TWO MEN WORK THREE LINES
Below, the waters leaf through the bibles, and the compass needle points to night. Out of dreams the gold is sifted and the sea inherits what remains.i Ingeborg Bachmann
Slack Water. The tidal point at which our planetary water mass greets its opposite purpose as dictated by the moon. Through gravity, the oceans, seas, and rivers take two submerged breaths a day. The 71% that measures itself, not with ‘coffee spoons’ but with eons of oxygenated blue in its own eye. We are detail, a drill down from the immense to the particular — the dot on the i the poet’s head, the head of the reader, or the head of the artist. Poetry draws its own doors to walk through, doesn’t bother to count its steps as the same door disappears, as thoughts measure the distance to the next wall. It’s been my habit for almost twenty years to reserve space on the ‘next wall’ for Arryn Snowball’s work. Our friendship is as much a collaboration as the work we produce. In the conversational drift of a project, we become truffle hunters in the subconscious, friendship to the fore, egos aside, taking turns in being hunter or dog. In October 2017, I went to see Arryn’s Square Sun exhibition at Nancy Sever Gallery in Canberra. The show knitted intersecting paths, paintings from his House of breath (2014–16) and Continuum (2014–15) series, plus a return to ‘word’ paintings. Loose, free, jazz surfaces that ask the viewer to go with it, to destabilise thoughts and self in the nourishment of egg tempera transparency. Arryn said he’d been “nicking” bits from my poems, jostling the context into a muzzle of shapes, sifting words to surface in a concrète consommé where (perhaps), the eggshells absorb the impurities. After viewing his show, we visit the National Botanical Gardens. We roll down a grass embankment. Queasy aftershocks ensue. Arryn asks if I’d like to do “another project”, “something big”, “not sure what”. The one seed in two heads, we drove away from the Garden. A few weeks later Arryn calls me from a boat in North Queensland. He tells me he’s been asked to do a four-week residency at the Museum of Brisbane
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(MoB) — maybe we can work that into our undefined project? I suppose because he was fishing, I mentioned how I’d used a few snippets from Grant’s Guide to Fishes in writing a commissioned poem.ii That poem was triggered by an article about game-hunter Vic Hislop supplying Damien Hirst with a pair of tiger sharks. Simpatico bird on shoulder, Arryn said, “Grant’s Guide is right here in front of me, on the boat.” So began another ode to happenstance. While the residency was good news, a month is not a long time to produce a series of poems and paintings (the latter to be showcased at City Hall). When he returned to Brisbane, we met for coffee, Grant’s Guide in hand. We randomly opened it at page 436 where Ern Grant’s phrase “on slack water” jumped out. We agreed I should use a found poetry technique, seeing this as the only way to produce a swag of poems within such a short timeframe. I settled on 77 poems as the number, simply because it’s Arryn’s year of birth. My constraint was to choose one fish for each poem with its page number becoming the title. Throughout the Guide two constants appeared — the words ‘line’ and ‘surface’ — respective philosophical materials for poet and painter. Thinking back, it was a matter of channelling imaginative blood pressure into improvised panic. No time to stop and look at what was being produced. Chance used as the lure. In many instances, I chose fish based on personal association: a Mangrove Jack for me, Moses Perch for my mother, Queenfish for my brother, Spanish Mackerel for my father, and so forth. With other poems, I just treated the book as an irregular die with over 800 pages. As the poems took shape, the metaphoric ‘else’ we hoped for commenced its construction. Writing the poems by drawing from what was identified allowed what was unidentified to form into transient shoals that seeped out of the cold blood of their subject. Aloud, the poems sound
