Laurence James Duggan

Rating: 4.33
Rating: 4.33

Laurence James Duggan Poems

Bill Doggett and Earl Bostic: Trading Licks
a great compilation
always reminds me of Ken
probably still at work
...

Ascending Mt Cannibal in rain-heavy air
– a few moments between downpours
allowed for the summit.
...

Monk’s Coming
on the Hudson's
about appropriate
for breakfast.
...

I have to write a poem
for a poetry reading
in the House of Parliament.
It’s the House they don’t use
...

or the light reflected off metal structures on the roof of the laboratory prior to a storm. The whitish sheets over a darkening sky, a series of regular solids, an obsessive repetition of inarticulate demands. Elsewhere there are
...

there is nothing
to make of it
or to make it of
save what lies about
...

Fixed ideas arrive on the beach;
as the storm falters
they disport themselves, will make
colourful patterns for art photography,
...

Fern shapes in rock;
sponges
solidified in fluctuating neon;
human digits
...

Listening to the Dandenong line trains
exploding detonators all day long,
hearing at one o’clock sharp
Blue Hills on the radio while eating
...

I lie in a converted garage, sun coming up
and the chuck-chuck of unfamiliar birds
from Lake Mizell.
The lamp grows ineffectual
...

. . . . dragon shape clouds over the national capital
Malcolm Fraser’s feet stick out the end of the bed

thick forest around Brindabella
...

Layered mountains:
the nob of Ben Cruachan, sharper from the west,
blighted Mt Hump emergent for some distance.
...

So much of a city
is light on stonework, woodwork;
demolition turns us into archaeologists
using the maps;
...

From a place deeper than the larynx
the voices of Tibetan monks
broadcast into the gallery cafeteria
as an undertow to all that is available:
...

Q: “Who’s going to tell me who’s he?”
A “Ned Kelly”
Q: “And who was he?”
A (chorus): “A BUSH-RANG-ER”
...

Soffici’s painting (my colour photocopy
from a 1946 book):
the glass and cup
flattened – glass with a thick base,
...

looking at a sunset
mango stains on my shirt!
...

Pain won’t last, neither will beauty;
once everything is registered as atmosphere
only change is left: each waving branch
or fall of light upon water, each
...

The sky reflects the wilderness.
There are miles on the map without
"interesting features",
the blank spaces Dorn talks about
...

1

Japanese brides drink red wine in the rose garden;
patches of snow (all the way from here to Hokkaido) .


2

The inhabitants of this continent eat potatoes for breakfast
their coffee is German (or Polish) not Italian;
they mix the sweet with the savoury.
...

Laurence James Duggan Biography

Laurence "Laurie" James Duggan is an Australian poet, editor, and translator. Laurie Duggan was born in Melbourne and attended Monash University, where his friends included the poets Alan Wearne and John A. Scott. Both he and Scott won the Monash Poetry Prize. He moved to Sydney in 1972 and became involved with the poetry scene there, in particular with John Tranter, John Forbes, Ken Bolton and Pam Brown. Duggan lectured at Swinburne College (1976) and Canberra College of Advanced Education (1983). His poetry grows out of contemplation of moments and found texts. His interest in bricolage started early: while still at Monash he was working on a series of 'Merz poems', short poems about discarded objects, inspired by the work of Kurt Schwitters. His book-length poem The Ash Range (1987) uses diaries, journals of pioneers, and newspaper articles in its construction of a history of Gippsland.)

The Best Poem Of Laurence James Duggan

September Song

Bill Doggett and Earl Bostic: Trading Licks
a great compilation
always reminds me of Ken
probably still at work

in Adelaide, though thinking by now
of coffee and writing

at Baci’s (or the Flash),
Hindley Street.
Here it’s hot

unseasonable September
leaves of brown
come tumbling down

Friday evening of the poetry fest

I’ll stay home
watch the light dim over Bulimba
cook mushrooms
a la Grecque

(bougainvillea a mass of crimson
on the balcony, the door
waving in the wind though held
by an elastic fastener).

The versifiers will be hot . . .

I mean hot, not
‘hot’
(a seven part performance
of the deadly sins sounds
deadly)
but it will be great

to hear what the poets in Sydney (and Melbourne) are doing
these days.

