| Island Earth: New and Selected Poems by S.K. Kelen |
A Doggy Life
On the way back from the Frankston Motor Registry, my Singapore-born nephew, now the proud possessor of his P-plates, drove confidently and in a celebratory mood. I was happy that learner had turned ‘chauffeur’ so that I could revert to one of the idle contentment of life – reading aloud from a new collection of poems without pressing interruptions. I decided to try out The Poem Relevancy Test with a couple of random pieces. In his early twenties and now at university, this post-modern Everyman communicates mostly through text message and is one of the vast majority of non-poetry readers. Thus, Island Earth: New and Selected Poems became the tome for some stick-the-finger-in-the-page bibliomancy while we motored through death-camp quiet suburbia.
My prime digit stopped early at some Kelen juvenilia: ‘Chairman Mao and Charlie Brown’, with its charmingly dated critique of Communism as a comic strip. It was the reference to Snoopy that grabbed interest. Being more into man-perfumes than Marxism, my nephew had also recently acquired his own first follower in the form of a black Labrador pup named Ross, thus reversing anthropomorphism and endowing the tyke with human characteristics. On theme now, I followed up with some of the other early ‘pooch poems’ where the life of the artist doubles as a metaphor for a young dog – in Kelen’s case, a mutt named Kafka – in which the vicissitudes of larrikin existence run parallel to the eager panting of a new poet first appearing in print. My WhatsApp-savvy nephew could relate to this canine portraiture as it touched on his own new master/slave relationship. (Don’t we keep pets to be adored without question?) He said that if this was poetry it was ok because it told jokes and was about ordinary stuff his generation could relate to.
I immediately felt old, in spite of the fact these vintage Kelen dog poems were my own publishing age. Yes, I have followed their first appearances in print over the years and am a fan. Many of them are old friends. The nephew didn’t ask to borrow the volume for later (not his or the poetry’s fault). This is the common problem of relevance that poetry faces when competing for attention with today’s multimedia smorgasbord, especially when the poetry hums and whizzes with pop culture references as Kelen’s does. Today’s multi-tasker has only a dog’s brief span of attention before moving on to fresh tree-trunks.
Meanwhile, in Kelen’s puppy-nosed universe, those loveable Hunds (with pure bounding energy) are not unlike young Kelen poems. Later, the spirit of the dog matures more into Wile E. Coyote, linking him to a broader earth of eco-relationships. Indeed, animals are one of the Kelen touchstones and perhaps more enduring than his first cartoon versions of animals: Snoopy, Bugs Bunny, Mr Jinx, Sylvester et al. Interestingly, from the first he has drawn from the lives of spiders and moved up the food chain to turtles, sea lions, cobras, cats, possums, rats, tigers, bears, not to mention bush birds. Cockatoos, galahs and kookaburras have also been there since the beginning as motifs of the raucous and instinctive, as well as representing Kelen’s developing ecological focus. They are representative of human behaviour as much as the animal world. Unlike often surreal or comic suburban satire, the animal poems less self-consciously evoke Big Notions: ‘Cats are ‘the tiger’s/ One great soul…’ (‘Tiger Lil’). Creatures arouse his curiosity. In fact, although a dedicated suburban dweller, Kelen goes under dingo skies in Australia on occasion – or overseas he finds wild jungles, prairies and deserts which link back to Australian encounters with domestic dogs, cats and those bush birds – those go-betweens on the cusp of great suburbia and the native tree line, that border we keep shifting, which still reminds us that we are part of a larger bio-system.
