This week’s spotlight once again shines on Peter Bakowski and Ken Bolton’s tandem collection Nearly Lunch, this time highlighting the poem ‘Selling Yourself’.
‘A spectrum of individuals, from the naive to the kind, caustic to the stoic, to those who suggest other ways of being – either hopeful, philosophical, grateful or resigned – pleased, though, all of them, that it’s NEARLY LUNCH.’ – Cover blurb
Post written by Polly Grant Butler
Last week, while eating cake and drinking wine in celebration of the lovely Milly Bollen’s 22nd birthday, equally lovely Wakefielder Maddy Sexton declared I am now a real Adelaidean. This is because, after just three months of living here, I have recently found myself correcting my Victorian family and friends’ pronunciations of the local language: ‘It’s CoriOLE not CoriOL-E’ and ‘It’s HI-ndley, not HIND-ley!!’
But given I’m still grappling with the fact that an Adelaide pint is a Melbourne schooner, and an Adelaide schooner is a Melbourne pot, I know I haven’t completely lost my roots. So, while pondering my newfound multi-state identity, I thought it fitting for this week’s Poetry Spotlight post to delve into a meeting of Melbourne and Adelaide, in Ken Bolton and Peter Bakowski’s joint work, Nearly Lunch. This week, I will be highlighting the poem ‘Selling Yourself’.
In both this collection and their previous collaboration, The Elsewhere Variations, Ken and Peter reveal a unique ability to draw attention to the performances of other people and the oddness of daily interactions, making insignificant moments feel significant.
In a previous post, Poppy Nwosu commented on how the poems in this collection ‘read almost like a series of breezy short stories’. Perhaps this is because the pages are full of lively, defined characters, who both resist and enforce ideas about modern life. They are often identified by their job titles and are sometimes selfish, sometimes innocent, sometimes pretentious, and almost always mediating on the thing they care about. In other words, they are human.
As well as the myriad of voices the collection offers, there are also the numerous characters we briefly encounter. These are painfully familiar people, like Moira ‘who’s lived in Noosa since 1969, / prefers yachts to cars’ and Freddie, ‘you’ll find him on the golf course’, or share-house resident Cedric who is ‘into obscure disco’. We are, therefore, provided with a glimpse of the world that is twofold: we see people from both the inside and the outside. There is a sense that, although most people deserve to be mocked a little bit, they deserve our empathy too.
The poem I’ve chosen to highlight this week is ‘Selling Yourself‘, an idea a lot of creative people can relate to, I’m sure.
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