A Note on the Editor

When Allen Ginsberg came to Adelaide Writers’ Week in 1972 (what continent and country did he not visit in those busy years?), a young Robert Adamson sat in the audience, already editor of the important New Poetry magazine and author of a first book of poems, Canticles on the Skin. Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti performed that night in the Adelaide Town Hall with a group of songmen from Indulkana. As Bob recently recalled, he came across Ginsberg afterwards in the hotel bar, playing his harmonium and singing Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. They struck up a conversation that carried over into Ginsberg’s hotel room and the small hours of the morning:

I started showering Ginsberg with questions about poetry; he answered some and ignored others. I remember asking him what he thought of the poetry of John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, and Robert Bly, among others. He started singing again — 
maybe to avoid answering my questions — however, I pushed on; I was obsessed with the need for answers. I think I became frenetic, but Ginsberg remained calm. After a while he sat down on the floor in the lotus position and began chanting a mantra.

I tried to interrupt when he lowered his tone of voice but he waved an arm and placed a finger to his lips. Finally he stood up and went over to the desk and picked up his Indian shoulder bag and rummaged through for a notebook. He wrote something on a page and handed it to me, saying, “Here, Robert, this man will be a godsend to you, he is a scholar-poet and will answer your restless questions.” I looked at the page and there was a little drawing, and he had written Robert Duncan’s name and home address.

After initial dismay that Ginsberg had evaded his questions, Bob wrote to Duncan, enclosing a copy of Canticles on the Skin. So began one of the most dynamic and generous exchanges between Australian and American poetries. Several years of intimate and searching 
correspondence led to Duncan’s poetry reading and lecture tour of Australia in 1976, a visit that has left detectable traces on the DNA of contemporary Australian writing. (Meanwhile, the impact of the visit on Duncan registers in his late sequence “An Alternate Life.”) That same year Bob arranged for Robert Creeley to visit Sydney, followed over the next few decades by Ashbery, Michael Palmer, Forrest Gander, and others, down to a new generation of American poets.

These were friendships forged first through long correspondence, Bob’s beautiful flowing penmanship on laid paper, an exchange of books, emails, the occasional long-distance phone call, and finally all-night excited talks in person. On first meeting Creeley, Bob’s first question was, “What do you think of Mallarmé?” Creeley responded with a quote, as if it were a password in a spy film: “Is the abyss white on a slack tide.” Bob recalled, “The next instant we hugged and began speaking, simultaneously, and continued without pause until he went on his way. He spoke like lightning, his words flashed out and hit home, then resounded in my head for days.”

It is easy to forget that the distance between our continents is vast, our purview limited, the cost of crossing extravagant, and even the expense of postage is high; such obstacles are only overcome by deep resourcefulness and persistent curiosity. We write across these distances, but poetry is a matter of presence, whether on the page or in the air; it comes to us through specific fortuitous occasions in the circulation of books and people. The photographs by Juno Gemes in this issue are vivid reminders of this fact, the decisive encounters that constitute the life of poetry. This living hand, now warm and 
capable.... As Duncan told Bob when they first shook hands,

Each poet is a link in a chain which goes from the beginning of time when the first poet ever wrote, to the end of time and the last poet who will write then.

All of this trans-Pacific activity had a measureable impact on Bob’s own poetry. He has never been afraid of absorbing influences, having taken to heart Duncan’s celebration of “derivations” and joyful acknowledgment of sources. He found in American poetry experiments with voice, as well as an attention to the way verse unfolds in time, that guided his own practice. He learned to modulate between literary and spoken registers, high and low, with exquisite sensitivity. Partly as a result, Creeley observed, Bob is the “rare instance of a poet who can touch all the world and yet stay particular, local to the body he’s been given in a literal time and place.” His poetry can 
converse with far-flung correspondents while addressing the flora and fauna of his native Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney. His work flies over and under national boundaries, like the bird in his poem “The Greenshank” that arrives in Australia from the Hebrides:

Ignorant of human borders, its migration
technology is simple: feathers

and fish-fuel, cryptic colour and homing
instinct. The elegant wader landed on a mooring,
got ruffled in the westerly, then took off again,
an acrobatic twister, and levelled down

onto a mudflat — a lone figure that dashed across
the shore, stood on one leg, then, conducting
its song with its bill, came forward
in a high-stepping dance.

In addition to being one of Australia’s most prominent poets, Adamson has been one of the country’s most energetic and influential poetry editors for more than four decades. In New Poetry, which he edited from 1968–82, he brought together the new Australian 
poetry with international strains of late modernism and postmodernism. With Gemes he established Paper Bark Press in 1986; it quickly became one of Australia’s major presses and went on to publish more than thirty books (including my first, I am grateful to acknowledge). A decade later, with James Taylor, he founded Boxkite, a lavish poetry annual of rare bravura and international breadth. Hundreds of copies were mailed to American poets and appeared in our mailboxes out of the blue, a breath of fresh air in our comparatively provincial worlds. More recently, Bob edited several annuals of The Best Australian Poems for Black Inc. While including work by established poets, he largely focused (in terms of his editorial energies and his use of space) on discovering fresh voices. For this issue of Poetry, Bob continues that emphasis.

This issue of Poetry involves an infusion of one culture into another. Beyond drawing attention to recent Australian writing, it may lead some younger American poet to search out elusive volumes by poets canonical in Australia but unread here, such as Francis Webb, Judith Wright, David Campbell, and Gwen Harwood. It may lead to an exploration of groundbreaking Aboriginal poets such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Kevin Gilbert. The impact in terms of influence may be subtle yet significant — a slight adjustment to the sense of what’s possible, a quality of antipodal light, a new word, the inflection of an accent or birdsong from the other side of the world. As Duncan wrote to Bob in the wake of his Australian visit,

The imprint of Australian “life” — of barely that month — is so deep-going that I find it now penetrating even into the most lasting and intimate engravings of my self — tho, if I picked up some echo of the lilt of Australian voices I found so delicious when I was there, contrasted with our American monotone and tight-lipt delivery, it has worn away.

Do you imitate the magpie’s morning song — or does the magpie imitate you?