Miraculous draft of Les Murray

The daughter of Leo Connellan, our poet friend who passed away, gave me a good deal on 10 of the poet's neckties. I then gave ties to musicians who worked on our poetry score to Leo's hitchhiking epic, Crossing America.

The trustees of Leo's ties are responsible for maintaining their tie with dignity and honor, reading Leo's poetry any day they wear a Leo tie, and submitting a story to Poetry Scores about what they have done on days when they wear Leo's tie.

I chose for myself a baby blue tie with two alternating patterns. One is a line of octagons inset with what look like black measles, the other vaguely floral with suggestions of spermatozoa, tufted by clouds. It is a little frayed, like Leo when we knew him, and blotched in three places with yellow, the same shade, probably from the same meal, I'm guessing egg.

In my Leo tie I sat for my visa photos, so when I entered Ghana and Togo, the border guards knew me in Leo's tie.

I took off my Leo tie to receive shots of yellow fever and meningitis so my body would be inoculated against those pathogens should I encounter them while I am in Africa, and then I kept my tie in my knapsack, because I love Leo but loathe ties.

With my Leo tie I met Les Murray, the unofficial national poet of Australia, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on the Met's off-day. I joined Les and his friend Alice, who restores tapestries for the museum, for a private, behind-the-scenes tour of a Renaissance tapestry show.

"I've seen that somewhere," Les said, pointing to one of the massive tapestries. He was wearing a New York Yankees fishing hat.

"You've seen it at the Vatican, Les," Alice suggested.

Les in his Yankees fishing hat, I with my Leo tie, we shuffled along.

"These are Big Deal tapestries," Alice noted of the next room. "Raphael did the cartoons. These hang around the Sistine Chapel, just under the ceiling." We were facing Raphael's Miraculous Draft of Fishes.

"'Have you caught any fish?'" Les quoted Jesus Christ from the Bible. "'Let down your nets on the other side.' And there came a miraculous draft of fishes."

Les in his Yankees fishing hat, I with my Leo tie, we shuffled along.

"They surely did like hunting, didn't they?" Les observed, looking at the next batch of tapestries.

"They liked horses' asses!" Alice said. Indeed, rather many of the horses on the hunt did have their backsides turned to weaver and viewer.

"This is one of the Triumphs," Alice noted in the next room.

"Triumph?" Les asked. "Of what?"

"Of Lust," Alice said.

"It's also the invention of the ice cream cone," Les said. One figure's neck was, in fact, coiled like a twirl of soft ice cream.

"The fellow in the middle is saying, 'Have you ever seen a club this size?'" Les said, "but the moral of it you can't read very well."

Les in his Yankees fishing hat, I with my Leo tie, we shuffled along.

"Look at this thing!" Alice exclaimed. "This is St. Michael Overcoming Satan."

"You know, I played Satan in a Medieval play once," Les reminisced. "I had to wear a pig mask. The governor of New South Wales attended. I jumped on him one night. I jumped off the stage. The devils were supposed to flee, so I fled, and ended up on the knees of the governor. His wooden knees. He had lost his legs in the war. The governor handled it with stony aplomb."

Les in his Yankees fishing hat, I with my Leo tie, we descended the grand marble steps of the Met.

"How do you fit into all this?" Alice asked me.

"I'm a Les Murray fan," I said.

"I should photocopy and send you the letter he wrote me," Les said, referring to my first fan letter, when I told him that Les Murray was the star right fielder on my dice baseball team composed of poets. "I keep that one in my folder of very special things."

As we bid Alice farewell, and headed down Fifth Avenue for coffee, I pointed at Les' Yankee hat with a smile.

"I went to the big game," he said, "all because of your insidious influence, of course. The very first hit I saw was a homerun. I started right at the top: a homerun at Yankee Stadium. I expect it's all a slight decline from there."

At the coffee shop, I gave Les a copy of Leo's book Provincetown. I explained about Leo's passing and the trusteeship of the ties. Les thumbed through the book. "I like this feller," Les said of Leo. "He is clear, and real."

Over coffees and ice cream sodas, Les told me that my wife's name, "Karley," means "black" in Sanskrit and Gypsy, because Gypsy is an Indian tongue.

I pointed out that the name is short for "Addokarley," which means "Third Daughter" in her home African language, Mina.

"The Romans went for that, too, naming people after numbers," Les said. "If she were an ancient Roman, I suppose her name would be Tertia."

Walking Les back to the Met, I asked if he had made a spoken word record yet. He had not, though he had done some recording with the Poet Laureate of England, and wanted to do a book-on-tape of his verse novel, Fredy Neptune. When I said that is precisely one of the things that I wanted to do, he agreed I should look into it.