Satire and Comedy – Weapons of Mass Entertainment
Animal matters are not all that constitutes this Kelen Selected. It has this totemic thread of naturalist wisdom underpinning a social conscience that has never been afraid to go head to head with public issues. At various points Kelen has addressed ‘Boat People’ tragedy and refugeeism, issues of humanitarian responsibility, wars waged on Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, or the come-home-to-roost reality of US imperialism after a hijacked airliner took down World Trade Centers I and II. Such themes are part of the terrain of ‘Kelen Country’, and meeting up again with some of these works is like being invited over to the Kelen household for a few tubes with mates talking old times and hard battles. This Selected does give them more historical resonance than contemporary relevance, which is partly the purpose of such volumes. Interestingly, the Twin Towers / Pentagon poem, with its history lesson on consequences, is not included in this volume. Is this omission an admission that some poems are necessary hot buttons of public experience, but have life spans as limited as protest songs?
If Swiftian allegory is the saving grace of satire and gives it longevity and relevance over time, allusions to cultural behaviour and public moments animate Kelen’s poems about Homer Simpson-like figures. In his case, Homer the cartoon character functions as an objective correlative for our continuing discussion of real suburban life. Likewise, Kelen ironically lets loose past literary pop idols such as Byron’s Don Juan in the shopping mall. These kinds of poems dust off characters as romantic tropes from literature for contemporary purpose, or reverse the referencing by locating ‘Bugsa’ Bunny and Sylvester as they chart the gondola canals of Venice, that ‘ancient Disneyland’ of the art world:
And Bugs, Sylvester never heroes of
a World’s Cup victory, no pizza or basilica
ever dedicated to you, saints of my sanity
for years and years you were art
and life’s all about, more real then any fresco. (‘Venice’)
Poems like this evolve out of a literary equivalent of pop art pastiche, cut and pasted for ironic effect. In my opinion, they are not bad art and have certainly entertained us in the past, yet marshaled here in this Selected they are less fresh, and point to a style or technique now the staple of magazine design, not the art gallery. For me they have fading durability. To be fair, using pop culture subjects makes Kelen a chronicler-hero of his time. To highlight these cartoon characters as motifs for human culture is to over-emphasise the temporary in con-temporary. That act runs the risk of rendering the poems irrelevant as their cartoon characters’ relevance fades. Have we admitted Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny and the rest to the pantheon of enduring cultural heroes, or have they been consigned to the shelf marked ‘Cliché’?
Kelen is a poet with courage enough to take on contemporary culture and public concerns and claw back some of poetry’s old territory annexed by modern media. Unfortunately some of the poems produced from this impulse may also not pass time’s test. Kelen’s works of this kind are well written, accessible and don’t club the reader with their social concern. They deploy comedy and satire as weapons of mass entertainment. He crafts clean lines – faithful to the poem as a language artifact – while attempting to deliver ironies and write a resonating cultural history of our times and views world crises and radioactive issues from the kitchen window or TV screen through serious-funny life-affirmation alongside celebratory idylls that Vote 1 for quotidian life:
Idleness is the ultimate responsibility.
Seers who can’t bear to look at doom see
we must evolve more Polynesian ways––
more afternoon siestas, more sleeping in
and less destructive machinery... (‘Trust’)
Homer and the Epic Tradition of Suburbia
Like his hero, Homer Simpson – and tribe who have maintained longevity as TV’s epic representatives of suburban life – Kelen has been true to his style and interests from his very first chapbook The Gods Ash Their Cigarettes (1978). In that doggy-poet post-romantic suburban universe, Kelen himself posed the relevance question:
How long do you think it will take
before people will be reading poems
rather than newspapers? (‘The Spheres’)
With the benefit of Hund-sight, the more relevant question now is perhaps whether people will be reading much, or anything?
Poetry and its occasional lucky dip winner-poets have so far been cannily prescient, which is the reasoning behind Ezra Pound’s statement “Literature is news that STAYS news” (1934) and that ‘artists are the antennae of the race.” (1967). Do we still believe that? Am I waxing a little too grim? The optimism of Kelen’s work, in general, points to his overall belief in the longer lifespan of the poem as an artifact of history, despite his specificity with popular culture images.
Fortunately, the horrors of atomic bombs, radiation cancer, crooked or inept politics, wicked wars and such-like realities that he visits, are equally matched by the small joys and perceptions gained through day-to-day activities like parenting:
Pale & cranky sick kids
fall off their perches
the fever suppresses
the hormonal tide–
a good flu, they’ll say words
unheard for years.
