#3 Writers and exile with Joan Nestle

Joan Nestle talks about exile and authors and poets who write in exile: "The vital absence, dreams of exile."

She talks about the life and work of Osip Mandelstam, a Russian Jewish poet who was exiled to Siberia, and Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestian writer and poet who died in August 2008. Joan also discusses Sally Morgan, Australian Aboriginal artist and author of My Place, and Dorothy Hewett, Australian poet, novelist, librettist and playwright, and the writer who made Joan 'feel at home' in Australia.

Joan Nestle is a 68-year-old Jewish, lesbian, feminist writer and activist originally from the Bronx, United States. She is the author of two books, A Restricted Country and A Fragile Union: New and Collected Writings, and many essays and is the editor of eight queer fiction and non-fiction books.

The talk is 30 minutes long. It was recorded at Coburg Library on 19 November 2008.

Warning: this talk acknowledges the existance of sex and contains a swear word.

Listen to or download Joan Nestle's talk

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Moreland Library Talks Episode 3: Writers and exile with Joan Nestle  

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Transcript

Joan: I'll thank everyone, but I had promised Christina since this is my neighbourhood library, a most precious place, that I would give this library as many copies of my work as I could find, some of which I bought for $2 a piece on amazon.com, always a humbling experience.

And so officially the Brunswick Library has the largest collection of Nestleana any place in Australia and along with this, which I'll give later, is … because this is part of my talk and what I'm talking about tonight may be a little different than what you expected. But I went … Di and I went to Israel or the first time a year and a half ago with the women's peace movement and the women there undertook translating my selection of works, things like My Mother Liked To F**k, into Hebrew and I wrote a new introduction. So this is my words in Hebrew and what I … so I'm going to present this to the library which will probably be your first book in Hebrew …

Christine Hornby, Brunswick Library staff member: Right.

Joan: … from the women's peace perspective. Thank you, Christine.

Christine: Thank you, Joan. I might just say that I find Joan one of the most generous people that I have ever met. I know that you donated books to us last time you were here Joan.

Joan: Yes.

Christine: But it's not only the books. It's also the time and energy that she puts into doing these talks and this is her second one at the Library and we do thank you very much. We appreciate it very much and thank you.

Joan: Thank you so much. And I, of course, have over-prepared. This is what 30 years of teaching does. But more it's what … the writers I've found that I want to share with you tonight. But some things to begin with, I'm talking about exile and writers who write in exile. I'll be talking mostly about Osip Mandelstam, a Russian Jewish poet, who was exiled to Siberia and Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian writer, who died in August and with a little bit of Dorothy Hewett which every bad girl should know.

How I was made to feel at home in Australia was Dorothy Hewett who I got to meet and who I wrote the whole retrospective about her work for the Women's Review of Books in America so I could carry her work over. But I want to say too in my own words that I want to give my respect and acknowledgment to the Wurundjeri people on whose land I stand and to all the indigenous peoples who in one way or the other in almost every part of this world are in exile to one extent or the other.

So I want to thank you for coming. I know some of you have worked all day and I know it's supposed to rain tonight. I was going to put this up but they said not to. But you know when I spoke … when I spoke two years ago you had Howard and we had Bush and friends, you have Rudd and we have Obama so … and the other person … you know I always carry voices with me. When you live within archives you live with voices. I want … since I'm talking about exile and what it does to the human spirit is bring in the image of Mary Makeba who of course I knew for my whole life it seems, and she who lived her whole life in exile singing the music of the land she loved with dreams of equality, with dreams of a new world, as these poets did. So, my friends are you ready?

Just look at me. I'm a queer woman, a fine femme woman, and this is what I'm choosing to present to you tonight in the hopes I thought that perhaps their work wasn't so familiar and I wanted us all to know all their work.

Okay. I've called my journey tonight "The vital absence, dreams of exile," written on 22 June 2007.

This is when Di and I we've made our first trip to Israel. Our friends in Haifa made us see with their eyes and so we saw through the landscapes to deeper histories. When we first travelled the roads between Tel Aviv and Haifa our eyes fell of the scrub hills but Hanna asked us to look again. "See those prickly pear cactuses?" And she slowed the car down so we could focus our gaze. Every time you see a cluster of them you are looking at the ruins of a Palestinian home. The farmers use the plant to form natural corrals for their grazing animals and also ate the fruit borne at the tip of the rounded leaf. We started to look deeper, longer, and soon we could see the tracings of another people. Not a long gone people, but a recently displaced people. Stone foundations started to appear buried in the uninteresting scrub. May you all have friends who make you look again, but when you see there is no return to blankness, to cruel triumphalisms, and that was what I wrote on my blog. And I'm sorry that I will be reading but you know you're right in my eyes.

