How did an Auckland poet living in Indonesia come to publish with IP?

Jeremy Robert's book Cards on the Table is about to be toured in New Zealand, along with David Reiter's latest Timelord Dreaming: tweetems from ward 8b.

We asked Jeremy to blog for us about his adventures as a poet in a strange land – or should we say, a strange poet in a stranger land, and here's what he's posted for us, and you.

BAJAJ BOY STORIES: Star Deli Gig, 2013

Even after a few months in Indonesia, we were still very much strangers in a strange land - experiencing things unknown in our former lives. It felt like we’d been given the key to a mystical city - the colourful Jakarta landscape alive with the sound-track of a million motorbikes & Bajaj, blaring minaret towers & calls of “Hey, mister!” Our eyes were full: female smiles filled with mystery; exotic-looking food we weren’t brave enough to try; the sight of a ‘rubbish-picker’ hauling his wooden cart - loaded with several hundred kilos of trash, barefoot, in driving rain with lightning overhead, straining uphill into oncoming rush-hour traffic; foreigners drunk on free beer; snakes slowly waking up at dusk. Of course, we were itching to keep playing live.

The need to scrounge for gig venues led us to the Star Deli, which is a gritty music bar in Kemang, South Jakarta - frequented largely by a mix of seasoned ex-patriot oil industry workers, with a sprinkling of Jakarta ‘greenhorns’ & staffed by young Javanese beauties decked out in cute little matching outfits. It is locally famous for being the bar where patrons have literally died while sitting at the bar. It serves as your typical seedy watering hole, where a good dose of bullshitting, cheating & gold-digging goes on, as the beer & spirits flow & the cigarettes are sucked off, one after another. There’s also a bit of violence, on occasion. The Star Deli’s stage is home to everything from tattooed punk bands to Country and Western. It was the location of the most in-your-face gig the Bajaj Boys ever did.

We talked our way into the gig by selling the idea to the owners that we were poetry & Rock ‘n’ Roll. Which was true. Not poetry trying to be Rock ‘n’ Roll; not Rock ‘n’ Roll trying to be poetry, but poetry AND Rock ‘n’ Roll. I thought our sound was maybe a little different to what I’d done before. It was a step away from ‘soundscapes’ & jazz influence & the free-form improvisation thing, where the musician stood there waiting for the moment to be cut free so they could largely play whatever they felt like. The two of us were tied together. You didn’t need a full band. ‘Manchester City’ man Derek was a good enough guitar player to create a memorable riff or borrow a suitable one from somewhere & it would set up a productive tension under the words. It worked. Our creative process was simple: I’d read a poem out loud & Derek would listen & try a few chords or notes – usually striking the right feel very quickly. The other way was for me to listen to a riff or tune Derek had come up with which we both liked & then I would rifle through the files & pick a good match for the music. The Bajaj Boys were simpatico.

It was the last gig done with Derek playing his Jakarta, Blok M-purchased rubbish guitar, too. Within a few weeks of buying it, the neck had warped in the constant humidity & the cheap strings threatened to go out of tune at any moment. After fruitlessly searching the streets, he’d been forced to part with a few hundred thousand Rupiah to buy the piece of shit, in a shop where the manager refused to turn down bad booming club music, when Derek asked if he could check out this guitar more closely. Have a play. Urgent necessity meant that he had to buy it.

