I’ve been going to post this for a while, but as I’m currently sitting at the table at my mum’s place on the edge of Bass Strait, it feels like the appropriate time.
All three of the poems I completed last year (and probably a similar number this year, dammit) were PoMFa poems (the Portrait of My Father as … sequence, but you remembered that, right?). Not sure how long the sequence will end up being – I currently have three complete, one almost done and a couple more in various stages of draft. I suspect it will end up being about eight or nine of them, but time will tell.
And while I promise not to bang on about every PoMFa poem I write (although, given the Cageian Organ2/ASLSP pace of my production, you wouldn’t exactly be being spammed about them) I do want to tell you about the third one.
I had been working on something else (a different PoMFa piece), but had gotten stuck and felt the need for a diversion. So, having recently taught my class on Shakespeare and the English Sonnet, I decided to use one of them as a trigger.
I went with Sonnet 80, “O how I faint when I of you do write”– one of the Rival Poet set, and not one of his best – warped it through a heap of translations, ran it backwards, and went looking up the etymology of the word decay. As you do. And then something unexpected clicked. A memory of an offhanded remark.
Apparently my Dad had been going to take part in the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race a couple of years before I was born. It was going to be with a friend from work, but things didn’t work out, and I didn‘t even hear anything about it until not long before he died. We never had boats or anything like that when I was a kid, so this was a part of Dad I didn’t know. I had it mentally filed under “Huh!”
The third element of serendipity that lined everything up was a Norwegian artist I’m becoming a bit obsessed with – Ane Brun. Kat brought her to my attention when we were doing the Shakespeare class – Ane had recorded a version of Sonnet 138, and I played it for the class. And then went on a bit of a dive into her other work.
I’d come across a performance Ane had recorded (with Linnea Olsson, Jennie Abrahamson and Josefine Runsteen) of a Sting song that I (mildly) liked, at the Polar Music Prize back in 2017. Why Should I Cry For You isn’t a song I’d especially gravitated to in the past. But in that moment, listening to Ane’s version, for the first time I really heard the lyrics. Something in the way Ane had arranged it just grabbed me. Grabbed me, smacked me about the face a couple of times, and sent me back to my writing chair.
So I wrote.
And cried. Floods of tears again, but it gave me the way into the poem. This one sets Dad as a racing yacht, and imagines him sailing off into the sunset. (Less corny than it sounds.) (I hope …) Lots and lots of rabbit holes, researching all manner of things to do with boats and sailing and races and currents and history. Virtually none of the research made it into the words of the final poem, but it’s all there in the background. I dug in to the song too – it had been written in the aftermath of Sting’s father‘s death, when he was trying to make sense of their relationship. (There are times when the universe gets very broad in its hints …)
I’ve included the performance below, for your listening pleasure. It’s such a beautiful version of the song, and as much as I usually love Sting and his performances, those three women’s voices do that song justice in a way that opened it for me for the first time.
Just hope I’ve done as good a job with my poem.
A Dark Feathered Art 