John Forbes, by vocation a poet



If someone had set off a bomb at 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon upstairs at Gleebooks, Australia would have instantly become a much more prosaic place to live. Gleebooks was absolutely crawling with poets, all asking each other if they were going to read. Not all of them were: some were there to be part of the event, a gathering and reading to mark the tenth anniversary of John Forbes's death.

It was a little like a live re-enactment of the book, Homage to John Forbes (Brandl & Schlesinger 2002). I can't lay hands on my copy, but I'm fairly sure that Gig Ryan's memoir, 'Petersham Days', which she read to us, was in the book, perhaps even written for it. A number of the poems that were read may have been in it too. But that's beside the point. It was a gathering of an extended family (I'm avoiding the word 'tribe') to remember one of their number who had died too soon. Poems were read by Nigel Roberts ('Dialogue with John Forbes', which probably reports on a real conversation -- you need to scroll down at the link), John Tranter, Pam Brown, Ray Desmond-Jones (once mayor of Marrickville, who as his first official act put a heritage listing on the house at the address from which the fictional Ern Malley's equally fictional sister Ethel wrote the fateful letter to Max Harris enclosing the poems that became The Darkening Ecliptic), Gig Ryan, Jaya Savige, Robert Adamson and Alan Wearne. Morgan Smith, Gleebooks' events organiser, read poems sent in by Andrew Burke and Adam Aitken who were a very long way away. Jaya Savige was the only one of the readers who hadn't been a friend of Forbes -- who hadn't actually heard of him until after his death -- and he read a charming, funny and touching essay about Forbes's presence for younger poets like him: he and another young poet once disturbed their neighbours' sleep by shouting Ode to Karl Marx into the night in Rome (Savige also posted on YouTube a video of himself reading that poem).

But the show was stolen by John Forbes's father, who could have had a career as a stand-up comic. Not that his contribution was frivolous: he spoke with regret of his failure to appreciate that John's poetry was more than an unprofitable hobby, and of his wish to atone by making sure the Collected Poems (also Brandl & Schlesinger 2002) was published. But he was very funny about his own quest to find out how John saw him -- from the four incidental mentions in the poetry and one or two in interviews. And then he told us about the words on John's gravestone: 'By vocation a poet', and then a biblical quote, possibly 'Do not forsake the work of your hands'.

David Malouf and some other Big Names were there. The woman who sat next to me laughed when one of the speakers said that Roger and David, owners of Gleebooks, had supported John in all sorts of ways. Afterwards she explained her laughter to me: someone had told her earlier that when he was short of cash, John used to shoplift books from Gleebooks and sell them to a secondhand shop down the road. Roger and David's support of poets and poetry was evidently greater than they knew.

Posted: Sun - February 3, 2008 at 07:42 PM           |

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