Prize-winning Gippsland writer Jeannie Haughton joins our group of essayists here, with a deeply felt, acutely observed response to the title piece from a fine collection of poems by renowned Melbourne poet Claire Gaskin:
PAPERWEIGHT – Reading a key poem by Melbourne poet Claire Gaskin
by Jeannie Haughton
I am magnetically drawn to the title of this collection, and this poem. From a writer’s perspective, the words ‘paper weight’ are laden. What writer has not felt the weight of the empty page, of completed but unsatisfying chapters, or the burden of what they should really be communicating?
And yet flyweight, featherweight, paperweight convey lightness.
Gaskin’s second poetry collection, Paperweight, published by the Hunter imprint of Contemporary Australian Poets, 2013 (p. 44), is a collection of almost 50 poems. The poem giving this book its title is midway through the collection. I have been both moved and prodded by its clarity and obscurity and lured into its contrary currents. It leaps off the page with vivid imagery, all the while dropping literary and feminist breadcrumbs for the reader to follow.
The poem is full of delights which I have dissected again and again. Part of me thinks such minute scrutiny is unfair, unpoetic, and yet, under this close inspection, the deconstruction and reconstruction, my admiration for the poem, and the poet, has been amplified.
A Melbourne-based poet, creative writing teacher and mentor, Dr Claire Gaskin has been writing and publishing her poetry extensively for over three decades. She holds a PhD in Writing and Literature from Deakin University: I’m relieved, thinking Gaskin must have done her own share of literary dismemberment.
Gaskin’s poetry collections include: A Snail in the Ear of the Buddha, 1998; a bud 2006; Paperweight, 2013; Eurydice Speaks, 2021; Ismene’s Survivable Resistance, 2021; and Weather Event, 2024.
Her poetry has also been published in Australian anthologies: Australian Poetry 2009, Motherlode, Australian Love Poems 2013, Best Australian Poems 2009, 2010, 2013 and in Contemporary Australian Poetry and Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry.
***
In a cafe, a writer waits for inspiration:
three pots of tea I sit here
while the cafe is selling cool and the look of the staff
The poet herself appears to be the picture of cool. (Why do writers choose cafes as workplaces? They are noisy, distracting places.) For Gaskin, this cool cafe is the best place to observe, and capture with haiku precision, the essence of the place and the people of that place. It is also where she ponders and gleans the rich pickings of her studies.
In “Paperweight”, akin to a Satin Bowerbird’s collection of blues, Gaskin’s many vignettes make a perfect contribution to a unique work. Across many artforms, collage, montage, assemblage and pastiche all involve the gathering of different/individual small forms to create a new whole. At first, although stanzas leap at me, the whole picture is unclear
Gaskin consciously weaves historical quotes with Imagist observations while lightly concealing the meaning. (The aim of poetic concealment: to encourage readers to allow connections and juxtapositions, imagery and illusions to wash over them, to unleash feelings and response, to simply be affected. Understanding and intention take a back seat.)
‘No matter what control poets attempt to exert on a page,’ says Simon Armitage, ‘ownership and empowerment over any text rests ultimately with the readers, and readers are largely unpredictable in their responses …’ (A Vertical Art, Oxford Lectures, 2015-201).
The opening stanzas introduce observation from the first of Claire Gaskin’s mostly-dead, white feminist writers.
we live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us
says Austen
the dead are useful as paperweights
Randomly, I have just visualised multitudes of Jane Austens captured inside glass globules, their only use, the weighing down of pages of text! I wonder where the poet is leading me.
practical like a piece of soap
in a stocking
tied to a tap over a bucket
in a front garden
This vivid image whisks me out of the poem to a time before liquid soap dispensers, when a bar of yellow Velvet soap was precious, not to be wasted. In a front garden, above a concrete laundry trough or a schoolyard sink. Practical and anachronistic, a piece of soap in a stocking.
Has it been suggested the words of Austen are useful and practical? Or anachronistic, useful only as paperweights?
