Saturday 31 May 2014

Opposite


OPPOSITE

 

arctic ANTARCTIC

balls-up BALANCE

chaos COMBINATIONS

daylight DARKNESS

energy ENTROPY

final FIRST

grounded GAGA
hindrance HELP
invisible INK
jewels JUNK
karaoke KOAN
loathe LIKE
major MINOR
now NEVER
occident ORIENT
parallel PEAR-SHAPED
quotes QUIET
ruin REPAIR
sink SWIM
thin THICK
used UNUSED
vice VERSA
winner WOODENSPOONER
excellent EXCREABLE
ying YANG
zillion ZERO

PHILIP HARVEY

Friday 30 May 2014

Joy

JOY


ardour awe
bliss beatitude
cheer charm
detachment delight
elation enchantment
fervour felicity
gladness glory
happiness heaven
inscape inspiration
jokiness jubilance
kindling koan
light life
mirth merriment
nada nirvana
outbreak olé
peace paradise
quiddity quickness
rapture rhapsody
serenity solace
treasure transport
up uplift
value vibe
wellness wonder
exuberance exultation
yes yes
zen zeal

PHILIP HARVEY


Thursday 29 May 2014

Melbourne May



seventeen melbourne haiku philip harvey wrote in may 2014



less starless darkness for a tightrope possum and first warbling magpie



black as tree root, pink as gumleaf, grey as bark sunrise again’s cold green



thick dew, dependent dogs while above park treelines three hotair balloons



because we breathe and need a roof and work is work peak hour begins



train says, now arriving at hawksburn, as train arrives at moorabbin



he keeps online profiles, likes and dislikes, blogs, deletes, stays in his room



sushi bar: one pair of eyes on the job, one pair on the customers



a crowd at the tramstop talk to their touch screens, the busker to his dog



brown or silver or grey or bronze towers mirror the turbid river



the new streamlined medical centre fills with crook backs, blood clots, stuffed heads



signs of shops and shops of signs and signs of streets and streets of shops and signs



thought he had change for a coffee but sorry only have a fifty



perfume paris, curve shoes london, handbag roma, voice pure brunswick



central locking remote sensing auto shifting slow brooding road rage



on jolimont half are stoic, half satisfied after the night game



basketball courts, game ended or yet to start empty under floodlight



lights out under doonas the mind sees autumn leaves collect as sleep falls

Monday 19 May 2014

White


White


                    aluminium accidents
blond blizzards
                carrara cumulus
                          deathless diamonds
   eavesdropping eyeballs
                          fresh foolscap
                          ghostly glass
                    highway headlights
                          impressive incisors
         jocular jasmine
   kempt kaolin
                       lightbulb lilies
        midnight moon
                          neglected notebooks
        opened onions
            peroxide plaits
                                       quick quills
        rippling reflections
                        silver screens
                 traditional tablecloths
 uncoloured units
 vanilla veneer
                   waterfall waves
               expressive exhalations
  youthful yetis
                         zinc zips

Philip Harvey




Sunday 18 May 2014

Wye

seventeen wye river now haiku philip harvey wrote in april 2011
 
undertow warm after cold spray, the boogie board tugs to get back in
 
issues that were crucial last week pass by like horizon containers
 
chinese on the bus, their cameras full of road signs blurred koalas
 
suds in the rushes, ducks on a roll, bottle with its nothing message
 
crash of waves then carol plays a chopin cd soft then crash of waves
 
op shop plates of film of baked beans eggy toast piled on a spare sink edge
 
two hours then bridie’s mayfair monopoly closes the game down
 
questionmarks are their sulphur crests peering down from the gutters for seed
 
salt residues wash with orange soap, sand curves in the shower corners
 
three grey powers park their harleys near the jimi hendrix campervan
 
gumleaves fawn slender mottled twirling from above layer the rain tanks
 
just enough time to see a bowerbird grab a grape from the decking
 
the newspaper tells how melbourne trams need improving, time for coffee
 
towels doonas wetsuits bathers on the railings, sun goes behind cloud
 
over reds talk goes through hobbies, dreams, bible, recipes, taylor swift
 
good weekends flame kindling catches mulga lengths smoulder the masport glows
 
after first light good friday twenty surfers drift beyond the reef  foam

Saturday 10 May 2014

Skywhale (Patricia Piccinini)




Whaleroad was one of the words Anglo-Saxons used for the sea. It’s a kenning, a sort of picture word common in Norse and Old English poetry; others are day’s-eye (daisy), mind’s-worth (honour), and heaven-candle (the sun).  Ezra Pound uses them in the opening of his Cantos as a way of summoning the ancient form of his adopted language. He also made an excellent translation of ‘The Seafarer’, the Anglo-Saxon poem where whaleroad appears. We find kennings used with happy abandon in the writings of medieval tale-tellers like Tolkien, while modern poets like Seamus Heaney employ them for effect as, for example, when he calls a skeleton a bone-house. Kenning itself is Norse and means to know, recognise; perceive, feel; show; teach. All of those things. These words typify the Anglo-Saxon propensity for riddling.

