Finders keepers: Kris Kneen

Writers are always collecting. Ideas for stories, poems and books can come from anywhere. Things writers see or touch or read can return – sometimes unexpectedly – in the future to inspire them. 

State Library is filled with treasures and curios. In this new series, we invite authors to find an item in our collections that inspires them to write a new, original creative piece of work.

Our first author is Brisbane-based Kris Kneen, whose most recent book is Fat Girl Dancing.

To find their inspiration, Kris went straight to level 3 where the library's vast music collection is housed next to the cosy Tim Fairfax Reading Room. It turns out that as well as being an accomplished writer of poetry, prose, non-fiction, and screenplays, Kris knows a great deal about instrumental music. For this post, Kris offers us an expressive and generous poem after they were inspired by memories of their musician grandfather and a humble music book they found. 

All through my childhood I played the clarinet. My grandfather’s family were musicians. My great grandfather played cello in the concert hall in Alexandria in Egypt, my grandfather, displaced, played duets on his piano with me in his bedroom in Blacktown, New South Wales. I took music for granted. I played first clarinet in the school band. But when I left home, I stopped playing. I pawned my instrument. I forgot music. Recently I bought myself a clarinet. I have not forgotten how to hold it, how to arrange my mouth and play a note. I have forgotten how to read music and it bothers me that something that was second nature could be so easily lost. 

When I saw that the library had collections of sheet music I was drawn to the back room on level 3. I found the clarinet section and this particular book of music. There were duets with clarinet and piano and I remembered my grandfather playing with me, secretly in his back room. Music was a language we spoke together. For many years I have been mute. This poem is about this loss of language and loss of familial connection. Looking at the sheet music is a little step towards reclaiming that part of myself.

'Easy original clarinet solos'

by Kris Kneen

 

The space between language and note.

The space between my fingertips

And keys as warm as wood

As cold as stainless steel

And dust-shadows under my bed.

 

The space between synapses

Carelessly knitting dot-stick to finger to breath

My lips tingle with the tone, tone, semitone

Flat, sharp, rest.

A breath.

 

Words like talismans

Tempo di menuetto

Rondo

Adagio

Ancient spells that once

Conjured sound

As Madame Blavatsky

Conjured silence

And Hilma af Klint

Conjured dream

A coven of spiritualists

Who once conjured me.

 

The space between action and memory

A thrumming in my fingers

At the sight of the notes sweeping up

A stave

A rising slur

A faint throb of magic

In my chest

My mouth tight

(embouchure)

My fingers

Rising and falling

My eyes eke out sound-shape

Ribs filled with sympathetic vibrations

Gone

But not forgotten.

 

My grandfather readies ghost fingers

Grand Duo for Clarinet and Piano

Filling history with chords and cadence

A swell of memory reverberating

Through suburban Blacktown and

Egyptian concert halls.

 

My eyes

Quiet in the library

Catch a tearful tremolo

Of sharps and flats.

My music lost to the white noise

Of decades of neglect.

 

The space between writer and first clarinet.

The space between knowledge and forgetting

The space between adult and child

Between here now and lost then.

 

The space between bass and treble clef

An incantation on a page

Gives form to forgotten self-hood

Sebelius

Bizet

Rachmaninoff

Charles Kneen

And me.

The space between swallowed voice and restless ghost

The space between transience and permanence.

The space between myself and me.

Kris Kneen is the award-winning author of fiction, poetry and non-fiction including An Uncertain Grace which was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Their poetry collection Eating My Grandmother won the Thomas Shapcott Prize. They have written and directed broadcast television documentaries and were the Copyright Agency Ltd Non-fiction Fellow in 2020. Fat Girl Dancing is their latest book.