Review Short: Therese Lloyd’s The Facts and Helen Heath’s Are Friends Electric?

Posted on June 26, 2018 by Amy Brown

The Facts by Therese Lloyd
Victoria University Press, 2018

Are Friends Electric? by Helen Heath
Victoria University Press, 2018





Midway through Helen Heath’s Are Friends Electric? I find:

The large electric that is you
is like the help that is you and
the mouth and the associated
kiss.

These lines have come from feeding the collection into an online text randomiser. What sounds and looks like decisions made by a person is the work of a consciousless algorithm capable of capturing a question that charges the whole book: What does it mean to be ‘you’?

There are many resemblances between Heath’s collection and Therese Lloyd’s The Facts. Both were written during doctoral candidature at the International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington. Both are answering with poetry philosophical questions regarding what it is, feels and means to be human.

Split in two, Heath’s collection speculates about the effect of rapid technological change on humanity: the first section is a succession of testaments spanning from 370 BCE to 2018, polyvocal as the internet itself; the second, an imagined first-person narrative, sci-fi in verse akin to Fleur Adcock’s disturbing sequence, ‘Gas’, and, more recently, Bonny Cassidy’s Final Theory.

Beginning with Socrates’s famous dismissal of writing is wise. Those who rely on the written word will be ‘tiresome company – a reality show having / the show of wisdom without the reality’. Prescient curmudgeon that he seemed to be, Socrates’ worries, Heath proves in this collection, were unfounded. This opening tempers the anxiety that rises (for me, at least) in the face of certain futuristic scenarios; if writing didn’t obliterate our memories, imaginations and selves, then AI may not destroy us either. It is Heath’s own inquisitive, intelligent humanity that energises her poems; the voices of people who have fallen in love with inanimate feats of engineering glow with uncanny familiarity:

I can feel her right
now. What we have
is real and if it’s only real
to me and it’s only real to her
then that’s fine.

In the unusual and the extreme, Heath finds not freaks but relations. The Victorian spiritualist attempting to commune with the dead, the robotics engineer creating a third animatronic son, and Heath herself tracing her genetic code back to 1500 — each is simply testing the limits of human life with the available technology.

In the second section, ‘Reprogramming the Human Heart’, Heath gives us the voice of a grieving woman who refuses to accept death as an inevitability. Profound loss is made meaningful with lyricism:

. . . this black night, into which
I must send you out in the longboat
of your body, seems endless.

If the body is a vessel, then where is the loved self? Following John Locke’s theory of the self depending upon memory, the narrator of this sequence collects ‘enough to build him’ – a digital version of Pygmalion, sculpting Twitter feeds instead of clay into not the ideal but the pre-existent.

An intricate thought experiment, this section considers not only the logical possibility of such a recreation, but the emotional and ethical consequences. In tandem with the robotic reanimation of her deceased husband, the narrator undergoes IVF treatment to conceive his child. This juxtaposition of science that in the last two decades has become conventional with that which still seems hopelessly futuristic is brilliantly perturbing.

As in her debut collection Graft, which was the first non-non-fiction work to be shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book prize, Heath has shown how lightly and easily poetry can wear serious research.

If Heath’s collection casts an electric brightness over what it means to be human, Lloyd’s is feeling about in the shadows of the self. The epigraph to the first section, titled ‘Time’, invokes Anne Carson: ‘It grows dark as I write now, the clocks have been changed, night/ comes earlier—gathering like a garment.’ The atmosphere does grow dark as Lloyd writes. The opening poem, [to begin], centred on the page, symmetrical as a Rorschach inkblot, signals the psychologically testing quality of the collection. Intended to resemble a moth, the poem adopts the perspective of a trapped specimen, while simultaneously examining it:

the hot glass ceiling
reflected only her
calm
resolute
gaze

This double view, from within and outside at once, is maintained to agonising effect throughout the collection. Lloyd’s gaze isn’t just calm and resolute but at times hilariously dry. On the farcical hypocrisy that tends to characterise weddings, Lloyd recalls a meeting between her, her ex-husband and their wedding celebrant, at which the celebrant said in:

a quivery, timid voice
that she was in fact, divorced—
like a chauffeur owning up to a DIC charge.
I was more offended by her sandals.

