The Poetry Reading

Ulitarra Robert Harris Poetry Prize 2000

We have all been to these, right? Well I’ve been to a few myself, in a rush of enthusiasm early on in my (first) public poetry phase. This was soon after leaving the desert, and I was grief stricken and back in my coastal home town of Newcastle (NSW Australia) slaving away at an extremely “straight” and incredibly boring job.

My antidote was to throw myself into my poetry, so to meet a few other Poets (the only other Poets I knew were back in Central Australia) I joined a local “Poetry At The Pub” group.

Well, I’m sure some poetry reading nights are great. I think it depends on the company, and what you might be drinking, but as a natural introvert who hates crowds I mostly found poetry nights pretty tortuous so, after a while, I just stopped attending.

Then I won a few awards and had more of my work published, and one sunny Thursday morning I dropped in at the only decent book shop in town (a big shout out to Maclean’s Bookshop - still there in Beaumont St). The original owner - Mark - who like me was an exile from Alice Springs - said hello and asked me how my poetry reading had gone the night before.

“What Poetry Reading, Mark?”

“Ahhh - that one!” he replied, and pointed to a poster on their notice board which read:

Poetry At The Pub

This week’s Special Guest Poet:

DAVID KIRKBY

Northern Star Hotel - Wed 10th. 7pm.

The preceding night. Which would have been fabulous, if anyone had thought to actually invite me…….

Sigh.

Well I did get rescheduled, and I did do the gig in the end, but I kept it short because I had recently written the following poem, based on actual factual experience…..

Footnote:

Those of you who have read my earlier poem here on Substack - “My Big Break” - may enjoy the irony of the fact that this poem won The Robert Harris Poetry Prize in the year 2000 - a poetry competition sponsored by Ulitarra Magazine - the subject of “My Big Break.” Consequently, they had to publish it - in full. (If you haven’t read “My Big Break” - go have a look. You might enjoy the joke)

The photos accompanying this piece are mine - from a road trip through odd parts of Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. The relationship to the poem will be evident when you read it.

The Poetry Reading

He warmed the engine up first
using plenty of choke,
a couple of one liners 
and a tanka or two
for a rich mix.
After a while 
he had it idling well -
just ticking over in his head -
so he loaded up,
closed the doors,
eased the clutch
and drove it out the shed.

It was a long narrative piece,
i could tell;
an old model.
nothing new or fancy,
no turbocharger just a 
classic big 6 meant
for the open road
of a pub night reading.

It burbled down the street
in low revs and into
our unsuspecting suburbs,
the deep engine note of his voice
reverberating from eyes
like curtained windows,
faces walls.
It slid down tall dark
avenues of hearing
with only a faint clunk
of potholed diction
and dodgy suspension 
and the sometimes slight suspicion
of  poorly tuned alliteration,
which would have been welcome
if the poem was ending, but... 

This was no brief joyride;
the tank was clearly full,
the road ahead wide open
as he reached the edge of town
and eased the tempo way back
down to a lazy fifth gear
I didn’t even know was there
on this model.

I guessed we were going 
somewhere, but 
it wasn’t too clear
where that would be.
The houses gave way to trees
and open fields
and vistas of insubstantiality
as huge as the poet’s youth, 
but only partially described, 
then left behind in the trailing blue 
exhaust smoke of an ageing engine,
worn memory rings and the slapping 
piston of an overused metaphor.

I wanted to see what the poet saw
but the windscreen 
had not been cleaned for years.
I couldn’t see beyond the stone chips
of broken relationships,
the expired rego labels,
and the cats muddy paw prints
left over from the night before, 
and I noticed that the back 
seat was strewn with old rubbish, 
wrappers, empty chip packets
and scraps of verse like used discarded tissues.
I was getting hungry but 
there was nothing to eat.

He must have been thinking that too,
because he pulled over at a debatable pub
in a nameless place 
somewhere far out along the way.
The reading wasn’t over yet –
there were pages still to go
stacked in a sheaf on the bar -
but we had a counter meal
of pie and chips and a schooner of black –
a brief autobiographical digression
while the poem sat waiting out the back
like a patient horse.
 
Of course by that stage he’d lost me.
I couldn’t keep up and I wasn’t 
going to try.
so i watched him climb aboard and crank it up,
heading off down the blue distance 
of his own heroic highway -
driving on while,
left behind,
I drifted off to sleep.