She prefers
my phone &
using my
computer
w out the burden
of her life
last night
I described
it open
a circle
she kisses
my knee
its life
that is
my name
they thought
she had
a lot
I think
it’s enough
I mean
it’s astonishing
if I had (his)
I could
feel everything
but as it is
I know
what it is
I love your
lips.
Fingers slick with smell,
hippocampus trick filling gaps.
From tram stop to rooftop, a kiss
still fresh on lips. This love’s been
all spanners, heaps to work out—
work through smuggled touching
between seats. Duration deficit:
twenty-six ’til the 96, hit snooze
times five. Maribyrnong walks and mud
on shoes, I’m on my way. Sneaking in,
I’m on my way: ETA unknown. You say
you’re with me. Nail-biter, make me
lightheaded—limbs weaved, must I bear this
wait? I need to learn how to trust
when you’re not there.
Faraway daze, covet constancy.
Microsecond split, I am too
in my head. 7.25 ’til showtime—
the next stage in my view.
Wurundjeri then Whitehall,
bridge over river. Last one before
the long one, amygdala multi-shot.
Double latte, stolen breakfast:
10.16 won’t seem that late.
I was costumed in a white tiger stripped bodysuit when I found out
I’d been accepted into the graduate creative writing program at the University
of British Columbia. The bodysuit was one size too small
and my labia majora squeezed out from either side of the gusset
whenever I sat down.
I sat with the other sluts, most of whom I loved like stopped clock
around a vinyl topped card table inside a corrugated steel barn
in Huntsville, Alabama. Our hosts brought warm tamales
wrapped in tinfoil and homemade moonshine.
From the moonshine
I expected what I expect of every spirit
stronger than seventy proof. I expected a methanol spice akin to grappa
and I yearned for the zippered mountain road between Sulmona and Pacentro
along which I once vomited in the passenger side footwell of an Alfa Romeo.
The Italian word for vomit is vomito. Maybe it’s nostalgia, but vomito sounds so cute.
Cute enough to name a small pet.
Moonshine flint behind my ears. My cell phone lit with a 604 area code.
The admissions secretary’s voice was bright and high
despite her calling from four thousand plus kilometres away.
She said “I’m so happy for you”
and “your acceptance letter is in the mail”
and “you should apply for a scholarship.”
The secretary knew my livelihood was pussy tap.
It’s likely the entire selections committee knew.
One can only write so many poems about men’s billfolds.
Our MC, Rose Anna, announced my big news to the audience. Their clanging
applause surprised me. It shouldn’t have because a whore that goes to collage is adorable.
Live-nude-crook turned hit-the-books is a narrative string
any fella can feel good about tucking a fiver into.
The rough decked stage caught my stiletto. The sound of my knees
pounding plywood was barely audible against the sonic boom of burlesque.
And besides what’s another bruise?
What’s a bruise? What’s a bruise? What’s a blue moon bruise
to do but pull young blood to and fro like the tide? What’s a bruise
but a testament to the sharp art of surrendering to place and time?
And how I surrendered to that stage. Quit the clamor
of spectator expectancy, the scream-pitch ringing in the round and instead
bowed down to the ageless filth of glitter and leaked fluid. Oh, hallowed ground
oh striptease stage, I prayed to spirits of every hustler who turned rock ballads
into rent, turned grind into gold. Face-downed belly-rolled until I met god
or a staph infection. Same difference.
This is definitely nostalgia talking. Don’t let me (and my propensity
for glorification) fool you. The truth
is I uprighted myself
and finished my routine
just like any other night.
I sometimes wonder, though do not care in the slightest, if pity
was the reason I was accepted into the creative writing program
at the University of British Columbia.
An anagram for “creative writing” is “tragic interview”
The one concrete detail I recall about the mother, who after the show
presented me with her virgin teenage son, was her pearls. Nacreous
is the adjective that describes the specific lustre of a pearl.
Her pearls had flawless nacre. Not like the poor flaking strand
passed down to me by my Nonna.
And we were in Alabama.
The mother in pearls was interested in buying sex for her teenage son.
“He has to become a man before going off to college.”
She was certain it was his virginity that hindered him
from the kingdom and the power of predestined manhood.
What she was unsure of was how much I should be paid for my service.
I would have to veer into fantasy to continue.
There’s nothing I remember about the teenage son.
To write what little appears on this page, I’ve superimposed the Geek
from the 1984 film Sixteen Candles and alternatively
Brian from The Breakfast Club.
A John Hughes-constructed outcast crying
over thwarted masculinity and a tenuous ability
to subjugate young women’s bodies.
I grew up with movies that taught me the meek
shall inherit the prom. Or, according to John Hughes
the Geek shall inherit access to a blackout-drunk cheerleader.
But life rarely mimics a Hollywood ending and sex work isn’t going anywhere.
I took my pussy tap money and went to Pacentro for the 553rd Corsa degli Zingari.
In the village dialect Zingari describes he who is barefoot.
Barefoot young men walk the mule tracks up Mount Marrone
past malnourished stray dogs that haunt the village cemetery, past
their ancestors resting in the high walls
past cicadas keening in the warped heat. Higher still, past
stone huts where shepherds have slept since time immemorial
past drags of scorched secondo dopoguerra earth, past
brown bear and antelope tracks, past prayer caves, past
consecrated bedrock, past unmarked graves. For the past
five and a half centuries barefoot young men have waited at the top
of Marrone rock for starting bell to echo through Peligna Valley.
This ringing bell made me cry for reasons I still do not understand.
I lined up with the other spectators to watch barefoot young men race
to the finish line. Bloody footprints on the church floor: a rite of passage.
Those who reached the Virgin became good men, heroes
spread in a dusty huddle before the altar. The Virgin of Loreto (or the Virgin
in this particular church) was pale blue, gold and haloed
in the kind of electric lights that reminded me
of a golden age of Hollywood dressing room.
And because I’ve seen every Fellini film,
I too knelt before Her and prayed.
For as long as I can remember I’ve been afraid of what I’ve seen and what I know
and now that I’ve refashioned this memory into a poem I choose not to show myself
praying the rosary, psalms or any grace I learned as a girl.
I prayed “Please, I don’t want to be afraid anymore. I’ll do anything, please
Ho paura. Paura lasciami. Please. Unafraid. Please.”
You (literally you) are reading queer and desperate poetry, and so
I already love you like a stopped clock, but if you’re wondering whether or not
I took that Alabamian mother’s money to fuck her virgin son then you too better
kneel down and pray.
The other sluts in dropped me and my bag full of small bills and animal
print lingerie off at O’Hare airport in Chicago. They travelled on to Milwaukee
maybe onto Minneapolis, and eventually into lonesome sphere
of memory. (These days, if I can’t find an old friend through google
I assume they are dead.) I flew back to Vancouver to attend the University
of British Columbia, where more than one professor warned me
not to confuse creative writing with therapy.
not this, or this
woman’s a waterline
you can’t crow your way home
with October banging round town
the weather settles early
waste erasing up and down
a brute dog after
all murky
and down in the details
cause the weight grows fire too
how you show curls
to school me a good time
cute as a kiss or
stealing covers
missing a way to come
away with only
SkinNotes by Kristen Lang
Walleah Press, 2017
Kristen Lang’s SkinNotes articulates an intense poetry and poetics of the body through a holistic series of lifelines in which skin, bone and organs are not so much dissected as regarded, reassembled and given human or other animate agency. Lang’s deft, original and at times startling use of metonymy places bodily parts and other material of daily life into alignments which convey an expansive range of meaning, dimension and depth.
The collection encompasses multitudes in both its scope and strata, with each skilfully edited section notable for a standout poem at its outset. ‘Glass’ is one of these, remarkable for the nuanced and multi-layered interplay between visible surfaces and what lies beneath:
The stained fringes of the shore remember the water. And the skins of the stones sketch their memories of the waves.
What is glass but sand, broken down and recomposed into the possible illusion of a level plane? Its transparency is both deceptive and a means by which a more complete perception of whatever it covers may be obtained. Just as stones contain water, so their own intrinsic elements are held in by a surface that despite its visibility remains imperceptible. These reanimated self-objects resist isolation or definition other than by shifting their constituent parts. This is reaffirmed by the luminous presence of ‘The horse’ that presages the third section of the book. By this point, Lang has already proposed that ‘none of us / are angels’, and this Rilkean thought expands through the equine incarnation and immanence. ‘How the angels are not ourselves’, she muses. Nevertheless, there are angels we fabricate: ‘We dress them’, possibly to cover their stark and frightening essence. Her eloquent rejoinder continues:
Much, though, is familiar. Are they here? The presence or absence of angels – how their songs dissipate in the slanting gaze of our search and we cannot guess what we would know of them.
The uncertain searching conveyed through the ‘slanting’ elision implies the same estrangement Rilke knew, that ‘we are not really at home in the interpreted world.’ Lang also concedes, despite ‘the familiar’ presences, this is mediated territory for human beings. Unlike us, the horse simply exists without apprehension of the terror that derives from the beauty each single angel encapsulates, even when its form seems to be within unsteady reach.
The animal world features in several, often shorter poems here, allowing for more condensed imagery when the discursive voice makes way for the emergence of ideas without reflective commentary. An example of this can be seen in ‘Dog quantum’, which begins with a simple physical sensation followed by creaturely emergence:
Swelling in our hands, her horse chest, bear paws, the loose giggle of her skin
This composes a gestalt of the immanent being, through connections that commence with the most palpable of feelings, moving seamlessly into ascription and metaphor that come off as effortless, despite the leftfield ‘loose giggle’ collocation. Another poem describes the recovery of a bird: ‘We follow the tide of its lungs, / the slow opening of its beak.’ The interplay between inside and outside space elaborates an instinct elaborated throughout the book, as the section ‘Blood harmonies’ ends with a poem for a young child, where
The birds of his heart flutter into my arms, swoop through my chest
Like the one recovered, whose ‘feathers hum with flight lines’, this literal embodiment moves in projective beauty and delight. The trope resurfaces, becalmed, in the wonderful and deceptively simple ‘Candlelight’:
the frayed flight-lines of the self, somewhere in the body’s cells, are as real as the flame you have painted by, as real as the stone.
The exact corporeal location may be uncertain or unspecified, but is also entirely perceptible and solid as its components coalesce into concise and incontestable articulation.
Contact in more overtly self-contained contexts consists of interlaced elements that at times elude comprehension, if not apprehension: ‘The touch / we cannot choose to extinguish’ in the opening poem, in one example, leading in to the initial section where the creation of new life and the changes that occur in the body involved predominate. A longer poem, central to the tropes Lang follows, ‘The small house of her body’, is structured like the book in four parts, expressing the pain of an unnamed trauma, that hints at either abortion or violent parturition (‘the torn haze of what she had done’), and in ‘Lake’ – as a coda – ‘she is torn by the ripples.’ Around the repeated rupture and aftershock the encircling stones are ‘dark as eyes.’ These simple seeming lines convey the concept of deep song and unfathomable nature of duende: love and almost inexpressible loss, lines that can be strummed like Lorca’s best when stripped down, as
skin folds the shadows of her bones, lays them on the bed in the slip of the hour. Her lungs grip.
The poet returns through assonance and music to stark physiological consciousness, night and a phoneme removed from sleep. ‘Lake’ is one of several poems here related to the oneiric capacity for ‘crumbling’, a word used more than once throughout the book, as well as heightened sensory reception in its stages or absence. In ‘The slight translucence of the sleepless’, for instance, tiredness assumes the simile: ‘like moonlight / on the inside of her skin.’ Once again the reader is returned to the inside, complicit and becalmed at the source of things.
