A site. A trace.
This site is still being developed, so there may be a bit of Latin in some corners. I like it, but it’s temporary.
Please email your comments through the CONTACT link at the bottom of any page.
Philip Salom is a contemporary Australian poet whose books have attracted widespread acclaim. He has published fourteen books - twelve collections of poetry and two novels - notable for their originality and expansiveness and for surprising differences from title to title.
Above: Philip Salom with publisher and poet David Musgrave - a hurried conference on receiving news that Alan Fish and MA Carter were unable to attend.
Left: The enigmatic Professor Ross Bennett.
The Launch Speech is now available in my SHORTS section. And a very strange speech it is. Have a look.
Introduction
My two new books have just been published - The Keeper of Fish, and Keeping Carter - are in fact written by Alan Fish and M A Carter, two heteronyms who took control of my head and insisted on a public text for their disembodied thoughts, ie: a collection of poems each. Closet poets closeted somewhere inside me. Now out of the closet in text if not in body. They are eccentric and very different. See my Blog entry for the latest news about Fish and Carter. These two books also complete the trilogy begun with Keepers.
A week or two before the Melbourne launch, The Keeper of Fish sold out. P&W had it re-printed just in time. Carter is catching up!
My previous book, Keepers, is a variation on the verse-novel, with a poem on each page and a prose narrative under it. It is both serious and mischievous, a study of the kind of Creative Arts institutions I taught in for 20 years. It is a chance to place portraits of actual artists alongside fictional ones, and in that way keep the creative gate open. It’s odd in the entertaining sense, but then there’s nothing odder than teaching the thinking and the making of art. Staff and students and artists all… are characters.
In the Books section of this site you can see what I have published and a brief account of how each currently available book of mine was developed. They are very different, so each genesis was a variation on the expected. One of the great pleasures of trying out original beginnings is finding the final form and the satisfaction (usually short-lived!) of holding a first copy of the book. There is also something about Why each book was begun, though that’s tricky territory…
There are six menu sections featuring books, poems, writings and musings, plus images - and even a video player (embedded in Shorts) to show off live links. I hope you enjoy the time spent.
I have been wondering about this quality for some time, an aspect of writing/language which I can only call poetic intelligence, a something far more than ‘intelligence’ normally accounts for ... and yet it is a kind of mental accuracy of skill and knowingness. An ability to understand and almost calculate language and knowledge – but also allow the aleatory interventions that ‘work’. It is normal intelligence in reverse – it happens as answer before the question is consciously put. And may never be put. It invents responses from within which the ‘problems’ are seen. Poetry as speculation. This might be as different as that line from Stevens, to Ashbery to Jorie Graham.
If the dates are correct, Rabindranath Tagore – whose 150th birthday has just passed - lived a life as brilliantly symmetrical as he was brilliantly talented: born on May 7 in 1861 and dying on August 7, 1941. In the west he is usually considered a great poet (for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1913) but throughout his remarkable 80 years he proved himself the most extraordinary person of the ‘Indian Renaissance’, publishing 30 or so collections of poetry, eight novels, four novellas, ten books of essays, several collections of critical writings and speeches on the culturally central subjects of literature, history, politics and religion. He wrote possibly as many as 2000 songs, including the music, and a large number of dramas, many of them also ‘musicals’. Just for variety, towards the end of his life he took up painting and print-making. But there was more...
During 2009-10 I worked in collaboration with Maggie Hegarty, a Melbourne photographer, to create a lucid and freshly imagined art book of poems and images. The pic on the left is one of Maggie's gorgeous photographs. Each double page was to feature an image like Morning Fog with a poem opposite it. Such books, especially with colour plates, have now become far too expensive to print and bind for the shrinking collectors market - and way beyond the budget of a general audience. Sadly, we had to accept this difficulty but the actual work will be incorporated in this site.
General
Curiosity is essential and energising for a writer (well, for anyone!) and the sections Shorts and Favourites reveal some of the raw interest behind much of my daily work.
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