days coupe.
It was an unexpected kindness—his meeting me. I would have surely gotten lost between the station and his house.
I was so relieved to see him there, and touched. It has stuck: that first sighting of him in his car.
He was waiting for the one thing in that landscape that he didn’t know the deep name for—some younger poet from Canada.
I thought: I am meeting the greatest living Australian poet.
I thought: I know nothing about fishing or Australian literature, and not much about birds—so what are he and I going to talk about?
I hadn’t brought any of my books for him. By the time I left, he had loaded me up with his books.
After I was back in Canada, I sent him two books by Don McKay: Birding, Lightning Ball Bait.
He was a short man with long white hair and a mottled aging face that had once been handsome-tough.
He had grown up in a place that has an ominous poetic name: Neutral Bay.
His people fished. He had spent time in a Boy’s Home, and then gone to jail.
He was getting too old for the rock band hair, but with a slouchy/dapper hat on he looked writerly.
Where I Come From (1979) tells of his early days—parents fighting, he goes out in his boat, ties up in the mangroves, fishes.
All day he catches catfish “the ugliest-looking things in the world”.
I thought: he is a Wild Colonial Boy—I knew the song—who has found by himself that miracle: empathy.
Later I discovered his poem “Wild Colonial Boys”. An unforgiving poem. He sees his country hard.
He had been softened by love, reading, and the holy discipline of fishing. Poetry had saved him, that was clear.
His voice was gentle, fast, confident, true, musical, enthusiastic, curious, grateful, generous, cautious, passionate.
His many poems about birds are some of his finest:
Jesus Bird, Southern Skua, Pheasant-tailed Jacana, Hudsonian Godwit, Gang-Gang Cockatoos, Dollarbird...
Maybe he had been a drinker. Not now. All of his scar-trace poems—aloft—endear him to me.
His talk—as he warmed to it—ignited a delight in him—for the details of his own history...
And I was keen to hear it all, for I was still blinded by that unapologetic light in Australia—a hot glare for which I had no previous model or reference.
His partner, Juno, had made us a lunch of salads and cheeses, maybe—I don’t remember much about the food.
We three sat out on a back balcony that looked down toward the river, maybe—I think I could see the river.
Or maybe I am seeing the Hawkesbury as it appears in Adamson’s poems. So that now I see it there as I chat and eat lunch with him and Juno.
She was Hungarian, I learned. She bossed him a bit, I saw, but it was a loving bossiness that he was proud of.
If she interrupted him to correct something he was saying, he’d show a slight impatience—an eagerness to keep running with some tale he had told often...
It seems now that I paid attention all that day to nothing but the poet’s infectious tales of his adventures in poetry. His talk was my Hawkesbury, I was out on its tide.
.
Am I ever writing a solid essay memoir now, with colour and character and a rich locale!
But in my lack of hard facts—in my blurriness and perhaps errors—I sound young—a kid meeting a legend.
I was 56 that year. I may never grow up, or get the story right—especially where poetry is at issue.
And if I don’t say it, some reader—if this morning’s dither has any readers—will notice:
I am repeating myself, having written similarly elsewhere about meeting Margaret Laurence when I was 18 or so...
What are facts anyway but anchors—and anchors are forged, we make them, design them, they are earth, they are vagaries. Like pens. Like ink.
I do remember being surprised that his favourite painter was Mondrian—in one poem he says of his home: “slats of cedar, verticals / of glass—a Mondrian chapel of light.”
Surprised, because I would have thought a wetter, thicker, more complicated paint would attract him.
Perhaps Monet’s Regatta at Argeneuil, but darker. Or, in Australia, the landscapes of Fred Williams. Or in Canada, Riopelle meets Thompson...
Of course I wanted to hear about his friendships with Duncan and Creeley. This was during the first seasons of my own apprenticeship to Duncan’s poetry.
I had already been to the Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne, met the owner Kris Hemensley. and seen there a group photo of Robert Duncan with local Australian poets.
Hemensley had told me of a knock on the shop door one day—and there was Duncan!
Who says: “I come not as an ambassador from that evil empire across the ocean, but only as one of the humble subscribers to your magazine.”
And they threw the American poet a backyard party! I might have the details wrong—but I hope to catch at least the reverie of that event.