Thanks Dad, thanks Mum,’
and they are pleasant
as sweet as lemon cordial
until they get better. (‘Sick Kids’)
A simple poem like this, not reliant on cultural references may endure longer than even bardic Homer’s American yawp, as the voice-actors depicting the Simpson Family one day pass.
Popular culture concerns and suburban locations are at the core of the Kelen oeuvre, yet raising kids, capturing wall spiders or traipsing around the neighbourhood budge in and gain prominence as the Selected progresses and the poet ages. This blend of the erudite with the mundane may be the best of what of Australia can ever be, out there in its urban sprawl. Like the lawn-planting exercise of ‘Earthly Delights’, ‘Kulchur’, as Pound called it, has to be planted in a place of brick veneer contemporaneity. This comic positioning in living rooms is reminiscent of that iconic Leunig cartoon with bug-eyed kids glued to the sunrise on TV, while the same sun is coming up unobserved in the window. To Kelen’s credit, he sees both and writes about them. The point is, where many poets screen out their un-poetic surroundings, Kelen has always owned up to his suburban realites, yet found ways to centre himself in it as a wry commentator, and even to write modern idylls from it:
They say Canberra’s a boring town
But opening the front door
The fuse lights on Mission Impossible.
Sheriff over the road lobs an empty
A mist spreads over a land where
Gardens bring tranquility ...
Kelen, then, deftly takes in immigration, job redundancy, child education, the dole, the carbon footprint of smoking chimneys during suburban winter and the need for road planning. Yet despite the social concern, the speaker of the poem hasn’t been overwhelmed by all and can still go out into the neighbourhood with an almost Zen acceptance, although not blithely unaware of the dark undercurrents, especially in the nation’s capital:
Walking the dog is the way, see Holy wattle and banksia glow. To be an oak or a cherry tree. Silver birch, golden ash. Yard dogs sulk, Cranky as the mighty sleep. (‘Back Home’)
The Poetry of Destinations
Let it not be said that Kelen doesn’t get out of the house and suburb. Although the neighbourhood and its backyards are clearly the main vernacular – ‘field of the poem’ – there are regular jet departures throughout this book to Asia and North America. In fact, there is more Asia than North America, and perhaps this is par for the course for his generation: being a part of Asia, not acting like some neo-imperialist brat of old-empire trying to lord over it. He is truthful to his era and to the desire for wider and wilder experience outside Western belief systems and canons. Thus, the ‘Grand Tour’ poet morphs into the economy-class Everyman, back-packing the self to faraway places. Self-discovery via ‘the Other’ has spawned post-colonial studies, which in turn rose from the ashes of a scholarly guilt complex after Edward Said’s political dialectic pointed out home truths about Orientalist Studies and Western colonialisation of the world map.
Earlier Australians followed the expat-off-to-London-to-be-an artist model, believing our great desert land was a dry womb. Since the Seventies, affluence and accessibility to cheap travel has shifted Australia’s centre of influence away from Britain. Thus, Kelen now wheels a nifty cosmopolitan suitcase through the anti-terrorist airport screening process onto Eastern philosophy and other vivid phenomenological experiences – down the Mid West State, Interstate and the Trans-Sumatran highways, pulling in at Burger King, observing the bicycle army on Hanoi streets, or drinking dirty chai at Madurai Station in Tamil Nadu. These are some of the destinations of his poems and revisiting them again through this Selected is like being at the kitchen table again and going through the photograph album with him. The US poems are mostly ‘road poems’ with stopovers and the connection with Native American animal totem culture ties up with traditional wisdom and planet ecology. When it comes to Asia, Kelen focuses on the urban south. India arouses tourist cynicism, as does a lot of what he sees in Indonesia and Thailand. Hanoi is clearly his ‘Paris of the East’ and has drawn him back more than one time it would seem. The earlier poems are refreshingly lacking in Western angst and cultural irony:
Love shimmers on the shore
when breezes shiver
lets the spine know its alive.
