Reviewed by Pam Brown for Southerly, 79.3 July 2022
Even though the impact of information technology has reduced smaller postal items to notices, flyers, occasional brochures and ads for Australia Post's assorted products, for me there's still something auspicious in seeing the person in the yellow hi-vis jacket stopping at the letterbox. Each postie on our street uses a different mode of delivery - walking with a push cart, wearing a heavy back sack or riding a push pedal or motorised bike to deliver the mail in all kinds of weather.
The letter has been a literary mode since the seventeenth century when James Howell published Familiar Letters and Aphra Behn published her novel Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister. In current times the literary form of the letter and, alas, the postcard have become anachronistic, and handwritten material is uncommon and quaint.
A quarter of a century ago poets began using electronic mail as an art form. Susan M. Schultz and John Kinsella published voice-overs - a chapbook of their exchange of email poems. Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark continued their relationship, borne of a brief sexual encounter in Sydney in 1995, via emails to each other. In 2015 their correspondence became the book I'm very into you. Thus, their once-possible letters became emails. At the same time in the 90s Chris Kraus published an epistolary feminist novel called I Love Dick. The obsessive, infatuated, yet ultimately table-turning author, writes to Dick, "Dear Dick..." Dick never replies in spite of her stubborn persistence. The second part of the book is titled, paradoxically, Every Letter is a Love Letter. Today in Australia 'the post' continues as a historical trope in the conceptual work of Dave Drayton whose poetry interplays with Australian postcodes and delivery routes.
Gareth Morgan's chapbook Dear Eileen, is an illuminating and kinetic discourse on social, political and aesthetic connections between employment and a life in poetry. It engages with the aforementioned writers Chris Kraus, Kathy Acker, Ken Wark as well as others. The addressee of his letters, 'Eileen', is, of course, the self-described 'most famous poet in the East Village', Eileen Myles.
Gareth, a young Melbourne poet, works as a postie. Eileen Myles' father was a postie (or 'mailman' as they're called in the USA). In their recent memoir Afterglow (a dog memoir) Eileen's father reincarnates thirty years after his death as the dog Rosie. I'm pretty sure that most posties don't relate to dogs with the finessed anthropomorphism that Eileen Myles poured into their love for Rosie, but the memoir so captivated Gareth Morgan that he wrote a series of letters, or as he says, 'google docs' to Eileen -
dear eileen
you noted in the foreword to chris kraus' i love dick that the novel
interestingly took place at the birthtime of email. i.e. the death of mail.
1997. i was 4. i can't remember your point about email but today i am
thinking about the death of mail. it has become clear that our days are
numbered. which feels poignant and odd to be typing here. because
naturally these are not letters but... google docs.
Gareth is a 'delivery only postal delivery officer'. In a slang acronym that's a 'dodo' and so, he says, 'a cute dead bird'. As he rides around the mail run on an electric pushbike listening via iPhone to Spotify recordings and podcasts of Eileen and other poets, there's the glaring irony of using internet content on the job when it is a main cause of the demise of the material his work depends on. In the first letter Gareth, in the context of his generation, writes 'life was so much posturing. i hated the internet, for example, yet i lived there. by which i mean: social media'.
Letters have a colloquial tone, as if the correspondents are talking to each other. Gareth's letters meander easily through various referential topics. For instance, here he quotes Bertolt Brecht -
each morning, to earn my bread, i go to the market where lies are sold and,
hopefully, i get in line with the other sellers ... so i am writing you these
letters, and going to work... i was all right. i didn't have any dependents. i
had my poems, a rental home, a beautiful girlfriend and a steady job. time
and space, time and space. like a dog, i did my rounds.
love,
gareth
later in a longer letter he declares the influence of reading Afterglow -
i wonder if i am just doing so much copying or echoing - of you. is that still
art?
and he continues with a brief appreciation of Kathy Acker and Ken Wark's email messages, and then -
but so, now i remember what i am up to: i am reporting from the ground,
that is my difference. i am a dog and sniffing. i'm gauging the field. is
that right?