So, at the Deli, we took a few grateful sips on our free-drink-of-choice (Scotch & dry for Derek; vodka, lime & soda for me!) & got into our work on stage. Just this side of ‘in-tune’, Derek’s picked-up acoustic twangs bounced off the walls & flew like dazzled mosquitos into the eardrums of unwilling listeners. Right from the start, it was clear we had only about a third of the audience in our pocket. The others really were just there to puff, drink & talk. Sometimes I yelled into the mic, blasting words into those same ignoring ear-drums: “Who surfs porn out there?”, “Who’s been to Paris?”, & “Hey, is there any cherry brandy behind the bar?” to cut thru the noise & indifference. If those fat beer-drinking expats didn’t want a mental floss, they were suddenly stuck in a room with two messengers who came to get the job done. It never really worried us if we met disinterest & we often did. The Bajaj Boys once played to an audience of one. But I felt that if I actually sat down with these nicotine junkies & alcohol sponges & gave them a copy of a poem to read, they would most probably relate to the content & say something positive. Was it bad memories of crappy, boring poetry teaching during ancient school days? One notorious local piss-head had commented to me a few days before our gig: “Poetry? Shit! - isn’t that something that people did about 500 years ago?”

During the gig, our eyes constantly scanned the dark, smoky room – past our own little posse of supporters, watching the sauntering, sideways-looking waitresses & chain-smoking regulars who would turn their startled heads every now & then, when a particular phrase caught their attention. Probably a dirty word. The whole scene seemed to unfold in slow-motion, while outside, the Java night hummed - busy as a gargantuan hornet’s nest, but filled with friendly, grinning teeth instead of threatening stings. Constant inspiration hung in that fertile, steamy air, which was always ready to be breathed in, absorbed. 

The truth is you never really know who might be listening & what people are thinking. I once chose to perform a piece about 911’s infamous pilot Mohammad Atta (in which I say “I’m glad you died”) at a PC, life-affirming Oxfam fund-raiser, where one poet actually apologised for being an American & for the existence of George Bush. There was surprise & dead silence after I finished my short piece - the last two words being ‘jet fuel’. Later, I was slightly shocked to have two female audience members approach me separately, with thanks & to say how much they loved it. No, you never know what people have in their heads.

Still, this Bajaj Boy set list was put together specifically for a Rock ‘n’ Roll bar: THE PUNK M O (anti-politician); THE TACO EXPRESS (drinking Margaritas in Texas); LENA (a young woman using men); PERMANENTLY TEMPORARY (watch out – change is coming); CICCIOLINA (how a famous Italian porn star once tried to save the world); SHE NEVER KNEW (falling in love with a woman who barely knows you); CHERRY BRANDY & THE LEAP OF FAITH (religion, alcohol & spirituality); IS ALL RAIN THE SAME? (life can be so full of PC, culture-respecting bullshit); THE FREAKS OF VENICE (homeless people who live outside the mainstream with their addictions know as much about the meaning of life as anyone); FADING WITH THE NEON FLOWERS (guys on the town, drinking & trying to pick up women); HE’S GOTTA SEE US, HE’S GOTTA STOP (live fast, die young - à la James Dean).

The Bajaj Boys did well that night.

Due to the pushing of the wrong button on the Sony Dictaphone on the darkened stage, no recording exists.

It's not often that poetry gets reviewed in the major newspapers any more, so we were very pleased to see The Sydney Morning Herald's review of our recent anthology of speculative poetry, not to mention their characterisation of IP as 'risk taking', which reminds us of Sir Humphrey's notion of what it means to be a 'courageous' politician in Yes, Prime Minister.

Peter's review speaks for itself, and we hope it'll prompt you to buy the book to reward our risk-taking, if you haven't already done so, and also to share the news.

One of the most enterprising, unusual and rewarding anthologies of the last year is The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, edited by New Zealand writer Tim Jones and Australian poet PS (Penelope) Cottier. The key word in the sub-title is defined with an appropriate generality: "the speculative is the area in which we attempt to write what we can't possibly know". 

 

The poets included range from the 19th century to the present, a much narrower temporal span than their poems, which travel millennia into the future and across galaxies. Bearing the latter point in mind, the editors note that theirs is a book "with a wide geography and an interesting fauna". They continue: "Here be dragons, true, but also zombies (traditional and vegetarian), werewolves, swagmen, poets small enough to fit into pockets, aliens of various sorts, angels, people made mostly of spare parts, or preserved wholly in DNA, and intergalactic tradies."