One characteristic of complex and original works is their confidence to operate outside established genre. SkinNotes contains Confessional and Imagist overtones without being dependent on either sensibility, creating enough space to manoeuvre and draw breath. Lang’s liberal use of personal pronouns and dedications punctuates a controlled discursive stream, with moments of spellbinding clarity and quietude that stop the reader short in sheer admiration. ‘Do play on’, she urges the body: a source of such splendour with its finely tuned and calibrated organs. As methodology, statement of intent or an invitation to start reading again, this underlines and understates a resonant tour-de-force.
The Hijab Files by Maryam Azam
Giramondo Publishing, 2018
The third section of Maryam Azam’s The Hijab Files is called ‘The Piercing of this Place’. It captures moments of perforation of this world by jinn, prayer, memory, death, and other unnamed, unnameable, astounding things.
Jinns make their homes where humans don’t. My older cousins told me this when they said they’d passed a jinn on a dirt road in the bush” ‘Jinns on Mt Kosciuszko’
our memory electrified except we had forgotten to go to class and felt the piercing of this place the way that entering into prayer pierces a place. ‘We Meet (Again)’
She held the bird and it was stone heavy as if to make the absence of soul clear through an exaggerated presence of body. The wondrousness of death chilled her.’ ‘Stone Heavy’
As a whole, what The Hijab Files does, is show that the piercing of this place is not only the piercing of the mundane by the transcendental; it is equally the piercing of the transcendental by the mundane. In contrast to ‘The Piercing of This Place’, the first two sections of the collection, entitled ‘A Brief Guide to Hijab Fashion’ and ‘Wallah Bros’, describe elasticity and porosity in the profound. And, let’s be clear, profundity is not often thought of in those terms.
In ‘Naseeb’, a poem in the ‘A Brief Guide to Hijab Fashion’ section, such profound topics as destiny and a potential arrangement of marriage for the young woman narrator are discussed. Meanwhile, the party of four sits ‘with our legs / crossed on the sofa eating / biryani from plastic plates. In ‘Shane No. 2’, from the section ‘Wallah Bros’, the sacredness of marriage competes with the very mundane needs of the human body:
Shane is shovelling the rice into his mouth and I can see that being my husband requires a lot of energy.
This realistic seamless coexistence of regular and religious experiences is comforting to read. In a Liminal interview with Robert Wood, Azam has said that The Hijab Files is ‘a snapshot in the life and times of a young woman in Western Sydney’. The richness of detail of both extraordinary and ordinary happenings described in the collection is one aspect of the mechanism of Azam’s de-Orientalising impulse. The young Western Sydney women/narrators of the collection are people with their own concerns and considerations. This stands in opposition to often one-dimensional representations of veiled Muslim women in poems by some white Australian poets. For instance, compare with these references to purdah and niqab in much older poems by Philip Salom or Dorothy Porter.
The women of The Hijab Files have ‘bad scarf days’ (‘A Brief Guide to Hijab Fashion’, p. 16) and deal with ‘fickle hearts’ (‘Facebook Relationship Status: Single’, p. 26). They pray, and they forget to pray. They have ‘stagnant Sundays’ (‘Layla and Majnun’, p. 30) and think about how weird their pets are. They go to school, and talk to their friends and parents, they go swimming and parasailing and snorkelling. But, as Azam says, ‘[t]o be a practicing Muslim is to bring your beliefs and religious practices to every aspect of life’. In the collection, things that happen are often conceived of as both religious and not, like the following, when the potential intervention of jinns comes into question:
In a dirt clearing surrounded by rocks are scattered two dozen chillies, plump and fresh as if they’d been picked off the plant a minute ago. The Woolworths down in Jindabyne doesn’t sell chillies ‘Jinns on Mt Kosciuszko’
And with these complex representations, The Hijab Files allows young Muslims in Australia to enter a narrative usually reserved for white, secular, ‘regular’ folk: sometimes things are ordinary, sometimes they are profound. The stunning accomplishment of The Hijab Files, however, is the grace and eloquence with which Azam relates these sometimes-mundane, sometimes-profound, always-relatable happenings.
Azam’s style is often direct, uncompromising. The poems written in this way feel easier to process because of this quality.
The sick bay seemed an odd place to use for prayer, the smell of disinfectant hinting at the volume and variety of bodily excretions. ‘Praying at School 1’
Circumstances and action are immediate, description is minimal, but alive. Azam writes with an awareness of the sensory. However, there is an array of beautiful, surprising metaphors among which the following stood out and have remained memorable for me:
Far more frightening than death the abyss is death not the abyss ‘Scary Thought’
The broken gas cannister of sleep slowly clears from my head. ‘Fajr Inertia’
I felt the world fold up around me like a cardboard box. ‘He Wrote’
she has not taken a breath outside this prism of protection since her father taught it to her ‘Duas Like Spells’
These beautiful lines, which often appear as a kind of gift / trip-wire within poems, are like the moments of profound clarity which pepper the life and times of the young Western Sydney women of The Hijab Files.
Apparent, of course, is that the collection is a text that cares deeply for its audience. It is a multilingual text. As a person of Indian origin with proximity (though not fluency) to multilingual thinking, speaking, and writing, I am very happy to see that non-English words and phrases are left unitalicised, often untranslated. This is a credit to Azam – and also to Giramondo – in normalising linguistic diversity. I do not know Giramondo’s house style, so this may be their standard, but it is certainly not the standard elsewhere. I, and other multilingual, migrant, culturally and linguistically diverse writers and editors welcome this intervention. As a non-Muslim, there is much of The Hijab Files that passes me by – language, custom, emotion. As a person of Indian origin, there are obvious moments where I am invited in – language, custom, emotion. But, Azam, in carefully selecting and ‘writing for an audience much like who [she] was in high school’, has not severely distanced other demographics whose own experiences may not align so closely with the young women in The Hijab Files. The poems are moving, there is joy and humour and gravity to them that is not unique to Azam’s specific slice of the Australian demographic pie. And, it’s a common truth that poems are not written to reach every reader with the same degree of clarity. These poems show there is much to be gained by centring young Muslim Australians.
Azam’s debut collection identifies and describes a flexibility and porousness in objects often thought of as stable and rigid. Cloth, faith, identity, reality become elastic. It conceives of worldly life as capable of sustaining simultaneity of perception, and as movement between piercing moments of profundity and mundanity.
1. Demo Day
Jo Gaines walks right into me and takes stock. Good bones,
y’all – I love this one. So much potential. Knuckle through a wall or two
and fill me up with light, hem back the big trees snagging eaves,
polish till you slide right off the slick of my boards. Tip out all my organs
and reset. Pull back my ceiling and truss me with fresh letter moulding.
A nest of bees released in a wall. The no-est house on Yes Street.
We just need the owner’s original mm to do this right, to fold
the thumb in and open the kitchen right up with a pop.
May as well rebrand your favourite prime-time flippin’ show
as Fister Upher. You’re welcome. Chip is somewhere else making a joke
into the hollow of another episode. The revolution is caramelised
in Joanna’s domestic vision. Let’s play house. She leans in
to lick up her handiwork, like a bond cleaner – the deepest
just before she leaves. Furrows to hang a final pendant light
from my cervix. Gimme Carrera. If it feels too full, let’s go low
on clutter. Are you ready to see your instant equity? Curbs
in all the right places. My muscles close around and vanish her work.
Any good renovation is invisible.
2. Nailed It
After Gertrude Stein
3. The Rose Ceremony
I am a dreadful flirt – the worst you’ve met.
She’s come around to watch – is this a date? This ritual,
to narrate like Attenborough: here we see the men
in TV’s natural habitat: The Mansion
set with daybeds, fairy lights, and ad breaks.
I want a rose more than I’ve ever craved a rose. Each bachelor
narrates, in turn, her entrance: Sophie walks in wearing—
and we’re speechless. Adjectives are mislaid in the fracas.
I’m the one man in this blur of boys. What would they do
with all the cameras off? What would we do with cameras on?
It’s like a bunch of pigeons with a chip. Can I just grab you,
Sophie, for a chat? (Does she even like The Bachelorette?)
The bachies pile their coats on Soph, till all we see
is bubbly flute and Uggs. You’re probably warm enough,
so I won’t offer. When I want someone, I want it like a volcano.
Sophie likes to sit on safe things only, like a couch.
This couch has not been safe for weeks – we even
tethered wifi from a phone once – so committed.
Our elbows keep making excuses. I learned to cook.
We know how to talk to girls, and how to date.
The female of the species picks off her lovers
one by one. I know I’m not the typical Bachelorette.
the price of freedom is eternal vigilance
– Thomas Jefferson
What we know about her is what she gives us
freely of her own will, one click wrap privacy
policy at a time, swiping across the slate of her life.
No red flags. Some search terms did generate
a first filter identification, but typing ‘terrorism’
is now as statistically common as ‘Trump’.
Her occluded and overshadowed earth is
portaled by the parabolic sweep of satellites
and anything done in secret soon enters the light.
She has two children, shops mainly locally,
pings the same cell towers every commute
predictably enough. We have adjusted our advertising.
The great collateral databases of the heart,
strung pin numbers, secret questions, blind
maiden names and first pets tangle the net.
A stable job, though debts exceed
income trending south, and her bank records
spot their charts with zeros. Bills gush red.
She has transited through the sift
and wringer of Tom Bradley, LAX, losing
an electron slice of cornea imprint, thumb whirl.
Her blood type is on record: a cancer scare,
a spilled pool of vital statistics, medication frothing
in the loose file of her body, a brief miscarriage.
She is the gestalt of her words.
She is the hologram of her actions.
We know her as a mother knows her child.
Behavioural stochastics approximate
her next decisions to within a
reasonable margin of error.
We are building her schematic by the day
and daily we are focussed on learning her.
What we know is more than she can know.
That she was up all night with a fevered child
is a matter of publically recorded metadata.
Phone logs. Helplines. Invisible departures of information.
We are her god of a thousand eyes
peering at her from every camera and device.
She has nothing to fear from us.
That her husband left her, was a surprise
equally to us, as it was to her, but
we will continue to refine the algorithms.
The inner life is essentially irrelevant.
The circuitry of motive and emotion.
By her actions we will judge her.
Run by Queensland Poetry Festival, and named in honour of a distinguished Queensland poet, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem is committed to encouraging poets throughout Australia. 2018 Selection panel: Alison Whittaker and Angela Gardner.
Winner
‘Reality On-demand’, was selected because it was too muscular to ignore, conveyed with a technical skill that denied us breath. It holds a mirror to the construction of increasingly curated forms of reality through media, without flinching. It asks, ‘What will we make of this?’, tackles our insatiable search for the real from home renovation dramas and cooking competitions to the ersatz confection of dating shows and wrestles it to the ground.
Runner up
We would also like to congratulate the second prize winner, for his poem ‘What We Know About Her’, Damen O’Brien. His poem, through a trail of sensitive, yet pedestrian, data and records, is a chilling mosaic of ourselves in surveillance societies.
Ultrasound in B-Flat and Other Poems
by Cary Hamlyn
Garron Publishing, 2018
The Quality of Light and Other Poems
by Jill Jones
Garron Publishing, 2018
Ultrasound in B-Flat and Other Poems, by Cary Hamlyn, and The Quality of Light and Other Poems, by Jill Jones, are two of five South Australian poetry chapbooks published by Garron Publishing in the spring of 2017.