Oh celestial Ha, your name
means water of the rivers,
bamboo spirit, one gold star’s
music on a night like this,
peace from the sky then
a storm whips off the Eastern Sea
the rain dissolves balconies
and the flooded streets flow like rivers
I feel love and cannot help it, the country,
Hanoi, most romantic city and river (‘Red River’)
This is Kelen at his most unguarded. Other Vietnam poems like ‘Thousand Star Hotel, Hanoi’ also do uncharacteristic things, dramatising Vietnamese voices without imposed irony. Here a new kind of empathy is visible, where the poet is not just the clever commentator, but a voice of place truly identified with the speaker of the poem: Huan, ‘decorated veteran, part-time cyclo driver’ whose renown rests on being the neighbourhood barber. He has endured and survived:
some days the clouds re-enact the old stories
Almost yesterday the sky lit with dragon’s breath,
we fired at American phantoms and bombers.
We were always bamboo, now we are also steel.
This comes from one of the long narratives in the book. The poet has disappeared into the neighbourhood of the poem, dropped ‘his stuff’ – his literary correctness, and got down to the ego-less art of writing poetry. It is an acknowledgement, perhaps, of humility before the subject: in this case, the struggles of the Vietnamese people, which are bigger than one’s self-cultivated ‘style’ or ‘voice’. The later poem ‘Hanoi Girls’ reports from a more familiar commentator perspective, yet still expresses a high level good heartedness for the older, less urbanised city of his imagination.
Yet, I wish more from Kelen – more unselfconscious identification with idea, place and time, rather than the orchestration of theoretical positions and modes of style. They often filter life to the point that somehow loses the largeness of experience through the smaller funnel of personality. I may be wrong about this and, as I said at the outset of this essay, I am a Kelen fan because he hardly ever displeases the reader.
Like Felix the Cat, Kelen does pull arty stuff from his bag of tricks – never randomly – and avoids the blatant or pretentious. There is thinking behind his writing decisions. Anyone who can scribe credibly and sympathetically about national obsessions such as cricket and footy deserves a wider readership for the sheer attempt of putting poetry into the public domain. The question of relevance I raise merely as a point to pause and reflect upon the ‘far distant’, while Kelen’s otherwise very self-assured and entertaining performance to date has been consistent and with more high points than lows. There are few – perhaps no – clangers in this collection.
Final Watershed
The more recent poems at the end of Island Earth continue his preoccupations while evoking sympathies more ecological, alongside poems rankled by mad things done in the world. There are poems with an elegiac mood, more family focus, a sense of his middle-agedness, not to mention the second-last poem in the book, something different for Kelen: an unabashed love poem with ‘The Blue Exercise’. The last poem, ‘Bird Diary’, with its sulphur-crested cockatoos, links back to one of the first Kelen works in Island Earth, ‘Very Early Morning’, completing some kind of cycle of returns.
Throughout his work, Kelen has wrestled with the devil in the details of things. That concrete connection with his world remains his strength and brings a reader back to poem after poem. However, the real challenge for each poet today is that the same world can be visited all too vividly and virtually via social media. How to make it new? For instance, as I mentioned at the outset of this essay, my nephew and his / our generation’s need for language and articulation is secondary to the nightly feast of blogs, movies and shows.
Does this mean the poet of negative capability has been reduced to a second-hand chronicler unseated by the virtual eye of technology? How can Kelen’s (or anyone’s) poetry compete? Can poets afford to retreat into art and speak big things to increasingly small audiences? What is the poet’s future and relevance in all this? Is it a cosmic joke? Impossible rhetorical questions these, and the subject of readings and essays to come.
This is a watershed book for S.K. Kelen. Let us hope that where he goes to from here during his ‘last quarter of the match’ will be even more interesting, provocative, entertaining and perhaps more personal and touching than his productive time spent so far on / in the field of the poem.