Though the book covers so much territory (and given the list above, unsurprisingly has several poems set in museums and zoos), it is tightly and wittily organised into five thematic sections, each taking its name from a notable nineteenth-century poem. The first, dealing with "space travels and related pursuits", is "We don't know where he's at" (from Banjo Paterson's "Clancy of the Overflow"); the second, "Howsoe'er anomalous", concerned with "aliens, weird creatures, surrealism and magic realism", comes from a poem as strange as any that is to be found here: Barron Field's "Kangaroo". Next – with its title from Henry Lawson – is "On the Wallaby (temporal)", whose subject is "time travel and visions of the end of the world". It is followed by "The fifth part of the earth" (Field again): "Australia in various lights".  Last is "His ghost may be heard" (Paterson – in a version of Waltzing Matilda – and the ballad is here in its entirety too), whose business is "ghosts, fairies, myths and legends".

P. S. Cottier

The collection opens with the controlled whimsy of "Tea and Stars" by the always engaging John Jenkins: "The mouse travelled to the stars/in a blue teacup". John Dolce's "Job for a Hyperdrive Mechanic" works with a wry matter-of-factness: "As I recall the ambient temperature/of the angular discharge tub/airlocked the anode rod". David Adès' travel to "The Three Moons of Tenoa" ends plangently: "how unimaginable a world/with placid seas, and no capacious moons/to sing serenades by". Travel is also the affair of S.K. Kelen's brilliant parody of a tourist brochure in "Flying Toasters". This of Kursa in Beta Eridani: "booking accommodation well in advance is wise though entirely futile". This first section also contains "The Last Planet Out" by David Reiter, who is also the publisher of the admirable risk-taking Interactive Press that we can thank for this book.

As promised, aliens roam in Part Two. Diane Fahey's "Silverfish" imagines the Thysaurans, while Benjamin Dodds' "Others" muses of a possible arrival from so-called outer space and then decides "Perhaps they'll simply pass us by/indifferent in sleek behemoths/on the way to a place less/parochial than here". Emilie Zoey Baker presents "The Vegetarian Zombie – the undead salad beast" – while there is homage to a master of the weird, H.P. Lovecraft, in Jude Aquilina's "Cthulhu Calls". Jan Napier's "Poets in Pockets" shows how "they shrill and argue/like an aggravation of lorikeets", while there are poems by Philip Salom and Lisa Jacobson about Daedalus, the space traveller who flew too close to the sun. A number of the poems in The Stars Like Sand were invited. Much to the editors' pleasure, one of those who accepted was Les Murray, whose superb poem "The Future" begins: "There is nothing about it. Much science fiction is set there/but it is not about it. Prophecy is not about it … Even the man we nailed to a tree for a lookout/said little about it".

Tim Jones

In this splendid anthology, that entertains from start to finish, we find such colonial poets as J. Brunton Stephens in "The Courtship of the Future" (AD 2876) depicts a world where – even though people coupling have been "taught to draw the whole soul though/A foot of gutta-percha tubing"– sexual misconduct has not been eradicated. Tim Sinclair's vision of the future in "Silent City" is quietly mournful: "There is no sunrise or sunset in the city,/just a uniform, sourceless glow". In "The End of the World", Lawson's contemporary Victor Daley reveals a peevish and disappointed God who brushes Man off his knees: "With all its glories ripe/The Earth passed, like a spark/Blown from a sailor's pipe/Into the hollow dark". The Stars Like Sand shows us, in the work of the more than 80 poets included, much of that illimitable dark, as well as the flights of fancy and hope that can give brief and brilliant illumination. Seek out this book – admirable, and one of a kind.

Why did Jenny McFadden pass up a book talk with Richard Flanagan?