In Jill Jones’s collection, The Quality of Light and Other Poems, ageing, mortality and memory are intensely private experiences that expand like ‘the nerve system of creeks leading into / the Torrens, or the oily wash / of Sydney Harbour’ to planetary dimensions, enfolding animals, city roads, streets, flowers, plants, bees, the skies and the galaxy into the rich particulars of its vast realm. Jones’s superb collection reinvigorates poetry as a quality of illumination amidst all kinds of opacity, sparking affective and rhythmic conversations between literature, politics, ecology and cosmology. Her poetry engages and enacts what T S Eliot called the ‘auditory imagination’, ‘the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and f eeling’. Deftly elliptical, suggestively insistent, and exuberantly introspective, The Quality of Light articulates the pleasurably enigmatic rhythms, tones and cadence of urban and modern existence.
An exemplar of poetry as practice, her collection recalibrates and proliferates our ways of seeing. Jones’ poems strike me as intensely democratic in effect and highly controlled in technique in its complex conjuration of spontaneous images as though independent of the poet, who becomes, in the process, one of the poem’s readers, acted upon and actively engaged in the practice of interpretation. In the opening poem, ‘The Quality of Light’, she writes: ‘the atmosphere, the clouds / I can see, any day I look up, are / there, and changing there / with or without me. With or / without me writing as though / they are there for me. / But I’m not there, in the letters / though I may scribe them’. She continues, ‘Luminosity perhaps is a dream, / like travel, building, or words. It all / comes and goes, it is / as if it’s happening…’ With characteristic elusiveness, Jones’s opening poem announces and enacts the collection’s process of seeing and interpreting images, memories and ideas in their slippery (re)creation, emphasising writing as inherently a form of active (readerly) participation.
There is so much here to explore. In the poem, ‘Wrack’, varied repetition and compressed, internal rhymes, which at times recall the characteristic style of American poet Kay Ryan, playfully perform and aggressively capture the ensnaring opacity of discourse: ‘it’s all brooding wrack or media flack, the rain / that never rains will rain and no attempt at / political hack will stop the weathering of weather / the tide comes, it’s not going back’.
Her writing communicates a profound ambivalence, expressing any emotion, state of being, sense of beauty, wonderment and imagination with measured equivocality. In this sense, Jones’s poems are imbued with emotional naturalism; her elliptical language but clear tone dexterously capture and engage but do not resolve or reframe life’s hard won and hard-battled ambiguities and complexities. The poem ‘Swoop’ sketches the spontaneous, raucous discordance and harmony of urban life without judgment: ‘leaves break in your hand, wing swoop / syncopates / blues of the galaxy / huge chords rush outside, rain, trucks / hard dreams / three stars in a pool / the grass shivers’.
One of the most mesmerising pieces in her collection, I think, is the poem, ‘Bitumen Time’. It evokes the familiar, yet profound, intangible exhilaration and melancholy of the journey home at night time. The run-on rhythm of dependent clauses is painfully staggered by pensive, insistent commas to create a sense of digressive relevance, a sense of the universal pull of ‘birds’, ‘bitumen thing’, ‘times, places’, ‘sounds that curve’, ‘roses…stripped/of winter colour’. With language and tone that blend enigmatic existential wonderment, the vagaries of memory and the crucial clarity of feeling, Jones asks: ‘[W]ho am I among/scent of this night flowering in dead arms of winter’? The poet’s language and pacing exert the central pull of the poem as though coming from forces beyond its control, what we cannot see but sense and experience as the subjective, invisible violence of humanity, of time, of systemic opacity, of collective, cumulative destruction, ‘…as though history ramps into/the moon’s famous indifference, the sky’s / night version of real things that hold into/strange corners, so help me, help me, / it’s transparent, but so alien, all these stories’.
Similarly, ‘The Vertigo Blues’ enacts a certain belligerence of fact, a fatalism that embraces both tragedy and beauty: ‘What makes it so / difficult is also what keeps me here, still. There are / silhouettes above my heart, a brace of baggy riffs / two-timing below.’
An intensity of tone at the heart of each masterfully crafted poem – ear, substance, subject matter, images and music deliberately, cautiously, vigorously consorting with each other –illuminates and intricately unravels our blinkered order of things. This, for me, is the pleasure of reading Jones’s beacon of a collection again and again.
Cary Hamlyn’s second collection, Ultrasound in B-Flat and Other Poems, sketches everyday sightings, objects and experiences; to name a few, the eponymous ultrasound, a lovers’ quarrel, a Burmese train journey, Siamese fighting fish, a dying pelican, sunflowers, night.
The stand-out piece in the collection for me was ‘Rozelle Boarding House for Sailors’, which cleverly engages the conspiratorial atmosphere and architecture of the haunted boarding house to convey the sense of the resurrection, renovation and reclamation of histories through storytelling: ‘In each single room their lives unwind, / each a story spun within a story – / as if every old tragedy or joy / were reinvented by the next man,/their thousand lost ships/still silently listing under our beds.’ The story of masculinity here is a poignant and complex one; the voiceless anonymity of the lives of the drowned sailors distances and abets their poetic (re-)construction, thus carrying with it an expressively equivocal force.
Perhaps less successfully, Hamlyn’s other poems at different points explore the theme of violent or predatory masculinity. A poem about a Lothario, drably titled ‘Preying in the ‘90s’, describes the said predator with unwieldy lines like ‘scoring women on a bell-curve / of ‘hotness’ and potential sizzle – / the Big Bang had nothing on him.’ Like some others in the collection (‘Post-Skirmish’, ‘Arguing with an Ex-Lover’, ‘On Meeting an Old Flame’), the title also seems unnecessarily prescriptive and adds further perfunctory framing to the poem’s meaning.
Interval by Judith Bishop
UQP, 2018
Interval is the fourth book for Judith Bishop and her first with University of Queensland Press. The book is divided into four sections. The first begins with an epigraph from the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard that ‘childhood is certainly greater than reality.’ It’s an apposite riff that informs the sentiment of the poems that follow it, in which speaker mothers talk to their children. These poems have a lyric modality, they feel intimate even confessional, while a tensioning quality of abstraction prevents slippage into pure nostalgia.
The first poem ‘Letter to My Daughters’ is organised around the refrain “bring me back to change the script’: a mother addresses her children about the failings of her parenting – (mild ones it must be said) such as restrictions on jumping in puddles, refusing the request for one last story – and asks ‘bring me back to change the script.’ ‘Give me time and I will stay with you / until our eyes have shut’, the speaker says, the irony of course being that time is so often the enemy of ideal parenting. Against the mildness of the complaint and the retroactive idealism of the improving parent, the shut eyes don’t just imply the bliss of mother and daughters falling asleep together, a kind of revelling in Blakean innocence, but also the threat and inevitability of mortality.
Reading the early poems in Interval, it is impossible to tell whether the swelling undertone of tragedy is due to the regrets of the parent, or potentially the loss of a child. Bishop’s lines resist such easy identification of event to emotion and are all the tauter because of it. When reading lyrical poetry, there is always the temptation to conflate the poet with speaker, a temptation whose satisfaction is deferred, not least by the speaker’s battle with time, which we also see in ‘Poem for a Little Girl’, elegantly comprised of six three-line strophes, the last three of which are (movingly) as follows:
But how her hands urged her to hold! Her legs, to run! Language flew into her ear and she could speak! Sun and wind were her friends. So you held her in her sleep. And you held her small body when she stumbled into night: for days the black river went plunging into night. But in the place you’ve come to there is only care. She has woke, your love, in the house of your heart. Oh, now she is laughing, saying Look! Ma! Pa! I’m a bird – I’m sunlight – I am everywhere you are.
There’s a powerful current of tragedy at work here, but it remains protean, despite the intimate clarity of the utterance. This creates an emotional shimmer that is consonant with flickering hopes of transcendence. The notion of tragedy is thematically supported by the following two poems which invoke Greek mythology, ‘The Blind Minotaur’ (via Picasso’s painting) and ‘Reading Myths the Greek’, a digest poem, playful, that finishes:
We’ll send the golden apple back before there’s damage done. The gods can find another game to play.
A brace of poems that reflect upon conception and birth are followed by ‘Snow,’ in which Bishop works cleverly through a series of riffed juxtapositions: cold and hot, snow and Icarus, death and life, black and white, word and life. It’s a movement away from the lyrical intimacy of the earlier poems towards a more intellectually abstracted universalising stance.
This abstraction persists in the following poem, ‘Openings’ which is a powerful meditation on emerging into the world, running out of a Roethke epigraph, ‘I could say hello to things.’
Here Bishop confronts the mortifying thought that the price of entry into life is death:
Loveliness and horror pass through the open gate. Appear in the field, and the widening ripples begin, startled dancers and audience beyond, all place in the brain where the judgments rise and shout. How do you open the gate to a birth? How do you open the door on a death? Open, knowing what must dart out like a cat; open, knowing how the rush will numb the fingers to any further action and the mind be transfixed before the scene.
The superb poise Bishop shows in her balancing of affect and abstraction, and the creation of an incantatory container for these sentiments that is organised around the repetition of ‘open’ is one of the highlights of the book. Primed by the mythology of the preceding poems, it’s almost as if Bishop is exploring birth and motherhood by the positing of an alternative Pandora: the box must be opened, even if there are terrible consequences because the only other option is not to live at all. This is in the second section of this 5-sectioned poem, and in following the poem, it becomes clear in section IV, a vignette of a young neighbour’s suicide how precarious this situation is.
The second section of the book begins with an epigraph from Dickens; ‘we had everything before us, we had nothing before us’. In this shorter section Bishop experiments with form such as in the prose poem ‘Fairytale’. It’s a less intimate and ultimately less powerful section. ‘Best of Times’ for instance starts powerfully in the present before veering into ekphrasis that dilutes the force of the poem’s opening statement, ‘Too much beauty is disturbing.’ The strongest poem here is ‘Miniatures’, four pithy yet elegant quatrains such as
Laid are the eggs, and the traps, and the plans. One is closed, until broken by urgency and life. One is open – and then – One is closure, with haunted dreams of opening
These are beautiful lines that shape the space of meaning without filling it in. Bishop’s great strength in Interval is as an explorer of uncharted interiorities where emotion and intellect entwine. The final two poems of this section ‘Rising Tides’ and ‘The New Maps Keep a Weather Eye,’ veer towards the eco-poetic by way of the cartographical and lack the same urgency even as they evince it.
Ecological perspectives continue into the third section. ‘The View From 10,000 metres’ plays with the estrangement of looking at the earth from a plane, while ‘Tunings’ juxtaposes the idea of a wind-driven leaf with the advent of self-driving cars. Meanwhile ‘The Ambun Stone’ is an intriguing if overly anthropomorphic address to a fossilised echidna foetus. The poems here feel lack the same collective impetus as section one. They feel more like clustered occasionals. They all have their merits, but they do detract somewhat from the consonance of the collection, evidence of the difficult balance of how to organise disparate poetic intentions in the one volume. Indeed the title Interval itself suggests a book perhaps composed from different times and mindsets.
Section IV returns to some of the collection’s earlier strengths. It’s highlights include ‘The Wild Has No Words,’ a musing on our inescapable animality, how wildness sings its songs in us, and drives us to action despite this lack of words. Again, Bishop confronts mortality, the poem finishing with:
… that I’ve kept my ears uncovered, but have asked for ropes to bind me, sailing by what seems the one thing inescapably pure: a song of minds gone naked, a hymn to human consonance – knowing, songs unheeded, your rocky mouth closes on the singers for all time.
There is more to say and much to admire in this strong collection whose intellectual integrity is marked by the way its thoughts are constantly butting up against the unknowable. This primary sense of accomplishment, however, might have been further enhanced if there had been a greater correspondence or a clearer logic of division between the volume’s sections.
