By Rosemary Nissen-Wade(WordsFlow Facilitator)
Thom starts talking. His voice is soft but clear. His words move like an impromptu dance. Liz and Kim (the Cathouse Creek Duo) play music behind him. He tells us, “Write down what you love.”
I write:
Trees. Song. Waterfalls. Andrew. Chocolate. POETRY! Home country. Birds. Purple. Red. Hot sauce.
He keeps talking. He passes out newspaper pages. “Find a word,” he says. “Write it down.” (That’s when I find “hot sauce”.) He hands round books, photos, CDs with evocative covers. “Respond!” he tells us, and, “We only have a short time together. Write while you’re listening.” We find that we can.
We write, he talks, we talk, the music plays, we read out what we’ve written, he recites a poem that responds to our words, he reads out poems by other people….
“Write about one of those things you wrote down, write about what you love.”
I write:
It’s the rain in Tassie that I miss. Strangely, and more the older I get – though when I was young and there, the rain was misery: a deep damp that permeated the whole world, the whole atmosphere. We stayed indoors as much as possible, gazing through windows as rain dripped constantly from saturated leaves. Now, in a sunny landscape, free from cold, I find myself hankering for just that sight of rain, a world of rain, dripping and glistening. I can recall the smell. Rain dripping from acacia, from eucalypts, from apple trees, from blackberry vines – it smells in each case a little different. I have known rain to somehow smell dry, how can that be? When it drips from dry twigs, the smell conveys that dry.
“Why Tasmania?” he asks me. I say that I grew up there. “Have you written much about that?” I tell him I haven’t, not very much, not lately. “Will you?” he asks, like a plea, looking deep in my eyes. I say yes. He talks of his own childhood in Brisbane, and the ways in which that Brisbane has changed, so much so that his Brisbane is lost.
Everyone writes while they listen. I write:
What is lost? Nothing is lost. It’s been said before: if we remember it, it remains. Only the new people cannot remember the old things that we knew. I can remember Byron Bay when it was a sweet little hamlet with dirt tracks. I can remember when the city of Melbourne had no Bourke Street Mall, no crazy glass thing next to St Paul’s Cathedral.
He hands around photos. “Find a photo you like. If you respond to it, you can keep it.” I accept a picture. There’s a large rock in the foreground, obviously placed there by people as some kind of monument. It’s been stuck in the ground and perhaps cemented. The base is much narrower than the top.
I write:
That poor rock is upside-down. It’s cracked, it’s crying. We come into this land, we pick up some great rock and plonk it down any old how, no respect, no thought that a rock is alive. The ancients knew. They would say, “We must sing to this rock, we must heal this rock.”
The grass and the sky are gentle companions for this displaced rock, and the house is far in the background. That is good.
As I actually dislike this photo – enough to respond – I pass it on.
Another bundle of photos is handed around the circle. When it reaches me, I see pictures of Liz, our musician – some on her own, some with her husband, Kim, who is playing here with her. I take four. No way I’d let them past.
I write:
I choose for my delight a picture of a girl in a red hat. She’ll always be a gir
l to me, with her long hair and her smile that comes from her whole self. My friend for a long time, and I always liked to see those mittens, a sign to me of natural elegance, individuality. And here’s another with a quirky look that I remember too, still with that irrepressible smile. Today is the first time we’ve met in twenty-odd years. Of course it’s like yesterday.Thom tells the group about poetry in Melbourne in the eighties, when he and Liz and I performed our work at all the venues. [In those days he was Thom the Street Poet, she was Liz Hall (now Liz Hall-Downs) and I was Rosemary Nissen.]
He hands out copies of his latest books. We accept them gladly and keep writing. He keeps talking.
I write:
He tells me not to get lost in his book. Birds and water, and people he loves. How could I not get lost in this book? How could I not float away into other worlds?
He tears up one of his books and hands out individual poems. I get one about nature spirits, read it, and tuck it inside the book he said not to get lost in.
He speaks of fear. ”False Evidence Appearing Real,” he reminds us.
In answer to the question, “How do you know something’s poetry, not prose?” he thinks a minute, then says, “If it doesn’t have music, it’s not poetry”. He speaks of “cadence, rhythm, emotional intelligence in concise expression.” (Then he reminds himself of discursive poems, and epics.) He adds, “It says what we can’t say.”
[No-one finds this odd, being said to a group engaged with poetry. Writers or not, I explain it to myself now, we all respond to poetry that touches us. We’ve all experienced that moment of release when someone says perfectly what we’ve needed said.]
Thom talks about rhyme and free verse, he talks about “faction”, blurring of genres. He says, “There isn’t any form that can restrict you. Revive, come alive, pass it on! No-one owns poetry, it’s all broad air.” [Was the word “broad”? I can’t read my own scrawl.] “Rediscover what’s possible. Go beyond where you were, get out of being comfortably numb.”