On the way back from the Frankston Motor Registry, my Singapore-born nephew, now the proud possessor of his P-plates, drove confidently and in a celebratory mood. I was happy that learner had turned ‘chauffeur’ so that I could revert to one of the idle contentment of life – reading aloud from a new collection of poems without pressing interruptions. I decided to try out The Poem Relevancy Test with a couple of random pieces. In his early twenties and now at university, this post-modern Everyman communicates mostly through text message and is one of the vast majority of non-poetry readers. Thus, Island Earth: New and Selected Poems became the tome for some stick-the-finger-in-the-page bibliomancy while we motored through death-camp quiet suburbia.
My prime digit stopped early at some Kelen juvenilia: ‘Chairman Mao and Charlie Brown’, with its charmingly dated critique of Communism as a comic strip. It was the reference to Snoopy that grabbed interest. Being more into man-perfumes than Marxism, my nephew had also recently acquired his own first follower in the form of a black Labrador pup named Ross, thus reversing anthropomorphism and endowing the tyke with human characteristics. On theme now, I followed up with some of the other early ‘pooch poems’ where the life of the artist doubles as a metaphor for a young dog – in Kelen’s case, a mutt named Kafka – in which the vicissitudes of larrikin existence run parallel to the eager panting of a new poet first appearing in print. My WhatsApp-savvy nephew could relate to this canine portraiture as it touched on his own new master/slave relationship. (Don’t we keep pets to be adored without question?) He said that if this was poetry it was ok because it told jokes and was about ordinary stuff his generation could relate to.
I immediately felt old, in spite of the fact these vintage Kelen dog poems were my own publishing age. Yes, I have followed their first appearances in print over the years and am a fan. Many of them are old friends. The nephew didn’t ask to borrow the volume for later (not his or the poetry’s fault). This is the common problem of relevance that poetry faces when competing for attention with today’s multimedia smorgasbord, especially when the poetry hums and whizzes with pop culture references as Kelen’s does. Today’s multi-tasker has only a dog’s brief span of attention before moving on to fresh tree-trunks.
Meanwhile, in Kelen’s puppy-nosed universe, those loveable Hunds (with pure bounding energy) are not unlike young Kelen poems. Later, the spirit of the dog matures more into Wile E. Coyote, linking him to a broader earth of eco-relationships. Indeed, animals are one of the Kelen touchstones and perhaps more enduring than his first cartoon versions of animals: Snoopy, Bugs Bunny, Mr Jinx, Sylvester et al. Interestingly, from the first he has drawn from the lives of spiders and moved up the food chain to turtles, sea lions, cobras, cats, possums, rats, tigers, bears, not to mention bush birds. Cockatoos, galahs and kookaburras have also been there since the beginning as motifs of the raucous and instinctive, as well as representing Kelen’s developing ecological focus. They are representative of human behaviour as much as the animal world. Unlike often surreal or comic suburban satire, the animal poems less self-consciously evoke Big Notions: ‘Cats are ‘the tiger’s/ One great soul…’ (‘Tiger Lil’). Creatures arouse his curiosity. In fact, although a dedicated suburban dweller, Kelen goes under dingo skies in Australia on occasion – or overseas he finds wild jungles, prairies and deserts which link back to Australian encounters with domestic dogs, cats and those bush birds – those go-betweens on the cusp of great suburbia and the native tree line, that border we keep shifting, which still reminds us that we are part of a larger bio-system.
Satire and Comedy – Weapons of Mass Entertainment
Animal matters are not all that constitutes this Kelen Selected. It has this totemic thread of naturalist wisdom underpinning a social conscience that has never been afraid to go head to head with public issues. At various points Kelen has addressed ‘Boat People’ tragedy and refugeeism, issues of humanitarian responsibility, wars waged on Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, or the come-home-to-roost reality of US imperialism after a hijacked airliner took down World Trade Centers I and II. Such themes are part of the terrain of ‘Kelen Country’, and meeting up again with some of these works is like being invited over to the Kelen household for a few tubes with mates talking old times and hard battles. This Selected does give them more historical resonance than contemporary relevance, which is partly the purpose of such volumes. Interestingly, the Twin Towers / Pentagon poem, with its history lesson on consequences, is not included in this volume. Is this omission an admission that some poems are necessary hot buttons of public experience, but have life spans as limited as protest songs?