Tilt by Kate Lilley
Vagabond Press, 2018
click here for what we do by Pam Brown
Vagabond Press, 2018
In 1915, H G Wells published Boon, a satirical novel that featured long passages pastiching the literary style of his erstwhile friend, Henry James. It kicked off an epistolary barney over what art should be about. ‘It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance,’ James wrote in one of the letters. I’m no Jamesian (and it’s not in my stars) but what he seems to be saying is that one of art’s functions is to give structure and meaning to existence by elevating moments, objects and sentiments, however vague or fleeting, out of the formless flux of stimuli that is our world. This curation process is how art helps shape our sense both of ourselves, our communities and cultures and our past.
I came across James’s letter chasing down the epigraph of the third section of Kate Lilley’s Tilt. It seems an apt way to consider, at least partially, Lilley’s latest work as well as Pam Brown’s new collection, click here for what we do. The epigraph begins: ‘I hold that interest may be, must be, exquisitely made and created, and that if we don’t make it, we who undertake to, nobody and nothing will make it for us.’ Brown and Lilley are both poets invested in making interest and exploring how it is made. This is particularly explicit in a number of Lilley’s poems that funcion through the accretion of unadorned detail and, in doing so, interrogate that act of depiction itself. This Jamesian notion of art is also a useful way to read the confessional vignettes that powerfully level serious allegations against Dorothy Hewett, her mother, and rape allegations at several countercultural figures, as well as the alternative history of Oxford Street the title poem recounts.
It’s also a helpful framework for understanding Brown’s work, which continues to mine the quotidian. This is a mode she has described, in 2002’s Text Thing, as:
this shambling contingency, (writing a poem) - work’s for me, (‘The ing thing’)
In determining which moments from life’s shambling contingency make the cut, Brown is, in James’s terms, making importance. It is a democratising poetics, privileging the mundane and the minor. The poems are a kind of poetic mindfulness enacting the benefits and pleasures of living in the present.
Tilt is only the third book in a career that began in the early eighties. ‘Academia buried her talents under bushels of work for more than a decade,’ wrote John Tranter in an introduction to Lilley’s work when her first collection, Versary, was published at the beginning of the aughts. But while readers waited ten years between her first collection and 2012’s Ladylike, a mere six years have elapsed since her last book. In some ways Lilley is picking up from where she left of. Like her earlier collections, Tilt is as concerned with how poems say things as what they say. This isn’t to discount the content, but to stress how important form is in her work. What is unique, though, is the way formally experimental or innovative poems sit snugly alongside more conventional lyrics and, in this case, confessional poems.
It is the confessional poems, which comprise most of the book’s first section, that have propelled the book into the nation’s newspapers. Predictably, the allegations contained in them have attracted far more attention than the poems themselves. This is a terrible shame. Not because Bob Ellis and Martin Sharp, or even Hewett, should be spared sanction and opprobrium, but because the poems are amongst the book’s best, revealing yet another facet of Lilley’s skill as a poet. Take ‘Conversation Pit 1971’, which recounts a conversation with her mother, Dorothy Hewett:
Mum said Are you having sexual intercourse? She wanted to know what was going on in the sports shed at South Perth Primary Kissing I said just kissing whoever’s nearest (only boy-girl) then swap
Lilley was ten, turning eleven, in 1971, but set aside, for a moment, the allegation these stanzas levy about Hewett’s appalling parenting and listen to their music: the decasyllabic staccato of the third line; the alliteration of ’s’, ‘th’ and ‘p’ in the fourth; and the balanced bookends of the fifth line. Other poems are less showy but no less virtuosic. ‘Chattel’ is driven by tone:
He appears in the doorway his white yfronts bulging A teenage girl is a come-on I get it Face to face on the living room floor so long as you’re enjoying it I’ve read his feature articles it doesn’t help I’m told I’m very good at this guess not
Poetry for Cordite 89: DOMESTIC is guest-edited by Natalie Harkin.
I invite you to lean into this DOMESTIC sphere in all its homely undoing. Use words like beautiful bait to seduce hearts with razor-sharp decolonising intent and rupture the masquerading shape of cosy bliss, as only a poem can. Haunt with your words, for there is unfinished business on this domestic front yet to be reckoned with. Toil your words and share the swollen, blistering, back-breaking load to sweep-up and expose this whole mess. Use your words like a class action against those who actively refuse us a healthy and diverse and peaceful, beloved community. Bear witness to history’s omissions and let future generations know you are with them. Breathe your words straight to them despite fearing what tomorrow’s air will taste like. Honour their future as hopeful and loved and safe and just and whole. Protest for them, and return some nutrient-vision to a parched, gasping foundation that drifts and slides elusive, almost impossible to grasp. Plant old local seeds with your words so they grow into story trees with the deepest roots and life-giving canopies; that may shape their worlds, shelter and birth them, feed them and make them feel well. Let us unravel these starched-white apron-strings, sip hot-black-tea from chipped porcelain tea-cups and get uncomfortable together; un-settle this DOMESTIC front and shape what survival looks and feels like.
Domestic Help / Domestic Mess / Domestic Front / Domestic Prowess / Domestic Violence / Domestic Goddess / Domestic Blooms / Domestic Slave / Domestic Livestock / Domestic Wage / Domestic Borders / Domestic Soil / Domestic Power / Domestic Law / Domestic Cleaner / Domestic Care / Domestic Climate / Domestic Affairs / Domestic Union / Domestic Bliss / Domestic Homeland / Domestic Service / Domestic Safety / Domestic Control / Domestic Cook / Domestic Apron / Domestic Ranks / Domestic Rights / Domestic Products / Domestic Quarters / Domestic Uniform / Domestic Protection / Domestic Load / Domestic Pleasure / Domestic Exploitation / Domestic Diaspora / Domestic Origins / Domestic Appliance / Domestic Budget
Submit poems (prose, comics, visual, concrete) or works of micro-fiction (500 words maximum). Read more about submitting to Cordite Poetry Review. Please note:
1. We will only read submissions sent during our official submission periods.
2. Cordite maintains a hybrid submissions policy. This means that the guest editor may invite five (5) Australian and five (5) overseas authors directly to submit to the issue. In addition, the guest-editor will anonymously select an additional 30-35 works from Australian authors and use their discretion to select further overseas works. For each issue, the guest editor does not know the identities of the online contributors (via Submittable) until after the final selections have been made.
3. Simultaneous submissions or previously published material will not be considered. This includes works published in print and web journals but does not apply to material first published on personal blogs.
4. Please place up to three (3) poems in one (1) Word, RTF or PDF document (unless specifically noted otherwise for special issues), with no identifying details in the document itself.
5. We are not able to offer feedback on individual poems.
6. Submissions will only be accepted via Submittable …
The Alarming Conservatory by Corey Wakeling
Giramondo Publishing, 2018
The Sydney launch of Corey Wakeling’s second collection of poetry The Alarming Conservatory at Frontyard Projects in Marrickville upended the traditional build up of acts that most expect from a poetry launch, with poets reading in an order drawn from a hat. The environment is amicable and warm, with young children running and playing and affectionately stealing attention from the readers by unwittingly performing alongside of them.
When Wakeling reads (third out of the six readers, the launch speech by Astrid Lorange is fifth), he commences with a long absurdist style poem Alfresco dining area dining alfresco; it’s a long poem, performed at high speed with no pause, and featuring preposition-propelled lines such as:
the hegimonicon of the alfresco dining area reasserts itself by collapsing its loft and filling in its basement, by plastinating the crowds, by patenting the perimeter of the area, by force feeding the plastinated crowd, by vaporising the excess, by a trigonometric archive of the final limits of the alfresco dining area, by the universal preservation of the trigonometric archive of the final limits.
Actions are always being done to the alfresco dining area: it is given an eviction notice, a loft, and a basement, punished by patrons levitating, swimming and dining at competing restaurant, confused by patrons licensing their own restaurants. It finally comes full circle by, itself, dining alfresco. It’s fitting, here, too, to note that Wakeling has a doctorate in English and Theatre Studies. An exploitation of the performative nature of language is never far from the work, nor is a constant reconfiguring of language, objects, place and structures (linguistic, familial, political, social). It reminds me of how in Beckett’s theatre, the subject of Wakeling’s thesis, objects often become the focus when dialogue stops, and how frequently en scène there is a negotiation of subject-object.
Talking to a friend from Perth, she provides another context for this poem: In 2017, local counsellors tried to reinstate previously banned alfresco dining areas in the CBD, and put these spaces ‘on trial’. The term ‘alfresco dining area’ and a debate around their existence taking momentary prominence in local politics.
This situation strikes as ripe as a premise for a Wakeling poem, that often twists found fragments and occurrences to a logical-illogical end and interlays reference and place, as in ‘Pupils of the Goat’:
Albany, you might say is heaven Kalamunda calls itself hell. They honeymoon in the shadows and the ferns. Darling Ranges make a really arbitrary purgatory
Referencing Dante’s Inferno and Beatrice, chalk circles, hip hop, Katherine Prichard, and Datsuns, these poems are phenomenal in that that gather so much phenomena.
There is a tangible joy at an excess of language and its resituating; for all the startling incomprehensibility that arises, the collected work is also grounded in the everyday and the current environment: Take the opening epithet for example: ‘He took you for a bubble gum America/ But now he finds that you speak kangaroo English’, a line attributed to a barista at the Hamburger Banhof in Berlin, or in the poem ‘Ecstasy’, that shifts common salutation:
Language is poetry is to be expected -- where could they possibly have Come from otherwise? From otherwise Is find, I should add, and sends her Regards.
There is never simply one thing going on. There is much to work under and through, themes expand and contract, taking on new meanings and contexts at each shift. They are poems that you can spend time with, deducing reference and connection, or read rapidly, startled by the strange juxtapositions and metaphors, perhaps intended to jolt one out of complacency.
The concept or noun ‘Australia’ also undergoes shifts of form. Aus is referred to as a ‘secret car park’, a goat, and, in ‘Available for Public Events’, is turned into stationery: ‘Poor Australia, he has no recognised partner or legal aid. / But he must be assured, we’ve rolodexed him.’
Having grown up in Australia, the title of the volume The Alarming Conservatory evokes several allusions. It brings to mind a Howard era ‘be alert but not alarmed’ mentality; the conservatory aspect could refer to a humid greenhouse, school, or alternatively, to a place that breeds conservatives. The title Alarming Conservatory could function simply as a moniker for colonial Australia.
Themes of an Australian tepid comfort are a recurrence, as in the poem ‘Ward’, that crawls through the Yu Yangs and abounds in lines that mention couches:
The couches intrigue by a slow invitation which becomes entrapment (…) the constant reminder / of Albert Namatjira, who is the only immediate rescue / here and now from the couches. / The saluting couches./ (…) Like a couch, the advantage is earned by those / who sit with you to console and comfort themselves.
The meaning, punning, and resulting associations in this volume are never settled, and frequently when I’m reading I’m saying ‘What what what?’ in my head, or out loud, trying to find level ground that is always escaping. But the poems are deeply funny and revelatory of current economic farcicalities and social perspectives. For example, in ´Being Paid to Live the Dunes’ that begins, ‘you are ready for the end of the world because / you are paid for it, and the apartment is good.’ This continues in ´Sydney sydney’, that speaks excessively and appropriately of landowners and in ‘The Person is Real’ that closes with the line: ‘Good bargain of education, you bought us up – yes, bought! – so well.’
Dissonance and decline emerge as other themes, two poems, in fact, are elegies (‘Elegy Written in a Dead Metropolitan Library’ and ‘Elegy for Epithalamium’). The poems capture a shifting world, and can be read more widely to comment on virtuality, mediatised environments, and family.