Blogger's Note: This is Jenny's launch speech for The Copyart Murders

It’s a pleasure to be here to introduce a new novel by Geoffrey Gates – The CopyArt Murders.  Of course I did have tickets for another book event this evening –as we speak Richard Flanagan is conducting a book-talk with Jennifer Byrne at the Town Hall on his Booker Award winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.  Understandably, I ditched this big-ticket gala once I was made aware of the opportunity to speak on behalf of Geoffrey Gates. 

 The Copyart Murders is a work of Crime Fiction. And I’m sure Geoff would be pleased to hear me say this, it’s a work of “intellectual” Crime Fiction. As most readers know, Crime Fiction has enjoyed a massively extended period of readership popularity. Possibly this is because we are all, by nature, nosey busybodies who like the opportunity to peek into the private, illicit doings of seemingly upstanding people. And certainly it’s also because, given the state of existential uncertainty in which we all live in the modern era, we all crave the sense of closure and certainty that the average Crime Fiction novel affords us. Even if we don’t know what the hell is going on in our own lives, it’s nice to read about an orderly, if blood-soaked world, where hidden actions can be deduced from small amounts of evidence and perpetrators can satisfactorily be brought to justice. It gives us some sense of stability and safety to think that there are still noble searchers-out of truth somewhere in the world – the Poirots, the Miss Marples, and all the rest who will stop at nothing to set an uncertain and often dangerous world to rights. And you only have to look at any random television program to know that, after concocted ‘reality’ cooking and building shows, crime rules the remote control.

However, how can the often ill-regarded, stock-standard, pulp-fiction elements of Crime Fiction find a place in the more intellectual realms of modern literary fiction? If you’re ever suffering from some serious disease which requires a long period of bed-rest you could try reading Foccault, or Derrida or Roland Barthes, in an effort to understand post-modernism before you die. And then you’ll die anyway. Yet the playfulness of postmodernism, so often alluded to in theory, does exist in practice. So, purchase a copy of Geoff’s novel before you hit the groaning shelves of post-modernist theory.

To clarify from the outset, within the novel written by Geoffrey Gates lies a novel written by his hapless and sometimes truth-challenged Australian protagonist, Blake Knox.  Geoff’s novel concerns, and I quote, “A would-be novelist found unconscious on the grave of an artist who very much resembles the victim in the novel he had come to France to attempt to write.” Thus, the novelistic endeavours attempted by the would-be author within the novel, Blake Knox, prove to be somewhat fraught since the at-the-time “fictional” death that he writes about predates by 23 days the death of the very artist who is the victim depicted in Blake’s crime fiction novel. Detective Sauveur who is investigating this murder of the artist immediately presumes it to have been committed by the would-be novelist Blake Knox himself. Sauveur, with a considerable degree of cynical self-reflexivity points out, that this is ‘a most unfortunate case of foreshadowing.’ Blake Knox himself notes ruefully that ‘stumbling upon the plot of an actual crime was an occupational hazard of writing he had never considered before.’

To boot, the death imagined and then written about before the occurrence of the matching “real” death upon which the novel-outside the-novel turns, is a very postmodern death. It is a death seemingly brought about by the very material that so plagues the royalty-dependent modern novelist of the real world – death by photocopy.

Indeed, the novel concerns itself to a considerable degree with the problem of re-presentation. In discussing one of the artworks of the murdered artist Jean Genet, the narrator, the sometimes fumbling but nevertheless intelligent Blake Knox, notes that Eyes (2003) was a landscape painting with a camera lying in the grass in the foreground, and Mount Ventoux in the background. There was an immediate tension over subject, whether it was the work being painted or the representation of that work in the camera lens where a reflection of the mountain and sky had been carefully matched. This pretty much sums up the problem at the heart of the novel. What is “art” and what is merely reproduction? And, more to the point, how can the detective work performed by the fictional detective/detectives be separated from the detective work done by the novelist/novelists in the creation of the very novel in which the detectives and novelists are represented? It’s all a puzzle – but then so is the world.