If Swiftian allegory is the saving grace of satire and gives it longevity and relevance over time, allusions to cultural behaviour and public moments animate Kelen’s poems about Homer Simpson-like figures. In his case, Homer the cartoon character functions as an objective correlative for our continuing discussion of real suburban life. Likewise, Kelen ironically lets loose past literary pop idols such as Byron’s Don Juan in the shopping mall. These kinds of poems dust off characters as romantic tropes from literature for contemporary purpose, or reverse the referencing by locating ‘Bugsa’ Bunny and Sylvester as they chart the gondola canals of Venice, that ‘ancient Disneyland’ of the art world:
And Bugs, Sylvester never heroes of
a World’s Cup victory, no pizza or basilica
ever dedicated to you, saints of my sanity
for years and years you were art
and life’s all about, more real then any fresco. (‘Venice’)
Poems like this evolve out of a literary equivalent of pop art pastiche, cut and pasted for ironic effect. In my opinion, they are not bad art and have certainly entertained us in the past, yet marshaled here in this Selected they are less fresh, and point to a style or technique now the staple of magazine design, not the art gallery. For me they have fading durability. To be fair, using pop culture subjects makes Kelen a chronicler-hero of his time. To highlight these cartoon characters as motifs for human culture is to over-emphasise the temporary in con-temporary. That act runs the risk of rendering the poems irrelevant as their cartoon characters’ relevance fades. Have we admitted Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny and the rest to the pantheon of enduring cultural heroes, or have they been consigned to the shelf marked ‘Cliché’?
Kelen is a poet with courage enough to take on contemporary culture and public concerns and claw back some of poetry’s old territory annexed by modern media. Unfortunately some of the poems produced from this impulse may also not pass time’s test. Kelen’s works of this kind are well written, accessible and don’t club the reader with their social concern. They deploy comedy and satire as weapons of mass entertainment. He crafts clean lines – faithful to the poem as a language artifact – while attempting to deliver ironies and write a resonating cultural history of our times and views world crises and radioactive issues from the kitchen window or TV screen through serious-funny life-affirmation alongside celebratory idylls that Vote 1 for quotidian life:
Idleness is the ultimate responsibility.
Seers who can’t bear to look at doom see
we must evolve more Polynesian ways––
more afternoon siestas, more sleeping in
and less destructive machinery... (‘Trust’)
Homer and the Epic Tradition of Suburbia
Like his hero, Homer Simpson – and tribe who have maintained longevity as TV’s epic representatives of suburban life – Kelen has been true to his style and interests from his very first chapbook The Gods Ash Their Cigarettes (1978). In that doggy-poet post-romantic suburban universe, Kelen himself posed the relevance question:
How long do you think it will take
before people will be reading poems
rather than newspapers? (‘The Spheres’)
With the benefit of Hund-sight, the more relevant question now is perhaps whether people will be reading much, or anything?
Poetry and its occasional lucky dip winner-poets have so far been cannily prescient, which is the reasoning behind Ezra Pound’s statement “Literature is news that STAYS news” (1934) and that ‘artists are the antennae of the race.” (1967). Do we still believe that? Am I waxing a little too grim? The optimism of Kelen’s work, in general, points to his overall belief in the longer lifespan of the poem as an artifact of history, despite his specificity with popular culture images.
Fortunately, the horrors of atomic bombs, radiation cancer, crooked or inept politics, wicked wars and such-like realities that he visits, are equally matched by the small joys and perceptions gained through day-to-day activities like parenting:
Pale & cranky sick kids
fall off their perches
the fever suppresses
the hormonal tide–
a good flu, they’ll say words
unheard for years.