And a journey this has been both in my own life so I would be standing here in the Brunswick Library on this rainy night, I hope, and with writers I have lived with for the last two months as I thought and planned and read. I have settled on two authors perhaps well known to some of you but who are new to me and whose work I could only seek out after I'd seen the bones of exile in the sands of Palestine, Israel.

Osip Mandelstam, the Jewish Russian poet who died in a Siberian transit camp in 1938 and Mahmoud Darwish, the beloved Palestinian poet who died in August of this year.

I want to say that my talk, my sharing of their words, their dreams of joy, their mockings of anguish and demands of memory, will not be a textual analysis, but a revealing of what one queer working class woman well along in her life's journey far from her beginning home in the Bronx, part of the Jewish Diaspora, found in their books. How their words seemed to call to each other above the walls of historical separations. How the poet, the writer, peoples the emptiness of exile, with the fullness of desire, with the shaping of language to stand for worlds. I found supreme moments of human dignity on their pages and that possibility of what Pablo Neruda has called our infinite tenderness.

And perhaps that is why I am also so moved to speak in this room. This place of offered human dreams. Find us, the writers say. I may weep during this. And in your hands our lives, our human visions of greener times, will live again. No matter if you be not a Russian Jew or Muslim Palestinian when walls crumble - the poet in all of us can walk more freely. In their extreme states, the poets make home out of sky and smoke. When I threw my mind open to images of home, that's what I was asked to talk about, then it became exile which seemed to me more … it seems to me you know … it seemed to me necessary to do images of home. In the books I'd previously read, I first remembered loss. The overwhelming sense of loss I had felt as a reader many years ago when I first read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

Can anyone else remember that book which was hard to read when you're … 'cause it was her new style and there you are with the Ramseys and all of a sudden.

So I had never lived in a house then, only an apartment building on floors far above New York streets where after all these years what leaped out at me was the memory of the loss I had felt after living within the minds of the Ramseys and the rooms of their rambling life filled house for all those pages. All their yearnings including a remembered lesbian kiss and everyday family clutter in an instant snatched away by the writer.

Quoting Virginia Woolf, "So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpour of immense darkness began" ... end of her quote. Yet it was an artist, a writer, who gave us the vital life of this place she chose to empty and by doing so lit it up with the special nature of our human way. The small moment of the glowingly real. Lily, remember Lily the artist, muses "One wondered she thought dipping her brush deliberately to be on level with ordinary experiences. To feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same it's a miracle. It's an ecstasy".

"To the hugeness of our imaginations" she says … this is Virginia Woolf who you know is going to take her life in a body of water. "Was there no safety, no learning by heart the ways of the world. No guide, no shelter, but always miracle and leaping from the pinnacle … and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air". And she continues giving joy to my sixty-year old heart. Could it be even for the elderly people that this was life, startling, unexpected, unknown? And those of us who are sixty and beyond know perhaps in different ways it is. This part might not be clear but why I wanted it here was what happens when you read poets in exile is that a huge life springs into the absence and that to me made me see all the hope of the world in these writers who have been nationally punished for their use of words and bringing the daily-ness, the glow of daily life, of keeping it alive. I'm rushing because I want us to be able to talk...

I want to leave this ecstatic world of the imagination for a moment to speak of history. In his book Reflections On Exile, Edward Said, the Palestinian thinker, asserted the 20th century with its scale of wars has launched an age of unprecedented mass displacements. "Exile," he continues, "is an unbearable rift forced between a human being and a native place". Another writer writes, "Emigration forced or chosen is the quintessential experience of our times". "Home," writes Salman Rushdie, "has become such a scattered damaged various concept in our present travails. There is much to yearn for". And it was that word yearn … these two words, yearning and banishment, and the tension between them stay on my tongue in the poet's air.