The Copyart Murders is also a demonstration that, outside the kind of single-minded pulp fiction, which brooks no deviation from formula, there is no such thing as the single-genre novel. Sprinkled liberally throughout this work of crime fiction is an entertaining mix of travelogue, laconic Australian humour and French for Beginners (not to mention sex, lies and videotape.) For instance: ‘…it was a short walk to the village’s main attraction, the Notre Dame de Cadenet. Legend has it that a former farmer was ploughing his field here in the 12^th century when his cows suddenly knelt down in front of a row of century old junipers (“Cade” in French) and the farmer decided to build a chapel here in response to this minor miracle. (But perhaps his cows merely had dodgy knees.)’ And elsewhere;  ‘Whatever evidence the French police had against him, it was a matter of common sense that a lanky intellectual like Blake would hardly be the type to commit a murder for the hell of it. For what possible motive could he have? A deep hurt in response to the painter’s manner to him during their dinner together? A pathological hatred of landscape paintings?’ You get the drift. The novel will engage your intellectual faculties, but it will also entertain you.

The novel begins with a memorable statement from Italo Calvino; “Who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined.” And indeed when the renowned novelist Geoffrey Gates is remembered and lauded in biography, perhaps his own description of his young, inexperienced but very readable and entertaining writer-protagonist Blake Knox, on his journey from Innocence to Experience, will preface those memories: ‘a teacher and (very occasional) writer whose only earthly possessions were his acoustic guitar a mustard-coloured sleeping bag, and an ever-expanding collection of paperbacks.’ Given his parlous state Blake concludes ‘I’ll write a book… because everybody likes an author!’

The Copyart Murders is a memorably entertaining and engaging novel on many, many levels. I recommend it to you most highly.

– Jenny McFadden

Rebecca Kylie Law: A Contemporary Metaphysical Poet

Rebecca Kylie Laws talks intimately about her new IP book In My Days and In My Sleep from her perspective as a poet and Catholic.

Rebecca's book will be launched at Bookoccino Bookshop on Sunday, 17 May, from 3 p.m. You can RSVP here.

The organ in St Mary’s Cathedral, St. Mary’s Road, Sydney has a beautiful console in the nave, designed I think by Eric Wisden and consisting of brass piping across horizontally slatted wooden backings that form part of a complex wooden sound structure. The piping is remarkable for the precision of its varying heights, remaining consistent in the increments by which they become taller and by which they recede. Indeed, they seem, toward the back, almost fan-like in their arrangement and the stronger, bigger and taller pipes at both sides add to this symphony of the delicate with the robust. 

When I first saw it I thought it was, aesthetically, a little like a book of poems, some short, some medium and others long. My new book essentially began here and became the reason for the religious overtones of the poems within. 

Of course, I was not at St Mary’s by accident but, rather, was attending a weekly service as a Catholic. To the non-religious person it truly is impossible to explain what it means to worship God in this ritualistic fashion other than to profess a faith I have had since a child, a faith that was given to me by my parents, vis-à-vis my education. 

The experience is extremely personal and rewarding in the sense the quietude of prayer, that dark space behind closed eyes in which you are with your soul, your heart, your feeling, directs you toward calmness. It is as though in drawing together your hands and kneeling you are facing yourself at your most composed and most beautiful: your most un-self. This is integrity and through prayer and worship, I follow it as my God and my light, my truth. 

At the same time I am with God, I am recognising a divine presence and sharing my most private life with him. I sometimes laugh at how useful that word, God, is, because it means in the one address, for instance, the beginning of prayer with “dear God”, I am really saying hello to the Trinity, to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Which in this sense means I am also addressing my church. So you see, prayer can be complicated! 

This point brings me to an important question a few people have recently asked: “how can you reconcile what has been happening in the media lately with your own faith?” This, more precisely, refers to the innumerable sex crimes the church tried to hide.

