This week’s poetry spotlight shines on Peter Bakowski and Ken Bolton’s first collection together, The Elsewhere Variations, highlighting the poem ‘Like-Minded’.
Post written by Polly Grant Butler
On the morning of my first day at Wakefield Press, overwhelmed by an unfamiliar public transport system and big wide roads that seem to stretch endlessly, I decided I would splurge on a taxi. The trip was quick and the small talk lacklustre, but after it had chucked me out and sped away, I quickly realised I had been deposited at 16 Rose Lane instead of 16 Rose Street. I checked my phone and saw I was not far from my destination, and still had time before I was expected there. Feeling comfortable on this narrow road – less country town than the rest of sprawling Adelaide – I settled into the gutter and plucked from my bag the Wakefield Press book I had purchased at Imprints Booksellers the day before. The book was The Elsewhere Variations, the first in Ken Bolton and Peter Bakowski’s tandem poetry series.
The poem I am choosing to highlight this week is ‘Like-Minded’, the same poem I stopped to read that fateful day in Rose Lane, a poem I found so funny and so charming I no longer felt nervous to meet Michael Bollen and my fellow Wakefielders, too drunk on my Ken-and-Peter bliss.
Like most of the poems in this collection, ‘Like-Minded’ makes reference to the poetic tradition, employing the names of known poets and forms and situating them in contemporary settings. In this poem, three haiku poets drinking behind the Coles on Swan Street are approached by a bashful cop who admits to being a haiku poet himself, and they encourage him to submit his work to prestigious literary journal Meanjin. This is such an absurd image, I envy the mind(s) that conceived it.
‘Like-Minded’ is a prose poem, a form that can, in less accomplished hands, risk obscuring its content. But this is a poem less concerned with pausing to ponder the sun and the stars (although the moon does make a cameo). Instead its seamless rhythm is used to carry you through the poem’s subtle humour and delightfully odd images. Like all good poems, it surprises you.
Maybe, if we are lucky, there will be more to come from this perfectly-paired set of minds!
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