I look at the cover of one of his books.
Who are these ecstatic people, hugging and grinning on the book cover? Are they poets? They look wicked enough – wild hair, bright colours, sunshine, joy.
More books are passed around. “If you respond to it, it’s yours,” says Thom. “You can buy these books and CDs from me, or you can pay for them with your response and you get to keep them.”
I find myself holding “The Erotic Spirit” edited by Sam Hamill: “An Anthology of Poems of Sensuality, Love, and Longing”. I dip into it over and over, and respond:
In a book of erotic poems I find a verse about a garden. How appropriate! Gardens are places for love, places of scent and colour, places for the senses, places where we can relax and be, places where it seems love might go on forever, and beauty last beyond our being, and our dreams be real.
Thom declares he will pay us for our writing. He hands around printed $100 bills copied from US currency, labelled “Thom Moon 10 Poet. Street Bills.”
Here is a face on a hundred dollar bill. It’s Thom’s, magic Thom. He writes of elementals and passes out books of healing. Creation of Health, says the title of this one. We know that poetry creates health!
Thom tells us: “Tithe your time for yourself. The best part of yourself, encourage it by feeding it.
”Respond to each other’s words,” he adds.
Aileen reads what she has just written. I respond:
One day I lifted my head. I saw the sky.
Aileen writes of Kwan Yin. Her own compassion sings.
Thom talks of coming home this trip and going to visit his favourite waterfall. It’s on Mt Tamborine. I respond with a memory 21 years old:
The waterfalls I love are in the Northern Territory, on the cliff banks of big rivers that rise and sink with the tides. Where there are steps of rock made for giants, where there are crocodiles that lurk and move fast as light under the surface, and mosquitoes thick and humming. Nevertheless I love those waterfalls of memory, in sun so hot we are near naked, hair sticking to the scalp; night sky so clear we see all the stars, a forest of stars, and little satellites too, clearly whizzing over. Lying back on the deck of the boat, we gorge on fish caught that day and tins of food, a stash of tins. Under the waterfall, anchored, the mozzies don’t bite, the water’s too thick, too fast. I stand with a rifle I don’t know how to use, as the two men row across to the giant rocks, alight and climb the steps. An American girl was taken here last month. But today there are no crocs. There is the roar of the water rushing down the fall, surrounded by a deep pool of silence.
“We are the rememberers,” says Thom.
Then he says, “Always start on an empty page. If you’re stuck, get a new one.” He tells us to have no writing on it, and to watch that there isn’t any showing through from the previous page.
‘If you’re stuck, start with, “I feel”. Start with the personal to get writing happening.’
He says, “If your parents are dead, talk to them anyway” and quotes Adrian Mitchell’s poem about doing just that. I tell him I just read that poem; he reminds me he sent it to me in an email the other day. We both laugh.
At tea-break, Anne, who keeps finding and laminating four-leaf clovers, offers them to everyone. She is surprised at the one I choose; to me it stands out, the only one I want, but she tells me she nearly didn’t include it, she didn’t think anyone would want it.
Kim and Liz must leave now. They gather up their instruments and tiptoe out.
I respond to an object in the room:
That leaf above the blackboard keeps catching my eye. Anne passed out four-leaf clovers. I took a gold one, the leaf dying into even greater beauty. The leaf above the blackboard was made by a child. It looks real, and not. A child made it. I like it. It keeps catching my eye.
Thom continues unaccompanied. We touch on more serious subjects. I don’t know if that’s mere coincidence or whether it’s a response to the new quiet.
Sally talks of her mother’s death and of her work with the aged. Margaret tells the story of her father’s death and then the story of her mother’s. Thom points out that she has been coughing ever since she arrived, but now that she speaks her voice is clear and strong and there is no cough. “You need to speak!” he says, and, “You’re a natural story-teller.”
He recites a poem about dragons, a metaphor for the problems of the urban young. But I don’t see dragons that way.
Dragons, I like dragons, I object when people use them as symbols of bad. I like their fire, I like their wings. I like their claws, I like their golden scales. Their hot breath whispers truth into my private ear. Their great jaws smile. They hold me softly in tender paws, then lift me aloft. On the back of a soaring dragon, I ride and fly.
He talks of telling our own stories, that only we can tell. He tells us that poetry reveals us.
I write:
Confessional.
We sing from deep wells.
He says poets were once called enchanters, chanticleers, and shape shifters. We can become what we write about, he says, we can see through the eyes of a bird or an animal.
I write:
Ancient and beautiful, we sing sweet.