Gareth's imagined identity as a dog makes the working life more problematic than that of an actual dog -
dear eileen
there were times i felt i couldn't piss while on my rounds and was indeed
made to feel my pissing should be rationed against the streets i'd passed
thru so it was that i was like a dog. i measured my route in relation to the
bladder which was a mean and dominating organ and tho you'd think to
be outside and yes to be a dog one would be free to pee wheresoever,
which is why i am telling you now: according to our bosses, whom we
naturally obeyed, and some of us even adored, we pissed like clocks.
love, and solidarity
g
Weather is a continual menace for posties. Gareth gives clear-cut context to the task of working in dire climatic situations in a letter that embraces the rant -
... the post is an important, powerful aesthetic, or: importantly aesthetic. it
is part of what holds a nation together both literally (in THINGS (waste))
but also symbolically. the post is colonial! it's capitalist it's evil. it's an
advertisement for the happy country, and well, like, we WORKED thru
the BUSHFIRE SEASON, chugging poison smog. what better heroes for
capital can you get? the postal service is a poetics of capitalism.
This letter goes on to quote from the late radical anarchist poet Sean Bonney and then returns to lament the dog-life of a worker - '...we are not free dogs'.
Gareth conveys anxiety and an angry awareness of the effects of class, the precarity of his job, actual job losses resulting from 'profit squeeze' and a weariness that has him quoting Newman, the mailman in the Seinfeld comedy series, saying "the mail never stops". He rails against everyday difficulties like 'SHIT letterboxes' and the huge number of parcels and inane ephemera ordered online by wealthier people. The volume of these packages sometimes causes his left shoulder to ache from the delivery work load. An 8-hour day is really 10-12 hours.
Eileen Myles has written often about their own background as working class Boston. Towards the end of the series of letters, after a particularly hard day's work and feeling peeved, Gareth addresses Eileen about the money problems that are analogous to a poet's life -
... you said when you were broke you could go knock on john ashbery's door
and ask him to help you get a grant! i could meet michael farrell for coffee
at the nova cafe, and sometimes i do. and then there's 'working in a totally
unrelated field', which i, like melinda,(1) do. how nice, or i know i
enjoy it. it sucks to be an insider i believe, at least for today. let me ask, did
you get paid to run St Mark's?(2)
today.... today i have been delivering SO many parcels of crap to the
wealthier houses on my route and have been wondering over the virtue of
being poor, which i feel you and others are proud proponents of, or were, in
the 70s say, when things were allowed to flourish a little... stinkily... but you
are no longer poor, and are in fact the most famous and probably richest
poet in the east village, or marfa - and probably america! which is like the
world... and it is time i think to return the rent controlled apartment to the
people, as if such a thing were still recognised, the people, or rent controlled
apartments in new york city.(3)
This small turn where a fan, or in this instance, an acolyte challenges aspects of the life of the subject of their admiration is unexpected and touching. It is also fundamental to Gareth Morgan's candour in writing in the moment. Letter writing releases a spontaneity that's mostly antithetical to the work of devising the structure of a poem.
Dear Eileen, is teeming with daily fragments that are sometimes vivid, sometimes casual, often referential, sometimes disagreeable, though not altogether only constituting acts of thinking aloud. Some parts are also simply observational.
Publishing letters to a living idol is a vulnerable move. Here though, the revelations of instantaneous thoughts and reactions work to reach not only the recipient but also the readers. Gareth Morgan's good nature takes us right in to his particularly readable, never humdrum, everyday world -
dear eileen
i have told myself - and now you: the reason i am a postie is the potential in
it for pleasure. the great outdoors, suburbia's unruly sheen, the sublime pain
of the elements. the mythic, loner's journey into the blue. to be the cutest
kind of hero. and each day like any other, at one with the footpath...
