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    Beautiful Waste: Poems by David McComb
    Beautiful Waste: Poems by David McComb
    Beautiful Waste: Poems by David McComb
    Ebook113 pages47 minutes

    Beautiful Waste: Poems by David McComb

    By David McComb and John Kinsella

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    About this ebook

    Published for the first time, this collection gathers the poetry of David McComb, the gifted and enigmatic songwriter and lead singer of the Triffids. Written during his 20s and 30s, when the band's output peaked, these perceptive pieces explore and confront topics such as addiction, pop culture, and the colloquial and metaphysical. Illuminating a hitherto neglected aspect of the artist's creative brilliance, this collection will strike a chord with anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry or the music of David McComb.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateSep 1, 2009
    ISBN9781760991623
    Beautiful Waste: Poems by David McComb

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      Book preview

      Beautiful Waste - David McComb

      PREFACE

      IT was during the course of compiling and editing Vagabond Holes: David McComb and The Triffids (Fremantle Press, 2009) that the editors of the present volume were kindly granted access to the poetry of David McComb. The poems contained in this book existed in a semblance of manuscript form when we first encountered them, together with McComb’s tentative proposals for ordering the contents of a modest volume, and the names and addresses of prospective publishers. Clearly, in the case of a typewritten manuscript entitled ‘IF FOUND PLEASE PUBLISH’ — ‘an anthology of the hopefully poetic musings of a teenage boy, AD 1975’ — McComb had long been intent on making his mark as a published poet. (Though, it should be noted, this juvenilia has been omitted from the present collection, in favour of poems written when McComb was in his twenties and thirties.)

      In terms of literary aspirations, however, McComb’s reputation as a ‘singer-songwriter’ appears to have been a stumbling block. Certainly, McComb was wary of rock music’s well-worn literary pretensions: ‘Rock Star Publishes Slim Volume of Poetry has such a shitty ring to it,’ he once quipped during an interview with Jon Casimir (‘The Black Swan’, Rock Australia Magazine, 17 May 1989). Such reservations notwithstanding, the editors are confident that this much belated — indeed, posthumous — ‘slim volume’ is none too daggy.

      A note on the ordering of poems in this book is perhaps warranted. McComb made several attempts to arrange the poems in a definitive sequence, none of which seems to have been more satisfactory to him than any other. Faced with these several possibilities, the editors have chosen to retain, where possible, a trace of McComb’s apparent intentions (his own sequences most commonly begin with ‘Prayer for One’, for example) but otherwise assembled them — eccentrically, perhaps, but we do not think unsympathetically — around loosely shared themes or objects: body parts; loss; love (gone wrong, often); nature; and (to borrow a term of McComb’s that we deploy in Vagabond Holes) unmarked tracks. We stress, then, that there is no authoritative sequence against which to judge the ordering of poems here as either faithful or capricious; but certainly our own arrangement of the poems should not be taken as definitive either.

      We are indebted to Joanne Alach and Robert McComb, without whom this book would not have been possible. We also thank Graham Lee and David Nichols, who each gave valuable pointers on the life of David McComb, poet.

      INTRODUCTION: IN BETWEEN WORDS

      John Kinsella

      DAVID McComb was a poet of coexistence. His liminality was more than living on both sides of a border at once; it was seeing the good in the bad, and the bad in the good, not in polarised terms but of necessity. He could celebrate the grim while loathing it. He could detest yob culture while singing to it; could make the poetic out of cliché and yet critique the easy saying, and the easy way out. He could be an addict and a purist. It’s not just a matter of contradictions (though there are plenty of these), but of a literary thinker who also engaged with the ‘ordinary,’ who thrived on the energy of paradox. Even when energy is sapped, biologically or emotionally, a glimpse into an altered state can generate hope. This is poetry about drawing life when life is being sapped; about exploring nostalgia because there’s no real hope for nostalgia. It’s a Dorothy Parker relishing the grim portrait because the writing of it matters. It’s a loathing of pretence, which resists the allure of belles-lettres while maintaining a certain faith with literary tradition. It’s not faux ‘on the streets,’ but streetwise; not hiding behind the facts of privilege, but showing their lack of worth and the damage they inflict in all directions. It’s connecting with landscape because a truth can be found in sea, sand, air, trees, rocks, space … if you want to find it.

      As a

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