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Nigel Roberts

this poem / is / for charles buckmaster


This poem was first published in New Poetry, April 1973


this poem is beginning

this poem is a wake of warm beer

this poem is from the heart / fort apache & hamburger hill

this poem is the poem that we publicly & immediately declared / we wouldnt write

this poem is the poem that we privately & immediately / began

this poem is a raid on fear & silence

this poem is a great auk

this poem is in memoriam verse

this poem is flowers / interflora annually

this poem is a black silk sheet

this poem is grasping at straws

this poem is mayday mayday mayday

this poem is panic

this poem is a consensus of the blank look / on many of the faces / in the pub that night

this poem is requiem

this poem is energy

this poem is taking a piss with death

this poem is my ace in the hole

this poem is having fifty cents each way

this poem is hustling response / & you turn out your pockets

this poem is recycling such responses

this poem is lifes telegram too late

this poem is the evening soup / waiting cold / your return from the hill

this poem is naming him poet

this poem is the establishment of a literary fellowship in his name / take what you can

this poem is bill beard / alison hill & kris hemensley reading over his shoulder

this poem is whitman / olson & baudelaire / in turn shouting the drinks

this poem is not the key to any mystery in the time cupboard / of you & him

this poem is quoting lenin who said / we are all dead men on furlough

this poem is a stick rutted on that corrugated iron fence / on which john tranter &

bob adamson wrote      RELEASE EZRA. RIMBAUD

this poem is a moments silence

                                                                      this poem is


Note: The poet Charles Buckmaster (1951–1972) edited a small magazine titled The Great Auk (1968–70). The fence mentioned in the poem surrounded a derelict industrial site opposite Robert Adamson’s rented house at 50 Church Street Balmain, in 1968. The yard and the fence have since been replaced by a block of flats. In fact John Tranter had no part in the painting of the sign in large white letters, though he often admired it. The paint had been given to the occupants by the landlord on the understanding that they would use it to repaint the interior. Other occupants: poet and painter David Rankin, Denise Reid, poet Tim Thorne, Patricia Davies. Ezra Pound was incarcerated in Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington DC, USA from 1946 to 1958. He died aged 87 in Italy in 1972, the same year that Buckmaster committed suicide. The poet Michael Dransfield often visited 50 Church Street; I met him there in 1968 or 1969. He died in April 1973, on Good Friday, as this poem was being published.     [John Tranter, 2004.]
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