‘[I]n fact’ is apposite. This collection consists of facts that might be described as confessions due to their personal nature. ‘Confession’ comes from confiteri meaning ‘to acknowledge’, which is to notice and to name. Lloyd does this exceptionally well (to borrow from Plath). There is an art to such revelation; it is not mere exposure of detail but an excavation of the self that requires sharp intertextual instruments. As well as frequently referencing Carson, Lloyd looks to Edward Hopper. In ‘On metaphysical insight’, she writes, ‘The red line of the shop lino blows itself out in a frowning bowl of fruit’, painting herself as she examines Hopper’s ‘Automat’. ‘. . . Hopper liked to think his / paintings weren’t desolate. ‘I’m trying to paint myself,’ he said.’ If the poem is desolate, it is only wryly so. The title’s faux-aggrandisement provides exactly the perspicacity it parodies.

‘What is eros anyway apart from sore backwards?’ Is Lloyd’s understated version of Carson’s conceptual triangle, which defines desire as consisting in equal parts of itself, lack, and the desiring of lack. As she navigates her own experiences of these, Lloyd reads Carson:

something is filling up in her
blocking in the surface of the triangle
that she’d sooner not have.

It is ambiguous which surface is being referred to: ‘lack’, ‘desire’ or ‘desiring lack’? Lloyd makes the art of lacking look not easy or glamorous, but human – specifically feminine – pulsing with blood and wonder.

In the second section, ‘Desire’, there is a sequence, which particularly hurt to read. This may sound insufficiently academic, but it seems fitting for pain to be mentioned without a footnote in regard to a book whose words are so bodily. ‘What is to be celebrated here? My meat? My fur? I expand outward, and in a fantastic trick of perspective my internals shrink, my vitals no longer vital,’ Lloyd writes with abstruse clarity of pregnancy. A poem later, ‘Imogen’, could be narrated by mother or miscarried baby. 

Signs of miracles 
are important to the faithless
stigmata, a vial of moving blood,

saints. My little saint suffered
via her lungs
found it hard to say the word imagine.

Mother, baby, saint and miracle are stirred together in this profound description of lack and desire. In the following poem, Lloyd writes, ‘What do we do when we serve? / Offer little things / as stand-ins for ourselves’, suggesting how oneself can be lacking, either eroded or unavailable.

Just as convincing as her depiction of this lack is Lloyd’s account of a self brimming over. In the title poem, about a noxious relationship, the self is inflated with infatuation. ‘Boundlessness streamed from me like the forever movement / of air. I could feel people breathing me in.’

Earlier in the poem, Lloyd refers to the poet’s medium as air: ‘I breathe and live, nothing more or less’, the words a source of survival. Indeed, this is a work to be inhaled.

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Review Short: Selina Tusitala Marsh’s Tightrope

Posted on June 26, 2018 by Paul Magee

Tightrope by Selina Tusitala Marsh
Auckland University Press, 2017


I like the way a backyard door opens ‘parting sooty / veils of flies,’ in the first poem of Selina Tusitala Marsh’s Tightrope. Outside are Max V, Lima and Ono (‘knotted fur, nettling bones / fat eyes, fat hunger’), and they have found a dead dog on the road

sniffed out its decayed meat

dragged it home

and in pecking order

began to eat

Uncle puts on his overalls, they are navy blue: ‘Don’t worry I take it. / Good, bury it deep, we think.’ I like these vivid words, the dance of the lines and the way Uncle comes through.

Marsh rhymes often, and keeps things fresh with pararhyme – e.g. the move from ‘said’ to ‘red,’ to ‘road,’ in ‘Apostles’ – and slant rhyme – ‘bed’ chimes with ‘world’ in ‘Tightrope Tantrum,’ ‘north’ with ‘taut.’ But what I particularly enjoy is the intelligence and poise of her cadences:

Gran’s jasmine

delicate pink

heavy and sweet

clings to the bone

These lines open a poem entitled ‘Kwitea Street in the ‘80s.’

Another poem is called ‘The Path,’ which is ala in Samoan. We learn that ‘The ala /is a bridge/ a road’, the ala is ‘a dog walking,’ it

is a tuna flying
through the sea’s

salt and spit

is a tongue

These are exciting and evocative lines. But the poem turns into something of a list from here, and the punning at midpoint (‘is a root / a route / a vein’) adds to the sense that things are getting a bit arbitrary.

