writer and photographer BERT SPINKS
I seized on a title for myself while I was overseas. I was in my early 20s and I had just come upon the German word Schriftsteller. In my ignorance I figured it translated to “storyteller” and I thought the word paired charmingly with my surname. I decided that when I returned home I would, in a booming voice, declare myself Schriftsteller Spinks. I nearly bought the domain name for a website. Soon enough I picked up a bilingual dictionary and learned that Schriftsteller means “author”, with a specific connotation of having work in print. I hadn’t yet been published and assumed I never would be. Shrugging off the more exotic title, I decided to be Storyteller Spinks instead. In hindsight, I’d say it was a lucky career move. If nothing else, most people could say the word I’d belatedly chosen.
I’d been researching non-literate cultures – that’s where the interest in spinning yarns had come from. I was meant to be studying something else altogether, but I’d neglected it for this tangent. I had begun performing poems. One night at Café Fresh in Launceston, about 70 people showed up for my first solo show. I cringe to think of what I read that night but it was exhilarating, as a 22-year-old, to have an audience hang on my every word. My craving to perform was something I had kept secret, hidden even from myself.
Years have passed. A lot of people have “storyteller” in their job descriptions these days, although that usually means they work in marketing. My vision of my career, if you can call it that – I normally don’t, but sometimes I have to try to convince family members that I’m doing something worthwhile – has changed, but I am still performing poems, perhaps more often than ever, and it’s one of the more satisfying aspects of my life.
. . .
Here’s an excerpt from a poem called Four Sydney Women. It’s about a road trip I took in January 2011, crammed into a hatchback with a bunch of strangers, to a small party on the Forth River.
The light burst on the glass pane as we drove towards it,
as if was erupting on a convex lens; entering forest, then,
its bursts were more irregular, cut apart by thin trees’ shadows,
those of dogwoods, young stringybarks. We’d been lured off-course
by the road sign that read ‘Paradise’. But eventually we found,
on that late Saturday midsummer afternoon, the soft-edged
single-lane gravel track that moseyed down to a dam of black water,
dead gums standing shin-deep in it, or strewn around like wrack.
I wrote the poem more than a decade later. That trip to Lorinna fits into a rare passage of my adult life. I have no archive of this season. The journal in which I diligently wrote about the weekend was lost. I took no photographs over this weekend; I did have some video footage, but that’s trapped on a conked-out computer drive. Yet a couple of stray images flared in my mind one afternoon and I couldn’t help but spin them out into a series of verses, which swiftly became a poem I rather liked.
The practice of poetic writing enriches my memory of journeys and events. I’m almost permanently alert for what is piquant or picturesque; several times a day I hunch over a notebook and scrawl about what I’ve seen, heard or felt. Even the view from my window, looked upon every day, is a source of endless descriptive writing.
Dawn rises with a riot of colour –
a rosella flying through my window.
For me, writing a poem can be a way of preserving a moment or stamping the vision of a particular place. In fact, the work is predominantly about places. Some of my favourite poems are set in Calais in France, Prizren in Kosovo, the Aegean Sea, the Adelaide Hills. But the majority have sprung from different Tasmanian locations. A couple years back, for example, I was looking out the window of a mate’s place on Hillborough Crescent, South Hobart. I quickly penned a fragment that was inspired by the haiku style. (I’d just found a haiku anthology in one of those street library collections. My thanks to whoever left that book – I bloody love it.) I’ll probably never go back to that share-house again but because of this handful of words, what I witnessed that night feels, to me, as permanent as a photograph.
The moon’s thin talon
grips the black mountain peak:
La Niña, November.
Don’t go counting on your fingers, it’s not meant to strictly fit the syllable count you were taught in primary school.
. . .
I also mentally compose a lot of poems while driving. Living in the bush, I spend a fair amount of time behind the wheel. Fortunately I pass through some beautiful places. For me, movement has always motivated imaginative thought. Driving across the Central Plateau, or on the road to the west coast, can be a form of meditation for me. Often enough an inspired brain only needs to catch an instant to see it to its conclusion as a complete work.