Whaleroad carries further meanings though. The sea in that culture is a crossing place, not a place for reflection or staying, nor even blessedly, for exploitation. It is wilderness: in Anglo-Saxon ‘deer’ meant any kind of animal, so wild-deer-ness was the place where the wild animals lived, i.e. where humans did not go or stay. They chose the largest creature of the deep to define the sea. Memory of the whale stayed inside the early English psyche, even amongst those who had never seen a whale but knew they existed. By choosing the whale they also pronounced themselves as other from the whale: humans who lived on land.

Skywhale is not a kenning, except in the sense that two vast realities are joined together by two words. Nor is skywhale representative of three-quarters of the Earth’s surface. It is the name of an object and the start of thoughts. When the sculptor Patricia Piccinini wished to design a hot air balloon her interest was to make a sculpture of a living creature rather than a “balloon that looked like something.”  Skywhale looks like something, but not anything we see every day. It stays in the memory, even if you’ve never seen it in the flesh. Piccinini is reported as saying: “My question is what if evolution went a different way and instead of going back into the sea, from which they came originally, they went into the air and we evolved a nature that could fly instead of swim.” The sculpture plays out our life experience of being held by gravity and our own fleshly being to the Earth, while simultaneously being autonomous entities filled with dreams, and the occasional experience, of flight. In this respect, the sculpture represents all such living creatures, but especially conscious humans, in or out of the wild.

Skywhale has an official website. There we find words like these: “Wings didn't make sense to Patricia; the creature was too big and the technical limitations of balloon design wouldn't allow them anyway. So she took a cue from the balloon itself, and imagined that the creature might somehow secrete a lighter than air gas. In the place of wings she imagined huge udders that might contain the gas, as well as a huge bulbous body. She imagined the creature with a slightly more human face, with a calm benign expression that would inspire empathy rather than fear. Her aim was to create a being that was massive and wondrous and that exists somewhere between the impossible and the unlikely.”  All shipshape and Bristol fashion is an Anglo-Saxon double entendre and it makes strange sense when we learn that Skywhale was constructed in that English port city. We notice the sculptor’s deeper purposes in her words. She is in the business of kenning, meaning she is getting us to know, to recognise, to perceive, to feel, to show, to teach.

Skywhale was surprisingly tight-packed when it arrived on trailers at Fitzroy Oval, the original home of the Lions. These Lions stand on two legs and run around the ground kicking to one another a variant of a possum-fur ball. Skywhale in its crinkled wrapped-up state fits inside a large bag. It had to be stretched out across the ground and all the corners unfolded so the air gas could fill the frame and mammary glands. Excited students of Fitzroy Community School had various things explained to them by Patricia Piccinini, that the balloon had to be three degrees warmer than the surrounding air if it was to lift off, that the balloon is thought of as round but is more like a teardrop in shape. It was her natural attention to shape that demonstrated Patricia Piccinini’s intrinsic sculptural thought patterns. Once inflated with cold air everyone was allowed to go inside Skywhale, as long as they had flat sole shoes. The interior is a marvel of beauty and difference too: the school children ran about with glee. But exit they must before the balloon could be fully inflated with hotter air. Slowly Skywhale took on its fully expanded state, body blowing bigger, nipples popping out, “benign expression” of face rising from the grass. The balloon received a mixed response from the school children and locals and commuters moving slowly down Brunswick Street, everything from very amazing to totally amazing to wow awesome to what on Earth is that. Gradually Skywhale gained composure for ascent above Fitzroy, a Melbourne suburb named after the half-brother of the man who commanded the brig-sloop Beagle on its second voyage (1831-36) to Galapagos and elsewhere across the whaleroad.



  


PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN BY BRIDIE HARVEY AND PHILIP HARVEY 
IN NORTH FITZROY ON THURSDAY MORNING THE EIGHTH OF MAY 2014


Saturday 3 May 2014

Oxygen (The Brazilian Email)



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dressmake condensate carburetor earthshaking pygmy summitry tranquillity
digging avenge circumpolar sprig misanthrope commute serge ripple
chipboard set bhutan washbasin ergative snag fearful luminescent occupant orgiastic marquis
dichondra annale crawford liggett interim lovelace radiate edematous
conclave store curd benton amount strategist candace chromate
gastrointestinal appellate eisenhower frivolity loathsome innkeeper carfare
judaism mildew citron athena run throughput incriminate wig continuity
innocent eulogy gaylord dung cyclopean cormorant planetesimal
buckboard loiter arcsin affirmative cindy sufficient black stamina calculisycamore reactively deere masquerade lemmaedict plastic pease stumble cavernous heath manacle than bushes implore well gentiancleans idols ventricle hiked achievablepeeks ahead unveiling flown sublimeoxygen unveiling flown sublime
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oxygen unveiling flown sublime
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oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime
oxygen unveiling flown sublime

The Oxygen Tree
THE BRAZILIAN EMAIL series NUMBER TEN