Introduction
by Mykaela Saunders
When Liminal offered me this commission I had so many ideas. Too many. And all amazing ones too. But I love to sit at the feet of older and wiser people, and given the smaller scope of this project I thought poetry would be the best fit. I made a list of all the poets who influence my writing and thinking; people whose work I have loved, who have comforted me in hard times and spurred me on with their generosity and energy as I set to work on my own writing. All of the poets on my list were blackfellas. As my list coalesced, I wondered how many of these poets had also influenced each other, too? All of the poets in this project are senior to me and some have been writing for longer than I’ve been alive. Of course they have nourished each other just as they have inspired myself and others, and I took great glee in thinking that some of them had possibly even annoyed each other too.
Once I confirmed the six poets I put their names in my favourite hat (a black corduroy flat brim with an Aboriginal flag patch sewn on the front). I had sold this project as a secret santa kind of deal, so I pulled the names out one by one, matching them up, and this is the way I assigned the poets to one another to write a poem in response to each other’s work. I have been thinking very hard about influences and lineages, and I am currently on hiatus from a related project in which I respond to my late uncle’s poems. I am on hiatus because I feel stuck. I wanted to see how the experts tackle this thing I’ve committed to. I wanted to study the techniques they chose and their chosen ways of relating to someone else’s work. Although they were assigned a poet, each participant had the freedom to choose which poem to respond to. I was interested in what moved the poets in their choices, whether they chose a poem for its technical brilliance or its emotional radiance or some other, more secret reason.
When each poet sent their work to me, I first read the original poem and then the response to it, tracing connections between the subjects and styles, and points of departure too. And with each reading I nursed a warmth in my heart knowing how honoured each poet would be to be engaged with in this way. It really is the highest form of respect we can ask for as artists—to have someone read our work this closely and to have them respond with creativity, with care, with rigour. I tried to be subtle in my editing. What do I have to offer such accomplished poets? I’m just happy to bring them all together, to bring them to you, and to sit at their feet and learn a thing or two in the process.
We begin Odes with Charmaine Papertalk Green’s ode to Jim Everitt-puralia meenamatta’s ‘Twi | Water Drops’. Charmaine relates to the senior truwana-lutruwita author and activist’s ways of writing water through her own Yamaji worldview. She structured her responses alongside his and the result is refreshing and quenching, just like water itself. Jim told me he recently had the pleasure of meeting Charmaine who told him she’d written this poem.
Jim wrote his ode to Ali Cobby Eckermann’s ‘It’s Just So Wrong’. Jim took specific lines from Ali’s poem and crafted his response around them, seeing in her poem a familiarity as he had experienced a similar thing on another part of the continent, by some same-same kind of colonial violence. It is special and important to note that Jim wrote this poem over a period of time when he put his body on the line for country, while he was sick and healing, and then travelling around organising resistance against the destruction of his country and culture.
Ali’s ode is to Lionel Fogarty’s ‘Ideal Crowded Streets’, a poem he wrote about India. She told me that although the two had travelled together to Kolkata, she also chose this poem out of respect for Lionel’s spiritual space, as it is one of his least personal-political works. We are moved by Ali’s imagery of colour, scent and sound as we move through the streets, noticing class and caste, sweet and savoury, bustle and stillness.
Lionel’s word play has always been in its own league; he was chuffed to hear I wrote an essay about his fiery hip-hop delivery for an undergrad essay in 2006. In Lionel’s ode to Jeanine Leane’s poem ‘Tracks Wind Back’, about her Wiradjuri country, he responds to specific lines of hers as call and response, creating an uncanny resonance between the two poems, and a fierce mocking of Australia’s version of history and its claim to Aboriginal land. Both poems are lessons in black truth telling and in black poetic excellence too.
In Jeanine’s ode to Tony Birch’s ‘Birrung Billabong’, river and culture are not just metaphorically similar but the very same stuff. It is structurally inventive too; in Jeanine’s poem, like a river, sometimes the words flow fast, and other times blank space eddies around obstacles stuck in the stream. Jeanine wrote this poem while she travelled around working with mob on poetry.
Finally, Tony’s poem is not just an ode to Charmaine’s poem ‘Walgajunmanha All Time’, but more of an ode to Charmaine herself. He evokes her energy and wisdom, from youth to now, and asks us to consider throwing labels out like yesterday’s news.
In these poems, water and rivers are common themes, and little wonder considering they are cultural vessels and connectors of country. Culture is like a river in that we drink and wash and refresh ourselves in the waters, but we are also tasked with keeping the river clean and flowing, and pouring ourselves back into to river for the benefit of our people too. Those who do this cultural work, like the poets in this project, are precious to us.
Travel is another constant both in the poems and in the lives of the poets. They all evoke their own countries and cultural locations, whether bush or city, and they bring to this task the wisdom of each lifetime working for and with our people. They are cosmopolitan writers, too; engaging with other cultures from a strong standing in their own.
I hope you can read these poems as beautiful works in their own right, as well as loving responses alongside the originals, and finally, as a set of poems: an offering from six of our most talented, generous poets thinking and feeling and conversing with each other though their own brilliant work.
Mykaela Saunders is the author of the David Unaipon Award-winning Always Will Be, and the editor of This All Come Back Now, the Aurealis Award-winning anthology of blackfella speculative fiction. Mykaela is Koori/Goori and Lebanese and is a postdoctoral research fellow at Macquarie University.