It’s a matter· or performance, and I wonder, am I saying something of importance, in a new and interesting way, my own voice, or am I just an actor? And is the act and the reality one and the same? Some of the poets can remember all their lines – I think of Tom the Poet and Rosemary Nissen. Others stumble through stanzas, or mumble metaphors. Charles Buckmaster used to do that – but his poetry on page, was something else!

I started reading at La Mama, run by Kris Hemensley and Michael Dugan in 1969. Kris said to me ‘how would you like to read your poems to people, Mal?’ ‘What, me read in public? Just give me half a chance?’ I said.

Those were heady days – Vietnam, the Hippies, New Left, the decline of the Beatles, Dylan keeping his tabs on everything, Leonard Cohen, the English Beats, and that amazing new breed of American poets – Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Le Roi Jones, Snyder, and their patriarch, Walt Whitman. We thought we could change the order of things – power structured politics, multinational tyrants, a society which went along with its double standards, even the juggernaut of the nuclear arms race. Wasn’t that what poetry was all about? For me it became, and still is, the mixing of a rainbow with the murky swirling gutters of experience, of aborted utopias, of Eden’s green garden ravaged by rusting beer cans, of pure meditative silence polluted by the doubtful jazz of a Ford-to­Mercedes, bumper-to-bumper existence – all ending in one big hi-tech zero! Ah, but the living – the fertile, virile fecundating the irrepressible DANCE! The dance of creation, preservation, destruction – ubiquitous and eternal! Then there’s the lady wearing Chinese earrings, the cat and its dead bird, me and my woman – the stuff of poetry!

There were other fringe poetry reading venues, apart from La Mama in Carlton, but La Mama with the Albion pub opposite was where we gathered on Tuesday nights – Kris Hemensley, Michael Dugan, Charles Buckmaster, Allison Hill, Garrie Hutchinson, Terry Gilmore, Lorin Ford, Retta Hemensley, Geoff Eggleston Norman Abjorensen, Billy Jones, and Nigel Roberts when they were tripping down south, and Adrian Rawlins reading Ginsberg’s Howl better than that self styled Buddhist himself. There were those uninvited visits from Johann the mad Russian with his paranoid laughter and gypsy violin. There was Bill Beard, Paul Smith, Shelton Lea, John Jenkins, Ken Taylor.

And we published – Crosscurrents, Our Glass, Great Auk, Flagstones, Free Poetry, Parachute, Mindscape – these were in the form of roneoed sheets, stapled together, and often giveaways, also a few slim volumes of individual, or two back-to-back, poets. We were called ‘underground poets.’ I think some of us called ourselves that. I think it was a misnomer. In any case subterraneans regularly emerge to take air, and some of us became ‘the establishment’.

Poetry at La Mama came to an end. The poets went their way. Some become avant garde, publishing journals with local and overseas writers. Kenny was doing Rigmarole of the Hours (books of individual poets) and still is. Billeter, Jenkins, and Hemensley were publishing Etymspheres and The Ear in a Wheatfield.

Fitzrot magazine had also started. Π.O. was its editor, with a strong political and social conscience, an ago as big as Coles New World, and a generosity to match. If you’re lucky you may hear him sing his ‘ego-blues’, sitting close to you one night in a smoke-filled car, outside some poetry venue and it’ll be a treat! Fitzrot came and went, and then until recently 925. Π, Jas Duke, and many workers turned out these magazines at an amazing rate, almost on a continuous conveyor belt which everyone replenished. They were packed full of poems, protests, concrete poetry, calligraphy – well-published neat booklets, good typeset, chockablock!

In 1974 Paul Smith published the massive anthology PIE. It was a cornucopia of everybody and anybody – 628 foolscap size pages which included my fourth edition of Parachute Poems. PIE was reviewed unfavourably in the Age – Paul’s Eastern perspective and his altruism being misunderstood, or ignored. We didn’t care too much. Something else was going on. We were finding alternatives – lifestyles, philosophies. We were tired of the old syndromes. The anthology contained work of great beauty – Andre Sollier’s Sumi-e art, Andrew Donald’s poetry, an article on how to build in mud brick, one on filmmaking by Bob Weiss, an insightful understanding of Rimbaud by Phil Motherwell, and a look at Tarot, Kabbalah, and Mirka Mora’s art.