Now if you remember when we talked about difference I threw out a slew of questions and I did the same thing about home. Home, questions of origins and destinations, of lost languages and new translations. Curfews, barriers, borders, walls, permissions granted and denied. Fady Joudah, a Palestinian poet, writes, "Our age is a checkpoint". Questions, is home the place where we think we know the answer to things? To whom do our homes belong and from whom were they taken and to whom will they be given? What is the relationship of home to patriotism, to the state, to money? What is the relationship of home to our sense of the future, our knowledge of the past? What is the relationship of home to the body? Walter Benjamin, the thinker in exile who took his life in 1931 on the eve of the rise of Nazi power wrote, "We leave home to learn fear".

Now in the next section of my talk I was going to go into how I learned about this, my new home, but I won't because we won't have time, so I did it up as a bibliography. But there … as I said there are four writers I must call into being. Now one is Dorothy Hewett and if you have not read her autobiography Wild Card you will find a woman here who dared as she said to walk naked through her life in this country.

Read Chapel Perilous which is a play about a character she created who's really a version of herself, Sally Banner. This young rebel in the 70s who is called the university bicycle. Do you know what that means … in the 60s, yes. Here is what she looked at as a … I have so much to say and I could do a whole thing, but a rebellious struggler for economic rights. She was a member of the Communist Party of which she was thrown out because she takes a position against Stalin just the way Osip Mandelstam does.

There is one part when she's writing about the last part of this which is like a quest of the character she's being thrown out of everything. She was someone who exiled herself from all orthodoxies and I got to see this woman in the later years of her life in a wheelchair, her body swollen, at the Melbourne Writers Festival, and that … as she called that armour of white … cascade of white hair and those eyes that just look out at you. Here this is a younger version. This is when they're attacking her. "You're expelled from the Communist Party because you flouted the constitution, refusing to recognise leadership" and then he says "Furthermore I denounce Sally Banner". So think of Dorothy Hewitt. "Minstrel of the grubby bedroom, lover of the seamy side of life. Pseudo revolutionary, ideological leader of intellectual delinquents. Decadent, bourgeois, revisionist, factionalist." And quietly Sally said "I make my own pattern. I believe in the brotherhood of man. I am the citizen of the world". And then she said "How am I charged?" She's found guilty.

And later in her life, at the end of her life, she created … she wrote this book, The Toucher, which is about a woman, a sixty-plus woman, almost seventy, in a wheelchair who falls in love with a young relative, a young boy who is probably around twenty. Dorothy Hewett never, as you know, hid from sexual descriptions of sexual vitality. It's the first book I've ever read written by a woman where the woman character who's confined to a wheelchair has this masturbatory moment where she masturbates in her wheelchair and falls to the floor drumming her heels in ecstasy. Keep Dorothy Hewitt alive. She made me feel at home, bad girl that I was.

The other writer that … now you must have read her a long time ago but I hadn't, it was Sally Morgan and her book My Place… I will pull all these things together but I'm hoping you'll see who certainly writes about exile and along with Ruby Langford's Don't Take Your Love To Town.

Sally Morgan transforms through the writer's will historical banishment into "Welcome to Country". How do I know I'm learning something here of your history? Never before has the absence of an article "the" taught me so much. The difference between "Welcome to Country" and "Welcome to the country". It's just a second but there's people's thousands of years of life. When Morgan's grandmother relents to trust the white world enough to tell her story and begins it "My name is Daisy Corunna. I'm Arthur's sister. My Aboriginal name is Talahui". Lifetime spent in interior exile and with the birthright of a public language.

How do we as a people banish other people from breathing free air? We create places like Parkerville and Corunna Down Station. Places like Dachau and Siberia. Like Gaza and the West Bank where disheritants reign supreme. As I've said I've been reading for two months for this talk. I was stunned by correspondences like Sally Morgan's book and the Grenville book about looking for the secret of the hidden river and how she has to go back to England to find her roots. But two amazing opening paragraphs that show the beginnings of your histories and really they should be read at the same time. So one of the world-shaping, I don't want to say best" books, it sounds too trivial, but is Alexis Wright's Carpentaria.

And this is her opening paragraph:

"The ancestral serpent a creature larger than storm clouds came down from the stars laden with its own creative enormity. It moved graciously. If you have been watching with the eyes of a bird hovering in the sky far above the ground looking down at the serpent's wet body glistening from the ancient sunlight long before man was a creature who could contemplate the next moment in time. It came down those billions of years ago to crawl on its heavy belly all around the wet clay soils in the Gulf of Carpentaria".

Remember I came here I was 62 years old. I'd never heard of the Gulf of Carpentaria and now I will never forget it. It's a rhythm in my body. And then Patrick White's The Tree of Man. The other history.