Adamson became a friend of Duncan’s, and for awhile almost became the Australian Duncan. Or the Australian Creeley, whom he also was friends with...
Creeley says: “Robert Adamson is that rare instance of a poet who can touch all the world and yet stay particular, local to the body he’s been given...”
.
I realize as I write this that I’m talking about three Roberts, three Bobs! Adamson, Duncan, Creeley.
And am reminded of a fourth Bob: Robert Hogg.
My friend, Bob Hogg, the Canadian poet. Who early on ardently apprenticed himself to Charles Olson.
Like Adamson apprenticed himself to Duncan.
And, like Adamson, Bob Hogg was also friends with Creeley. It was Creeley who shepherded Bob through his last year at university in Buffalo, and then through the completion of his PhD.
There used to also briefly be a group of poets in Toronto called The Three Roberts: Robert Priest, Robert Sward, Robert Zend.
They performed together for the first time on January 29, 1984 at Grossman's Tavern in Toronto. Was that the last time as well as the first time? I find that Robert Zend died the following year.
Of that trio, only Robert Priest is still alive. And Bob Hogg died in 2022.
All the Bobs are dying. The underbrush is alive, teeming, these useless details...
.
Lunch over, Adamson took me into his study, or library—a large empty room full of books.
We sat on the floor beside the bookshelves—under the looming of them—and talked. I mean: he did.
Adamson pulled out books to show me. Eventually we were both lying on the floor, propped on our elbows, facing each other, while he read to me from Duncan’s letters.
Wide-ranging, unguarded personal letters—I could see and hear Duncan’s hand-writing.
I never met Robert Duncan—this day with Adamson was as close as I got. And I had to go to Australia to find him.
Toward the end of my visit, Juno took a few photos of us. I have learned since that she is a major Australian photographer. Juno Gemes.
She has documented Aboriginal movements for justice. But at the time I didn’t know enough to be honoured.
.
Here
is one of Adamson’s poems—“Canticle for the Bicentennial Dead”—a favourite of
mine for its solidarity and fierceness:
They
are talking, in their cedar-benched rooms
on
French-polished chairs, and they talk
in
reasonable tones, in the great stone buildings
they
are talking firmly, in the half-light
and
they mention at times the drinking of alcohol,
the
sweet blood-coloured wine the young drink,
the
beer they share in the riverless river-beds
and
the back-streets, and in the main street—
in
government-coloured parks, drinking
the
sweet blood in recreation patches, campsites.
They
talk, the clean-handed ones, as they gather
strange
facts; and as they talk
collecting
words, they sweat under nylon wigs.
Men
in blue uniforms are finding the bodies,
the
uniforms are finding the dead: young hunters
who
have lost their hunting, singers who
would
sing of fish are now found hung—
crumpled
in night-rags in the public’s corners;
discovered
there broken, lit by stripes
of
regulated sunlight beneath the whispering
rolling
cell window bars. Their bodies
found
in postures of human-shaped effigies,
hunched
in the dank sour urinated atmosphere
near
the bed-board, beside cracked lavatory bowls,
slumped
on the thousand grooved, fingernailed walls
of
your local police station’s cell—
bodies
of the street’s larrikin Koories
suspended
above concrete in the phenyl-thick air.
Meanwhile
outside, the count continues: on radio,
on
TV, the news—the faces
of
mothers torn across the screens—
and
the poets write no elegies, our artists
cannot
describe their grief, though
the
clean-handed ones paginate dossiers
and
court reporters’ hands move over the papers.
A
“larrikin” is Australian for a rough fellow, unschooled, rowdy. And “Koorie” is
what the Aboriginals there
prefer as a name for themselves.
This poem, I see now, speaks thoroughly to Canadian shame as well.
.
