Stephen Oliver

“ Remember, you’re not writing bus-timetables and calling it ‘performance poetry’ like a few I could name. Stick with the atmospherics, the true essence of people. That’s your angle, as mine is now to brow beat you. ”

“ The stanza alludes to Stevens’s Jove, a false divinity who ‘moved among us, as a muttering king’ in ‘Sunday Morning’, and to that poem’s existential conclusion that (contra Milton) ‘We live in an old chaos of the sun’. Like Stevens in ‘Key West’, Oliver laments the ‘Blessed rage for order’, the ‘glassy lights’ which gave a bogus sense of structure to the sea. But in a sense, and an important sense, much of the language of Oliver’s stanza is the language of Stevens: it is an eloquent testament to a failure to find in the present a viable voice for poetry. ”

“ Oliver’s other new collection, Deadly Pollen, is an ambitious undertaking - a meditation, in large measure, on Wallace Stevens and his legacy - and brings together thirty-five short lyrics into a loosely linked sequence which examines the state of the world after 9/11. And the poem is not ‘merely’ political, for it diagnoses a state of spiritual malaise based on fear, a state of crisis in which the role of the poet is in question. ”

“ You’re not a poet for all time but for your own time. Don’t worry about it. And forget those supposed poets the M=E=Z=Z=A=N=I=N=E=S as you call them caught between the floors: they ain’t going nowhere. So get up and make a cup of tea!” “Sure, care to join me?” “Only for a minute,” he said, “I’ve got more important things to do today, like glinting off the Hauraki Gulf and the iron-clad poppy of Sydney Tower. ”

“ For while he is adept at finding occasion for the lyrical richness of which modernism was always suspicious, he also writes at times in a spare modern voice, as in the following lines which may owe something to the New Zealand poet Curnow’s ‘Canto of Signs’:
Rubbed off sky exposes an
undercoat of white that is really
fuzzed, mid-day heat. Birds
change over shifts. Things settle.
Shadow drops under eaves, tier
by tier .... (lyric 32)
The language here has a powerful antipodean flatness, and depends on its laconic pauses. ”

“ Oliver goes on in a following lyric to demonstrate his gift for image, in his intense visualization of Spring’s strange bloom, the terrorist’s bomb:
Compression of bees,
shrub-shaped, in proton loops,
on cushioned air. Spring!
See the counter, its bright ticking
with fail-safe growth. (lyric 34)
Political poets do not always manage to capture so well the estrangement which is necessary for successful social comment. ”

“ The poem prints -
makes a seal of every season,
its message delivered and read.
An Actual Encounter With The Sun On My Balcony At France Street ( for Gloria Schwartz ) When the moon slipped its knot and left a ring for the night to drop through, and a baggage of stars thudded on the loading bay at the other side of the world, I heard, “Ho! get up you slack-arse poet, I want to have a word with you.” It was the sun. “This is a surprise,” I yawned. “Shouldn’t be - you’re the one whose been whingeing about his own personal light.” “I must admit,” I conceded, “I was worried there for a bit.” ”

“ Free lanced as production voice, newsreader, announcer, voice actor, journalist, radio producer, copy and features writer. Poems widely represented in New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, USA, UK, South Africa, Canada, etc. Recently published, Ballads, Satire & Salt - A Book of Diversions, Greywacke Press, Sydney, 2003. Recently completed a CD of poems and music, titled: KING HIT Selected Readings - poems written and recorded by Stephen Oliver with original music by Matt Ottley designed for international release. He is a transtasman poet and writer who lives in Sydney. ”

“ Stephen Oliver Deadly Pollen [Middletown NJ: Word Riot Press, 2003] ; and Ballads, Satire & Salt [Sydney: Greywacke Press, 2003] . Review by Nicholas Reid. First Appeared: JAS Review of Books.
Stephen Oliver’s anthology of 2001, Night of Warehouses, brought together the work of a poet who combines an astonishing facility for image with a complete assurance of voice, while showing a deep engagement with the poetic tradition . Two new collections, Ballads, Satire & Salt and Deadly Pollen, will do much to extend that reputation. ”

“ Stephen Oliver b. 1950. Grew in Brooklyn-west, Wellington, New Zealand. One year Magazine Journalism course, Wellington Polytechnic. Radio NZ Broadcasting School. Casual Radio Actor. Lived in Paris, Vienna, London, San Francisco, Greece and Israel. Signed on with the radio ship, ‘The Voice of Peace’ broadcasting in the Mediterranean out of Jaffa. ”

“ POETS’ PALACE: a name given by the author to an old Kauri, weatherboard guest house in France Street (the upper story of which he occupied in the early ’80s) near the prostitute’s strip off K’rd, Auckland. Various ‘emerging’ poets & artists lived downstairs at intervals during this period. As the last of its kind in Newton Gully this 100 year old wooden building was finally demolished at the close of the decade. Deadly Pollen is published by Word Riot Press PO Box 414 Middletown, NJ 07748 USA http://www.wordriot.org/press ISBN 0-9728200-2-7 Typeset by Word Riot Press in Bembo Contents ”

“ Deadly Pollen (2003) Ballads, Satire & Salt (2003) Recordings Earthbound Mirrors, a selection, Stephen Oliver, Ode Records Label, Auckland, (cassette) 1984 For more information on Stephen Oliver visit: http://people.smartchat.net.au/~sao/ Cover design: Pina Ricciu. Cover image: The Lithuanian Bison, engraving from J. von Brincken, 1828. Acknowledgements: Antipodes (USA) , Biff’s Quarterly (USA) , Brief (NZ) , Catalyzer Journal (USA) , Comet Magazine (San Francisco) , JAAM (NZ) , Poetry NZ/26 featured poet, San Francisco Salvo, Spreadhead (USA) , Thylazine (Aust) . ”