Bostic’s ‘Flamingo’:
that great blast, rescues a tune
from ‘lightness’

(Coltrane would take this on)
half-a-century old
like me
the 1950s
a now unimaginable world
of bright lights, electricity
coloured drinks
“we don’t need alcohol
we just like it”.

Whatever you say, Frank.

Are Pam and Jane
wandering Rome
or escaped to a cool villa elsewhere?
Is Pam writing

a view across Trastevere to the Tiber

positioned at a desk in the apartment
as Ken
sets up in the Baci with coffee, cake,
The Guardian,
me
on my back on the sofa
my preferred writing method

. . . from which I watch aircraft
descend over Hamilton,

my friends in their various places
in the fading twilight

like a line from The Star Spangled Banner
a couch
Kerouac was too patriotic to sit on.

*

I cook dinner to
Danny Gatton, 88
Elmira Street,
the moon, yellow
gibbous
over Morningside,
thinking 50s hits
a teenager imagining
being there
(on the moon)
away
from all this
the cream-puff face
of George Méliès satellite
(Satellite of love?)

Danny G an heir to this philosophy
(he
hanged himself in the garage,

though his music now
seems benign enough

especially the theme to The Simpsons
or, heartbreak, a version of
‘In my room’.

*

A day later:
I’m sitting on the floor
(not lying down)
at the Judith Wright Centre
– the poetry
and Frank Sinatra
continue –
Jill Jones
not liking the heat,
Michael Farrell
(‘the man wears shorts’)
reading in tandem with Martin Harrison

“Re-
New the Word”
says the poster.

Sitting, I view
legs of the poets
(“Gimme da word . . .”
said a cartoon in Pam’s early book;
the frightened reply
“I . . . I’ve forgotten it.”)
When Michael reads
a guy with beard and sandals
walks out.

*

Home,
post-reading

the hottest it’s been in this room
a moon
like the one that hangs over
fields of Shoreham
Samuel Palmer’s harvest
except here
suburb, not ripened corn
or both?
(suburb and corn)
that would be Brisbane
the “blessed city”
as Gwen Harwood had it
in wartime
and me
an age
of consumption
a river-side
of plasma screens.
Who needs the moon?

*

Coffee at Jamie’s Espresso
a minimalist model plane above the refrigerator

wire body
pathetic wooden wing
propeller spun by the fan

(what was the line from EM Forster
highlighted METAPHOR
by some scholar:

“the fan rotated like a wounded bird”

a metaphor for poetry?)

Another coffee
“Hi Bronwyn”
is that sculpture on stage
really fish fucking?

The poet takes notes.
New poetry
a veneer of theory
John Forbes
invoked by the multitudes.

Outside, the heat
“neon in daylight”
(the 24-hour grocery)
inside
FAME
I wanna live forever . . .
No Joke!

*

James Street Bistro.

Will my coffee arrive? (the waitress busy
chatting up the young ‘suits’).

It does, but it’s the
wrong coffee.

‘The Reverend David Sheppard . . . Freddie Trueman
. . . I’ll remember that forever’

Revelation of the year:
John Howard doesn’t like cricket.

“Downtown Huddersfield . . .”

I want a bistro, not an open-plan office.

*

At Vroom, figuring
what it is I like about
music played in cafés

generic ‘acid jazz’

neither ‘acid’ nor ‘jazz’
but ok for coffee

(‘Ambulance Music’
invokes cool for the texters
and me
I’m part of this theatre
wet ink dries visibly

charades of western life

as, at home, on the wall

the fall of Capa’s republican soldier, over
an exploding sand dune
somewhere in W.A.
by Tim Burns

(not the Tasmanian Tim Burns
the formerly Sydney one)

rain on the suburbs

drill vibration
from the building site

*

Max Planck said
“paradigm shift always happens
after the funeral”

apparently.

As I age I look
more and more like a thug

waiting
with Basil Bunting
for that fad
(fiction)
to pass.

(at the writers’ festival

the mild boredom of hearing people
discuss their work
– it’s what you do –
Hello Ivor!
the clouds mass
promising STORM
like the rain last night
horizontal
as I drove Rosemary to the airport

(‘airpoet’
said Richard Tipping.

Thanks Richard.


At the New Farm Deli:
Alla Zonza!

Already
it’s October


Poet's Note: 2003

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