Π was holding readings fairly regularly in Fitzroy. As Robert Hughes commented, they were more like parties. The readers included Frank Kellaway, Rae Desmond Jones from Sydney, Tahalia (t.o.) and Patrick Alexander. I did readings with Kellaway at Potters Cottage Warrandyte, and The Little Book Room in Camberwell. Eric Beach was often.in Melbourne reading and playing harmonica at all the high spots, including the Albion. We read poetry in barns, the back of an Eltham bakery, and in a condemned church. We organised readings at several High Schools and Technical Colleges. Among the poets were Robert Harris, Allen Afterman, Marc Radzyner.

Let me say how it was for some of us. From the mudlarks of the mind the spirit’s nebulous bird seemed to take wing. Not all of us felt that way. Our politics and polemics· certainly varied. But I know many of us became euphoric on new waves of consciousness – how far they reached is indefinable, unknown. I think of Carl Jung’s Theory of Synchronicity – circles in a pond. eddying outward – outward. They had their ramifications and effects on the poets writing today.

‘The poet of today has no other choice than to be a revolutionist, or not to be a poet’ – so says Benjamin Peret. ‘A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility’ – Thomas Carlyle. Poetry for me is both of these and more, and graffiti says a mouthful in a few words (contemporary Haiku!). And there’s always been Street Poetry – Tom the Poet, ex. poetry band, ex. ‘dial-a-poem’. Tom’s very active. You’ll see him on street corners, in the City Square. handing out his poetry pamphlets. He runs several poetry venues, including Cafe Jamin in Middle Park, and readings on Sunday at the Carringbush Library in Richmond. At these places I’ve heard Carmel Bird, Philip Martin, John Irving, Cornelis Vleeskens, Liz Hall, Komninos, Lauren Williams, Simon Macdonald, Ken Smeaton.

The scene is alive with small presses. Parish Press have published Joyce Lee, Barbara Giles, Lyndon Walker, and have a book planned for Rosemary Nissen. Abalone Press brought out Allan Eric Martin’s ‘Spitting Out Sixpenny’. Shelton Lea’s ‘Poems from a Peach Melba Hat’ is at press. They have books planned for Jennie Fraine, Susan Schwartz, and Frank Kellaway. Long live the small presses and poetry! The magazines are rampant too – Cornelis Vleesken’s Fling!, Syllable, Going Down Swinging, Turnstyle (from Pentridge and open to all contributors), and more. Charles Rimington via the Poets Union has been organising poetry workshops in Pentridge prison.

There has always been a seeming dichotomy between ‘academia’ and ‘the rest’. The old question crops up – ‘Why do you write in such a way that I don’t understand what you’re talking about! Does a potato have to be a pomme de terre, and who the hell was Aesculapius – never heard of him! Are you being clever, purposefully obscure, or does it come out of your head like that?’

I dislike categories. There are divisions, but the divisions make up the whole.

Sometimes it’s the poetry

you don’t understand

that you tend to disregard thinking it deceives

by subtly stating

the obvious

and I want you to remember

this is just another poem

inevitable as the morning

and the evening

and in so saying

not to be disregarded

Dimitris Tsaloumas read at Montsalvat Poets Festival in 1984. A.D. Hope read there the year before, and was published in an edition of Fitzrot. So perhaps the schism between ‘academic’ poets and ‘others’ is diminishing. Perhaps it’s only there when you want to sound off! To me it’s all poetry. You can’t stop it and nobody wants to – poems keep on rolling down Poets Lane (Tom’s Easter Festival).

At present John Irving and I are holding poetry readings at La Mama on Monday nights, every four to five weeks. We advertise in the La Mama Newsletter, in the Weekender (when they remember to put our ad in) and by posters which we stick up at universities and around town. Our aim is to present a cross section of poetry. We’re not concerned with groups of cliques. We choose the poets we think are innovative, lively, original, and refreshing.

Last night I read poems. Even my simple funny ones were misunderstood. This was definitely not a poetry audience. Had I been drinking too much? – no, only one stubbie! Oh well, I had a good talk to Kris – haven’t seen him for some time, and he’s going to read at La Mama. You know, even Komnimos’s ‘fish shop’ poem went flat, and it’s great, not too filleted, and he’s usually very raw entertainment. As he says, his dreams turned to grease. Walter’s translation just had no chance. They wafted up somewhere near the spotlight. So am I a poet or a performer? Can’t I be both?

I had a dream. It was a dream within a dream. I saw my dream looking at me. It smiled and said ‘don’t take yourself so seriously’.