Fifteener

 April 5 Word of the Day: Fifteener

 

In hospital in May 2022, I received a book gift from Lenore Stephens, the last poetry of her schoolfriend Jordie Albiston entitled ‘Fifteeners’. Today I retrieved two pages of Notes written into my phone at the time while resting in bed, and never returned to.   

 Fifteeners 1, written in the Austin Hospital: “First, these poems are not sonnets, not just because they are not 14 lines but because JA is not using the 8-6 argument and counter-argument of a sonnet. She has in most of them gone consciously tripartite 5-5-5, itself a useful thing to be aware of when reading the poems as that’s the turn JA is playing with, three main connected thoughts or feelings in careful sequence. Like a sonneteer she reels them off. They are not a sonnet + 1 line, rather the sonnet looms in the background of her practice as model of a short turning poem. I think JA has a tragic view of existence. Even her humour and comedy is frequently coming from that vision of things. I remember reading her say somewhere that life is full of sadness, fragile and in a state of loss. Her Red Dirt Hymn ‘Gone’, for example. Her alphabetic series ‘Omegabet’ rides on just this transience, cannot be understood without this edge of near permanent despair. Sometimes she writes lines that do pushback from the prevailing mood, bringing with them beauty and respite and consolation even. I pay close attention to these small advances. She seems haunted in a present tense where memory is telling her it’s all over. More anon.”

Fifteeners 2, written in Donvale Rehabilitation Hospital after the operation: “Her use of the Cloud of Unknowing as a model, I suppose you’d say, for the Poem (i.e. that explains everything), is she simply forwarding an elegy for language, or promoting the Poem as a means to speaking of God? Maybe JA holds a Romantic view of the Poem, which she presents here in a mock medieval style, one that is rigorous and humorous at the same time. I am left pondering the game she has played with the ancient text. Her game playing with old works goes up a notch in The Five Wits, as she turns them into little Shakespeare acts of querulous tragi-comedy. Dickinson’s mode and internal argument is on fervent show in this set of marvels, as she turns mere philosophical terms into the combustible realities they would so calmly define.”