The ‘Afterword’, too, is worthy of note. Shifting form, it presents a lucid eight-page poem-essay that is vividly transporting and recounts in a measured, gentle and suspended tone the poet’s childhood in Western Australia. Cars trips to Fremantle, garage sales, adventure stories, comics, fiscal difficulties. It provides a commentary of the social climate: ‘I grew to dislike the perpetually bold sky of Western Australia (…) the weather to me mirrored a self-satisfied, recreational population’ and of the situation of childhood where a lucid narrative is easier to obtain.
Reading the afterword following the intricately layered, complex and at times close to indecipherable poetics, is somewhat similar to having the answers and the clues to the previous day’s cryptic crossword side-by-side and working backwards to fill the grid in.
Frequently in these poems, the economic climate, neo-liberal free market, and housing market are all thrown together; The Alarming Conservatory is the site of the fall-out. It is recommended reading, and provides a counter narrative if you’re reading closely.
Hush: A Fugue by Dominique Hecq
UWA Publishing, 2017
To some readers, like me, Dominique Hecq’s Hush: A Fugue may be daunting at first appearance. This starts with the cover, which has the sort of self-assured, intellectual air I find a little intimidating. A wary look inside reveals unstable text formatting – blocks of dense prose broken by verse, haiku, couplets, one-liners. And whether you do your page-flicking right or left-handed, you surely cannot avoid noticing a list of references at the back, containing some imposing names: Barthes, Freud, the dreaded Derrida, Lacan. Hesitating on ‘Heaney, S.’, and ‘Rimbaud, A.’, I found myself hoping for reassurance. Some readers will undoubtedly have put the book down by this point, but others love a challenge and they will certainly find Hecq’s book stimulating. It is rich and satisfying on many levels, whether or not you enjoy Derrida’s games.
As a story, read in a simple readerly way, Hecq’s poetic narrative is moving and beautiful. A child dies and the voice of the poet is the voice of its mother, travelling through the surreal world of grief. Motifs of affluent, inner-city life appear throughout, but become strangely unfettered; splashes of colourful hedonism in an otherwise colourless, mist-like free-fall through pallor and darkness:
I read to the child and helped him draw his own story of loss [. . .]. I cooked.
There were pancakes and French toast and brioche. Lemon pudding and orange cake and rhubarb pie and apple crumble. Poppyseed cake. [. . .]
I longed for food. [. . .] I felt so greedy. [. . .] I would not eat. There was no room for me. I rose and fell. Flailed around me in a sea of black. Lack. Living and wanting to die. I fell into the waterfall of my mind.
Hecq’s juxtaposition of an external life of food, music and flowers against an inner world marred by lack, opens a tense space. It is a space weighted in one direction by absence (of the child and of language/meaning) and in the other, by the continuance of life; life which must be negotiated and travelled. To heed the call of life, meaning is needed, but normal language fails. Hush’s complex formal structure flows, like Orpheus’s music, into the void it leaves:
Eurydice, Eurydice, Eurydice.
Hush is both poetry and prose; and in its poetry it pushes the written language away from denotative meaning, into sound and back again. Form changes and responds to content, even becoming content itself. And Hecq’s writing is double-layered: she writes her protagonist writing; the grieving mother’s struggle to understand what she experiences through the construction of language. This strategy enables Hecq to reveal the spaces before and after an act of writing, and the other ‘languages’ that inhabit these spaces – music, song, performance, the words of other tongues. Actions, impressions and sensations whirl chaotically, or coalesce on the body of the narrator.
Let us start with the language of Orpheus:
Chalk, rice, zinc
. . .
Phosphorous
Lightless body
Alabaster
In music, ‘fugue’ denotes a short phrase that hangs and is taken up successively by one part after another, like the above lines. As the phrase is repeated and embroidered, it attains the texture of a song. Hush is a fugue in this sense. It is scattered with lines that echo, repeat, and drift quietly like a refrain, the sort that gets stuck in your mind yet returns reassuringly, rather than annoyingly. Hecq’s style is at times reminiscent of T S Eliot, in the way she sets stubborn gleanings from commonplace life into her poetry, like in the lines above. In doing so she elevates them from the ordinary, revealing them as wondrous and gem-like.
Music is an important motif in Hush and it would be accurate, I think, to surmise that Hecq’s intention is (after Barthes) to allow her writing to ‘sing’ by freeing its spoken qualities from a weight of written meaning. She allows the sounds, rhythm and allusive qualities of words to ‘speak’. Hence her use of repetitions like refrains, and also her liberation of the sounds of French, the ‘mother tongue’, to which she returns, seeking a means of expression and understanding:
Une mise en abîme to write of desire, of water and fire.
Music is allowed to express itself without the intercession of words and their symbolic meanings; as a complete signifying system in its own right. By contrast:
I tried writing. Words came in bursts and spurts. Made no sense.
But Hecq demonstrates that writing and its failure can be overcome by using language in ways more akin to music. She uses structural motifs throughout the text: akin to epigraphs, haiku-like tercets or couplets separate passages. These also evoke ‘fugue’ in another sense: that of a vagueness or loss of identity that sometimes arises in response to trauma. In Hecq’s hands, these passages seem like instances of clarity, setting a tone for what is to come, yet they are deceptive:
Dark then light
Uno makes rainbows
doubling the sky
Fugue, in the psychological sense, often involves wandering. And here lies the heart of Hush: A Fugue. Hecq charts the impact of trauma, the shattering and slow reassembly of self as a person drifts through a netherworld that is neither Hades nor sunlit. Like music, action itself provides another language that expresses, reflects, and perhaps draws both reader and protagonist towards understanding:
The fear was so strong I bolted for the door and into the street. I ran to the park as fast as thoughts ran through my mind. I ran oblivious to the traffic. Oblivious to time. Oblivious of the cold. I ran to the pond. And stood. When the shadows merged with the waters in the cold, when the wind moaned in the branches of the gum trees, when the last rays of sunshine gilded with mystery the white snowdrops and camellias, I turned back home.
Wandering through a seemingly ‘nonsensical’ yet concrete world in a state of fugue, Hecq’s protagonist finds a kind of meaning that nudges her back, inexorably, towards the written word. Words offer reassurance, even if their meaning is obscure:
… I needed to write for the sheer satisfaction of keeping fear at bay, of experiencing the vanity of meaning, even if words did not make sense.
When people say ‘difficult’ and ‘poetry’ in the same sentence they are usually referring to the experience of reading a certain type of poem. It is often a poem that seems to make little sense, that doesn’t have a strong sense of narrative, that uses strange words or strange forms, that does not follow rules of grammar and syntax, that may not even communicate any coherent message at all. Difficult poetry, for some reason, is a phrase that refers to these weird poems and the people who try to read them. Difficult poetry is about the tension and struggle to make sense of this weirdness.
Charles Bernstein even wrote a whole book about this type of poetry. It’s called Attack of the Difficult Poems. In this book he says that difficult poetry is hard to appreciate. He talks about how difficult poems can be offensive to readers, make them feel ‘inadequate’ or ‘stupid’. He admits that much of his long career as a professor has been trying to make life bearable for readers of difficult poetry. He even put together a ‘practical guide for handling difficult poetry’ and invented a new word for the act of reading difficult poetry – ‘wreading’ as in writing and reading mixed together, because according to Bernstein, reading difficult poetry is a ‘creative performance’ that requires ‘critical interpretation’.
Bernstein’s views make reading difficult poetry sound like some sort of war (one in which he is deeply entrenched); taxing, confusing and often without meaning. Yet a crucial part difficult poetry’s appeal is the surprising pleasures it produces, whether it’s the odd somatic qualities, images (or lack thereof) or systems and constraints that feel like games. In Matthew Welton’s series of poems he creates a rich linguistic playground for the reader to explore. Reading difficult poetry doesn’t have to be feel so tense or embattled. We often attempt to squeeze some sort of narrative meaning from poems, but difficult poems provide an alternative – the reader is invited to play.
The way Bernstein talks about difficult poems makes them seem like crop circles. They are these inscrutable, weird, compelling, sometimes beautiful, occasionally destructive things that just drop from the sky leaving no trace of their creator, objects of immaculate poiesis that leave us humans powerless to do anything but come up with elaborate ways of interpreting their messages. Indeed, crop circle experts are some of the most creative ‘wreaders’ around – the patterns stamped in fields are treated as a lens through which we can understand alien languages, the mysteries of Mother Earth, the secrets of ancient ancestors, etc.
In 1991, at the height of international interest in crop circles, two English men in their sixties admitted that they were almost single-handedly responsible for the crop circle craze, that they had been creating these patterns in the fields for more than 10 years. They described how on warm summer nights they’d have a beer at the pub, discuss water colour paintings, and then head out into the fields with wooden planks attached to two hand-held ropes for stomping the stalks, and a baseball cap fitted with a loop of wire to help them walk in a straight line. After years of labouring in the cover night, always careful not to damage the crops, always careful not to leave a trace of their labour, they were growing tired of the many imitations that were springing up around the English countryside as well as the ridiculous ’experts’ who were making millions of pounds writing books that taught the public how to interpret these ‘other worldly signs’. So, they decided to reveal themselves.
One evening, in the presence of a journalist from a London tabloid, they created one of their crop circles. The journalist then invited Patrick Delgado, the foremost crop circle expert in the world, to assess the formation and decide whether it was an authentic work of extra-human creation or whether it was a hoax. When Delgado entered the field, he said it was one of the most beautiful circles he had ever seen, that the precision of the circles gave him goose bumps. ’It is a genuine article,’ he confidently asserted. ’No human could’ve ever made this.’
When the two creators revealed themselves from behind the wheat bushels and told Delgado that they were responsible for making the circle, showing him their rudimentary tools, he said, ‘We have all been conned.’
But then later, in another interview, he added: ‘My reaction is one of wonderment at the artistry that they have done in such a manner that their work could be considered as something out of this world. They are to be admired in the way they have conducted their nocturnal escapades which made it look as though there was a real intelligence that we don’t understand. From this simple prank has developed one of the world’s most sensational unifying situations since Biblical days. If everything they say is correct this is a lesson to us all that we should look and listen to the beautiful and small things in life.’
What we were most interested in, when reading through the many hundreds of submissions for this edition of Cordite Poetry Review this edition, was not only the crop circles but also the ingenious acts of creation behind them. That is to say, not difficult poetry as such, but the difficulty of writing poetry – the act of creation, the labour that goes into the lines, the difficulty of writing a good one.
As we read through the submissions, we were reminded of the countless ways that writing poetry, particularly good poetry, is difficult. How it is difficult to point out the beauty and joy of something simple like flowers or outer space at a time like this; how it is difficult to give yourself the space to be playful with language and find compelling images inside it; how it is difficult to make the sound and rhythm of words your palette; how it is difficult to reach out and speak to an audience you don’t know about your life in a way that is unadorned; how it is difficult to find a poem amidst all this turmoil; how it is difficult to have conviction, to be funny, to create an alternate reality in four lines; how it is difficult to find the time to write poetry; and how it is is also difficult to say out loud, ‘I write poetry’, because sometimes people look at you like you’re slightly mad, as if you spend your nights dragging a wooden plank around a field while wearing a baseball cap with wire coming out of it, but that despite all this difficulty, you do it anyway.
Image courtesy of crooked lines.
