Happy Birthdays New York Greats

John Ashbery turned 80 recently and so did Kenward Elmslie. To view photos of Kenward and friends celebrating his birthday at The Poetry Project in NYNY click here.

Kenward Elmslie & me & Pete Minter in Sydney October 2005





My 2003 poem for Kenward :

Rainy Day in May
              ‘if only you’d settle down somewhere streamlined’
                                            KENWARD ELMSLIE,Winter Life

ah      chlorophyll afternoon
    green-deepening my day
now I function     do my physio
            
I know       I’m at
       the bottom of the world
but when we say
        ‘local word goes here’
we know what we mean

thousands of kilometres
    from the adirondacks,
schenectady
                orono
where almost-billionaires
      are taking the waters,
         warming the poptarts,
getting a little haptic
    with the  foil-wrapped
cell-shaped chocolates

am I missing anything,
                      down here 
 in murwillumbah
thousands of kilometres
     from granite-ville ?

         *

sorry you were 
 a bit late
    for the fennel snags,   
     and
the sweet purple cabbage,
     too late
   for the salty feta
( we’d already eaten 
                the feta,
      all the feta)
 
& the rain fell down,
  too wet, too sombre & grey, 
                       all afternoon
but      mellifluous tenor,
                 you sang and read,
 a  Babe Rainbow    
      brightening the place up,
                              just  like  (we imagine) at
                                         Touché’s Salon -
  all those  synaesthetic pleasures  
    on,
              as it turned out to be,
    your saddest anniversary


good news was          the G-G quit
          during your show
(god save the queen
   because      nothing     will save 
                     the governor-general)
  thus ending      weeks & weeks 
      of everything interesting
down here in the wilds
   far from 
                  where-ever

note - ‘your saddest anniversary’ - Kenward Elmslie first performed in Sydney in 2003 on May 25th , the anniversary of his partner Joe Brainard’s death.
In the line, ‘good news was the G-G quit’, the ‘G-G’ is the Governor General of Australia,(appointed on approval of the English monarch) who was at the time an Anglican Bishop embroiled in a scandal about the treatment of sexual abuse victims in his church. He resigned on the weekend of Kenward’s visit.

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