Here is another Adamson poem—“Black Water”—more meditative, with a local tongue:
I took Robert Duncan in my grandfather’s skiff
rowing across Mooney Creek
words hummed around our headsThe trees are speaking on the far shore
we’ll never get there in time
the pages of books swim upstreamwe study words growing on them
The time will come and you will turn
the present a breeze that passescarrying the smell of cut grass
The Mower is creating as he moves through
the rushes looking for glow-wormsWords little warm animals of air
words growing and teaming over the mudflats
This river has no bendsthis river is not an actual river yet
this water has eaten its way into sandstone
great sheets of it slide by on either sideparting and taking the flotsam
“for she my mind hath so displaced
that I shall never find my home”Marvell was called from the mangroves
time created endless bendsthe river was never the same
that night Duncan gathered the southern stars
into his being the black water plopping with fat mullet
I think this poem is a homage to Duncan’s precocity as a talker: When I was rowing the master across the creek, he began to recite Marvell to me...
The form has the gentle force of a tide swell—incantatory. I admire, too, how at the second-last stanza we find that the poem is not locked in to its form.
The poem’s tense is drifting too. And its last line overdoes it, mentioning Duncan’s “being”. It is a bit too long, too full—bountiful, teeming, almost Biblical.
.
The greatest living—in 2009 most others would have said: Les Murray—but Murray, to me, is in the classical register—even given his dirt farm perspective.
And Adamson is in the demotic register. He speaks from among—not with Tradition behind him, but with compulsion.
He doesn’t own or wield the language, but is surprised and shepherded by it.
It depends on whether your writing—your freedom and abilities while writing—is intended to catch the attention of the rich or famous or upper-schooled—and to be built with their language...
Or do you want your freedom and abilities while writing to legitimate the hunger you come from and are always in empathy with...
Adamson’s register is my register: a rush of too much—a surge followed and held and sung of— toward survival—alphabet survival. Within Folk traditions.
The scars can stay in our little carved toys that are fishes and birds.
.
Some of the fascination we write from is a fascination with names—the word Hawkesbury vibrates—especially when we know it is a river.
And there is a way in which all memory—all personal history—is a cobbled attempt at provenance.
From this to that to me—an insistence of connection—a plea for all this to be real, on-going, not disparate, not fragmented. Not usurped.
You have your DNA checked to find what percentage of you is Neanderthal. The lost trail. The bare foot.
I can’t help name-dropping because I don’t know who I am—even still. A new family can be chosen. Named.
.
This spring, we have lost three important avant writers, two of them here in Canada: Judith Copithorne, Paul Dutton.
Judith drew or wrote flaming text trees that remind us of Van Gogh’s trees—but she used red and black markers: Logos deeper than Logic set me free...
Paul roared at us, he took us aback, his spit and lack of polish had an urgent refinement even so.
And Alice Notley has died.
Her disobedience kept widening as more and more voices were allowed in.
Eventually everything talked with her—there was no shutting her many hers up.
If we recognize compulsion in each other, then we knock and are admitted to the fire circle.
She took a stage coach from a small city to a wild river to meet the legendary Shaker hermit...
Fables are still viable baskets—even true—even if see-through—aren’t they—can’t they be...
.
Only today I learned that Robert Adamson died in 2022. Three years ago.
So I have spent the morning writing this. Poem. Essay. Essay-poem. Too much. Too little.
And have typed out these poems of his so they could be in my hands awhile.
One of the books he gave me that day—I have it here—is Reading the River: Selected Poems (2004).
In it he wrote: “Reading the river with you—onward, Bob.”
Given the title, he probably wrote the same thing in every copy of that book when he signed it...
I know that. But for a day I was doing what he says—reading the river with him.
.
When all of this yellows and is no longer current—no longer quick but bronzed—it will hold more resonance, not less—we think. But this is only ambition talking.
There is also always an unbronzing process at work—let memory rot, let names rot—it says.
Let books rot—let our anecdotes return to the sloppy baroque muddle that is their warren.
A hand-like bird-head shadow moves over the same strange desire-constructs again and again...
Ph . Otty Lake . 2025
Phil Hall's [photo credit: Paul Elter] most recent books are a chapbook The Hobo (2025), a children's book (with Margaret Miller) Searchers (2025), and Vallejo's Marrow (2024). Guthrie Clothing—a Selected Collage (2015) is available from Wilfrid Laurier University Press. He has won the Governor General's Award, the Trillium Book Award, twice been nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, and twice for the Griffin Prize. He is a valued editor, and the founder of Flat Singles Press. AnyWord: A Festschrift for Phil Hall was published in 2024. He lives near Perth, Ontario.