One afternoon I drove to Nowhere Else, also by the Forth River, for no reason other than to find myself in the locality with this peculiar name. Cruising around a corner, I found myself behind a learner driver, progressing at the pace of an echidna on a hot day. The scene suggested poetry and the meditative speed provided a perfect chance to not only draft but edit a work of verse:
On your L’s, in a place called Nowhere Else:
all these roads that are laid out before you
are still furled, like the fresh growth on ferns.
But you mustn’t forget: you will not be Nowhere Else ever again.
For the rest of your life, the places will overlap,
the roads will pass through several municipalities at once;
you will travel through past and future simultaneously, hope and regret.
They will wait for you at every bend.
An unfortunate side-effect is that I have a lot of poems about roadkill. Although perhaps it’s only reasonable. After all, it is a central part of Tasmanian life, even if it’s an aspect to which most of us don’t wish to be receptive.
This one is from the Bass Highway:
That afternoon, the farms and forests wore
the sort of light she liked so much –
of a clarity and an intensity that she said
she would not find in the atmosphere of Europe,
at the latitude of her own homeland.
I was driving her to the ferry terminal,
to say farewell. From the corner of my eye,
on the side of the highway just outside of Sassafras,
I saw a Tassie devil’s carcass.
These were her last hours on the island.
I didn’t mention the dead animal; I kept my silence.
But you might say that this had already
become a habit.
. . .
To tell the truth, I’m not sure how the lines come across in print. I have a better idea of how they’re heard: each of these poems have each been read aloud to audiences, at least a couple of times.
A while ago I met with Pete Hay at the Shipwright’s Arms Hotel and suggested we could do a show together. Hazy is a legend of Tasmanian letters. We were only occasional acquaintances, but he was decent enough to have a drink with me from time to time. My proposal was pretty ambitious, but Hazy signed up for it and since then we’ve teamed up several times, touring the island with a simple stage show called A Tasmanian Map.
I have taken, at these shows, to gently explaining to the crowd that they don’t need to worry about knowing what’s going on with poems. There will be images that don’t quite make sense or feelings that are foreign to the listener. Some of the language may be complicated, overdone, or hard to relate to. These things are true even for those of us who write poems.
Even with the dubious, cocked eyebrows of our audiences, I love the energy of sharing poems to a crowd full of human faces. There is a more immediate risk, of course – you can definitely sense when a poem has landed flat – but the sheer delight of having my words meet a receptive audience is yet to falter. It feels closer to the folkloric way that poets, balladeers and yarn-spinners of every kind have, for millennia, tried to meet the moods and mores of their community.
Pete Hay’s style of performance is a treat to behold – there’s no-one quite like him. I envy him. His work, unlike mine, is published in actual books. My stuff’s scrawled on loose sheets, which so often get lost, torn, or stained with ink and beer. I have to rewrite or reprint them frequently. Maybe it’s for the best: I like to tinker with the poems and before any show I can be found hunched over my manuscripts, making infinite changes. These endless last-minute emendations are a questionable habit picked up from having once staged and hosted a largely-improvised variety show. But the constant changes make each performance feel a bit more daring, and I really do believe I improve each piece with every performance.
Hazy is yet to say whether or not he agrees.
We both like to perform longer poems for our show. Shortly after I wrote it, I debuted Four Sydney Women. It goes for about four minutes. Towards the end, I make a reflection on the nature of travel:
By then I’d made plenty of itineraries, trips that followed a string of strangers,
the journey’s next stages shaped by luck and coincidence, as it was that weekend.
The same can be said for the impulsive mood to call myself a storyteller. Who knows where I’d have ended up if I’d stuck with the more cumbersome job description of Schriftsteller?
Bert Spinks grew up in Beaconsfield and is now, mostly, a resident of Launceston. He is a writer, storyteller and bushwalking guide, each of which feed and reflect his interest in the way human communities interact with place and landscape. He focuses especially on journeys and movement, language and literature. Although based in Launceston, Bert spends much of his time without a home because he is in one of the world's wild or interesting places pursing local lore.