At the close of his poem ‘Autumn Fragment’, Kaiser Haq asks: ‘Can one write / Verse that is free of ambiguity?’ A more pointed consideration for contemporary writers hailing from Bangladesh is whether perhaps one should. Ambiguity is a comparatively safe stance if you happen to be a progressive political-bloc affiliate or a moderate Muslim of the Tagorean cultural set: anything other than ambiguity might potentially imperil your life. The use of ‘potentially’ is deliberate, for it is undoubtedly reductive of Bangladesh’s complexities to characterise a country only through the tragic number of secular writers, publishers, activists and intellectuals murdered in recent times for challenging, in the interpretation of Islamist extremist groups who later claimed responsibility for many of the slayings, certain (conservative) socio-political and religious ideals. With the assassination of writer and publisher Shahzahan Bachchu on June 11, during this year’s Ramadan, Bangladesh is becoming a noticeably volatile place for those who confront, ambiguously or not, the darker strands of tension intersecting the country. Years ago, a friend in Dhaka made clear the severity of the divisiveness concerning identity and affiliation in Bangladesh: ‘If you are wrong, you might get killed.’ In the current context – not the only devastating surge of violence the people of Bangladesh or Haq himself, as a veteran of the Liberation War of 1971, has experienced – this is not an aggrandised statement.
Despite the blurb of the second edition of Haq’s Pariah & Other Poems (Bengal Lights, 2017) claiming he deals with ‘everyday … social and political problems’, the poet’s own words convince further. Seasoned, erudite and ironic, Haq’s poetry reaches across the beauty and devastation of memory; progress and ageing; death and loss, and the deterioration of people, community and the recognisable ‘home’. In Pariah & Other Poems, instances of activism are cast under the glaze of reminiscence: ‘I remember, I remember so well / My first protest march on a broiling summer day’ (‘Barbecue’). In the course of a restive morning, the speaker ‘blinkingly’ reads in the newspaper of a ‘poet’s retraction / Of satirical verses’ (‘An English Sonnet = 140 Syllables’). In ‘Kabbadi with Death’, written after the murder of Dhaka tailor Biswajit Das by Chhatra League activists, the speaker wearily abandons question marks: ‘What happens to the ash / From burnt young flesh / Disinfected of politics’. Just as poetry’s ‘helpless lines’ are acknowledged in ‘Kabbadi’, in ‘Getting it Right’, words are ultimately deemed inadequate weapons: ‘… in prose or verse / It’d come out the same: / Day 9 of blockade, / Eight more dead’.
Elsewhere, Haq admits to ‘unwittingly’ making himself a ‘cultural pariah’ by claiming ‘the language of the erstwhile colonial masters’ when commencing to write poetry in English during his school years (‘Testament of a Pseudo Translator’). Haq does not offer up his method of survival. By adapting his words to title our conversation, I imply an alternative to the pariah’s ‘untouchable’ status – one that is neither pejorative nor heroic, but bound to observation, finely-tuned irreverence and a knowing eye for the effects and aftereffects of change, rather than its definitive cause.
In January this year, during one of my regular visits to Dhaka, I spoke with Haq in his office at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, where he is currently a professor of English. During the eleven years since our first meeting, Haq’s generosity is undiminished – matched, this time, by the motley, evocative clamour of traffic along Satmasjid Road, pressing against us as we talked.
Kathryn Hummel: You’ve written that you have developed a taste for precolonial Bengali literature after working on The Triumph of the Snake Goddess (Harvard UP, 2015). What draws you to these texts?
Kaiser Haq: An abyss separates modern Bengali culture from precolonial. Students studying Bengali literature hardly delve into precolonial texts. The focus is on colonial and postcolonial – modern Bengali –but the precolonial culture is still alive in the countryside. These traditions pre-date colonial power, though everybody left when the Brits started taking over. Story-telling, performances, these are marginalised and if you categorise something as just ‘folk’, you’re also marginalising it. It’s there for our amusement when we feel like it; it’s not a part of our modern cultural life. And that is what I want to sort of change, in my small way, by presenting some of these stories in modern English so that everyone can read them and find something. There’s nothing to prevent one from entering that world packaged in the way I got [The Triumph of the Snake Goddess] published. I’m not translating, I’m retelling. These old texts are in verse and I don’t want to do verse novels – they’re in prose.
KHummel: I know that you get asked a lot about why you write in English and I know you’ve written a lot about it …
KHaq: I consider it history [laughs]. Throughout the sub-continent, English writing has been there since 1780, when the first book was published. Not so much in Bangladesh, but in India, you have a large number of people who belong to the intellectual and cultural arena who know English better than their mother tongue.
KHummel: But knowledge of English is class-based here, right? People go to Bangla-medium schools or English-medium schools.
KHaq: In Bangladesh it is. In Bangladesh, even knowledge of Bengali is class-based. Because the Bengali that you hear people speak is the demotic Bengali of all the different dialects of the districts. The literary Bangla which you’ll hear on the television, perhaps, or which is written in literary magazines or literary supplements in newspapers is something that a very small percentage of the people really know or are familiar with. Education is class-based now.
KHummel: Who is writing in an accessible Bengali here? Is anyone writing in modern, informal Bangla or in that kind of style?
KHaq: That has a place in dialogue but the narrative and descriptive prose is Standard Bangla. Some of the films feature informal Bangla, because film is entirely based on dialogue. In fiction it always comes in as dialogue or if it’s a first person narrative when the point of view is from a person who speaks only that dialect. We have this problem in every language – how to bring in the regional, class-based dialect.
KHummel: While I’ve been in Dhaka I’ve been thinking about Shahbag and the changing political significance of the neighbourhood since before the Liberation War until contemporary times. After the 2013 protests against the leniency shown to Liberation War criminals, many of my friends who go to Charukola [Institute of Fine Arts] at night-time say it’s changed significantly because of greater government presence. I know Shahbag is the site of the murders of publishers and writers as well. You write fairly, what one might classify as, secular work. Have you ever had any death threats yourself?
KHaq: I haven’t written anything condemnatory of religion.
KHummel: But of politics, it seems you have. You wrote ‘How Many Buddhas Can They Destroy’ after the 2012 burning of Buddhist temples in Cox’s Bazaar and that was anti-fundalmentalist; would you also say, anti-government?
KHaq: Well, yeah, but that kind of thing I think doesn’t put the extremists’ backs up.
KHummel: No? So what would?
KHaq: It began with the bloggers because the internet is a battle ground now. The religious right has been very quick to adapt to the internet and use it for propaganda purposes, as you know, a lot of the Islamic State recruits were seduced by things on the internet. So the secular bloggers then began to challenge those: this is the background. I haven’t read any of these blogs but apparently there was this running battle going on between the fundamentalist blogs and the secular blogs.
KHummel: Faisal Arefin Dipan of the publishing house Jagriti Prokashony, who was killed in 2015, I understood that he …
KHaq: Well, the bloggers, a lot of them then published books.
KHummel: From what I understand, Dipan published a range of texts including secular ones, but it was just because he was open to all perspectives that he was targeted.
KHaq: He was killed there.
KHummel: In Aziz Supermarket, yes.
KHaq: Another publisher, Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury Tutul, of Shuddhoswar Prokashony, was attacked and survived. Not far from here, in Lalmatia.
KHummel: Is your poetry, then, becoming more responsive to contemporary politics in Bangladesh?
KHaq: I don’t think so. Contemporary politics in Bangladesh is partisan politics – which I don’t support. It’s very difficult to even formulate political questions in a literary context without being at once placed within that bipartisan framework, isn’t it?
KHummel: I’m not referring to directly responding to whatever is going on in parliament but just the state of the country, which has always, I think, been your concern?
KHaq: It doesn’t come in. I don’t think it’s direct. It’s in a state of flux. There’s little disturbances going on all the time and to get a handle on that you have to, sort of, write with purpose and that hasn’t yet happened. What I see is that this is a society that is changing very fast and it used to be very political. Now I think homo politicus has been replaced by homo economicus. People are just concerned about their livelihood, their careers, their earnings and they don’t want politics to disturb that.
KHummel: Do they want literature to disturb it?
KHaq: Literature cannot disturb it, it can only comment, describe, transform into an aesthetic form the objects of criticism, of literature and art in bourgeois society – and when you’ve homo economicus you end up with bourgeois society.
KHummel: Does that interest you?
KHaq: A little, somehow.
KHummel: But then you’ve gone back to your medieval texts.
KHaq: There’s a prose poem, ‘Forever Amber’, in Pariah & Other Poems, which is about Dhaka: ‘The state of governance, whichever party holds power, is evident in the streets. Mercedes, BMW, Lexus. Battered public buses, motorised three-wheelers, rickshaws, pedal vans. All in a scramble, like dogs nosing each others’ bottoms, sometimes in the wrong direction …’
Image courtesy of Ziarul Lumina
The following four poems have been selected from two volumes of poetry: Rătăcirile Doamnei Bovary [Madame Bovary’s Wanderings] and Cât de departe am mers [How Far We’ve Gone], published in 1996 and 2008 respectively. Vasile Baghiu coined the term ‘chimerism’ – a cross between bovarysme and literature – which he defined as a kind of escapism; the creation of a parallel universe or counter-reality through which to escape the everyday struggles of 1980s Communist Romania. Four elements are intrinsic to the concept of chimerism: ‘imaginary journey’, as a means of evading the socio-political constraints and the cultural provincialism of the time; ‘disease’, as a reality devoid of superficiality and flippancy; ‘transfiguration’, as a way of creating new experiences; and ‘science’, as poetic adventure in a space that has rarely been explored through poetic means. The driving force and key inspiration behind chimerism, as Baghiu himself confessed when I interviewed him in 2017, was Thomas Mann’s bildungsroman The Magic Mountain, along with poems depicting sickness and human suffering, which Baghiu read throughout his teenage years.
Baghiu’s poetry is dominated by a reality-memory dichotomy. Its uniqueness resides in the fusion of imagery, self-discovery, escapism, and a sense of freedom. The verse is crisp, clean and economical, thus making the process of translation similar to cutting, shaping and polishing a diamond. What struck me more than anything was the visual element that dominates most of Baghiu’s poems; after reading volume after volume, I was left with the distinct impression of a painting waiting to be discovered and understood. While sound and rhythm are also present, I felt that the true meaning was hidden in the visual imagery, and as a translator I focused on capturing both the visual elements and the meaning behind them, and on delivering poems that preserve the freshness and authenticity of the originals.
Another key element was the translation of certain Romanian words and names. For example, I pondered over the translation of poezia [poetry] in the poem ‘As it happened’, because I was looking for a way to keep some of the original flavour in the translation. So, I settled for the archaic, poetic English word Poesy, which is closer in sound to the Romanian word and adds an element of musicality to the imagery. Turning a common noun, poezia, into a proper noun, Poesy, was a deliberate choice, as I felt that Poesy itself played a key role in the story.
I applied similar considerations around maintaining authenticity to the translation of foreign names, such as that of Nicolae Bălcescu (including its original spelling with diacritical marks) in the poem ‘Those were tumultuous times’, to give the Australian reader a taste of Romanian culture. I felt there was no need for added explanations or references about Nicolae Bălcescu himself (he was, for the record, an important political and intellectual figure and leader of the 1848 Wallachian revolution) because for me, the message of this particular poem – estrangement, memories and regret – was sufficient to convey its Romanianness.
Image courtesy of The Steven Barclay Agency.
(Extract from Denise Levertov’s final interview, October 27, 1997.)
Nicholas O’Connell: In the essay ‘Some Affinities of Content,’ you spoke about how you responded to the goal of Northwest poets to submerge themselves in something larger than individual ego, in their case, nature. Do you try the same approach in your poetry?
