This week, guest reviewer Ben Sando gives his impressions on the combined works of Peter Bakowski and Ken Bolton, including their most recent poetry collections Waldo’s Game and On Luck Street.
Ben Sando is an exhibiting artist based in Adelaide – mostly painting, mostly abstract – but has also worked with manipulated photographic images and made performance and installation work. His critical writing has appeared in various magazines, most notably a review of the Adelaide Biennial in Art Monthly and a major article on the photography of Ian North.
Ben Sando reports on Peter Bakowski and Ken Bolton’s linked sequence of four books – The Elsewhere Variations, Nearly Lunch, Waldo’s Game and On Luck Street.
I’ve been reading the four Bakowski-and-Bolton books. Those guys have been on fire! I especially like the poems with crazy conceits. When I look to identify which ones, I find they’re just about all conceits of one kind or another, many with very funny stuff in them, (‘Dairy Of A Country Priest’ and ‘Babette’s Fist’ are just two of the great groaners sprinkled throughout). I liked so many – birthing babies aboard an all-female-crewed fishing trawler; Thursday, the time-travelling electrician; the coffee-shop patron who turns out to be an alien; and the many stories of bottom-feeders, has-beens, losers, faithless lovers, dropouts and failures – tenderly dealt with. I liked the idea about mourning the slow – (or fast) – loss of not just a generational language but an individual’s personal language – in the poem ‘Dead Man’. But should we mourn? Isn’t it normal and ok? The following poem, ‘Entente Cordial’, loosely answers that.
The ‘tools’ used in the generation of poems – the fictional characters, the narratives, jump-cuts back and forth in history and all over the world, etc. – do great work. It is skilful the way the writers’ personal thoughts, memories, observations, etc., are woven through these fictions. In observational or personal historical poetry, the reader can end up trying to find the singularity of an image or description from the poet’s point of view, but when it’s a fiction, the reader is freed and encouraged to imagine – to make it up for themselves.
The use of clichéd or stock-type characters from TV shows and films gives those poems where such are used a kind of nostalgia – not a gluey nostalgia, but a looking back with a kind of amazement that such stuff, which seemed hilarious when first encountered, is still there, fantastic and undiminished.
What these two writers are doing is unique and intriguing. The books are structured around ‘6-Packs’ of poems where three are authored by Ken and three by Peter, in the pattern of K-PP-KK-P, followed by P-KK-PP-K in the next sixpack, or vice versa. Critically, the author of each poem is never identified. It is very successful. Both writers adeptly manage the ‘call and response’ nature of the set-up by responding either tangentially or not obviously at all. The opportunity given by the doubles (KK or PP) means complete changes of tack are possible. With the poems being unsigned, in the ‘sixpack’ structure, and the use of other generative tools, there is a double-de-authoring which, like a good double-de-clutch, has got the motor humming. There are special advantages that derive from this practice. For one, both authors get a known reader – who is not just any reader, but a fellow poet – and there are us punters to be considered as well. In effect, the poems are addressed to two readers – the other author, and ‘the Reader’. My guess is it provides focus to have that specific audience in mind.
And there is a sense that each poet tries to delight the other with their next installment, and by doing so, to delight us.
I also think that the considerable amount of material accumulated over the four books has given the caper seriousness – I mean, it’s substantial. It’s not that I’m surprised they’ve done something substantial, it’s that the poems themselves tend not to countenance being taken ‘seriously’. Well, they should be – they’re terrific.
Support Wakefield Press by buying our beautiful books! Visit our website or contact us on 08 8352 4455 for more information, or to purchase a book (or three!). We can post your purchase to your doorstep!
To keep up to date with our new releases, events and juicy office gossip, subscribe to the Wakefield Weekly here.