Robert
Adamson and Juno Gemes (2009) Credit: Juno Gemes
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 heads
The
trees are speaking on the far shore
we’ll
never get there in time
the
pages of books swim upstream
we
study words growing on them
The
time will come and you will turn
the
present a breeze that passes
carrying
the smell of cut grass
The
Mower is creating as he moves through
the
rushes looking for glow-worms
Words
little warm animals of air
words
growing and teaming over the mudflats
This
river has no bends
this
river is not an actual river yet
this
water has eaten its way into sandstone
great
sheets of it slide by on either side
parting
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 bends
the
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.
