"I have always been one of the obsessed. From birth. I could stare at the head of a pin for a million years. I am subject to crushes, obsessions, fetishes. Each time I fell madly in love, the object of my passion was never available. Delay was my closest lover. Yet Lucidity came to me. I learnt to work with suffering, ruthlessly applying it. I worked with the bloody tangle, unwinding the cords that threatened to strangle, working like a mad silk worm, year after year... In darkness, in blinding light light, I studied the somber jewel of sorrow. Stumbling upon secret seams of joy, I found a type of balance. Working like a medium, I called up many influences, sorting them blindly, perceptively. This is the way with creative people - they are born with an excess of mental energy. If not used properly it rots. In this way one must be careful with obsession. One must work with it... the energy must be conducted... and one must learn how to do this, otherwise it turns back on the creator causing stagnation and torment..."

- CONRAD

The art of Christina Conrad, and indeed her life, is a distinct and marvellous phenomenon. Her vision seems just as surprising to me now as when I first met her in 1970. It has always seemed to me that she embodies the integrity of an outsider scorning the hurried directions of modern pretence and emptiness. Christina is not a part of the cynicism or dehumanisation that often unbalances art and makes of it a pathetic amusement.  -  Nigel Brown

There is no dictionary large enough to contain the words I need to write this down. Virgo, child of doubt, server of scars, mostly self-inflicted. My perfection is a cracked pot, knowing only questions & voices huddled in silence, shaping an unnameable darkness with singing & impenetrable light. This lump that lives inside hope, curled deep within a dream, this song that rises in the throat but will not come out. We learn too late, the unteachable things – how the Abyss overtakes us, even when we refuse to jump. Creatures loyal to the asking, we tear ourselves to grief in the service of history, in the name of self, & call it Life,  understanding how Love in its usual grimace provokes only a temporary healing: something unreachable. Where is the bandage that will cover this tear? As if it wanted fixing.

we had a summer that was more than Summer & Spring for a back-story we no longer lived in – had we ever?   we made love shyly in front of Japanese screens we had no desire to hide behind   we were an odd coupling invisible characters that touched each other in cuts   struggling to say what we saw what we heard what we felt in the spaces between the bruises & scars   some times it was hard work but mostly we played inventing ourselves in languages that might say what could not be said in adjectives   nouns & verbs scatological or not we were not always pure or grammatical not always kind   with each other though endured frustration & broken sentences & still do wrestling with the eloquence of unreachable silences to liberate a story strangely us

Don’t waste your time searching for the Dead. They are not there, no matter how carefully you look. We inhabit a kingdom of spiders & metaphors, a chaos of certainty. & as best we can, breath by breath, half-truth by half-truth, we are distracted by memories, lovers, food & lies. The assault of fear is as real as the dog in the ditch run over by the neighbour’s car. As the expected condolences are carried out, a council worker in an orange vest disposes of the evidence, hoses down the street.

Even so, there are those who fear the mysteries shovels contain – the nameless residue of victims cut by skidding steel, or crushed by something as mundane as a rubber white-wall cruising away from the latest error, not to mention the children or animals that will be neither altered nor tamed into something more palatable, or how the flesh that desires to be entertained is eventually rammed to its knees in games sanctioned by serviceable cowards.

Blood & meat can never be adequately framed by either climate change or breeding. Who among us takes solace from the knowledge that our GPS wasn’t made to recover our mother’s ashes or dissolve our sister’s pain, delicately etched onto the side of a late-model Nagasaki hatchback? And who's to blame? The safety of streetlights & numbers can’t disguise the fact that the cop’s smile is unreasonably bland & when he urges you to move on you move on,  not because you believe in cops, but because there’s already been enough wounding for one night & more to come.

In a curious way, to die of the cold makes the bus stop warmer. Even common sense understands this kind of hunger, even as it requires one less body in the street. Better not to linger, lest they scoop you up well before you prove an inconvenience to the good folks down at Starbucks, perusing their deathless menus with withered hands.

Years ago, buried deep in my own, personal dark age, when I was unseasoned enough to think I belonged to a group of significant Australian poets who were pushing the language and the boundaries of poetry by exploring the voice and aurality in general in ways that were fresh, innovative and alive, I lamented to a friend one day how we’d all seemed to have been passed over by the Australian literary establishment. It was as if it had skipped our generation, bestowing its awards and grants and prizes on the ones that had immediately preceded us, and then on those that had come after. In reply, he took me to The Albion, bought me a beer, and through a wooden matchstick he rolled between his teeth, from one side of his mouth to the other, explained how winning prizes, getting grants and being published wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It wasn’t fame that mattered, or how many books you’d had published. What counted was whether or not your work made an impression, especially among those who loved and wrote poetry. In short, what sort of impact did your poems have, what or who was your poetry influencing? Had it touched anyone in any lasting way? The life of poetry, at least for my friend, was about what endured. What if anything would be taken up by those that came after?

Yeah, I said, but what about so’n’so, or whatshisname, what about X, Y, an’ Zed?, citing the names of a handful of successful contemporary Australian poets who nevertheless, had still not attained the status of household names.

How many people do you know under 24 who are reading X? he replied. How many would even care? How many books of Y’s is your typical 18-year-old kid from Werribee going to pick up, let alone be changed by? It’s about affecting people’s lives, see? How many unopened poetry books and little magazines sitting on shelves does it take to make someone take another look at their life? How many poems taught in a high school classroom would have been enough to stop the fight, the bullying, the intolerance? A poem has to work on the lives and in the lives of the people with whom they intersect. Poetry is legacy. It’s what we receive, and what we keep, even as we give it away. It’s what remains after the final echoes fade. It has consequences. It multiplies. It’s the soundtrack that keeps our ear to the ground, that keeps us alive - the meanings and the feelings, the stories without which every one is nothing…

…or at least that was the way the conversation played out in my mind… for days, for months, for years, and even now, longtime after that last sip of beer. Between matchsticks. My shout!

- BILLY MARSHALL STONEKING

Billy Marshall Stoneking