Well, my answer is very simple. Sexual abuse is everywhere. It is happening next door or over the street from where you live. It is happening to your best friend or friend of a friend. It is perpetrated by lovers, by strangers, by new acquaintances or teachers; and, sadly, by priests. In light of this, to my mind, the church has been disproportionately singled out by a media spotlight that, almost through bemusement, won’t beam the light of exposition elsewhere. So I continue in my relationship with God and go to Mass etc. because there are a lot of people in the world and some are bad, some so-so and some good.  

Now to poetry… 

My prayers are not poems. One comes to mind that could be with potential but, no, onthe whole they are quite different. They were written to share with others the experience of prayer, of being quiet with yourself and looking around at the world, of appreciating life and the loves you have in it, the people, animals or favourite moments. 

Some of the poems were inspired by walks in the botanic gardens, others at the beach whilst others were more sudden, for example, a child break-dancing or at my feet, sunlight catching the iridescent colours of a pigeon’s neck. 

One of the greatest tests, I think, for any person, is accommodating tragedy into the pace of everyday life. Halfway through the book, my dad became quite sick with cancer and died after a four-month battle. Spending time with him during his illness and in the last weeks whilst composing my book I remember making a very firm decision that this would not ‘become’ the book. I wanted to be sure the book showed enough resilience and faith to take my life past what I was about to lose. So there are a few dad poems, but not too many! 

To be honest, when I was first bedside with dad (an architect and later, church architect) I didn’t want to write any poems about his illness or last days. I was annoyed at Dylan Thomas for writing his exquisite poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” because to my mind he had cashed in on a personal tragedy. Yet write about it I did. And take the book past the fact, I did too.  

I have always written poetry. In my early twenties I tried out short fiction and was published, even shortlisted for a national prize; but, in all honesty, this is not my genre. Nor would anyone want it to be if they read any of my attempts. 

This book is poetry because it is the closest I get to prayer without telling the world my most private, intimate thoughts or worse, introducing you to the God I talk to before falling asleep.In My Days and In My Sleep is personal but not private, shared publicly because I think what I have witnessed, lived and loved is important.     

     

Hemingway in Spain is featured in a new critical book

The most gratifying outcome for an author is, of course, to have his book bought in huge numbers. But the next best thing is to be the subject of an extended critical study. That's what's happened in the case of my book, Hemingway in Spain: Words and Images (1st edition, 1997; 2nd edition 2007), and the feature film Hemingway in Spain, which was released in 2006.

In his 2015 book Appropriating Hemingway: Using Him as a Fictional Character, American academic Ron McFarland studies both works at length in his final chapter, "Hem Among the Poets". Dr McFarland has graciously given his permission for us to quote from his analysis of the works.

David P. Reiter’s book, Hemingway in Spain: Words and Images (1997, 2nd edition, 2007) offers a kaleidoscopic portrayal of Ernest Hemingway in that post modern vein touring contemporary Spain accompanied by his girlfriend Maria, presumably borrowed from his 1949 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. As Publisher of Interactive Publications in Brisbane, Australia, Reiter, who was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Denver, has seen to the publication of several of his own books, and on the IP Web site he describes the “several ‘Hemingways’” that make up the sequence as “voices from the past and present, real and imagined” in a mode he calls “fusion poetry.” In a DVD based on the book and released in late 2006, available through amazon.com, Reiter fuses his reading of most of the poems (only sixteen of the 61 are not included) and an elaborate pastiche of images and videos pertinent to the texts. We can sample the variety of these Hemingway voices by reflecting on a few of the poems, starting with the first one, “At Plaza de España, Madrid,” where we hear a voice sounding very much like Hemingway addressing Cervantes:

You were their best, Miguel,but you only got it right once.Is that why they bronzedthe myths before the man?

