Deadly Pollen

Stephen Oliver

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***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEADLY POLLEN***

Copyright (C) 2003 by Stephen Oliver.

DEADLY POLLEN

Stephen Oliver

WORD RIOT PRESS

(c) Stephen Oliver, 2003

Books by Stephen Oliver

Henwise (1975)

& Interviews (1978)

Guardians, Not Angels (1993)

Recordings

Earthbound Mirrors, a selection, Stephen Oliver,

Ode Records Label, Auckland, (cassette) 1984

For more information on Stephen Oliver visit:

http://people.smartchat.net.au/~sao/

Cover design: Pina Ricciu.

Cover image: The Lithuanian Bison,

engraving from J. von Brincken, 1828.

Acknowledgements: Antipodes (USA), Biff's Quarterly (USA), Brief (NZ),

Catalyzer Journal (USA), Comet Magazine (San Francisco), JAAM (NZ),

the author to an old Kauri, weatherboard guest house in France Street

(the upper story of which he occupied in the early '80s) near the

prostitute's strip off K'rd, Auckland. Various 'emerging' poets &

artists lived downstairs at intervals during this period. As the last

of its kind in Newton Gully this 100 year old wooden building was

finally demolished at the close of the decade.

Deadly Pollen is published by

Word Riot Press

PO Box 414

Middletown, NJ 07748

1. 'ZIONISM:'

2. 'You return to the stupa, yearly,'

6. 'Mediocre raiders lie in wait.'

7. 'Time passes - that pressure in'

8. 'Hugely, our indifference squats -'

9. 'Circuit; right hand wise,'

10. 'If streets had cobblestones'

11. 'A Public Works draughtsman'

12. 'Pyrrha, your dewy hair,'

13. 'The flames above the wall,'

15. 'Forty thousand tons. Space'

18. ''A line is taking a full-stop'

19. 'Buildings off the crustal shelf,'

20. 'Generalization of Old World'

21. 'CEOs in castles cascade'

22. 'Footprints for satellites?'

23. 'Is recollection seeing anew,'

27. 'Alcatraz not Minoan ruins.'

29. 'Serpent-backed bridge profiled:'

30. 'One quadrant of sky turns,'

31. 'Barrel of the sun, gun-wad,'

32. 'Rubbed off sky exposes an'

An Actual Encounter With The Sun On

My Balcony At France Street

Deadly Pollen

ZIONISM:

to carry forward the cultural gene -

The child's bouncing ball lands in mud

on the other side of the wire;

slowly, the yellow ball rolls to a stop.

*

You return to the stupa, yearly,

come back as forest deer but

upon which your dreams founder,

yearly, - you return that which

you do not have. Meanwhile, in the

*

levelled and swept. The first cubicle

an open doorway. One man

on a step looking out to sea. Civilization

open for business. Soon, marble

was made smooth and square. The Idea

locked into permanence. Curiosity

*

"With digital, there is no past,"

says Jean-Luc Godard. Either way,

the button is redundant. Voice-command

is thought - the fear deep and futureless

as history, desire to appease which

remains featureless, not the disorganized

weather it truly is, as much a part of

the breathing stars as constancy of rock.

The 'Mr Whippy Man' weaves

caravan in search of a trade-route -

via the village that never existed.

8

its first appearance, otherworldly,

but of this world, a wheel loosened

from the world's ratchet, out of time,

theorem-thought; elevated imponderables,

set underneath as you sail under?

Islands, a dream of round towers!

the sudden rush of water under hulls.

with ambush. Orders intercepted,

encrypted to the house style.

The litterateur tracked back through

his ISBN to no man's land -

the robotic verb activated, sent

in under barbed metaphor strung out

where trees once stood as

camouflage. The voices from his

hill-bunker a wind turbine. Accusations

tumbled in the night. For months he

heard soft hammering, mimicry;

they failed. Could not beat back the

weather on his chosen ground.