A sense of insubstantiality affects many of the poems in Tightrope. At times that is because the topic is too occasional (e.g. ‘Nadadola Road,’ a light-hearted poem centred on the poet’s embarrassed failure to tell off a Fijian taxi driver for texting while driving), or the dance too automatic (e.g. ‘Led by Line,’ which is entirely composed of plays on the word ‘line’). In the case of ‘Dinner with the King,’ it feels like the occasion is standing in for the poem. The language dwells nicely on the ‘Cool sliced cubes of fish’ the poet and her interlocutor (Samoa’s most recent head of state, the royal Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Efi) share, its ‘flesh speckled with salt.’ But the idea that that fish is

Raw as Nelson’s hunger for independence

As bitter lemon sweet as Tamasese’s peaceful

Call for freedom

At Tuaefu

feels forced, and so too the idea that the ‘Crab soup broth / Coriander, lemon grass’ the two are sipping is ‘Clear as the conversation between us.’ The imagining in these lines is all just a bit flat, and the prosaic rhythms and word choices in the lines that follow reflect that:

I spoke of e-books and twitterature

Self-publication, facebook and literature

Of Al’s Prime Ministerial Award

Of Lani’s storming of Amazon.com

Another place where we belong

Gathering kindle, setting fire with words

Setting fire to worlds.

To this sort of perfunctory style, I would compare the lovely lines to ‘Dr Ngahuia,’ which at one point turn from the doctor to invoke

Te Arikinui Dame Te Ātairangikaahu

hawk of the morning sky

the longest glide

over Taupiri mountain

an unmarked grave framed

by Tyrian purple roses

and also the way Marsh circles around the difficult and intriguing task of performing for Queen Elizabeth as Commonwealth Poet in 2016. The poem she delivered in Westminster Cathedral is set here alongside a series of elegies to ‘Queens I have met’ including Dr Nghauia Te Awekotuku, QEII herself, Oprah and Alice Walker. This juxtaposition hits just the right estranging note: after all, the Queen is pop culture. On the other hand, popular (and at times even academic!) culture has a sort of royalty to celebrate as well.

Marsh’s Westminster performance is further described in a poem that bounces from the appropriate nursery rhyme – ’Pussy cat, pussy cat, / Where have you been? / I’ve been to London to visit the Queen’ – into the kind of self-fashioning and strut which hip hop has brought along with pararhyme and half-rhyme to the fore:

My Niu Ziland drawl

My siva Samoa hands

My blood red lips

My Va philosophising

My poetic brown hips

Then standing before Her Majesty

And the Duke of Edinburgh

I centred Polynesian navigation

Making sure to be poetically thorough

In proposing a timeline

Inverting West is Best

Instead drawing a circle

Encompassing all the rest.

For me, the best poem in Tightrope is ‘Essential Oils for the Dying.’ The poem is an elegy for Teresia Teaiwa, poet and former director of Va’aomanū Pasifika, the Pacific Studies unit at the University of Wellington. Marsh dedicates the book to Teaiwa, describing her in that dedication as ‘Teresia Teaiwa / shooting black star / (1968-2017).’

‘Essential Oils’ again has some lovely cadences, and a real tenderness in its opening offerings of cardamom and ginger, its concluding balm that ‘for the rest of us’ there will be

cypress for sorrow

chamomile for resentment, tension

and bitter-sweet melissa

to press against the loss.

In 2010, Teaiwa and Marsh co-edited a special issue of The Contemporary Pacific, an issue dedicated to the critical and creative work of the great Samoan poet, novelist and essayist, Albert Wendt, a contemporary writer who should be far more widely read in this country.

One of Wendt’s most celebrated works is his 1977 novel Pouliuli. The word means ‘utter darkness’ in Samoan. Wendt and the novel play a central role in Tightrope too, via what Marsh describes as her ‘black out poems.’ Marsh has taken Wendt’s story of a Samoan chief’s self-revulsion and descent into (an initially) simulated madness and she has quite literally blacked out all but a few of the novel’s words with thick texta. A full 20 of the 98 pages of Tightrope are given over to full page reproductions of the resultant work. Tom Philips’s A Humument is an obvious generic predecessor. But the effect in Marsh’s case is overwhelmingly of black texta hues, with small patches of grainy white around the few words that remain. Those words leap in strange directions: ‘burning’ ‘hands’ ‘Draw’ ‘no visible marks’ ‘as if’ ‘whole mean-’ ‘ing’ ‘was reflected there’ (page 83 of Pouliuli). Interspersed through Marsh’s book, these blacked out pages provide important (because intriguing, vanishing) subtext to the surrounding poems, giving a sense of curious and undisclosed purpose to Marsh’s book as a whole. I like the effect very much. The following – page 104 of Pouliuli – appears between some lines on Philippe Petit’s tightrope walking (‘Le Coup’), and a fine poem on gafatele, a word left unglossed. All the rest of the page is black:

