I was sifting through some old poetry e‑mails trying to find some details about an upcoming festival when I spotted something I’d missed.
Bruce Beaver apparently died on February 17 (see John Tranter’s SMH obituary here). He was a great poet and a lovely man. He was a friend of the father of one of my friends and colleagues, Matthew Powell. I wrote him a poem when I was about 17 in response to one of his poems, from his collection, Letters to Live Poets.
When I met him at Matthew’s wedding, I spoke to him about it and he asked me to send it to him. I did and he sent me a beautiful letter in reply with a copy of another of his collections. So I sent him my chapbook, Amaranth, and got another lovely letter:
“I’m so grateful for the copy of Amaranth. It looks so good and is so good – it lives up to its name: a flower that never fades.” He then spent three pages going through my poems… he says wonderful things, like “as you may have guessed, i’ve been a feminist all my life” and “Pardon my double talk – they are very subtle poems poised on the point of meaning and a sense of a hunger for fulfilment.” He mentions every single poem. What an incredibly generous man. And he asked me to keep on writing to him and to my shame, I don’t think I wrote back after that. It was October 2002. I think I was somewhat overwhelmed and didn’t know what to say. And then everything happened: I lost my job at Fairfax and my cat Loki died and in the whirlwind I forgot all about it. And now it’s too late. Goodbye Bruce. You were an inspiration and one of Australia’s greatest poets.
17.10.1988 – Letter/Poem (for Bruce Beaver)
Killing the two proverbial birds
with the one proverbial stone
makes sense even for a pacifist like me.
Having found time for neither an audience
nor my regular readers of that
particular prose, letter-writing,
i combined them both. The idea
is not mine. it comes from a live poet
out there somewhere contemplating
sharks and other marine life.
He has achieved a combination
of simplicity and admirable ethics,
and what’s more believes them (although
even that is less surprising than the fact
that he can somehow express them
without their losing any meaning.)
If this ever actually reaches you,
(and by this I mean in the traditional sense,
encased in an envelope, sealed with a 39 cent
square bit of sticky paper with scalloped
edges) that will be a sign to me
that it’s time to start believing…
though in what I’m not sure. The postal system
would certainly make a strange deity.
More or less important is the content of
expression, although the methods and the wherefores
have often halted me at their checkpoints
and refused to let me pass without interrogating me.
I’d like to tell you honestly that I’m barely coping,
but my automatic pilot usually smiles wanly
and telephones the message through: yes, sure,
I’m doing fine. Mmm, he’s fine too.* We’re both
very happy – which is only admitting to one half
of existence, the other an endless nightmare
of half-acknowledged HSC tensions,
a man on the edge of my consciousness who
is more than half a stranger, although
I’ve been comforted by being told
that most of it’s due to the drugs and
that if I can stick it out, it will be
most rewarding, and that it can only be
for a year, max. Told regularly
how strong I am, how brave, by the one person
I have so far admitted all this to.
And by my subconscious, told that I’m a fool
if I think I can answer the eternal questions,
achieve brilliance in an external exam
and become a full-time emotional leaning post
without cracking up myself, and all in one week.
It’s somewhat like *being* a get-well card.
And sometimes I wish I could have chosen
3‑unit self-expression, which i could have
failed frustratingly, and 1‑unit suicide
which might have got me the marks I need.
Sorry? yes, yes, we’re both doing fine.
* For those of you who don’t know me too well, I should probably explain some background info here. I moved out of home mid-way through my final year of high school (higher school certificate or HSC in New South Wales) to take care of my schizophrenic boyfriend. The drugs referred to here were anti-psychotics he was on. The references to “3‑unit” and so on are references to the degree of difficulty of a class. 2‑unit English was regular strength English, 3‑unit was higher-level English. Amazingly, I actually did better in the final exam than in the trial exam when i was still living at home. Go figure.
The references to marine life is because Beaver lived in Manly and wrote a fair bit about the sea.
In completely irrelevant news, I noticed tonight that one of the writers on CSI is Naren Shankar, one of my favourite ST: TNG and ST: DS9 writers. I know, I know, I’m a geek. But I thought agwat and hawk_eye might appreciate that.