AUSTRALIAN POETS AT WORK SERIES 2
Judith Bishop
Selected by Coral Hull
[Above] Photo of Judith Bishop by photographer unknown, year unknown.
CH: What is your favourite animal and why?
JB: I love the (notorious) independence and sensuality of cats, but I'd have to say the orangutan, for the soulfulness of its eyes, and the queer mirror it holds up to us as human beings.
CH: What are your primary concerns regarding the world?
JB: That money and status, in the end, will matter (will have mattered) more, to more people, than the environment we live in and the other inhabitants of it; that critical decisions regarding the future of the world have been made, and will continue to be made, out of those motives. Even as we know more and more about the environmental crisis the world is facing, the political and social will to change remains a minute fraction of what it should be, or could have been.
CH: What kind of working environment best suits you?
JB: Just somewhere quiet, closed, light-filled, with trees and birds in sight and hearing, and my bookshelves close at hand.
CH: Talk about when you first fell in love?
JB: To describe this, I would have to make a distinction between being and falling in love; having been in love before, there was nonetheless a first time that I plummeted, rather than drifting down. We met at a café, knowing who the other was and something of the other's poems, but little more than that. We almost didn't meet - two cafés in the area have the same name, and we had, as it turned out, different ones in mind. The day we met began a dance of intimate distance - drawing closer and holding each other at arms' length with words, images, names and play, awkward embraces and near-kisses - a dance in which coincidence and paradox played uncanny roles. But I wasn't free to love him, and soon, too soon, he left.
CH: Why is poetry important to you?
JB: Poetry is a way of listening to life (to being), and of amplifying instances of it, in order to share those intimate experiences and perceptions with others. It's feeling connected with life by being attentive to it.
CH: What is the hardest thing you've ever had to do?*
JB: Continuing to live in the States, in the wind and snow of a northern winter, and poor as hell, as the longest relationship of my life up to that point fell apart in Australia. Feeling I'd risked everything, everything, for poetry, and lost.
CH: What do you think we can learn from children?
JB: To see the world as a wonder again; to feel the exhilaration of an utterly new understanding or experience.
CH: What are you working on at the moment?
JB: My day-job as a linguist aside, I'm working on a second collection of poems (begun at the end of last year); translations of four short prose works by the French (originally Swiss) poet, Philippe Jaccottet, to be compiled and published, with luck, as a book; and I'm also studying intermediate Russian in evening classes.
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RABBIT
Life shivers between yourself and us: help us to stretch
toward the kingdom of our burrows in the earth: we'll never occupy
again the silk-soft that was a womb, but we wander the night grass
with you,
searching for a tenderness, an innocence at birth: until the quiet
winds cut
the quiet breath from your mouth and your hindquarters stamp,
Quickly, I must go-
Rabbit, winding up your stride, in your alignment, recalling full
stretch,
a god's arrow-head, shaft, lengthening from nose to tail, aching
to occupy
the whole damn bubble of the moment of each movement: if you
made it, what would snap, whose shining fingers, what scene
would cut
abruptly to another, what deity float gently in to bid us her
good night?
Rabbit, laid ragged at the fold of day's field, where the sparrow-hawk
stretched
the stars' scarf across her wing: with your velvet heart, you occupied
the blood's old theatre: with your hushed ballet of spring, you
performed the coiled rites you have taught us tonight: showed
our ropes of matter cut
by the one puppet-master, hanging in his own winds.
LATE IN THE DAY
Arrives the moment of contradiction. A rat
has sown its leanness in the earth;
a hawk, blue stencil, floats low across the field of hay,
resembling, as you see it, the
brushed hair of a child.
Wind has ferried the hawk south
toward a swatch of pines.
There, a boy with shaky hands
shoots her down with a stone.
In his fingers,
he gently takes the threads of her entrails.
His eyes reflect a sky sharp as water
from a spring.
In late-shadowed pines,
her young incline toward the sun.
A screen of white down
lies aggrieved by wind at dawn.
THRENODY
Morning light; arcs of the wind, its sightless paths.
This mirror gaping blue-eyed on a garbage heap
tacks up rain and refuse: grips the flare of a cloud, the ink of
cypress needles.
Presence, then release. A thrush hovers in a bush.
Give me your whispers. Give me howls
like a bright wind furling through the rain, lines
etched on copper plates with mortal acid burns.
Give me a promise you will keep.
This mirror won't tell me what you need.
This tree, limbs grinding in the sky, says nothing of proximity,
savagery, belief.
This thrush flees the nest a mouse has raided; she will not return.
This blindness is the pause. Wind covers up the dead.
DESERT WIND
High, bright winter morning: the tenements' tree-antlers
clatter on each corner and the stepping black spines are smooth
and glossy as mirages; framed, the scene shines as if transported
to a desert,
and never (since this winter day will not end hereafter, having left
the field of time), will the trees
flicker leaves again or carry broods of flowers; but still, as in a desert,
a random bird alights, hoarse-throated after days of luckless questing
for a moth or a spider that has cellared spring rains in its body,
so honeying
the juices of itself; and when startled by a boy skating down the lane
a moment,
she is swallowed by the wind, as a rasping draws nearer on the dirt
and turns articulate,
becomes the shuck, shuck of a snake tasting engine oil and frost,
as if astonished
how far it has gone across terrains, when last it knew, an iridescence
meant the felled wing of a hummingbird, and thus the sweetest
meat, but never such a black stench as pools below this metal corpse ...
High, bright winter's morning: the desert wind whistling from the north,
radio static from the kitchen clarifying to the small maracas rattle
of the sand,
briefly clambering with every wave of air: go, stop; go, stop; and then,
a long silence-
(as if entire days have held their breath). Now comes a human voice,
low, soft,
perhaps yours, rising like the yam tendril, which knows how to bind
whatever's still,
and for long enough to touch.
Acknowledgments to: Australian Book Review (Australia), Best Australian Poetry (UQP, 2006), Verse (USA, UK), Eureka Street (Australia), Tongue's Palette: Poetry by Linguists, eds. Andrew Sunshine and Donna Jo Napoli, (Atlantis-Centaur, Chicago, 2004) and Fugue (USA). |
About the Poet Judith Bishop
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Dr. Judith Bishop lives in Sydney, where she works as a linguist and project manager. Her first collection of poems, Event, will be published by Salt Publishing in June 2007. As a linguist, she works with speakers of many different languages, and the opportunity to meet these people who have remade their lives in Australia, and to learn something of their languages, is a great privilege. Judith wrote her PhD on an Aboriginal language of the Northern Territory, Bininj Gun-wok (specifically, the dialects known as Manyallaluk Mayali, Gun-Djeihmi, Kunwinjku and Kuninjku). She has a Master of Philosophy degree in French Literature from Cambridge University, and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Washington University in St Louis, the latter funded by the 2002 Marten Bequest Scholarship in Poetry. She is currently studying Russian, and working on a translation of three prose works by the French poet Philippe Jaccottet. Her poems and reviews appeared in Verse magazine (U.S.) and the Australian Book Review, and a translation of a chapter on Rilke from a book by Philippe Jaccottet is forthcoming in the poetry magazine Agenda (UK). Her poems have appeared in The Best Australian Poetry 2006 (UQP) and The Best Australian Poems 2006 (Black Inc.). |
[Above] Photo of Judith Bishop by photographer unknown, year unknown.
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Thylazine No.12 (June, 2007) |