"A car drove between the two big stringy barks and stopped. These were the dominant trees in that part of the bush rising above the involved scrub with the simplicity of true grandeur. So the cart stopped, grazing the hairy side of the tree, and the horse shaggy and solid as the tree sighed and took root".

These are two origins, tales of origins, and the rest is the history we're living.

When I was reading Dorothy Hewitt's collective poetry I'd already found Osip Mandelstam and I just went … how many of you have heard or read Osip Mandelstam? How wonderful. This means so much to me. So much to me. And how many of you have read Mahmoud Darwish? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Because I hadn't either and I took them into me so I could give them to you and I am so … we'll see what you think. The other thing before I go on … my nose is running ahead of me always. How many of you would say you're part of the Diaspora, of any diaspora? Just raise your hands. You don't have to. But think as I … how many of you live in different places of exile? Just think. Because that's what this is all about. How many of you have questioned home? Is it a place of safety or a place to flee from?

Now here we go. Osip Mandelstam there's only one book of his and this is it. The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks,let me tell you a little bit about him. But the amazing thing is I'm reading Dorothy Hewett and there in her collective poems in the 1970s she translates … she writes in the voice of Osip Mandelstam and she translates some of his work. So here she was. I can't … how this happened one night late in my study I had these books you know who gave life to me and here they are giving life to each other. That is why I honour writers so. They carry us on those words, those little words on these … on these thin pages. Do what all the armies and all the power and all the punishments of governments do not want to happen. They find our hearts and they find each other's hearts and I firmly believe that Mandelstam and Darwish as poets would rise above all the walls and barriers and talk about how they made life out of the smoke of words.

Okay, his dates 1891 to 1938. He's born in a Jewish family in Warsaw but grows up in Saint Petersburg, Osip Mandelstam. Travels in the Crimea, Armenia, Georgia, Moscow, writing poetry. Then Moscow, which he hated. He travels to Paris. Lives in Paris, Switzerland, Italy, Finland. His first published book of poems Stone in 1913. The Moscow Notebooks and here … by the way, these were all taken down by his wife because he's already in exile. He speaks his poems as he walks the freezing rooms. She's able to go and come. He cannot. So his wife is the one who was his archives.

The Moscow Notebooks cover his years of persecution from 1930 to 1938 when he's arrested for writing a poem critical of Stalin. And this was the line that cost his life, "His cockroach moustache laughs perching on his top lip" and for that this man is sent into exile for the rest of his life. Subjected to gruelling interrogations and torture he tries twice to end his life. Exiled to Voronezh with his wife Nadezhda Mandelstam, the lifelong protector of his poems who writes down his poems in purple ink, all they had, and for the more dangerous poems a homemade code.

A friend who visited him in these years described him in a state of numbness. His eyelids were permanently inflamed and his arm was in a sling. He held on for four more years writing 90 poems in those cold rooms. In 1938 he's rearrested and sentenced to five years hard labour for counterrevolutionary activities, dying that winter in 1938 in a transit camp outside of Siberia. He said once, "Only in Russia is poetry respected. It gets people killed".

And now my friends, the voice of Osip Mandelstam. God knows what they would think of me inhabiting their world. I can only hope that the humanity would extend all the way round. Now these are fragments of poems that he wrote. So from I've Many Years To Live 1931 and of course he didn't but … "And how much I want to be carried away by play, to have a conversation, to speak the truth, to blow my desperation to the mist, the devil and to hell. To take someone by the hand and say to him 'be kind we're on the same road'". That was written 19 October 1931.

Birth of a Smile 9 December 1936 and remember he's writing these in extreme physical discomfort, "When a child starts to smile with a split of bitterness and sweetness honestly the ends of his smile go off into the anarchy of the ocean."

9 December 1936: "I'll wonder at the world a little longer still, at the children and the snow, but a smile is like the road it can't be faked and is disobedient not a slave".

October 1930: "This life is terrifying for the two of us my comrade with a generous mouth. Our black market tobacco is crumbling and you sit cracking nuts my simple little friend. One could whistle through life like a starling or eat like you're a nut cake, but both of us know it's impossible."

Anyway, he's talking to a squirrel. He, like Darwish, in the midst of all the emptiness and as Lily, Virginia Woolf's character, found the glowing truth of life in these small moments. Not so small. The friendship of an animal or … fragments from a destroyed poem. You see how I'm ranging far and wide. I love this. I hope you will love it.