‘the dark ground’ 
								‘recited’ 
	‘whole passages’ 


	‘bone by bone’ 

			‘to’ 



			‘identify’ 


		‘the brutal’ 
	         ‘memory’    ‘root.’
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Review Short: Charmaine Papertalk-Green’s and John Kinsella’s False Claims of Colonial Thieves

Posted on June 14, 2018 by Timmah Ball

False Claims of Colonial Thieves
by Charmaine Papertalk-Green and John Kinsella
Magabala Books, 2017


False Claims of Colonial Thieves weaves together two disparate voices, Charmaine Papertalk-Green and John Kinsella, in a demanding collection that reaffirms the troubling environmental era we are living through. Structurally, the book shifts between traditionally oppositional views – an Aboriginal woman and a white man. Neither dominates the narrative: instead, we witness their shared commitment to challenge the environmental direction Australia is spiralling towards. Their concerns take the form of protest. In ‘Dream mine time animals’ Papertalk- Green writes:

Contemporary mechanical mine dream time animals
Hills broken into millions of pieces
Deep cuts into the flesh of earth
Gapping wounds with polluted waterholes

In ‘Histories,’ Kinsella illustrates the devastation of mining with equal ferocity, writing:

Burrowing deep, 
Extracting gold
To make it no more
Then bullion – the veins
Of the earth
Uprooted. 

And the killer
Goes off-site
Chases a kid
To his death. 
And the earth
Cries out of the dry

These similarities suggest how their collaboration has evolved through a mutual desire to nurture our country in a time where neo-liberal mining agendas supersede social, moral and environmental consequences. But while these relationships are crucial, they exist within a history of uneven power dynamics where white Australians – however well meaning – have often spoken on our behalf. With this firmly in my consciousness, it was impossible to approach False Claims of Colonial Thieves without some hesitation. Was Kinsella aware of his privilege and the responsibilities that go with it? And had he considered the benefits of proximity that blackness might bring to his career? These concerns may seem harsh, but they are present in the minds of black Australian poets and authors.

This years Judith Wright Poetry Prize winner, Evelyn Araluen, commented on the ABC radio program AWAYE! that the [Australia’s] poetry scene initially felt like an encouraging space for black people, ‘but the more I learnt, the more I realised it was usually just about containment, possession and appropriation.’ Given the extraordinary rise and dominance of black writers – Araluen took out both first and third prize, Alexis Wright won the Stella Prize and Tony Birch received the Patrick White Award amongst a growing list of achievements by others – her words seemed to reveal the ironies of success. For a long time, Aboriginal writers have been creating some of the most exceptional work in the country, yet our identities and stories are often contained and controlled elsewhere. And, as the growing appetite for our culture rises, it has attracted some white writers who have benefited from the new black wave far greater then we have.

Given these complexities, it felt reasonable to consider Kinsella’s voice more closely, analysing the role of a white ally instead of asking people in his position to simply listen and learn? A cover quote by Bruce Pascoe alleviated my concerns, stating that the book ‘takes no prisoners, but goes into the heart of Australia’s darkness.’ As I delved into the collection, his reflections accurately described the catastrophic atmosphere the reader is thrown into. The words of both authors reveal the destructive consequences of colonisation or, more specifically, the environmental chaos mining has caused. Poems like ‘The Salt Chronicles’ demonstrate that, despite my questions regarding their pairing, Kinsella expresses a deep longing to repair the damage done to Western Australia.

Beyond the elements that unify the writers, one of the most compelling aspects of the collection is the assured way that both reflect on their stark differences. Kinsella doesn’t hide his positionality and the structural advantages he gains as mining destroys the land. In ‘Grandmothers’ he writes 

My grandmother was a mining town child –
…
My father
worked for decades in Karatha and Kal - 
so it’s not as if I come to the mines
without foreknowledge.

