READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

The Young Poet Only Writes to the Academic Professor Thanks for the Original Message. Hell, it's 6:06 PM already and I haven't started cooking dinner. I guess Jasmine Anderson’s email doesn’t work and the sky is very grey over Greensborough, just like yesterday. We'd all really like a poem from her. She’s one of the main people on our list. But isn't she always? Damn it! The garden looks good with a wet path. 'Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme' is like something from another time or Time, as they say in those comics I threw in the recycler. Let's talk about the transfer of herbs but as the Pope has said many times it's an apology makes a world of difference and makes the world different… They've been saying that for some Time, Popes. And then there's the job. Not that they’ve actually given it to you yet, but you’re thinking you won’t go for it when they advertise it. A little oregano does wonders in a bolognese sauce. Simon...

He gets so worked up about what takes a long time to work out. He walks off the stage when it gets dull. He looks around for the record player. He has put in at least ten thousand hours. He sends a poem called 'The Prelude’ to a New York editor, with a covering note. He remembers the road down to the beach in autumn. He inspires people to send mail, sometimes more than once. He inspires tributes. He is an American poet. He has been under an influence that he didn’t understand. He has been under the influence. He is an attraction, which wasn’t always the case. He is an inspiration to many Australian poets. He influences the writing of other poems. He is addressed. He is in some way neither in nor out of control. He rarely stoops to et cetera. He is previously published, which is an advantage. He is in book form. He gets the okay from his publisher. He is possible. He doesn’t worry about acknowledgments. He is at this stage, though this ...

The Whispering Gallery : Art into Poetry, by Peter Steele. Macmillan Art Publishing, 2006. ISBN 1 876832 85 1, RRP $88.00. Reviewed by Philip Harvey in Eureka Street at the time of the book's publication. Johnson, deploring an absence of trees in Scotland,      claimed that one would foster gaping, ‘as a horse in Venice.’ Homebound or hapless, the mind      will have its fling, essaying. (from The Bridge) Peter Steele’s poems are miniature essays, assemblies of words and ideas compacted into easeful lines with well-tempered rhythms. Steele is well-tempered always, even when the subject is not. Aphoristic gambits, different sides of a paradox, colours occasionally nailed to the proverbial, the personal in play with the like-minded or other-minded, criss-cross paths of the argument – all good features of an essay – animate the Steele poem. He is insistent on the conjunction; we can sense the word ‘but’ about to turn a vigne...