Thanks Dad, thanks Mum,’
and they are pleasant
as sweet as lemon cordial
until they get better. (‘Sick Kids’)
A simple poem like this, not reliant on cultural references may endure longer than even bardic Homer’s American yawp, as the voice-actors depicting the Simpson Family one day pass.
Popular culture concerns and suburban locations are at the core of the Kelen oeuvre, yet raising kids, capturing wall spiders or traipsing around the neighbourhood budge in and gain prominence as the Selected progresses and the poet ages. This blend of the erudite with the mundane may be the best of what of Australia can ever be, out there in its urban sprawl. Like the lawn-planting exercise of ‘Earthly Delights’, ‘Kulchur’, as Pound called it, has to be planted in a place of brick veneer contemporaneity. This comic positioning in living rooms is reminiscent of that iconic Leunig cartoon with bug-eyed kids glued to the sunrise on TV, while the same sun is coming up unobserved in the window. To Kelen’s credit, he sees both and writes about them. The point is, where many poets screen out their un-poetic surroundings, Kelen has always owned up to his suburban realites, yet found ways to centre himself in it as a wry commentator, and even to write modern idylls from it:
They say Canberra’s a boring town
But opening the front door
The fuse lights on Mission Impossible.
Sheriff over the road lobs an empty
A mist spreads over a land where
Gardens bring tranquility ...
Kelen, then, deftly takes in immigration, job redundancy, child education, the dole, the carbon footprint of smoking chimneys during suburban winter and the need for road planning. Yet despite the social concern, the speaker of the poem hasn’t been overwhelmed by all and can still go out into the neighbourhood with an almost Zen acceptance, although not blithely unaware of the dark undercurrents, especially in the nation’s capital:
Walking the dog is the way, see Holy wattle and banksia glow. To be an oak or a cherry tree. Silver birch, golden ash. Yard dogs sulk, Cranky as the mighty sleep. (‘Back Home’)
The Poetry of Destinations
Let it not be said that Kelen doesn’t get out of the house and suburb. Although the neighbourhood and its backyards are clearly the main vernacular – ‘field of the poem’ – there are regular jet departures throughout this book to Asia and North America. In fact, there is more Asia than North America, and perhaps this is par for the course for his generation: being a part of Asia, not acting like some neo-imperialist brat of old-empire trying to lord over it. He is truthful to his era and to the desire for wider and wilder experience outside Western belief systems and canons. Thus, the ‘Grand Tour’ poet morphs into the economy-class Everyman, back-packing the self to faraway places. Self-discovery via ‘the Other’ has spawned post-colonial studies, which in turn rose from the ashes of a scholarly guilt complex after Edward Said’s political dialectic pointed out home truths about Orientalist Studies and Western colonialisation of the world map.
Earlier Australians followed the expat-off-to-London-to-be-an artist model, believing our great desert land was a dry womb. Since the Seventies, affluence and accessibility to cheap travel has shifted Australia’s centre of influence away from Britain. Thus, Kelen now wheels a nifty cosmopolitan suitcase through the anti-terrorist airport screening process onto Eastern philosophy and other vivid phenomenological experiences – down the Mid West State, Interstate and the Trans-Sumatran highways, pulling in at Burger King, observing the bicycle army on Hanoi streets, or drinking dirty chai at Madurai Station in Tamil Nadu. These are some of the destinations of his poems and revisiting them again through this Selected is like being at the kitchen table again and going through the photograph album with him. The US poems are mostly ‘road poems’ with stopovers and the connection with Native American animal totem culture ties up with traditional wisdom and planet ecology. When it comes to Asia, Kelen focuses on the urban south. India arouses tourist cynicism, as does a lot of what he sees in Indonesia and Thailand. Hanoi is clearly his ‘Paris of the East’ and has drawn him back more than one time it would seem. The earlier poems are refreshingly lacking in Western angst and cultural irony:
Love shimmers on the shore
when breezes shiver
lets the spine know its alive.