"In Moscow there's the laurel tree and the telephones and the days are distinguished by executions." This is the height of the Stalin terror. And then one of his more famous fragments that Dorothy Hewett uses, "You took away all the oceans and all the room. You gave me my shoe size in earth with bars around it. Where did it get you? Nowhere. You left me my lips and they shape words even in silence".

From Armenia October 1930, this is his poem about Armenia:"I shall never see you again short sighted Armenian sky. I shall never again squint and look at this nomad's tent of Ararat. I shall never open again in this beautiful land of clay authors, this beautiful land of … this beautiful land's hollow book that taught the first people".

Another fragment May 1936, "I want the thinking body to turn it into a street, a country".

19th January 1937, "The people need a poem that is both mysterious and familiar so that from it they should wake up for eternity and bathe themselves in the flaxen curl chestnut wave of its sound".

1937, "He tells of human heads go off into the distance. I grow smaller there. They won't notice me any more but in much loved books and children's games I shall rise to say the sun is shining".

1936, "My goldfinch. I'll cock my head together we'll look at the world".

1937, "I return and wait for some service or news from my servant the air. I will get ready for a journey and sail along the arcs of travels that never began. I am prepared to wander where there is more sky for me".

That was the only thing he had. He had no more access to ocean so it was … and so does Darwish talk about his country and the sky.

And here is the final poem that I'll read. So this is just Osip Mandelstam speaking to you in fragments about exile and about the artist, the writers, the reader's ability to conquer it.

But here is a poem he writes that could just as much be for Mahmoud Darwish:

"Having deprived me of seas, of running and flying away, and allowing me only to walk upon the violent earth what have you achieved? A splendid result. You could not stop my lips from moving".

And as long as we read his books … that's why we're all in this together. We're in the terrible things together and we're in the glorious of not allowing the worse tyranny over the human spirit to win.

And now my friends we'll turn to … and I always keep checking because Mahmoud Darwish … these are new names to me and I want to thank Sonia from Women for Palestine who brought his work to my attention. He died in August of this year and just to let you know a little about him. Darwish himself experienced an array of displacements as a friend of his Najat Rhaman has written. Now just listen to his life.

Fleeing to Lebanon from his family home village in the upper Galilee and Palestine before the advance of the Israeli Army in 1948, the subsequent internal displacement when his family infiltrated, meaning snuck back, to his home months later to find his village no longer existing under the newly declared state of Israel. The many imprisonments and house arrests that followed throughout his youth. The self-imposed exile in 1970 to Egypt and later to Beirut. Expulsion from Beirut in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion in 1982. The return to Ramallah with the onset of the second Intifada he has been both locked in and locked out except in his language, in his art, in his books. As he wrote in 1994, "It is the absence of countries that I shape into words".

Now both Mandelstam and Darwish, of course, we're reading in translation and that's a whole other part. You know, I don't want you to get tired but just listen to a new voice for so many.

From his poem The Owl's Night, "Here is a present that yesterday does not touch. When we reach the last of the trees we notice that we were no longer able to notice. When we looked at the trucks we saw absence heaping up its selected things and pitching its eternal tent around us".

And then a longer poem. This is from, Why Did You Leave The Horses? I want to show you his books which are not easy to get. In fact I'm probably on some list because I order these books over the Internet. But just their titles. For instance, this is his diary of his time in Beirut, Memory for Forgetfulness. A collection of poetry, Unfortunately It Was Paradise, Victims of a Map." And this is what he looked like. Some consider him the greatest poet writing in Arabic of our time and in Israel there are Israelis who would like his poetry taught in schools but that's enough to bring a government down. Okay.

This is To My End And To Its End and it's a conversation between a father and a son:

"Are you tired of walking my son? Are you getting tired? Yes, father. Your night has grown long on the road and your heart has flowed over your night's earth. My son, you're still as light as a cat so climb up on my shoulders. In a little while we'll cross the forests of Terrabin and oak. This is the northern Galilee. Lebanon is behind us. The sky is ours, all of it, from Damascus to the beautiful wall of Accra.

And then what? We'll return to the house. Do you know the way, my son? Yes, Father. East of the carob tree on the main street, there's a small path crowded by cactus at its opening. Then it leads wider and wider to the well where it looks out on the orchard of my Uncle Jamil, who sells tobacco and sweets. Then it gets lost on a threshing floor, before it straightens out and settles in at home in the shape of a parrot.

