Rhyming The Dead - Reflections - Melody Paloma
A motion toward Jennifer Rankin
I write this with the road. I say “with” because it feels as though my words have become driven by the curves and stretches of bitumen and dirt. Poems settle with movement, like a restless child eased only by the lull of the backseat. It is in the car that I think about Jennifer Rankin the most. Out the window, shifts come quickly and you have to pay attention if you want to catch them – green to pindan, bloodwoods and spinifex spread out before that first boab, cliffs grow layers and drop colours into earth and ocean. Parts of me shift too and then bleed out; mix in with road kill and abandoned cars rusted into dirt. These parts speak with place, and with Rankin, tyres picking up threads between the three of us.
I carry Jennifer Rankin’s Collected Poems (1990) from Melbourne to the Barossa, to Cooper Pedy, to Alice Springs, across the Tanami to The Kimberley, along the coastline to Margaret River, and then back across the Nullarbor. It is a library copy edited by Judith Rodriguez now out of print; I have renewed it nine times. Rankin died in 1979 at age thirty-eight of breast cancer, and despite the substantial amount of writing she left behind, it is largely dispersed and difficult to come by. Despite acclaim from Martin Harrison, Judith Rodriguez and Robert Gray, critical work around Rankin is also sparse. Bonny Cassidy remains a significant critic and champion of Rankin’s work and her research continues to support much of my understanding around Rankin. Talk around Rankin feels quiet, but her voice continues to punctuate the landscapes I find myself in.
I can’t stop watching birds. I can’t stop searching for lines. I can’t stop seeing things from outside my body. There is dynamism in Rankin that moves beyond traditional assumptions around human and other-than-human, reading her work continues to alter they way in which I interact with and write about place. Rankin’s poems move, they shift – temporally, subjectively and spatially. As Cassidy highlights, “Rankin’s “I” is a problematised fluid identity whose humanity is in no way a given” (110). Rankin is forever causing her reader to reconsider and review their understanding, resisting a sense of completion; her poems remain open (Cassidy, 111). For Rankin, there is no end point. This openness in combination with an overarching fluidity sees a celebration of the interconnection between all things. Rankin’s celebration moves beyond a purely romantic ideal (Cassidy 106), addressing the harshness of land as well as those places often overlooked as realities her poetry sees as essential to an intimate understanding of place.
After just over a month of travelling Australia by road with another month or so still to go, Rankin has offered momentum. The road seeds a new connection with Rankin’s work, my own literal movement has granted me access to the metaphorical movement in her poetry, pulling me in and past earth, sky and walls.
References:
Cassidy, Bonny. “A Tactic of Return”: Purpose and Ground in the Poetry of Jennifer Maiden and Jennifer Rankin. PhD Thesis. The University of Sydney, 2008.Print.
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Melody is a poet commissioned for the Rhyming The Dead Radio Series.
Melody Paloma is a Melbourne-based writer currently undertaking her honours year in Creative Writing at RMIT University. Her poetry has been published in Overland, Rabbit and Voiceworks and she was recently awarded the 2014 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets. In 2015 she received a WriCE fellowship and took part in a collaborative residency held in Vietnam. Melody is founder and editor of Dear Everybody (IG: @deareverybodycollective twitter: @deareverybody_), a creative collective facilitating collaboration and creative exchange between artists and writers.
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Click here to read Renee Pettitt-Schipp's reflection
Click here to read Judith Rodriguez's reflection
Click here to read Fiona Britton's reflection.
Click here to read Aden Rolfe's reflection.
Click here to view Producer, Maisie Cohen's reflection.
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