After fixating on taps and soap and paperweights, I am intrigued and must read on…
***
Here, then, is the full poem ‘Paperweight’ by the prolific and enduring Claire Gaskin:
we live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us
says Austen
the dead are useful as paperweights
practical like a piece of soap
in a stocking
tied to a tap over a bucket
in a front garden
three pots of tea I sit here
while the cafe is selling the look of the staff
the body must be heard
says Cixous
the moon is full
the pain in my uterus
she keeps pulling
her blue tailored shirt down
over her lower-back tattoo
my mother on the phone shocked she has spoken
to my dead father out loud
suppose, for instance, that men were only
represented in literature as lovers of women
says Woolf
her orange-singlet breasts
rest on the laminex
she leans forward as he leans back
the glass holds water
the rotating blades of the ceiling fan
and light
A Very Easy Death, de Beauvoir says
The sight of mother’s nakedness
had jarred me. No body existed less for me:
no one existed more.
their graves are shallow because the soil is rocky
a child of sand
the wind remembers
and blows away
a world of comfort and family
that disappears when the match goes out
part of her dress
hangs out the car door
as she drives past oblivious
cool defines itself by what it rejects, it has no substance
and the workers are pissed-off by what is required of them
Woolf would say it’s not good to work from anger or defence
so long as you write what you wish to write
she says
for another six pages while my vegetables get hot in the car
functional like a piece of soap in a stocking
tied to a tap over a bucket
my heart a paperweight
on a fiction of self-possession
Claire Gaskin
***
Akin to Austen (‘our feelings prey upon us’), Gaskin mulls over the wisdoms of feminist writers (Jane Austen, b. 1775; Virginia Woolf b. 1882; Simone de Beauvoir b. 1908; and Cixous, b. 1937). Some of the most arresting lines and stanzas in this poem are not original, but quotes from these feminist writers whom Gaskin clearly respects:
Du Beauvoir: the sight of mother’s nakedness/ jarred me. No body existed less for me:/ no one had existed more.
Woolf: suppose, for instance, that men were only/ referred to in literature as lovers of women
Cixous: the body must be heard
Lesser-known Cixous was a feminist experimental and academic writer critical of the masculinity of language who created the first centre of Women’s Studies in France. Cixous springboards Gaskin to observe:
the moon is full
the pain in my uterus
she keeps pulling
her blue tailored shirt down
over her lower-back tattoo
her orange-singlet breasts
rest on the Laminex
she leans forward as he leans back
It is interesting to note Gaskin’s repeated observation of other women and their clothes, and the actions around the clothing that reveal internal states of mind. And yes, women do look at what other women are wearing, at times quite critically, but Gaskin’s neutral observations allow the reader to decipher each mini story.
Du Beauvoir’s famous words about her mother’s body are reflected in Gaskin’s own mother:
my mother on the phone shocked she has spoken
to my dead father out loud
The use of concrete statements, neatly juxtaposed, which create clear unbiased snapshots of the moment is a cap-doff to Ezra Pound and others of the Imagist movement in poetry.
cool defines itself by what it rejects, it has no substance
and the workers are pissed-off by what is required of them
part of her dress
hangs out the car door
as she drives past oblivious
Woolf would say it’s not good to work from anger or defence
so long as you write what you wish to write
she says
for another six pages while my vegetables get hot in the car
the glass holds water
the rotating blades of the ceiling fan
and light
Gaskin’s cafe is also a place of newspapers and daily current affairs which interrupt her dalliance with the luminaries to inject world events into her thoughts and poem.
their graves are shallow because the soil is rocky
a child of sand
the wind remembers
and blows away
a world of comfort and family
that disappears when the match goes out
These haunting, heart-breaking, universal images resonate, be it 2013, or 2025.
And back to the paper weight. I wonder, was Gaskin aware of the symbolic use of paperweights by other writers? The glass paperweight sold to Winston Smith in George Orwell’s famous 1984, symbolised Winston’s desire to connect with the past and to discover the truth of what had really happened to society. Haruki Murakami, in Norwegian Wood, observes that, ‘Death exists– in a paperweight… –and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.’ (1987)
In some ways, Gaskin’s ability to layer and contrast imagery and thoughts creates an enigmatic collage, one the reader must spend time with. The reward: to see clearly from between the lines the poet at work in the cool cafe, self- conscious of the uber cool writer she appears to be, acutely aware of the magnificent luminaries who have come before her, doubting her own contribution, and like all writers, anxiously casting around for inspiration:
my heart a paperweight
on a fiction of self-possession