The presumably rhetorical question might apply equally to Hemingway. Hemingway––or more accurately David Reiter, speaking through that mask or persona––then rips on Franco, whom he reduces to no more than “wet sand: between toes of the peónes. In the DVD, Reiter provides images ranging from statues of Cervantes and Franco on horseback to a quick clip of a donkey. Throughout he occasionally inserts lines of text from the poems, in this case the description of Franco as “no more than wet sand between their toes.” 

As the poem ends, Reiter looks back to a piece of dialogue near the conclusion of The Sun Also Rises, when Brett says, “It’s sort of what we have instead of God” (249). The neuter pronouns’s antecedent may or may not be regarded as ambiguous. It would seem from the context that she means simply “deciding not to be a bitch” is what we have instead of God. But Jake proposes that they have a martini, so one might surmise that alcohol is “what we have,” and in a broader context, perhaps “it” refers to love, or perhaps to feeling “rather damned good.” In appropriately post modern fashion, Reiter’s Hemingway offers “irony’s what we have instead of God” (4). Addressing Cervantes again, he writes, “You took up a pen to escape a war; / I took up battle to escape an uncertain / pen.” In the closing line, he declares flatly, “Things haven’t changed a hell of a lot.” The opening poem is set opposite a familiar photograph of Hemingway from the early 1930’s. Another twenty or so photos of scenes from Spain are distributed throughout the book, and most of those also appear in the film. 

The second poem in the book, “A Clean Well-lighted Place,” opens with a three-line passage from A Moveable Feast and follows with a quatrain very much in synch with the style and tone:

It’s easier when you come back in winter, in the half-life. The sun’s more sympathetic to grey and you can sip a cheap rosé without regretting those stories you left too quickly [5].

Hemingway then notices a wooden bust of himself, and he comments on how a waiter told tales of how Papa composed A Moveable Feast there in Madrid and he made out so well with the tips that he was able to open his own place, which he called “Not the Hemingway Restaurant / and all the postmodern pretenders go there” (6). Ernest claims not to be able to understand a word the postmodernists say. In the third poem, “At the Hotel Florida,” the first-person speaker signs the register as “E. Hemingway, / Ketchum, Idaho,” and in the lobby he encounters Maria, who will accompany him throughout the rest of his visit to Spain (7). In that poem we watch him struggle with his writing. Maria joins him in the next poem, “No Writers in the Prado.” There and elsewhere in the book the dictator Franco, who ruled Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975, is conjured up and repudiated as a man incapable of appreciating art or literature. 

Some sense of how the poems affect the reader can be gained by citing a few opening stanzas in which the historical past (sometimes the Spanish Civil War, sometimes events from much more distant history––Reiter provides explanatory endnotes) mingles with the present:

It took days for our troops to reach Toledo through all the sniper fire and land mines but just a few hours for Maria’s old Renault 

[“The Walls of Toledo,” 15].

I couldn’t help but think of Robert Cohen
as we walked by that pathetic synagogue
scrunched between souvenir shops

[“In the Barrio de la Juderia,” 25].

Charles was tapping his sceptre in the dustas we passed the ticket counter. “I suppose,”he said, “that Boabdil asked you to intervene with me on his behalf. The man has no shame.He gives the crown––or whatever he wore––a bad name.” [Boabdil, or Muhammad XII, was the lastMuslim ruler of Granada, the last Muslim-ruled city in Spain] 

[“Charles V Sets the Record Straight,” 65].

It would have been pure hell for Scott––a Hollywood without martinis and olives––but old Clint never looked so fit.

“You won’t believe your eyes, Hemingway,”he said, “but they’ve done it up in spades.Look at this––it’s a base away from home!” 

[“Clint Eastwood at Tabernas,” 73].

Some of the poems are more subtle, and in some Hemingway appears nonexistent, or perhaps more completely blended into a first-person speaker who seems more akin to David Reiter lowering the mask. In the credits at the end of the film, Reiter states simply, “David Reiter was Ernest Hemingway.” 

