The Streets Aren’t For Dreamers

Tim Thorne

Shoestring Press

Nottingham, 1995

ISBN: 1 899 549 02 1

I love poking around charity shops, their bookshelves and, if they have one, the poetry section. This section may or may not have poetry books in it and if it does, they are usually hidden between plays, books on religion or, most often, ‘poetry’ has just become the overflow area for the miles of abandoned cookery books that fill shops like these. Then I love poking around the books that I bring home and this particular find offers up some interesting considerations.

Tim Thorne [1944-2021] was a standout Tasmanian poet. He published his first book of verse in 1969, his last in 2018, 15 in all, so, at number 7, The Streets Aren’t For Dreamers is about half way through his oeuvre by number of editions and by years. It is only 26 pages long, so is very much more like a chapbook. The cover is brown card, outfacing and off-white inside to match the pages that have been stapled in. This card is slightly pebbled to give the faint feel of worked leather, the font is Times and printed in white. There are flaps to this cover through they are not printed on and inside the back of the cover a brief ‘acknowledgements’ text is printed in the same brown as the cover. The pages inside are thick with a similar although more pronounced ‘pebble’ feel. Poem titles are in all upper case. The font of the text matches the cover.

The smell from the folds of the pages is gentle and pleasant, with a very faint sense of bleach, but no trace of dust or damp. For a paperback it has been very well preserved. It was printed in Nottingham by “Chas. Goater & Son Ltd.” And the use of the ampersand reminds me of the efficiency of printers. Mechanised molten-then-cooling-and-formed letter presses – even though this book just falls within the age of the digital printer. Under the title on the title page Tim himself has signed it “for Dorothy with love,” and the two capital ‘t’s of his name are cranes hunched in a pond, or we might say backward ‘3’s – which is to say a ‘t’ made with only one stroke. As the shop where I found this book is only a click away from the Varuna Writers’ Centre, and as the brown text inside the back cover thanks this centre for supporting the production of the edition, I type “Dorothy” and “Varuna” into Google to see if anything obvious comes up. The Dictionary of Sydney notes that Dorothy Porter was in residency there in 1997 – which is two years after publication of this work, but the connections also of this centre to Dorothy Hewitt are also extensive. These make for two obvious choices for the dedication. Then, of course, there are the dozens of other Dorothys the poet may have known – but I do like to speculate. As one might expect of such a volume, the Tasmanian minister for the arts and Arts Tasmania are thanked but what is also interesting are the thanks which the publisher offers to “East Midlands Arts” – as though back in these frontier days of the nineties, poetry funding in English still flowed outside the strict regionalism that now so strongly divides funding in the Anglosphere.

The pen marks of the dedication do not remain on the title page alone. It is interesting to see how Tim has gone through the volume with the same ink correcting three little mistakes. With some delight we find a line in the middle of page 12 that reads

in case Satan through the floorboard cracks

takes my by surprise again

Here the author has crossed out the ‘y’ and placed a written ‘e’ as a superscript above the ‘m.’ Now to you this might look like a simple printer’s or editor’s mistake. Could this be, however, proof that the devil indeed does exist? That he has let himself into our world through this spelling mistake, and his presence is clearly demonstrated by the persistence of the mistake despite the professionalism of author, editor, and printer? That this Satan has indeed taken the voice of this poem literally by surprise?

The next intercision by pen is at the top of page 18. A shopping mall is closing down for the day and

…. Meanwhile, the lost toddler’s

been dragged from the toyshop to the car seat.

But by a crossed out letter and a new ‘a’ written above we find that this lost toddler was, thankfully, never really lost and has more sensibly has become the ‘last’ toddler taken from the shop. Relief. The lost child is found by a single pen stroke. But is it the superscript ‘a’ that is the hero of this lost child narrative and the one who has found him? The final pen correction is on the back cover where what seems to be a three-month celebration of the Gleebooks Poetry Spring is revealed more efficiently as a momentary ‘Sprint’ – which Tim, along with a range of other prises, has won. I delight in how he has taken the care to make these changes not in the cursive of the dedication but by using his pen to carefully replicate the font of these added letters. It has me thinking – did he do this for each copy or was this corrective added just for Dorothy alone?