*

Time passes - that pressure in

talons curve and hook - how the

mouth chokes with ash. Feet drag

muffled under dungeons. Time passes -

that pressure in space again - a

new proclamation from Semiotic City -

this custom built dome and

no corners to hide around - no zone

*

landmines. Camels wait for sand dunes

to drift into ridges - blue flags flutter

back at Fort Apache on brave

hobbles past, bargain hunting,

over Manhattan, out across the Hudson

river as from a Bedouin campfire.

*

Ireland as the first Celts castaway -

whose home precinct the Black Sea,

the right hand to the centre;

memoried in standing stone circles.

Yet homage to a sun as walking

pillar of fire, with hell for a coronet?

The world's breath and mystery

end here, earth's innards engorged -

sprawled redly coast to coast.

*

If streets had cobblestones

blood would flow in tatters - torn

and blood wakes from its blackness,

ice, the glass-edged sky to play upon;

in silences deep as birch in the

bayoneting dark - and leaves finally

resemble paper money piled up

under the turbined lamplight.

*

A Public Works draughtsman

spent thirty years designing the City

archways, treatment ponds breaking into

sunlight - the architects of Athens

would have been proud of it.

*

Pyrrha, your dewy hair,

yellow, scented, doubly wreathed

against your squally lust, he won't

find safe haven in your arms! This note

is record enough - that I set down

against your lubricous hold.

See: Horace's 'Pyrrha' ode. I,v.

*

The flames above the wall,

burned three days, at night, smoke

warmed the stars. Border forest

wheeled under a pennant moon.

the God found within the stone.

*

a battery of rocket-launchers

each one bright as a guiding star

slams home to its birth place, sand sprites

Cross and Crescent belch fire.

dust, diamond and sapphire, snips

of light, collect on earth yearly.

Dust breaks bread on our too dusty

planet; on our twice dusty planet;

flick over, air fill with warmth,

*

Scent makes the air visible,

seasonal; autumn lays its long

scaffolding of shadow under wood

smoke; winter smells of damp

brickwork; spring lifts the lid on

lighter smells - is something

between cleaning fluids or garden.

Only late at night true secrets

and scents are disclosed; summer

ancient journey. The poem prints -

makes a seal of every season,

My Balcony At France Street

( for Gloria Schwartz )

When the moon slipped its knot

through, and a baggage of stars

at the other side of the world,

"This is a surprise," I yawned.

"Shouldn't be - you're the one whose

"I must admit," I conceded, "I

was worried there for a bit."

"You must know by now Stephen,

I visit with a poet every thirty years or so.

Last time it was Frank O'Hara,

and before that,

Mayakovsky. Can't say it's your turn

but I'll stop by anyway.

You're not a poet for all time but

for your own time. Don't worry about it.

And forget those supposed poets

the M=E=Z=Z=A=N=I=N=E=S as you call them

caught between the floors: they ain't going

"Sure, care to join me?"

"Only for a minute," he said, "I've got more

off the Hauraki Gulf and the iron-clad poppy

Oh, that reminds me,

see the sun was pretty worked up.

hang in there, and like me it'll

"Thanks sun."

a little preoccupied."

The sun jumped onto my balcony

outside the window.

"You don't see much of me down here at

POETS' PALACE - do you?

Move over,

this is the only time I get a look in."

I propped myself up

on one elbow.

"Remember, you're not

That's your angle, as mine is now

to brow beat you.

either, leave such things to the (small minded).

Honestly,

it's straight forward focus."

"Hold on sun,

I've a few questions."

"We've had our little talk. Give my regards

to Greece again, if you ever get there."

And he was gone

Stephen Oliver b. 1950. Grew in Brooklyn-west, Wellington, New

Zealand. One year Magazine Journalism course, Wellington

Polytechnic. Radio NZ Broadcasting School. Casual Radio Actor. Lived

in Paris, Vienna, London, San Francisco, Greece and Israel. Signed on

with the radio ship, 'The Voice of Peace' broadcasting in the

Mediterranean out of Jaffa. Free lanced as production voice,

newsreader, announcer, voice actor, journalist, radio producer, copy

and features writer. Poems widely represented in New Zealand,

Australia, Ireland, USA, UK, South Africa, Canada, etc. Recently

published, Ballads, Satire & Salt - A Book of Diversions, Greywacke

Press, Sydney, 2003. Recently completed a CD of poems and music,

titled: KING HIT Selected Readings - poems written and recorded by

Stephen Oliver with original music by Matt Ottley designed for

in Sydney.

and with permission of Nicholas Reid:

Nicholas Reid. First Appeared: JAS Review of Books.