True to the postmodern premise of the poems, anything can happen. For example, in “Bluffing at Gibralfaro” (Lighthouse Hill in Málaga, per Reiter’s endnote––a castle-like fortification on a hill that rises about 427 feet over the Mediterranean) a gypsy attempts to force Hemingway to pay a parking fee, an obvious scam. “Here was another gypsy / who didn’t recognize Hemingway!” he grouses (48). When the gypsy returns with a shillelagh, Hemingway, slipping into the role of his own character, Robert Jordan from For Whom the Bell Tolls, regards him as “one of the faceless ones I shot down / before I passed out above the bridge.” Then just as a fight seems inevitable, Teddy Roosevelt shows up with “a mean bull-whip” and the gypsy turns tail. “Get tough, / Hemingway,” TR advises, that’s the ticket to ride” (50). In that gesture, Reiter connects what was most likely an unpleasant contretemps he experienced as a tourist in Málaga with Hemingway, with the fictional character of Robert Jordan, with Theodore Roosevelt (as Rough Rider), and with the Beatles via the allusion to their 1965 hit “Ticket to Ride.” Viewing the bullring from the ramparts of the Gibralfaro, TR scoffs at bullfighting, but Hemingway suggests, “Maybe that’s what they have instead of God” (51). 

Near the end of the book Maria parts company with Ernest, ending their relationship “quick / as a bullet” and reminding him, “If you have to turn the page / the ending was wrong!” (105). In the final two poems Hemingway first visits the Escorial, where Philip II (1527-1598) welcomes him and Ernest likens writers to kings: “The veins we mine are the only ore / worth a sentence. Yet who else loses sleep / over the marrow behind the architecture?” (107). He then visits the Valley of the Fallen, a monument to the dead from the Spanish Civil War. Here he feels the presence of Franco, who had the site constructed by prisoners of war, but Franco is not there:

I walked further and further into the mountain but I couldn’t find him among the statues. Maybe he’d decided not to interrogate the myth [110].

Of course, both the film and these poems, most of them driven through with lines and characters drawn from Hemingway’s prose, invite just such an interrogation.

Both titles are available in physical and eBook formats from the IP Store.

Michael Cohen at the Tucson Festival of Books

On a sunny afternoon in Arizona, author Michael Cohen signed copies of his book at the Tucson Festival of Books.

We asked him to blog about the festival, and here are his impressions...

'I signed copies of my essay collection A Place to Read at the Tucson Festival of Books on Sunday, March 15th. This two-day book fair is held on the University of Arizona campus under old palm trees in the warm, dry air of southern Arizona.

Already in just its seventh year, the festival has grown to be the fourth largest in the United States, attracting 130,000 readers, who come to see their favorite authors, 350 of whom give individual talks, workshops, and panel discussions.

Many more authors can be found autographing their books at the authors’ pavilions and the booths of publishers and booksellers. Over three hundred exhibitors show their wares at the festival. Attendance is free for the public, but proceeds from booth rentals and other fees (over a million dollars so far) are donated to local non-profit organizations that promote increased literacy.


           
This year a visitor could have attended talks by Joyce Carol Oates, Noam Chomsky, Iris Johansen, Dave Barry, Scott Turow, Amy Tan, Jim Harrison, Alice Hoffman and dozens of other best-selling authors. The emphasis was on books, but Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva and columnist Katha Pollitt spoke on a panel celebrating the 150th anniversary of the liberal weekly The Nation.



Promoting her memoir and spy fiction was Valerie Plame, the ex-CIA covert operative who was outed by Dick Cheney’s chief-of-staff Scooter Libby (who went to jail for it) after Plame’s journalist husband had published articles critical of the Bush administration.

Genre writing of all kinds was well represented at the festival, and so were children’s and young adult fiction. There was a little something for every reader’s taste. For most of the two-day festival, a stiff breeze shook the white tents of exhibitors up and down the university mall, but the crowds were undeterred.'

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