Oh celestial Ha, your name
means water of the rivers,
bamboo spirit, one gold star’s
music on a night like this,
peace from the sky then
a storm whips off the Eastern Sea
the rain dissolves balconies
and the flooded streets flow like rivers
I feel love and cannot help it, the country,
Hanoi, most romantic city and river (‘Red River’)
This is Kelen at his most unguarded. Other Vietnam poems like ‘Thousand Star Hotel, Hanoi’ also do uncharacteristic things, dramatising Vietnamese voices without imposed irony. Here a new kind of empathy is visible, where the poet is not just the clever commentator, but a voice of place truly identified with the speaker of the poem: Huan, ‘decorated veteran, part-time cyclo driver’ whose renown rests on being the neighbourhood barber. He has endured and survived:
some days the clouds re-enact the old stories
Almost yesterday the sky lit with dragon’s breath,
we fired at American phantoms and bombers.
We were always bamboo, now we are also steel.
This comes from one of the long narratives in the book. The poet has disappeared into the neighbourhood of the poem, dropped ‘his stuff’ – his literary correctness, and got down to the ego-less art of writing poetry. It is an acknowledgement, perhaps, of humility before the subject: in this case, the struggles of the Vietnamese people, which are bigger than one’s self-cultivated ‘style’ or ‘voice’. The later poem ‘Hanoi Girls’ reports from a more familiar commentator perspective, yet still expresses a high level good heartedness for the older, less urbanised city of his imagination.
Yet, I wish more from Kelen – more unselfconscious identification with idea, place and time, rather than the orchestration of theoretical positions and modes of style. They often filter life to the point that somehow loses the largeness of experience through the smaller funnel of personality. I may be wrong about this and, as I said at the outset of this essay, I am a Kelen fan because he hardly ever displeases the reader.
Like Felix the Cat, Kelen does pull arty stuff from his bag of tricks – never randomly – and avoids the blatant or pretentious. There is thinking behind his writing decisions. Anyone who can scribe credibly and sympathetically about national obsessions such as cricket and footy deserves a wider readership for the sheer attempt of putting poetry into the public domain. The question of relevance I raise merely as a point to pause and reflect upon the ‘far distant’, while Kelen’s otherwise very self-assured and entertaining performance to date has been consistent and with more high points than lows. There are few – perhaps no – clangers in this collection.
Final Watershed
The more recent poems at the end of Island Earth continue his preoccupations while evoking sympathies more ecological, alongside poems rankled by mad things done in the world. There are poems with an elegiac mood, more family focus, a sense of his middle-agedness, not to mention the second-last poem in the book, something different for Kelen: an unabashed love poem with ‘The Blue Exercise’. The last poem, ‘Bird Diary’, with its sulphur-crested cockatoos, links back to one of the first Kelen works in Island Earth, ‘Very Early Morning’, completing some kind of cycle of returns.
Throughout his work, Kelen has wrestled with the devil in the details of things. That concrete connection with his world remains his strength and brings a reader back to poem after poem. However, the real challenge for each poet today is that the same world can be visited all too vividly and virtually via social media. How to make it new? For instance, as I mentioned at the outset of this essay, my nephew and his / our generation’s need for language and articulation is secondary to the nightly feast of blogs, movies and shows.
Does this mean the poet of negative capability has been reduced to a second-hand chronicler unseated by the virtual eye of technology? How can Kelen’s (or anyone’s) poetry compete? Can poets afford to retreat into art and speak big things to increasingly small audiences? What is the poet’s future and relevance in all this? Is it a cosmic joke? Impossible rhetorical questions these, and the subject of readings and essays to come.
This is a watershed book for S.K. Kelen. Let us hope that where he goes to from here during his ‘last quarter of the match’ will be even more interesting, provocative, entertaining and perhaps more personal and touching than his productive time spent so far on / in the field of the poem.
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