KEN BOLTON + JOHN JENKINS
Background
The authors:
Ken Bolton and John Jenkins are both widely published poets in their own right.
John was born in Melbourne, where he still lives, and Ken first lived in Sydney, and now lives in Adelaide.
Ken Bolton is a very active publisher and critic of poetry, as well as an occasional art critic and teacher. For many years he has managed one of the most interesting bookshops in Adelaide, Dark Horsey - part of Adelaide's Experimental Art Foundation, specialising in the discussion and theory of new art.
John Jenkins has similarly wide interests. He has worked in small-press and mass market publishing, and with various magazines and journals. He was a journalist for many years, working in print media and to a lesser extent in radio, in Australia and overseas. He is still an occasional book editor, reviewer and feature writer. Recently, he has devoted much more of his time to his own writing - particularly to poetry - and to teaching.
As a poet Ken Bolton has proved to be, in the words of David Malouf, 'consistently alert and inventive'. His first book appeared in 1977; and, more than a dozen books later, he continues to surprise us and catch us off guard. Bolton's work is marked by the sort of wit that Aristotle attributed to the liveliest of minds, when he said 'wit is cultured insolence'.
Bolton's Selected Poems (1975-1990) published by Penguin, and his Untimely Meditations, published by Wakefield Press in 1997, are good places for new readers of his work to start.
John Forbes wrote: 'None of [Bolton's] poems escapes his preoccupation with the impossibility of practically every verbal gesture or rhetorical strategy that the idea of Poetry (big p) implies.'
Reading Bolton's lyrical formalist, seriously comic, and genuinely poetic anti-poetry, it very soon becomes clear that he has untied the knots and escaped the conveyor belt to dullness. Having gone his own way, he presents a playful, semi-serious challenge to poets and readers alike: to think clearly about what they are saying, about what they reading, and just how this odd world of writing and reading came to be.
Bolton enjoys and celebrates life as it is actually lived, with all its oddball chance-iness and lack of 'closure'. He talks a lot, too, about his friends and what happens from day to day. And, out of all this - and with a great deal of charm and ease - he makes it new, showing us how poetry can be resuscitated and made to breathe again.
John Jenkins began as an 'experimentalist' in poetry, when his first book, Zone of the White Wolf, appeared in 1974. Strongly influenced by various strands of European avant-guardism, this book contained poems mixed with prose, concrete poems, work with a decidedly philosophical edge, and experiments in what, these days, would be called radical language poetry.
His second book, Blindspot, in 1977 showed the influence of the New York poets and some of their Australian counterparts, and was much more relaxed, playful and humourous in tone, though still with a strong commitment to poetic and formal innovation.
In his third book, The Inland Sea, Jenkins looked to an Australian ethos, our pursuit of leisure and the good life, and the real and imaginary landscapes of both Australian cities and the continental inland. He became interested in writing poems about rapid social and political change, and the shared and imaginative places and spaces in Australian life that had become mutated and fractured by change.
Then followed a long hiatus in poetry, in which time John wrote mainly non-fiction books, including an important study of Australian new music. There were, however, a few booklets of poetry, before he returned to the art with a semi-fanciful comic verse novel, The High Tides, published in 1990. This showed a new interest in re-inventing some traditional forms, as part of a post-modern project that might allow new possibilities for poetry.
He had become disenchanted with the collapse of extreme irony as a part of a bleak and terminal tail-end modernism, which had increasingly become defensive of its ground, wary of affect, and impoverished and desiccated in style.
He took a completely new path, marked by his verse novel, A Break in the Weather, published by Modern Writing Press in 2003. This book was short-listed for the FAW Christina Stead Award for Fiction in that year. Also in 2003, Five Islands Press published his Dark River - a collection of new poems. This book saw Jenkins exploring new areas of subject matter, while remaining an innovator, and consolidating lyrical, experimental and narrative impulses. In 2004, he won the James Joyce Foundation Suspended Sentence Award, travelling to Ireland, Paris and Beijing as part of his prize. He feels he is now writing at the top of his form.
The collaboration:
John Jenkins and Ken Bolton first met in Sydney in the late 1970s, and they quickly became friends. Their long collaboration writing poetry began in 1985, when Ken was living in Adelaide and John arrived on his doorstep for a short visit. They wrote together for enjoyment, and to revive their friendship. They found they were able to produce a lot of work surprisingly quickly, and the result was quite unlike their solo work. They tried many co-writing methods: usually, with no strict system, usually just by taking turns at will, when it seemed like a good place to do so, but sometimes sending pieces through the post with lines left out for the other to fill in. Some poems were done 'in halves': half by one poet, half by the other. To make it impossible to decide whose line or phase belonged to whom, one poet would sometimes deliberately imitate the other's style. They also edited quite a deal, but agreed always to 'bin' any poem they didn't unanimously like or want to see published. Their first co-written work, Airborne Dogs, appeared in 1988. Then followed their verse novel, The Ferrara Poems, in 1989 (which was also turned in to a film), The Gutman Variations, 1993 (a sort of comic attempt at film theory), Gwendolyn Windswept (another verse novel, serialised in magazine form), The Wallah Group, in 2000 and then Nutters Without Fetters.