Les was in town to read at the Guggenheim Museum during the world premiere of new works that set his poems to music. During his performance there he had read a piece that refers to music as a "nonsense poem," so only with hesitation did I mention my other dream, doing a poetry score to his long, highly musical poem, "The Sydney High Rise Variations."

"What kind of music should go with it?" I asked.

His lips quivered with the ghost of a melody he was keeping in his head. "There should be some wind in the sound. It starts on this big, high bridge, you see. I wish I had the text in front of me."

I suggested that he mail me a cassette of melodies when he gets back to New South Wales, and he nodded yes agreeably.

In Central Park, just south of the Met, I cornered a street vendor and had him snap a picture of Les and me, Les in his Yankee fishing hat and me with my Leo tie.

"I hope that took!" I said. "That was my last picture."

"Ah, we'll take one when you come to Australia," Les said, opening up a strange new continent in my heart. "There's always corn in Egypt, as my father used to say. "

**

Image of Miraculous Draft of Fishes from that show at The Met we saw.

Thom Fletcher makes failed proxy bid for Jamillah

Lynn Josse took a few snaps of the 2008 Experiential Auction that she has posted on her Flickr site.

This particular image reveals Thom Fletcher making proxy bids for Jamillah Jones, who made advance bids of $100 for horseback riding with Robin Carnahan and for having Wiley Price shoot her personal portfolio. Jamillah was outbid on both.

I believe in this action shot, Thom is bidding for the photo shoot. I heard him later shyly remark that it was kind of fun to bid on something like that which would hold no personal interest for him. Thom is a good shooter, not not much of a poser.

I can't bear to look at these pictures myself. The people in them are drinking beer. I am recovering from oral surgery and not allowed to drink beer.

I love beer. I miss beer.

Peter F. Alexander on Les Murray's religious work

With my mind still full of a new show of contemporary religious art that opened yesterday in St. Louis, I finally got around to checking out an interview about religion in poetry that was sent to me recently by Peter F. Alexander.

Peter Alexander is an Australian writer, critic and professor who wrote the definitive biography of the great Australian poet Les Murray. We are scoring Les' poem The Sydney Highrise Variations for 2009, and I have successfully tabbed Peter to help write some liner notes.

It's rather grand and romantic for me to say this, but I met Peter at The British Library in London. My little family was on vacation in Europe, and I happened to catch Peter gallivanting from library to library, tracking down rare documents. (As I recall, he was hunting for caches of letters by the South African writer Alan Paton, author of Cry, The Beloved Country.)

Peter seemed taken by the odd independence of what we do - set long poems to music without any institutional support whatsoever. His wife is an independent publisher of juvenile literature - that is, literature by juveniles, including literature by juveniles who went on to become famous writers as adults - so he understands something about unlikely and somewhat lonesome pursuits.

I have a feeling that Peter and I will always remember that first meeting, long after our Les Murray project is behind us. While we were talking at The British Library, he took a call. His adult son, who has a health condition, had taken ill in a remote location in Papua, New Guinea and was being helicoptered to safety.

Peter received this remarkable news by cell phone, just as we were speaking. It lent a different dimension to our conversation about oddball artistic puruits. It also brought an unexpected intimacy between strangers.

Back in the U.S., we learned his son was rescued and returned to health and civilization.

At any rate, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation interview with Peter about Les Murray's religious poetry is available online as audio and transcript. It appeared on The Spirit of Things, hosted by Rachael Kohn.

The whole interview is worthwhile, but this bit by Peter seems especially true of the religious dimension of Les Murray's work:

"He has a whole series of poems in which he doesn't argue, but just asserts, or shows that religious belief is something ordinary and everyday and maybe omnipresent, and it's that element of religion which unites human beings and makes us see our common humanity. One of the best elements of course, of religions is one of the things he's stressing. So what he's focusing on is the kind of casual, demotic quality of religious belief and religious expression in Australia, and he does so in a slangy, often jokey way, which makes it seem very ordinary, but also very extraordinary, and that's one of the best things he does for it, I think."

*

Snapshot is of Les Murray browsing my library in The Skuntry Museum in its original Long Island location, looking for a book to read on the flight back to Australia. (He picked out a detective trilogy set in Nazi Berlin, but then decided not to borrow it after all.)

Hugs, thanks, love and experiences

A big hug and thanks to everyone who participated in Poetry Scores' 2008 Experiential Auction, which we held last night at Atomic Cowboy.