Denise Levertov: I hope I do. I’m certainly very tired of the me, me, me kind of poem, the Sharon Olds ‘Find the dirt and dig it up’ poem, which has influenced people to find gruesome episodes in their life, whether they actually happened or not. Back when Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton were the models for neophytes, you had to have spent some time in a mental hospital to qualify as a poet. Now you have to have been abused. I know perfectly well that lots of people really have been abused, but it’s unfortunate to use the fact of abuse as the passport to being a poet. I’m certainly tired of that kind of egotism.1
‘Egotism.’ ‘Shallow pretence.’2 ‘No abstraction and no surprise, only the videotape of life played back at full volume.’ The loudest critics of Sharon Olds repeat the same complaints that met confessional poets some sixty years ago, chastising her work for being self-obsessive. Poets should speak, the argument runs, to experience that is collective and, by virtue of being collective, profound. As Patricia Meyer Spacks lamented, referencing the work of Anne Sexton:
art requires more than emotional indulgence, requires a saving respect for disciplines and realities beyond the crying needs, the unrelenting appetites, of the self.’3
The means may be the self, but the end must be the collective.
Yet, as literary theory in the intervening decades has shown, no individual can speak for the collective per se, bound as they are by the confines of their culture, gender, race, class, as well as the inherently constructed nature of that self that defines lyric poetry (which, as Maria Takolander has recently argued, is in turn bound by the technology that writes it).4 And this is to say nothing of the political implications: that, in universalising any poetic self, as some argue, we necessarily privilege certain voices over others, and so reinscribe dividing lines that have historically pushed female, non-white voices to the margins.5
If Olds’s poetry can be useful, as she professes is her intention,6 it seems we must continue to wrestle with questions that, for a few centuries of debate, we still don’t have good answers. Do we see the ‘I’ in Olds’s work (and other confessional poetry), as a single (egotistical) voice (and so useless), or a collective, universal voice (a voice Ben Lerner has recently called ‘an impossibility’),7 or somewhere in between? If the voice can speak to (or for) all, in any sense can we speak of it having a universal effect?
I argue here that recent work in the fields of emotion, cognition and evolutionary psychology provides one interesting avenue for reviving the outdated, universal ‘I’ of lyric poetry, and thus its usefulness, while avoiding enacting dichotomies that perpetuate the divisive literary status quo. Taking the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Stag’s Leap (2012) as a case study,8 I suggest that Olds’s poetry exploits cognitive systems that are, in essence, universal (by which I mean common evolutionary adaptations). In so doing, it accomplishes in a significant way the romantic ideal of poetry that can speak to all; poetry that, in the long-faded words of Shelley, ‘exist(s) in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.’9
Finally, I wish to suggest that the reading of Sharon Olds’s poetry makes one a better person, to the extent that it is able to remove barriers that inhibit empathy. This is so because it manipulates a relationship between valence and appraisal that is a universal evolutionary adaptation. I will suspend my argument on this point until the poetry has been considered, but it is worth keeping in mind that the thrust of my argument is in large part a defence of (or rather, prescription for) Olds’s poetry on pragmatic grounds. The contention is that, insofar as reading this work affords a particular, unusual form of emotional response (what I refer to as dialectical meta-emotion), the sustained experience of such emotional responses may strengthen neural pathways that are conducive to empathy, patience and increased emotional nuance.
My argument, then, consists of three premises and a conclusion:
| Premises | |
|---|---|
| p1 | emotion throughout Stag’s Leap is largely dialectical meta-emotion, which creates a short-circuiting of hardwired cognitive appraisal and emotional valence; |
| p2 | emotion serves as the means of expression throughout the collection, rather than the result of expression; |
| p3 | Olds’s poetry promotes an ability for readers to experience dialectical meta-emotion in the real world; |
| C | Olds’s poetry can make readers more empathetic and thus, in a small way at least, better people. |
Universality and the Lyric ‘I’
When Olds first submitted poetry for publication in the early 1970s she was told, by her own account, ‘this is a literary magazine. If you wish to write about this sort of subject, may we suggest the Ladies’ Home Journal. The true subjects of poetry are … male subjects, not your children.’10 If entirely unwarranted, it is perhaps unsurprising that such a response would be penned at a time when women’s writing was still grossly underrepresented, and while post-structuralism was simultaneously dismantling the self that had previously underwritten meaning in language and authorship in art. While one line of argument attacked confessional poetry for its self-indulgence, a parallel argument attacked the legitimacy of the self that wrote it.
Yet despite the monumental impact of theorists such as Barthes and Foucault, in the intervening decades a number of feminist historians and literary critics, and indeed Sharon Olds herself, have insisted on the legitimacy of employing the decisively female lyric ‘I.’ They do so on the grounds that the death of the Author merely constitutes a further marginalisation of subjects that had already been denied a voice. As Nancy K. Miller writes,
the postmodernist decision that the Author is dead, and subjective agency along with him, does not necessarily work for women and prematurely forecloses the question of identity for them.11
And this is true not only in the domain of creative writing. As Katie Barclay points out,
Feminist historians have been reluctant to let go of the ‘subject’, perhaps because, as Susan Bordo suggests, subjectivity symbolizes the essence of personhood, which has only recently been granted to women and which is still challenged through attacks on their bodily autonomy.12
In an interview with The Guardian, Olds has stated that ‘I wish to write about my life partly as stories representative of any ordinary woman,’13 In order to conceive of it as such, we will need to revive what was previously decried as an anachronistic (or impossible) ‘I.’ The self present in the poems ahead needs to be conceived, tentatively, as both individual and collective, and legitimised in light of the arguments put forth by Miller and Barclay (among others). This entails, as Miller puts it, acknowledging ‘contradictions, the gap, and the (perhaps permanent) internal split that makes a collective identity or integrity only a horizon, but a necessary one.’14 It is a voice that speaks from the individual, for the (decisively female) collective, and in some respects (as I will argue), to all.
Image courtesy of Museu Histórico de Itajaí.
Map
To the north, the bright tower, the plaza, the eternal meeting,
Forever the silent agreement with your face.
To the east, ocean, green, waves, foam,
That distant ghost, boat and fog,
The wharf for that most definite departure,
For a distance scouted in dream:
Perfume of isolation, the holy city.
West, the big house, the hallway, the bed:
That intense affection for silence and for bathing.
The land to the west, that fondness for pianos and windows open.
To the street where you passed, the waving from balconies: the hill and the cemetery
and the wisteria.
To the south, love, all hope, the circus, the kite, the cloud: that shaft of wind,
In the south, the illuminated idea in the dream in which I dream of you,
To the south, the beach, the breath, that lookout to your country
Blue map of childhood:
garden of roses and mystery: the mirror.
The never beyond the wall, beyond dream the never,
And the avenues I stroll down, acclaimed and happy.
Before the sun in its newest light,
The daily awakening for the rehearsal of the sky,
Black and white and turning: swallows and wind off the land.
Afterwards, the cold, crystalline night,
The night of stars and of suddenly withdrawn accordions,
Dizzy with hope: that mixture of kisses and dances along the road,
Eternally arriving in the earldom of Love.
Mapa
Ao norte, a torre clara, a praça, o eterno encontro,
A confidência muda com teu rosto por jamais.
A leste, o mar, o verde, a onda, a espuma,
Esse fantasma longe, barco e bruma,
O cais para a partida mais definitiva
A urna distancia percorrida em sonho:
Perfume da lonjura, a cidade santa.
O oeste, a casa grande, o corredor, a cama:
Esse carinho intenso de silêncio e banho.
A terra a oeste, essa ternura de pianos e janelas abertas
A rua em que passavas, o abano das sacadas: o morro e o cemitério e as glicínias.
Ao sul, o amor, toda a esperança, o circo, o papagaio, a nuvem: esse varal de vento,
No sul iluminado o pensamento no sonho em que te sonho
Ao sul, a praia, o alento, essa atalaia ao teu país
Mapa azul da infância:
O jardim de rosas e mistério: o espelho.
O nunca além do muro, além do sonho o nunca
E as avenidas que percorro aclamado e feliz.
Antes o sol no seu mais novo raio,
O acordar cotidiano para o ensaio do céu,
Preto e branco e girando: andorinha e terral.
Depois a noite de cristal e tria,
A noite das estrelas e das súbitas sanfonas afastadas,
Tontura de esperanças: essa mistura de beijos e de danças pela estrada
Numa eterna chegada ao condado do Amor.
‘Do more, do better’ is a poem in four parts that explores transgender discrimination through a hypothetical augmented reality (AR) mobile app. The accompanying inked and embroidered art pieces reiterate key themes within the poem using a medium that could be considered an analogue to tech culture’s digital: craftivism. In combining elements in alternate modes, the pieces point to the ways in which these media may have commonalities, but may also be divergent. This aligns with the subject matter of the poems, drawing as they do on the everyday experiences of trans and gender diverse folk within public spaces. Public spaces should be safe, but are instead revealed as fraught with the threat of, and direct instances of, public violence.
In the first stanza of the poem, a new mobile phone app for transgender, non-binary and gender diverse people is introduced: a Band-Aid, a quick fix ‘until society catches up.’ This is not a trans utopia, but the creators of this app are doing their best with the tools they have at hand. The illustration of the Trans Shield logo is half embroidered in satin stitch while the other half is unraveling, trailing threads that fray and fall away like bandage fibres covering up an old wound, reiterating that this app is only a stopgap. In the poem, the question is posed: why do we ‘see [trans people] differently’ and why should an app like Trans Shield be needed in the first place? Indeed, the title ‘Do more, do better’ asks the reader as well as the wider community if they are doing enough for trans people and others in marginalised communities.
The second and third stanzas of Part 1 acquaint us with the ‘bloody upsetting’ realities of being trans and gender diverse, like being ‘politely misgendered,’ and highlighting the simple changes people can make in their lives in order to make trans people more welcome: using correct pronouns and terms, and respecting trans identities. The use of ‘polite’ is heavily ironic, demonstrating that politeness does not result in inclusive discourse and can be used to deliver a microaggression. Sonny Nordmarken in Transgender Studies Quarterly defines microagressions as commonplace, interpersonally communicated ‘othering’ messages which either intentionally or unintentionally relate to a person’s perceived marginalised status (Sue, 2010; Nordmarken, 2014). Part of the cruelty of microaggressions is that they come from friends and family as well as enemies, and here the politeness is positioned as an essential aspect of the misgendering, making it a ‘bloody upsetting’ reality for trans and gender diverse folk. The use of humour and sarcasm in these stanzas and throughout the poem draws upon the idea that comedy can be used to cope with the anxieties of life, and can have a beneficial effect in response to both positive and negative life events (Martin, Rod A. et al, 2009). The reader can laugh at and relate to just wanting to ‘buy / your fucking groceries,’ but this poem stresses that when you are trans, this simple domestic experience is often fraught with ridicule and dehumanising misgendering.
When reading these stanzas, augmented reality (AR) games like Ingress and Pokémon Go probably come to mind – games that layer our reality with computer-generated perceptual information. In the case of the fictional app Trans Shield represented in the poem, these data include multiple sensory modalities such as visual and auditory augmentations (Schueffel, 2017). While a game like Pokémon Go can layer your boring walk from home with competitive gamification, Trans Shield promises to shelter you with layers of trans-inclusive AR, turning an antagonistic walk home into a peaceful one. This does not, however, as we see later in the poem, remove the physical violence of transphobic attacks. It also does not change the structural transphobia of mainstream society.
The fourth stanza presents us with fantasy tech jargon, stating the app ‘syncs with your / BrainChip’ and uses ‘the latest / AR breakthroughs’ to give the user visual and auditory peace of mind. The line ‘glazes of hands / and sign language’ reminds us of the intersections between marginalised communities, in this instance the transgender and disabled communities. It is important to remember that ‘a voice / and mouth’ may not be a sensory option for everyone and that experience is intersectional.
