Paul Hetherington
Pavement Painting
—after Jane Monson’s “Road Art”
She lies on a pavement painting of a mongoose. Nearby, cars accelerate toward the intersection without noticing her cheek nestling against the brown pigments of animal fur. The street is empty of pedestrians; no-one says they’ll phone an ambulance or nurse her head in careful hands. Other creatures begin to intervene. Crows hunching on the fence make scything announcements just as a Mercedes takes a corner at speed, fishtailing away. A power pole throws its shadow towards her, pointing like a teacher at a complex equation – and, as the car moves out of sight, the street takes on a classroom’s distracted air. Two insects climb the mongoose’s back and search her long plait; a supermarket docket floats next to her ankle; a butterfly skims her forehead before alighting on a flower. From above, the pavement gleams where the mongoose opens its toothy mouth; a dark leaf skids into the grin of a letterbox and soundlessly falls out of sight; a squirrel descends a tree trunk just as an approaching siren gusts into the street. Memory forms and empties. Ants inspect her lips as a neighbour exits a house and points. The painted mongoose is out-of-sorts, with softness in the depiction of its flank where she nuzzles into her perception something familiarly strange.
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Statement of Homage
I have been reading Jane Monson’s prose poetry for many years, and I especially admire the manner in which the cumulative detail and narrative components of her prose poems move so easily toward figurative tropes and poetic gestures. The prose poem I have written, “Pavement Painting,” is “after” her prose poem, “Road Art,” published in The Fortnightly Review on September 4, 2020. This poem meditates on the way in which people may fall in an ordinary street with little attention being paid to them while being surrounded by a variety of other, often unremarked, creatures and inanimate objects. It deals with notions of vulnerability and evanescence. My prose poem takes up the main tropes of Monson’s prose poem while working some variations on her themes and ideas—a direct act of homage to a fine writer.
Jane Monson
Jane Monson lives in Cambridge, UK as a poet, independent researcher and Specialist Mentor for disabled students at the University of Cambridge. She edited the prose poetry anthology, This Line is Not For Turning (2011) and British Prose Poetry: The Poems without Lines (2018). She is a widely anthologised prose poet and her prose poetry, articles and reviews have been widely published. Her poetry collections include Speaking Without Tongues (2010), The Shared Surface (2013) and the forthcoming The Chalk Butterfly (2022).
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Paul Hetherington is a distinguished Australian poet who has published 16 full-length collections of poetry and prose poetry. He has won or been nominated for more than 30 national and international awards and competitions, recently winning the 2021 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. Paul is Professor of Writing at the University of Canberra, head of the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI), and joint founding editor of the journal Axon: Creative Explorations. With Cassandra Atherton, he is co-author of Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton UP, 2020) and co-editor of Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (Melbourne UP, 2020).