Do you know the house, my son? I know it like I know the path. Jasmine winds around an iron gate, footprints of light on the stone stairs. Sunflowers stare at what lies behind the place. Friendly bees prepare breakfast for my grandfather on a reed tray. In the yard there's a well and a willow tree and a horse. Beyond the fence, a tomorrow thumbing through our papers. Oh Father, are you getting tired? Do I see sweat in your eyes? My son, I am tired. Can you carry me? Like you used to carry me, Father. I'll carry you from my beginning and its beginning. I'll follow this road to my end and to its end."

Darwish is not an easy poet. It would have been so easy to not explore the possibilities of language which is very rich in the Arabic poetic tradition and … but he's worth every bit of following it. I just want to … okay. This is the danger of having too many … too many books on the table. Here it is. This is what I want, this poem, and then I'll just read and then we'll be quiet together. Okay. This is … no here is wonderful. You know even just seeing the language, the forbidden to us language of some … the Arabic on one side and the translation on the other by Geoffrey Sachs the translator.

One traveller said to another, 'We won't return as' - this is just excerpts - "I am a son of the Syrian plain. I live there travelling or residing among the people of the sea but the mirage presses me eastward to the ancient Bedouin. I lead the beautiful horses to water. I feel the pulse of the alpha bed in the echo. I return. A window looking out in two directions. I forget who I am so that I can be plural in the singular and in time with the praises of foreign sailors under my windows so that I can be the warring party's letter to their families. We won't return as we went. We won't return even now and then. Write, in the desert absence said to me write. I said there is another writing on the mirage. It said write and the mirage will become green. I said I like absence. I said I still haven't learned the words. It said to me write and you'll know them and know where you are and where you are and how you came and who you will be tomorrow. Put your name in my hand and write so you'll know who I am and will go a cloud into the open. So I wrote. Whoever writes this story will inherit the land of words and possess meaning entirely".

And there is Sally Morgan. There is Mandelstam. There are all of us who try to hold on to life with words another way.

And he says "Am I me? Am I there or here? And in each you, me. I am you the second person. It is not exile for me to be you. It is not exile for me to be you and it is not exile for the sea and the desert to be the song of the traveller to the traveller. I won't return as I went. I won't return even now and then".

These are excerpts. Mahmoud Darwish wrote, "And travel led me to travel and I didn't see a country there". He wrote, "The countries between my hands are the work of my hands".

He wrote, "History will be a stage for poetic spaces where peoples can roam with no boundaries and the search for constituents of identity will be within the rules of mixture of confrontation and cohabitation of identities".

Think of what he's saying and think of Virginia Woolf, the leap, the pinnacle into the air where nothing is safe. He wrote, "Poetry must always ask the questions without answering it". He wrote of loss not as nostalgia or regret but as a horizon. He wrote, "I have a project for a book of Genesis that could as well be a book of exoduses". He wrote, "Home for the exile is in constant reconfiguration". He wrote, "There is no harbour for me".

He wrote, "We live in a moment of history where we appear to be deprived of a past". He wrote, "The last smoke is ours. The beginning is not our beginning but the last smoke is ours". And he's referring to you know from a chimney, that smudge in the sky which is often all we know that once there was a people here. Their bones in the ground and smoke in the sky.

He wrote, "We travel like other people but we return to nowhere as if travel is the path of clouds. We have a country of words". And then he wrote for me for tonight ,"Why do you want to travel?"

He wrote, this man who'd been in prisons and banished from his land, "Because I do not know the path". What I'm trying to say is the courage of accepting … not of accepting. The courage to live in lack of sureness and create from that place.

My words to end this... 

So much has been taken from these poets, so much of human ugliness has been unleashed on their worlds of desire and still here in our hands are their lasting gifts of transformed language. They have suffered huge losses to give us these final pages. A different kind of human home. The books here are not the end of journeys but the beginnings as long as you touch them.

Some of you I know have had trouble staying awake and I know that … I could have read my own thing but my things are in the books and you'll find them. This is the Dorothy Hewett I met. If you can see in her face. I saw. That's the Australia I had to know, this woman, this woman. And that I got to hear her voice on the phone with the roar of the Blue Mountain winds and the massive truck trains roaring through. You've given me such gifts and one of them is tonight listening to me.