What a Party!

The invitation came by email, and read:

Greetings Chums!!!
THIS COMING SUNDAY 13TH January from 5.30 PM you are invited to
daevid's 70TH BREATHDAY PARTY Party at EWINGSDALE HALL turn right immediately (approx 50 metres after the exit roundabout) once you have turned off towards BYRON BAY from Pacific Hwy coming from the north.
There will be yum vegie food for sale but bring: intoxicants, YOUR POETRY(for the poets open mike from 5.30-6.30 and in between acts) songs, drawings, brilliant ideas, crazy costumes, instruments, & a pal or two and kids if you like!
The line up:
5.30 poets open mike
6.30 the molotov with stefanie petrik
7.30 Kirtan & acoustic songs
8.30 Trypswych (Sound Art )
9.30 Vashuda & friends
10.30 GONG 70.
This means 1970's gong set played for the first time live in Oz with ORLANDO FURIO drums GREG (Hunter.S.Thompson 2) bass DAEVID EL ALIEN guitar GILLI SMYTH: chaoswhisper MICROCOSMIQUE synths.....plus additional surprise soloists. YASSS!!!
12.00 MIDNIGHT. TEN YEAR REUNION OF AUSTRALIAN SPACE ROCK BAND:ALPHA OMEGA
MC'd by Willie of the Zinnias!!!
Wheeee!
Hope you can make it rain or shine!!
HUGE hugs!! LUV Y'all!!
daevid & tribes

Let me translate a little. I met Daevid Allen in 2005 through Thom the World Poet, I met Mick ("Microcosmique") last year through his wife Parvati, and knew Gilli Smyth back in Melbourne days when we were both around the poetry scene in the eighties. She was working with Daevid back then too, but I didn't get to meet him at that stage. They are wild and wonderful performance poets and "space-age rock" musicians. Daevid is part clown, part elf: sweet, clever, funny and irreverent. His energy would be amazing in anyone, let alone a man just turning 70.

I threw on my purple Goddess gown, grabbed my latest book of poems, some intoxicants of the alcoholic variety, my husband Andrew and a couple of pals, Raeline and Dan who are visiting Australia at present. Raeline's an old friend, an Aussie who's been living overseas for 12 years but gets back here now and then. This is the first time here for Dan, who lives in the Florida Keys. So far he's seen Melbourne, Sydney, and a rather wet and dreary northern New South Wales, where he did at least manage some surfing at Byron Bay a few days ago.

'Love your frock,' said a woman in jeans behind me, when we stopped to raid the ATM.

The Goddess gown

We got a bit lost on the way to the party – which allowed us all, and Dan in particular, to observe the stunningly beautiful scenery in the Byron hinterland. When we arrived, Daevid greeted us with warm hugs and shouts of, 'Hello darling, I'm so glad you could come!' Other poets I knew came up to kiss me too and tell me how good I looked. (The Dress is always a winner!) And then I couldn't wait to find Stefanie.

She's been my friend on MySpace for a while, and wrote my favourite celebratory poem about our recent Federal election. And she's off to Austin soon for the April poetry festivals, like me a couple of years ago and Bob Mud last year (he's going again this year too). Great to meet each other in person, and she promptly put me down for the open mike she was organising. Then she opened the proceedings herself with a rip-roaring number about 'Maracca Man'.

'Who's the man in the hat?' I whispered to her during the subsequent performances. 'Archie, from Nimbin,' she whispered back. I knew it! Another MySpace poet friend I was about to meet in person; great! But before that could happen, Mick (yes, the muso – also sound and lighting engineer) came and snuck me away to give him a Reiki treatment. His house was in the recent floods in Murwillumbah; the water came up to his chest and a lot of stuff was ruined, including his equipment for gigs. He was pretty stressed.

Stefanie put me on last to accommodate the Reiki, but I got back in time to hear a number of other performers, including Ghost Boy – yet another MySpace connection – who delighted us with a poem to "Your Anus". I did two birthday poems in honour of the occasion, although not written for the occasion. Thom had sent through two by email that morning, which were written for it – one of which you can now find on the Gong website (click on News in the sidebar) – and I thought, 'I bet he wants someone to read them'. But I looked at them and saw they relied on a lot of shared history with Daevid so I didn't think I could do them justice. Instead I did these:

Birthday Poems

These two poems, Rosemary and Magic, were written in 1984 when I invited Carmel Bird to my birthday party. She recalled the time when we were children in Tasmania, and she came to my party.

1.

Rosemary

If I come to your party
Will there be a cake
With green jelly
Dark green jelly
Deep pool jelly
For the frogs?
Shall we go into the summerhouse
Underneath the willow
Our smiles revealing
The gaps between our teeth?
Will the butterfly cakes
Filled with the red jelly
And the cream
Leave icing sugar dustings
On our noses?
Are we going to look
For a fairy ring?

Or has there been some alteration to the plans?

© Carmel Bird 1984

When poets have events, they tend to do it with poetry. Some time earlier, Carmel and I had been in the entourage for Melbourne poet Ken Smeaton's wedding to Marita, and recited poems onstage. I refer to that in my reply to Carmel:

2.

Magic
For Carmel

Behind the summerhouse
under the willow,
do you remember
there was a swing?

I used to drift,
leaning against the ropes,
toes ruffling the dirt,
watching the sky through leaves.
I trailed the stems’ transparent green
around my hair and fingers.

I’ve read somewhere
that willow casts a spell:
it turns us into poets.

