Part I of the chronicle is the single poem ‘Australia’, an extended meditation on Australia’s relationship with America that begins with a rousing repetition of ‘BULLSHIT?!’ The hard-B consonant – ‘BLOW ME AWAY?!’, ‘bashed up’, ‘Boxer’s’, ‘BAD NEWS’ – gives way to the caressing repetition of ‘AMERICA’. What emerges from the bluster is a scared and naïve narrator who has been nowhere and believes everything he is told. Coming from a self-declared anarchist, it’s hilarious. Take the story of light-fingered Ted Guggenheim at work, which segues into a critique of the narrator’s acceptance of Guggenheim Foundation funding.

so what’s a nice Anarchist Greek Poet like me doing (going

to the States) on Guggenheim money????

                                      /

               FUCK KNOWS!!!!!

                                  Stay tuned!

                                              I DENOUNCE ME!

                         or as John Berryman (the

       poet) said (in one of his poems)

                 “WE HATE ME”

Part II begins with an epigraph by the eleventh-century poet Wei T’ai – ‘Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing, and reticent about the feeling’ – and is composed of stepping stones on the journey from Melbourne through Sydney to the fabled USA. Π.O.’s choice observations position the narrative precisely in time and place and, for the most part, live up to Wei T’ai’s dictum.

As if on cue, the narrator is stopped at US customs. Increasingly paranoid, he has visions of being handcuffed and ‘dragged off the plane for trying to smuggle PORNOGRAPHY/ into AMERICA!’, a copy of his The Fuck Poems (Collective Effort Press, 1982) next in the pile. Luckily, the threat of poetry saves the day. He screamed out ‘((((Hey!))))/ THEY’RE MY POEMS YOU’RE LOOKING AT’, and the custom’s official ‘put down the books like/ they were hot potatoes’. It is rare to laugh out loud when reading poetry but I did (on a tram!). Of course, the sting is in the last lines: ‘cos i looked like/ Yasser Arafat!’

Throughout The Tour, punctuation serves as an indication of vocal emphasis and as the concrete manifestation of action or object. Occasionally, small sketches are interpolated in the text. One of the most successful is Π.O.’s interpretative drawing of Anthony Braxton’s ‘lab for experimental music’ on stage at Kimball’s Restaurant & Bar in San Francisco. Captioned with the assertion ‘Picasso lives!’, Π.O. then proceeds to do what he does brilliantly, somewhere between ekphrasis and transcription, a sound poem made of recognisable language imitating music.

(Now...) Saaaaaaax!! Now: How do you / hit

a cymbal, now?! Like... /// that! How?! Side-on??? Sideways?

Side-long???? Scrape the sides! Scrape... scrape... POUND!

Thump-BANG-boom! (What was * That?) Was it a scratch?! A..

scratch ///// your head?! A, mouse? WHO CARES?! WHO

CARES?! — We do! — [applause] [applause] SAX!!!! What?! (     )

Insult and bitterness creep in as the tour progresses. The naïve rabbit of Part I is delighted to discover that American audiences react much like Australian ones. ‘I was great!’ he crows after their first gig. As his confidence increases, so does his disaffection with his fellow poets. They are boring and bourgeois. He’s rebellious, radical, and has a strong sense of social justice, certainly, but he also emerges as intolerant and pugnacious. Inevitably, relations between the narrator and the other poets deteriorate. Rejected and alone, with hours to kill before he is due at Kate Jennings’ apartment, he walks the streets and reads ‘a sign on a pole (outside/ a Hotel) that said: NO PARKING, NO STANDING, NO STOPPING, NO / KIDDING, and the word: HOMELESS (stencilled on / the sidewalk).’ There is some irony in the lucky chance that sees his momentary vagrancy end in photographer Bob Cato’s studio (Jennings’ husband): ‘What a life! (i thought) from / nowhere to a room full of Models / and glamour.’

The Tour does not have the breadth (nor the heft!) of Heide (2019) or Fitzroy: The biography (2015). Its focus is smaller and more personal, a desire to set the record straight, perhaps, or a desire for revenge? As ‘THE END’ poem tells it, there was venom in the newspaper article that followed the tour, deliberately lampooning the narrator, derailing his career, and stereotyping the performance poetry scene. Strictly entre nous, I’ve heard the whole story is true (from one point of view).