Stephen Oliver's anthology of 2001, Night of Warehouses, brought

together the work of a poet who combines an astonishing facility for

image with a complete assurance of voice, while showing a deep

engagement with the poetic tradition . Two new collections, Ballads,

reputation. The former is subtitled 'A Book of Diversions' and

a fine set of illustrations by Matt Ottley. The book's light verse

moves from political satire ('Think Big') to a series of reflections

on the poets of this and the last generation, ranging from Larkin

his legacy - and brings together thirty-five short lyrics into a

loosely linked sequence which examines the state of the world after

9/11. And the poem is not 'merely' political, for it diagnoses a

a crisis poem, it is also a crisis in which (and this is my

subject of much recent American commentary. And in any case, there is

also an enormous amount to admire in the language and in the range of

reference.

I can convey something of the fineness of Oliver's craftsmanship in

Pyrrha, your dewy hair,

yellow, scented, doubly wreathed

in Jasmine, fresh from the trellis

this morning.... (lyric 12)

Nor is Oliver's ambition here as limited as it might seem, for in

taking on such a translation Oliver is setting himself up against a

history of translations, and most notably one by Milton. It is a

challenge in which he succeeds admirably. And in the later lines of

the lyric, Oliver marks his disengagement by a withdrawal into a

more demotic register. For while he is adept at finding occasion for

the lyrical richness of which modernism was always suspicious, he

lines which may owe something to the New Zealand poet Curnow's 'Canto

of Signs':

undercoat of white that is really

The language here has a powerful antipodean flatness, and depends on

its laconic pauses. And if 'things settle', it is because, as the

allusion to Yeats suggests, things are about to fall apart; and we

move to images of Bali. Oliver goes on in a following lyric to

demonstrate his gift for image, in his intense visualization of

shrub-shaped, in proton loops,

on cushioned air. Spring!

See the counter, its bright ticking

bravura display, a description of architectural form:

... Complex of

archways... (lyric 11)

The language here is finely controlled, from the way in which the

'x' sound is perfectly balanced in the opening phrase, to the series

of falling monosyllables which are released in the enjambed

expansiveness of the final phrase with its open vowels. The language

is reminiscent of Les Murray's 'Bent Water' (surely Murray's

Late in the poem, Oliver brings together these themes in a grim

reflection upon the role of the poet - in a voice in which the emotion

is italicized but never allowed to run outside its bounds:

One quadrant of sky turns,

face up, black as the ace of spades.

Much as a God can manage

muttering from the side of his mouth.

Star flecks, nova spittle. Rage of

emptiness pours through, for the hell

of it, endlessly. Looking back to

what beginning. The whole shebang

best efforts. We live under a Niagra

of star fall, huge optics dilate time,

strung between a singlet of lights. (lyric 30).

awareness of his place as a poet of the vernacular republic; but it

also speaks, in its use of cliche, of a loss of faith in the

resources of poetic language.

And something similar can be said of its use of Stevens, for where

Stevens is the poet who brought romantic metaphysics to its final

in the world, Oliver's use of Stevens here seems also an act of

divinity who 'moved among us, as a muttering king' in 'Sunday

Morning', and to that poem's existential conclusion that (contra

Milton) 'We live in an old chaos of the sun'. Like Stevens in 'Key

Clearly there is much in this sequence which I find powerful, and

respond to warmly. Many of the lyrics are perfect, and thematically

the poem traverses many of the issues which are at the heart of

registers, and a concern with post-modernism and the end of history.

and Hardy and Auden. But I would like to see it slightly reshaped,

for I feel that there is a great poem hiding in here somewhere, if

only I could be persuaded more of its motivation. I think fear does

lie at the heart of its psychology, but the real fear is artistic

rather than political; and if this could be worked more into the

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