Language poetry and conceptual poetry have both been enormously important movements in the development of contemporary experimental American poetry. They continue to be influential, however they are now both historical moments. This has led to some contemporary poets positioning themselves as post-language or post-conceptual. Here I want to focus on a particular aspect of post-conceptual poetry: the return to the personal and the embrace of a new kind of confessionalism. This seems a particularly teasing development because contemporary experimental poetry has so often been couched in terms of a rejection of the direct personal expression that characterised the lyric. However, this new confessionalism is not a return to the style of Plath, Berryman, Sexton and Lowell, though it inevitably shows some continuity with it. It is an experimental confessionalism: one that embraces but also transfigures the genre’s previous incarnations. It adopts the confessional as a mode but at the same time questions its claims to authenticity.
Conceptual poetry, of which the anthology Against Expression (Dworkin and Goldsmith 2011) is an important example, encompasses a number of techniques involving ‘uncreative writing’ (Goldsmith 2011). These techniques include appropriation of texts, sometimes on a large scale and often involving material drawn from the Internet; the use of systems, procedures and constraints; and the creation of concept-based poems where the fundamental idea on which the poem is based is as significant as the details of the content. Many conceptual works combine more than one of these different techniques, and there is considerable breadth as to what is considered conceptual.
Post-conceptual poetry, according to Felix Bernstein – one of its main practitioners and proponents – is both a continuation of conceptual writing and a reaction against it.1 Bernstein’s theorising is often ironic, opaque and deliberately contradictory. On the one hand, it attempts to delineate ‘post-conceptual poetry’ as a movement (Bernstein 2015). On the other hand, it also suggests that true poetic liberation could only ensue if all such movements collapsed, creating not only the death of the author and the death of the text but also ‘the death of work’ (25). This, Bernstein posits, is a possibility that post-conceptual poetry can gesture towards but can never fully embrace, because it is caught up in a seductive and inescapable contemporary culture of branding and celebrity.
Bernstein claims, with regard to post-conceptual poetry, that:
Its practitioners, born (on average) in the mid-‘80s, are part of a larger trend within post-postmodernism to bridge affect, queerness, ego, lyric, and self-conscious narcissism within the inherited procedural structures of the ‘network’ and the ‘concept’. (Bernstein 2015, 22)
He goes on to say that the project of post-conceptual poetry is most fruitfully a hybridisation of different traditions and notably includes some jettisoned by other experimental movements:
Post-conceptual poets can assert authorship by deferring to the confessional/affective /lyrical (traditional, Romantic poetics) or the mechanical/conceptual or, better yet, they can mix both together (as a conceptual strategy or as a heartfelt impulse or some hybrid of both). (25)
While many post-conceptual poets continue the appropriation and transformation of pre-written texts that is central to conceptual poetry, there seems to be an increased emphasis in their work on performativity, the tangible impact of social media, and an eclecticism of styles ranging from employing appropriated texts to writing more freely. Particularly relevant to my purpose here is that this work is distinguished, in some instances, by a revamped confessionalism: I characterise this as an experimental confessionalism that embraces the personal but with self-awareness, critique and distancing. This is accompanied, in some cases, by an engagement with transgressive or non-heteronormative sexualities. Felix Bernstein, assigns ‘queer structuralism’ to post-conceptual poetry – the word structuralism in this context is puzzling and seems a throwback, but is perhaps employed because of conceptual poetry’s focus on system, network and concept. The poets Bernstein names as post-conceptualists are Sophia Le Fraga, Andrew Durbin, J. Gordon Faylor, Trisha Low, Josef Kaplan, Kate Durbin, Joey Yearous-Algozin, Holly Melgard, Danny Snelson, Steve McLaughlin and Steve Zultanski (23).
This essay will not focus on the work of the post-conceptualists overall but on the engagement of some of them with experimental confessionalism. For that purpose, I will examine selected works by two of the poets: Trisha Low and Felix Bernstein. I will look at the particular social and artistic environment in which their work is embedded, its relationship to previous experimental poetries, and the ways in which it shifts notions of authenticity and affect in experimental poetry. First, however, I want to address the malleable concept of experimentalism itself.
‘logogramme’ by Christian Dotremont from Logbook (Yves Rivière, 1974).
Growing up in Australia, I learned to associate the word ‘calligraphy’ with what is beautiful, perfect, virtuosic handwriting. However, there are other ways to interpret calli – the beauty – of handwriting. Punk calligraphy is my term for unhindered explorations of handwriting.
Even though I still find inspiration in the idea of punk, it’s post-punk music, which explores some of the landscape revealed by punk’s destructiveness, that continues to give me pleasure. Could one import the fertility of Melbourne’s ‘little band scene’ of the late 1970s into literary culture? In the case of poetry, if you strip it back to simple mark-making on a surface, and follow whatever logic emerges from that, you might end up in a new place, one that feels closer to your authentic self than a sonnet ever did.
The Belgian poet Christian Dotremont, a co-founder of the CoBrA movement, developed his own style of loose brush-written poems on paper, which he named logogrames. One description of them would be a European interpretation of Chinese calligraphy. Several examples were published in Logbook (Yves Rivière, 1974). The majority were written in French, although the example reproduced above is in English. Good luck reading it.
In the short text Signification et Sinification (published in CoBrA #7, 1950; an English translation posted at gammm.org), Dotremont advocated for creating a pseudo-Mongolian or pseudo-Chinese writing by writing something in your native language on one side of a page, then turning the page over and rotating it 90°, and then tracing what is visible of your writing quickly, moving downwards rather than left to right. What you get is mirror-writing, rotated 90°, drawn loosely rather than traced exactly – that’s certainly a punk engagement to another culture’s art if we are to take him at his word that he’s creating Mongolian writing.
The idea that illegible but freely written handwriting can be beautiful is at home in Chinese culture. As long ago as the Tang Dynasty (around 800 c.e.), a gentleman who chose the brush-name Zhang Xu practiced his particular specialty; a form of wild cursive calligraphy known as kuang cao shu, which was in some cases illegible to a Chinese reader, but full of passion. Zhang often wrote after drinking wine, and on occasion could not read his own handwriting the morning after a session.
If you know nothing about Chinese writing, perhaps a place to begin with an alternative form of calligraphy would be scribbles. Rhoda Kellogg, with the assistance of educators around the world, concluded that children of all cultures traverse identical stages of learning to make marks. In her book Analyzing Children’s Art (Mayfield, 1970), Kellogg identified 20 ‘basic scribbles’, ranging from dots, straight lines in various orientations and circular motions – which most children master in the course of learning to wield a pencil. As a child’s mental and physical capabilities grow, the scribbles are combined into more complex diagrams, combines and mandalas.
Scribbles can be assumed to be meaningless, and of little value. I argue otherwise: while you cannot write a logical, critical essay using scribbles, you can record certain states of mind and body more effectively than you can by words. The fast-flying scribbler’s arrow hits the bird. The composer of sentences has only written a single word by the time that bird has flown past. There seems to be a difference in level of intensity of scribbling, between tentatively testing a pen and making confident broad strokes to cover a large area. Some scribbles are serving a mental purpose, and have more of their creator’s personality in them. Other scribbles are made physically, with little of the mind involved.
Seeing Jim Leftwich’s marks in Lost & Found Times #39 (1997), reproduced below, got me thinking. I’d never seen anything like them before, especially not in a poetry magazine. They looked like unfinished snippets of handwriting.
Marks by Jim Leftwich from Lost & Found Times #39 (1997).
At Leftwich’s request, I quote his recollection of how they originated, and as published in his text Subjective Asemic Postulates, part 2 (2015):
My first explorations of quasi-calligraphic faux writing came the morning after a particularly intense experience of taking what Terence McKenna called a ‘heroic dose’ of psilocybin mushrooms. I had experienced a complete annihilation of the self, and not one of merging harmoniously with the universe, rather one of being ripped apart, as if in a ritual sparagmos. The next morning I was sitting in my car and I started for the first time to write lines of illegible fake writing. It felt as if I were being guided to do this, as a kind of healing for the night before.
It’s mid January in Edinburgh. Patches of yesterday’s snow make florescent patterns on the future flowerbeds of the new old folks home across the road. It’s a home specifically for people with dementia. From the living room I can see that all of the rooms are, as yet, empty, but at night the lights are on and the lit stairwell and empty rooms have a waiting quality about them. The place actually looks quite nice. There are raised garden beds and a smoking pegoda. It’s close to the sea. Still, there it is, in direct line of sight, the sort of well-run, nicely maintained facility my mother ended up in.
My bedroom has a better view, a bus depot with the North Sea behind. And at night three different lighthouses, the Stevenson-designed lighthouses on Bass Rock, Fidra and Inchkeith. They are all small islands in the Forth with layers of human and bird history: the gannet-call from Mary Queen of Scots; the empty bellies of the Covenanters growling in the seacaves. I watch the lightbeams flash at different times on different moments every night. They are like ministers who reach across to bless me by touching my head and all the worlds I hold in it. Which makes me think of the Christmas Eve service I went to with two friends at a local Catholic church here in Portobello last year. They made darkness and then lit candles, there were songs and words, but my favourite part was the Eucharist when we were invited to line up to either receive the Eucharist or, if we would prefer, just to get a blessing from the priest. We were told if we wanted the blessing and not the body we should, when we reached the priest, lay our right arm across our chest. Although longing to make the gesture that was suggested for the blessing that was being offered, I didn’t join the line. I stayed in my seat, listening to the blessings and The Body of Christ’s and the Amen’s. I sat longing for what was right there: for the ancient stone church I was in, the candles that were burning, the smooth wooden pew I was sitting on, for the call and the response, for the psalms, for the hand above my head. But there was something about submitting. I could not say yes. There was something about the stories, or perhaps those who were delivering them. And it wasn’t just that it was a Catholic church, because neither could I have said a true yes in a lovely plain Protestant church or in the gold shine of a Buddhist center. No matter the lonely pilgram that I am, my feet sore from the journey.
The place where I can hear and respond to the chants of ritual, of community, awash as it is with human frailty and wrong-footedness, is in poetry. Here I can bear the most vulnerable of human fallibilities, not least my own, because the lodestar for poetry is contingency, the acknowledgement of chance and change. I know I will not be hobbled by a single strand of anyone’s story, or my own. It’s my belief that poetic repetition describes and significantly enables that contingency – that when a word or phrase is repeated it connects to previous iterations (within the poem and across poetry) at the same time as demonstrating change (the influence of a changed context, its changed syntactic neighbourhood). So I can hear my foundation songs there; I can say yes to them, because they are constant (sounding our deep and far traditions) as well as mobile and accommodating (fluid, responsive to context).
To be honest, I don’t entirely know what I mean by foundation songs, but I do recognise them. No, actually, I recognise the structures that lift them from the ether to the ear. Most importantly, the measured returns of anaphora and the echoing of form in parallelism that allow incantation, chant, prayer, spell, and poem; sounds that have shaped and defined social, spiritual and geographical communities across the world. Constructions from which we have called for protection, for shelter, for food, for solace, for guidance. Calling the dinghy into the shore, the deer to the arrow, the heart back home.
In her essay ‘Liturgy, Art and Politics’ theology scholar Catherine Pickstock writes that ‘all cultures begin in liturgy which fuses the repetition of ideal value, with physical inscription upon bodies, places, times and motions.’ She uses the term liturgy rather than ritual because she feels that Western scholarship has diminished the meaning and scope and relevance of the word ‘ritual.’ She goes on to note that places are ‘bound together by ceaseless performance of liturgy’ and that ‘this rhythm leads the city to refer beyond itself to nature and to the eternal.’ Poetry, so grounded in detail and moment, also releases us from detail and moment by its repetitions that remind us of the ‘ceaseless performance’ that is the constant process of making and becoming. It reminds us how we belong. It washes us in community that doesn’t depend on physical proximity, internet access, a car.