Now, you might hate me for making fun of these mistakes, or even for noting them, but this is not my motivation. I raise these little changes because it makes this volume all the more human. Knowing that it was Tim himself who laboured over these changes makes this book far more personal. It draws me to a deeper connection with Tim Thorne as author, book manager, and perhaps horrified pen-wielding corrector, and I feel for him in that moment when, excited to get a pack of printed books from Nottingham – his own books – he found these little mistakes. I also like the fact that, according to his Wikipedia page, 10 years before this edition came out, he founded the Tasmanian Poetry Festival, and that he held a residency with the Miscellaneous Workers Union which, given my own union connections, makes another fraternal bond between us.

About now, you might be wondering if I am going to mention the poetry. Yes, but let’s never forget the importance of a book as an object and an expectation that, by its carefully managed details sets an atmosphere around us as we start to read for, in my eyes, mistakes and all, a book remains a spectacular achievement.

What these poems tell us, contra the title, is that the streets are for dreamers, but the dreams here are small and retrospective. Characters look back on their short lives – sometimes with fondness occasionally with horror. Thorne here is trying to discuss the hopelessness of life in Tasmania and in particular the roughness of life on the streets of its towns and cities. There are poems from car-obsessed hoons, from those who can’t find meaning beyond drugs, from those who are able to do nothing but busk - and the lesson the poet gives on these subjects is gentle, mostly considered, and in no way overwrought. There is a call for social justice here, but it is not made by labouring policy points, rather it is done by amplifying the stories of those hard done by. These verses, then, consistently ask us to consider what life on the streets can mean. This is good.

What is less good is the way women’s voices are presented. Of the twenty poems in the book one is by a genderless narrator writing about an aboriginal woman rebelling against the colonial whites (‘Cardia Lola: Arramaieda at the Oak’). The distanced narrator is re-awakening an aspect of Tasmanian history and encouraging future indigenous heroism. Another poem is about a street-bound Jehovah’s Witness critiquing the wantonness of both the men and women passing him (‘Witness’). This seems to me a potent dramatic scenario played out with intriguing competence. But six poems are written from the perspective of young women out on the streets (‘Madonna and Child’, ‘Stairway’, ‘Advice’, ‘Words for K’, ‘The Ballad of Tamieka Sharp, Aged 15’ and ‘Escort’). In all Thorne is motivated by the same social justice concerns that drive the rest of the book, and I suspect his research is carefully collated. The title and content of ‘The Ballad of Tamieka Sharp, Aged 15’ suggests he knew and spoke with a ‘Tamieka’ and that this girl, living precariously in a cave, was indeed 15. Still, I feel uneasy that these voices speak not as themselves (with Thorne framing the words and actions of these women as their narrator) but they speak only through Thorne’s character construction of them. So that the male voice replaces the female voice completely and they have no way to get through to us except via the poet’s mimicry of their state. This can lead to a universalisation of the female experience as we see in ‘Escort’ where he says (as she):

Bucking with fake joy I syphon

your pride and let it soften

in the lather of our bargain.

You were the hard man, the men,

all my uncles, landlord

of every clammy flat. Now

I’m getting the rent easy

as moaning.

Thorne passes on to us somatic experiences that are very unlikely to be his own and the genuineness of the poem is corrupted by the political complexity of a male poet speaking as a sexually abused sex worker.

It was 1995 when this was written and times have changed, but here is one of the crucial reasons why we should read as much poetry as we can and do so as carefully as we can. Thorne’s work is a cry on behalf of the marginalised and the hopeless. In relating this cry to us the author writes some poems that leave me feeling politically uncomfortable. The challenge then is framed. How do men write women, and how can they make their strategies for this more successful? Similarly, these poems ask us – how can we carry forward Thorne’s social justice concerns, but do so in a way that does not collapse the voice of women completely into a male construction of them? This is a good challenge for any creative mind male or female. Thorne in this work gives us this challenge – which is also a warning – that we think deeply about the voices of others before using the strategy he deploys in these six awkward poems.

I am writing this review in November of 2021. The Wikipedia page tells me that Thorne died two months ago. I only picked up his book this morning. Sadly, two months ago would have been in the depths of lockdown, and the death notice in The Advocate reflects this: “A celebration of Tim’s life will occur at a later date” it reads. I do hope so.