Greek-Australian poet PiO has written a 700-page poetic biography of Fitzroy and himself. Photo: Meredith O’Shea
REVIEW BY GIG RYAN
February 19, 2016
Fitzroy: The Biography by PiO.
COLLECTED EFFORT PRESS, $55
PiO’s epic-sized Fitzroy, his 11th book of poetry, yields a history of the suburb through portraits, dramatic monologues and pithy tales.
Fitzroy stretches from Robert Hoddle’s road-plan grid over the Wurundjeri people’s habitation to a boisterous crowded suburb of struggling labourers, shopkeepers, and dodgy characters such as Squizzy Taylor: “Squizzy’s first recorded conviction, was when he was 14/ – Back orf!, he said, and pulled out a gun / Stupid!/ The Boot Trade wasn’t going to be one of his options./ During an arrest, he fought so hard he had to be handcuffed./ From soup to nuts, he was the whole shooting-match. / He was King of the Push, all right … /People who come from nothing, are nothin’.” (Fitzroy Vendetta 1918)
Among this vast assembly, PiO mingles his own biography, and his parents’ lives as new migrants in the 1950s. Facts, wise proverbs, advice, chequer each page of this vivid chronicle: “A poor man’s capital, is his labour”, “A whistle, tears the air apart / with applause”, “Pride, is a mask, patched up by bandages”, “The place of slang, is in real life”. These bombarding statements juxtaposed through each narrative often provide humour as well as widening perspective.
Characters are often defined by their deaths, such as the champion footballer lost to war: “he done what he was told./ There’s no record of a card game in Chaucer, or of/ a pool hall in Beowulf …/ only a whiff, he said (of the Kaiser’s/ gas) nothing to worry about. They fixed him up, and/ sent him back. He got killed, in Belgium. His remains have/ never been recovered; he done what he was told./ Fitzroy’s a working-class suburb, and/ a gum tree is, no shade; Lest We Forget on/ St George’s Rd, an exploding football/ in the clouds. (“Jack” Cooper 1889-1917)
Fitzroy: The Biography by PiO. Photo: Supplied
An Ancient Greek view that the past is in front of us, because we see it, whereas the future is behind, recurs throughout, and thus many of the often violent deaths are emblematic of the life: “He said ‘I’ll shoot you’. She said ‘You couldn’t/ shoot a maggot’, and as she opened up her mouth (for him to shoot ), said ‘Shoot –that!”… He told the Cops, he/ didn’t think, it was loaded.”
PiO celebrates the suburb’s now extinguished areas such as “the Narrows” of his childhood: “Kids from the Narrows, know how to fight … Gratitude doesn’t always translate, into a jar of sweets.” By the time of the counter-cultural 1970s, the local poet is offended at not being invited to read at the T.F. Much Ballroom, once Cathedral Hall, that had previously hosted Italian films and dances. Fitzroy’s rapid gentrification soon prices him out of his territory.
“The solution to the Housing problem, came to Fitzroy, from/ 10,427 miles away; in the shape of an Architect and/ Town planner – Le Corbusier: ‘The site must be made to/ suit the plan’. Or there can be no ‘order’ (which Modern-life/ demands … i.e. throw out all that is outdated onto the scrapheap,/ and make way for Progress. A public nuisance is ‘an offense/ against the publick’. The past must tumble, into the rubble/ i.e. a Modernist tenet. Le Corbusier said, we are to be/ ‘pitied’ for our worthless houses …/ Modernism destroyed my whole life. (Le Corbusier 1887-1965)
Since his first book, Fitzroy Brothel: Poems (1974), PiO has been an experimental yet accessible poet, influenced by the clamorous optimism of the Russian Futurists Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, and their inheritors, Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and Greek poet Yiannis Ritsos, as well as the Beat generation poets and the “performance” poetry initiatives of the 1970s.
His 24 Hours (1996) superbly captured the dialects and slang of migrants and other locals, showing that sound is of similar importance to meaning, indicated by unexpected commas that pause for emphasis; his work has ranged from visual “concrete” poems to poems written entirely in numbers, with which he feels an affinity, evinced by use of his poetic initials.
Resistant to what he sees as academic or depoliticised schools of poetry, he instead insists on a transformative poetry “of the people”, apparent in the many magazines he has edited: Fitzrot in the 1970s, then later 925, which featured poems about paid work, and more recently Unusual Work. Though oddly perhaps, much of his sound and visual poetry remains obscure to many.
Fitzroy ignites fact with fiction, hearsay with aphorism: “Some men, are/ so stupid, they’d shut the door on a sunset”, “The Law is far – the fist, is near”. This is a magnificent monument relentlessly stacked with idiosyncratic yet faithful incident, honouring the many brief flickering lives that have composed Fitzroy.
*From The Age at http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/pios-portrait-of-fitzroy-and-its-people-in-poetry-20160216-gmud8w.html#ixzz45zi5kxjW
