a
powerful
but anarchic
talent
Geoff
Page, Books and
Writing, Radio National
Vivian Whiteley Hopkirk
was born
in Sydney. The nephew of Brett Whiteley the painter, he was educated at
Christ's College, Canterbury, and Victoria University, New Zealand,
he lived and studied for a decade abroad, sponsored by Cinzano in
Tuscany and living as writer in residence at the Shakespeare &
Company Bookshop in Paris. He returned to Australia in 1992 to write Meditations of a Flawed Groom,
for
which he deliberately induced a brief stay in a Sydney jail. Vivian
Hopkirk was well known as a poet, publishing poems in Europe. He passed away unexpectedly on 31 May 2013.
Vivian Hopkirk recited the following poem at the Big Day Out music
festival in Melbourne on 28 January 2007 as part of the John Cooper
Clarke segment.
this lava packed, root-adhered
planet swings calyxed blue
glacier
crammed sea-esteemed & pinnacle/geared
deep
midnight, flagrant noon, vespertine gloam,
in
the race of time a season, seasons burn,
infinities
of systems/dialects/races/plumaged cities
&
blood born, sky to the wing,
minerals
deep in thought crystals sing/the amorous
bower-bird
arranging its masterpiece,
&
tusked boar root up shells on mountain tops:
mud
elects the rose & the great azure orb
hurtles
head-long spinning declining its brow
in
the torque of the sun through infinite thrumming
space...
seas
of atoms collaborate to an eye
light
light
light
a
ton of lightning rapes the ether visions clash blood spurts
the
immaculate swan drifts, immaculate, by,
an
oboe cries a lover dreams his inexplicable brain
the
dark sealed secret reticular mirror
&
none know (the galaxies blooming perpetually apart)
none
know.
‘
spring
rhetoric’
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