I did little of the detail work myself and am waiting to see the list of winners and prices, but to this pain-medicated observer the big-ticket items seemed to be horseback riding with Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, a case of custom homebrew by that beautiful man Anthony Brescia, and Dana Smith paints your band performing live.

I remember the winner of Dana's painting, because he was reached via my cell phone at a remote location to see if he wanted to raise his advance online bid (which had been beat by another bidder at Atomic Cowboy) - and he did raise his bid to clinch the experience. A bigger hug and warmer thanks to the great musician and producer Eric Hall for investing in Poetry Scores and for appreciating Dana's work.

For fun, I have posted, above, my old sketch of Eric performing live with his band Peanuts at The Tap Room, and signed (with love) by the guys in the band. No one would pay for that piece, now would they, though my donated experience (a trip to Alice Neihardt's horse farm and the chance to pray in a prayer garden designed by Black Elk) attracted a tiny bidding skirmish, as distinct from an all-out bidding war.

There were more bidding wars than in the previous two years - many experiences themselves experienced competition at the bidding table - though no one high roller emerged, along the lines of Gillian Noero (2006) or Tom Danforth (2007).

What most pleases me is to see Poetry Scores finding its place in the mutually supportive creative arts scene that helps to make St. Louis a very livable city. We don't have much money in this scene, but we have plenty of ideas and an affection for one another and one another's work. This is all very valuable. And I simply can't wait to hear what comes of people's experiences, and to post them up here for the world to share!

KDHX donates free National Film Challenge spot

Lights! Camera! Auction!

KDHX Community Media has got into the 2008 Experiential Auction action with a deluxe offering: You get a spot on the 2008 National Film Challenge!

That's an $110 value - and bidding on all experiences begins at $10!

The National Film Challenge is a timed filmmaking competition where filmmaking teams have just one weekend to make a short film. Only 300 teams from all over the world will be accepted - and one of those will come from Poetry Scores 2008 Experiential Auction.

The basic rules for the Challenge are simple. Win the bid, register your team and start lining up gear, cast and crew. At 7 p.m. sharp on Friday, Oct. 24, log into a secure website to get your genre and a character, prop and a line of dialogue that must appear in your film. Your team then has from Friday at 7 p.m. through midnight Monday, Oct. 27 to create a short film. All creativity must occur within the competition period: writing, rehearsing, shooting, editing, graphics, sound design, etc.

Bidding is open now and starts at $10. Check the Comments page on the auction's main post to see if anyone else has bid, then add your bid as a Comment - or email it to brodog@hotmail.com. The highest advance bid will be the starting bid at the 2008 Experiential Auction 5-8 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 21 at Atomic Cowboy, 4140 Manchester Ave. The $10 admission is deducted from the price of your first winning bid.

Out of town filmmakers can email a proxy bid (as high as you are willing to go) and someone from Poetry Scores will bid on your behalf on Sunday.

It's a wrap.

*

Picture of someone shooting a scene from their National Film Challenge film from somebody's Flickr site.

The artist Dana Smith paints your band performing

With the 2008 Experiential Auction coming up tomorrow (5-8 p.m. Sunday) at Atomic Cowboy (4140 Manchester), I have my eyes on one experience in a spirit of regret:

The artist Dana Smith paints your band performing live and gives you the signed painting.

Dana painted the above image, of Ajay at Mad Art. I love it. My regret is that I no longer am in a band he can come paint. If the bidding on Dana's painting experience is slow, I'll throw in my bid and have him come paint me performing Kenneth Rexroth at the 2008 Day of the Deadbeats.

Come to think of it, I open bidding on Dana's painting experience at $10, where all bidding begins. (It costs $10 to get into the event, and you get to deduct $10 from the cost of any winning bid.)

Dana's experience is one of 15 experiences on silent auction from 6:45-7:45 p.m. tomorrow (that's the Straggler set). There also will be an Early Bird silent set of 15 experiences (from 5-6 p.m.) and a Live Auction of 8 deluxe experiences (from 6:15-6:30).

Aldermanic President Lewis Reed told me he would call the Live auction set if he can make it to the event and is in the mood. I think he will and he will be. A bike ride in the city with Lewis is one of three raffle items, along with breakfast at Goody Goody with County Executive Charlie Dooley and lunch at his country club with attorney Chet Pleban.

For a complete list of experiences and times, etc., go here; you can bid in advance there or by emailing me!

$1 off Schlafly Pale during Experiential Auction

I spoke with Bill Kellogg at Atomic Cowboy today. He said they will pour Schlafly Pale Ale for $1 off during the Experiential Auction on Sunday (5-8 p.m.).