When you came to play
on my birthday,
did you sit in the swing?
I know you went into the summerhouse.
You must have gazed hard
at the sky through slats
and up, through curtaining fronds.

Now, when we play on stages,
it’s not for elocution, not for school.
This power, these words, are ours.

Last week, you wore white frills
and flowers in your hair.
I was dressed in glitter.
There were balloons.
We showered our audience
with rose-petals, lollies….

You ask,
if you come to my birthday this year
will there be magic?
Yes.

(Both first published Women’s Studies Journal Vol. 1, Nos. 4 & 5, Special Section on Celebration. Also published in my Secret Leopard: Selected Poems 1974-2005. Paris, Alyscamps, 2005.)

It was particularly appropriate as, in their youth, Daevid and Gilli were protegés of Robert Graves, in whose book The White Goddess I read about that property of willow.

Raeline urged me to recite my C**t poem. When some other readers came back for a second go, I asked if I could have an encore too, and Stef obligingly announced me again. It brought the house down as always, and Ghost Boy told me afterwards he thought it was an excellent response to his Anus poem. Some of the women thanked me for it, and when I finally introduced myself to Archie he told me I'd stolen the show.

Love it, love it, love it! I'm such a ham, when I actually get to do any performing I wonder why I don't make the effort to attend spoken poetry events much more often.

And then the real show started. There were some stupendous women musicians as support acts – Mohini who sings in the Beach Hotel at Byron Bay, Yashuda who is also a well-known local performance poet – and finally we heard Daevid, Gilli and crew. Their music was psychedelic and wonderful. I'd never attended a Gong concert before. I joined the swaying throng in front of the stage. Quite an experience – an alteration of the senses for sure.

"Imagine if you were stoned!" I whispered to Raeline. It was such a buzz even without that.

Driving home, I told Dan he hadn't done too badly: "You surfed at Byron, and now you've attended a hippie party and heard a Reiki Master recite obscene verse!" But he was studying an interesting car we passed, and I don't think he heard.

WE DID IT!

Thousands of cheers for the change of Government in Australia! A political commentator on TV this morning expressed the opinion that it was more than anything about getting rid of John Howard and his mob, and there's an element of truth in that. In fact, I was agreeing with my stepson Adam just a little while ago that the collective mood seems to be a huge sigh of relief around the country.

Our erstwhile Foreign Minister was quoted as saying, 'No-one was waiting for us with baseball bats. It was more a kind of ennui, a feeling that it was time for a change.' Oh yes? Then why, after the relief, am I feeling such glee?

Actually I voted Green. Witches care for the natural world! But my second preferences went to Labor. Getting the Howard Government out was indeed a huge priority.

On a vid of a US anti-war protest on MySpace today, I saw a placard saying 'Violence isn't strong. Compassion isn't weak.' I loved it so much, I thought I should use it as a banner or an email signature.

Our new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, will probably steer us to the centre, when I'd rather go more left – but I do believe he will restore some overdue compassion to Australian politics.

The issue of the pulp mill remains. Although I haven't lived in Tasmania for a long time, I'm keeping in touch with what's going on there. It must be hard for even the most wilfully blind to deny that there was a big protest vote against the mill. And that campaign continues. See these articles: Labor returns as pulp vote hits polls and The Lucky Country?

Today is a day for celebration, a great day for Australia!

Here is a quick-off-the-mark piece by Brisbane poet Stefanie Petrik:

HAVE FAITH, PEOPLE CAN LEARN FROM THEIR MISTAKES

Standing outside a community center
Deep in the heart of the Gold Coast
My friend and I beamed smiles through
The haze of affluence and indifference
Handing out how to vote cards:
“Socialist Alliance. Vote for a Revolution”.
Nobody got the irony.
The lone Labor supporter, was swamped at the door
By blue wearing oldies in t-shirts stamped
proudly with familiar effigies
Of a country unsure of its identity
Or of what it really wants and needs.
The conservatives, safe in that electorate
played dirty. They knocked down
her sign, repeatedly. They sniped at her with
pack mentality. The minor conservative
parties worked together, knowing that all
the preferences were theirs, anyway.
Then, a homeless man walked up to the My Family First
Christian party, them representing money, not God,
And asked him for a dollar. He was pointed over to
Lone labor woman, while another bouncy woman
Tied blue and white balloons to a shopping trolley
That contained his companion’s worldly possessions.
I sat with my friend, hours later,
tired from standing in the sun
And a car screamed past yelling:
“Die Johnny Howard, you Liberal scum!”
We cheered a little too loudly.
The liberal next to us leant in and said,
“You’re lucky I don’t have my glock”.
In an American accent.
Told him he didn’t scare us, and asked him why
He had a registered weapon in a country with restrictive gun laws.
He was a bounty hunter from the USA
A personal friend of his candidate,
And he worked on promoting the Bush/Cheney campaign, too.
Lying or not, what bounty could he possibly
find in threatening two women on their own?
Apparently, he could even claim
his attack dogs back on tax. How nice for him.
We told him again:
You don’t scare us.
At the end of the day, the last rush of people
Voting after a working class day
The gauntlet of conservatives manned the lip
Of the gate. I joined them.
They said:
Don’t risk the economy, vote Liberal.
I said, louder:
People before profits!
Planet before profits!

And later that night, the people of this country
Voted John Howard out, and threw a magnificent party.
Hungover and definitely not scared - Nov 25th 2007