Adrian Mitchell



It's a week since the Sydney Morning Herald ran an obituary for Adrian Mitchell. I don't feel too bad about my tardiness in posting something, given that he had actually died, of a heart attack, on 20 December last year, a full month before the Herald noticed, a fact I only found out now since the Herald discreetly avoided mentioning an actual date.

Mitchell, of course, was a poet. Ezra Pound claimed that poets write the news that stays news, but all the indications are that the news that sells papers and wraps chips doesn't care much for poets. In my small way, I want to acknowledge that Adrian Mitchell mattered to me. I actually met him once, though 'met' is probably too strong a word. He came to the Sydney Writers Festival in 2004. I didn't get to any of his gigs, but I loved his work and wanted to meet him, so I went to the signing table where I knew he's be after a panel appearance. I was told he'd be on the top floor of the Sydney Theatre foyer, and sure enough, when I reached the top of the stairs, there he was, sitting at a small table, with a couple of books in front of him, a pen in hand, and not a soul in sight -- not even a publicist. I'd like to tell you that I strode forward, joyfully seizing the opportunity, introduced myself, quoted a line or two from his work and said how much it meant to me ('Celia Celia' perhaps, which manages to be sexy, serious and funny, to mock Jonathan Swift and pay homage to Mitchell's actual wife, all in four lines). We might have chatted. I might have told him that as an editor of a children's literary magazine published by the state department of education I was personally delighted by the condition he placed on any reproduction of his work: he expressly forbade any of it to be used in 'connection with any examination whatsoever' and required that this condition be printed alongside the poem. Instead, I blew it completely. Overcome with shyness, I mumbled something like, 'I didn't come to your talk just now because there was something more interesting on, but I love your work.' Unsurprisingly, he scowled at me, though maybe he just turned in my direction the face of a writer who was signing books for nobody, and who has just been gratuitously insulted by a complete stranger to boot. I don't think he said anything. I think I turned and ran. I haven't mentioned the incident since, and hope he didn't.

In my time at The School Magazine, we published three poems by Adrian Mitchell: 'To My Dog' (twice), 'A Spell to Make a Bad Hour Pass' and 'Two Dances', each of them superb. I'm particularly fond of the second, known as 'the hand poem'. It must be due for reprinting this year: I can't find it on the web anywhere, but it was in School Magazine: Orbit number 7 2003, and if you can get hold of a copy of Heart on the Left: Poems 1953–1984, you'll find it on page 203. And don't just look at page 203 and put the book down. Browse. Make the man's acquaintance. Read 'To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies About Vietnam)', which he read at protests against the invasion of Iraq. His poetry will be bitingly to the point for a long time yet.

I didn't realise until I read the obituary in the Herald that my first encounter with Mitchell's work happened long before I'd heard of him. In 1969 or thereabouts, I was a member of a religious order, living in a college in Dundas, in Sydney's western suburbs. One night, I crept out before dinner and made my solitary and unsanctified way by public transport to the Rose Bay Wintergarden, a movie theatre I had never been to on the other side of the city, to see Peter Brook's Marat/Sade. I don't remember why I went to it, or why I went alone. I must have assumed that my religious superiors would not have approved. It has to have been one of the most profound evenings I've ever spent in the movies: I still have to stop myself occasionally from doing a Glenda Jackson impersonation ("What kind of town. Is. This?') and the songs come back unbidden, though I don't think I've ever heard any of them performed since that night. Adrian Mitchell wrote the screenplay.

Posted: Wed - January 28, 2009 at 04:30 PM           |

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