There are histories to write, of the days of Melbourne poets.
I share that last thought. “Would you do it?” he begs.
He asks if we’d like him to tear up a book of women’s wisdom and pass the pages around, or to pass the whole book around and each of us find something in it to note. As he had intuited, we opt for keeping the book whole. It starts its journey around the circle.
I look at his CD, “Spirits Burning and Thom the World Poet”, and write:
Spirits that burn, not in hell but in poems, burn with passion not punishment.
I look at CDs he’s brought from Austin, Texas and the poets there: “Youth Verse”, and "Expressions June 2009: June is a Woman” .
Meanwhile the conversation continues. He talks of the money he earns from this workshop as simply what helps him exist through time and space.
I write:
Woman expresses herself in June. I remember these women, Kathleen, Nancy, Deb. Kathleen’s long pale hair covering the face she tries to hide, the beautiful face. Deb short and stocky, promoting youth. Nancy older and slightly worried.
The Youth Voices of Texas exist through time and space in the form of this CD.
The spirits that burn are depicted by a white cross that looks like a bird in flight.
All these things evoke my responses. Also I am responding to Thom’s continued reminders, woven in and out of the poetry and the talk about poetry: “Respond and you can take it home.”
Remembering that Thom is all about engagement, I write:
Your response buys something. That’s a lesson we’re being taught.
And I write but don't say:
Margaret, are you going to sit on that book forever, of the wisdom of Woman? I look to read that book, I seek that wisdom, though I have my own. There is always more to learn.
Thom talks again of our own voices, our own stories. “What else is there?” he says. “There’s only my life.”
He remarks on the value of groups like ours. "Your lives can be articulated when you’re with people you trust. It’s a sanctuary. Value judgments can be left outside the door." He thanks me for keeping it going for three years. I tell him, “We all keep it going.”
He invites us to continue the conversation of “What’s the real truth about this?” He says we are lending meaning to each other.
"RESPONSE! It’s really all life and response." [Did Thom say that, or was that my own note to myself? At this point we are so aligned, I can’t tell. I’ll credit him with it.]
I know it’s I who write:
A sunny afternoon.
A big room.
Words and music.
The movement of pens.
Books and words.
Memories.
Lines that sing.
[I notice, as I type these notes, how often I mention singing and song. There’s a clue there for me to follow.]
Behind the conversation I stare pointedly at Margaret’s pile of books and CDs, set aside on the floor, till she asks uncertainly what I want. I want the book of women’s wisdom. She scrabbles through the pile and finds it for me. I flip through and find many gems, but these are the only ones I jot down:
“Advice is what we ask when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.” – Erica Jong.
“Never judge someone by who he’s in love with, judge him by his friends. People fall in love with the most appalling people. Take a cool, appraising glance at his pals.” – Cynthia Heimel.
I guess they appeal to the cynic in me.
I don’t respond. I’m glad to have looked at the book but it isn’t one I need to keep.
Thom talks of “b
ody shape fascism”. We believe him because he is fat, like some of us. He speaks of those who would have us conform: "You must look like this. You can't have red hair," gesturing to me.I quote my youngest on the subject of my deliberately improbable purple-red hair (pictured here): "It looks like you're trying too hard."
Thom tells me, "Rosemary, you are full of aliveness".
We get on to adult children who try to bring up their parents. Several of us have anecdotes. Nan says in a growl, smiling evilly, "Mine wouldn't dare!" We applaud.
Then Thom speaks of going to talk with his mother, to listen to her voice. His father died last year.
I respond:
Your mother’s voice needs your listening now. She doesn’t know, I think, that your father can still hear her.
He is telling us of his friend who works in palliative care, the wonderful things she does for her charges, to empower them.
In my mind I become one of them:
In the garden of tranquillity, poems hang from the trees. I embrace a huge heart larger than myself. There is music that I love. I decide on my last wish. I step inside a magic cloak, my magic cloak, with the power to make my wish come true. And it does.
He tells us how important it is that we speak, that we write, that we don’t give up and accept the status quo. We are agents of change.
“What can we do?” someone asks. He replies:
“You do what you can. Give no energy to limitations, anger, fear. Clearly articulate. Start where you are. Allow your articulation to sharpen.”
He asks, “What will you do next, after today? I’m outa here now. What will you do next?”
I write what I’ll do:
• Write more about the things I love, my own stories.
• Send Thom more of my poems (as today he had to ask if I’m writing many).
• Create a performance venue.
Four WordsFlow regulars couldn't come to this workshop. Four members of the public turned up instead; they left vowing to start coming to the group. We cheered.
We cleaned up the plates and ate the last of the cake. People hugged Thom. People hugged me. There was no mood of sadness on separating; we were filled with delicious joy.