In contrast, Papertalk-Green writes:

My grandmother washed
White town fella’s clothes
To feed her kids and survive
I don think mining would have
Meant much to her

These sharp distinctions ensure that the complexity of race and Australia’s cultural landscape isn’t erased. Although both are fighting for environmental justice, their connection is never constructed simplistically, and with the kind of reconciliation approach that so often becomes tokenistic gestures of unity. Instead, some of the most powerful moments are the reflections of how difficult it is for black and white Australia to unify and address ongoing injustices. In ‘I won’t Pretend,’ Papertalk-Green draws out these frictions writing:

I won’t pretend it’s easy
Living in an intercultural space
Cultural clashes and tensions
Bounce and collide
And sometimes explode

These moments leave the reader wondering how the two worked together, and what the experience would have felt like for them, responding and playing off each others work as the collection developed. These intercultural differences are articulated in one the most effecting poems, ‘Shopping Centre Car park,’ and response. Set in a Woolworths (Woollies) car park in Northam – a familiar town I have visited frequently on trips back to York where my mother’s family of Ballardong Noongar descent live – I recognised the tensions immediately, familiar with the irritable looks white people often gave mob that congregate in the air-conditioned supermarket in waves of extreme heat. Kinsella writes about this racism with a sense of disgrace and apology:

I think over this town and it’s foul history and I think over this town and the friend
I have made and I say to myself Brother if you ever read this
Know I admire you

But in Papertalk-Green’s response, there is no need to apologise to mob getting pushed around … instead, she shows them getting on with it:

Centre manager pushed them out
But they refused to retreat to wollies car park
With their get of yamajiland Pauline H banner

A major strength of the collection is its opportunity to see the colonised and colonisers’ voices in parallel, fighting for the same cause in different ways, both determined to see justice, yet never shying away from the enormous gulf that exists between them.

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Review Short: Andy Jackson’s Music Our Bodies Can’t Hold

Posted on June 14, 2018 by Ruth McIver

Music Our Bodies Can’t Hold by Andy Jackson
Hunter Publishers, 2017


Music Our Bodies Can’t Hold’s premise is unique: 54 poems for the 46 chromosomes in the human body. Each poem is distinctive in typography and voice, gleaned from a primary source interview of a public or private figure believed to have Marfan syndrome. Often very tall, slender and gifted, those with Marfan syndrome are aesthetically, artistically, intellectually, athletically extraordinary. As the collection’s poet, Andy Jackson puts it: ‘Marfan troubles the boundaries between “disability” and “extraordinary ability”’; much anguish is caused by this illness, and there is a sense of being ‘dumb with pain / suffused with light’, ‘when the genetic stars align’’.

Marfan emerges as a kind of magical affliction with a sense of tragic inevitability. It represents being touched by something great and terrible, evident from the selection of historical individuals represented in this volume: Akhenaten, Mary Queen of Scots, Abraham Lincoln, Osama Bin Laden. These figures appear in the volume along with lay people with Marfan, and in keeping with the musical theme, there is a prelude, interlude and postlude that operates as the book’s connective structure. Here is a chance for Marfan to justify its genetic mischief. And mischief it is, because Marfan can potentially devastate the body and cause premature death and great physical suffering in the process.

It is Jackson’s refusal of reductive sentimentality and cliché when representing his subjects that imbues the volume with power. The dialect in which the subjects speak, their rhetorical inclusions and exclusions, and the attendant typographical experiments all indicate the integrity and ingenuity of the project. Jackson’s curation of disparate voices creates sometimes ironic, sometimes poignant portraits of a broad historical and cultural spectrum of individuals, from pharaohs to teens on MSN. Each poem expresses pathos without pity, where unexpected humour collides with trauma such as in ‘Charlotte’: 

(There) are always corridors, classrooms,
 chewing gum, scissors, a hammer.

And at home, the classroom, MSN.
Go kill yourself, you lanky bitch …

Really, I’ll keep studying
 footwear design. It’s so hard

when you’re tall,
to find fashionable shoes

A sense of ongoing off-stage dialogue between the poet, the subject and the reader develops, as in ‘Bradford,’ as Jackson includes non-verbal cues from the invisible narrator (interviewer / curator / God voice):

On the solo album cover you 
thought would be your last 
bare-chested pectus excavatum
your halo burns a hole in the sky
so, should we start now?

In another poem, ‘Krystal,’ a series of italicised interjections paint a picture of a very young subject who has had a series of open heart operations and the removal of glaucoma: 

She holds five pink balloons, smiles for the camera …

I want to meet Elsa the Snow Queen and go on all the rides. 
Her pale floral dress.   Her thick glasses.

b. 2008

The date of birth (and for some subjects, the date of death), adds another element of graveness; with adult and infant subjects alike, lives are defined by multiple medical interventions and some are horribly truncated like ‘Micthell’:

Wedding night my temperature 
Was a hundred and seven,

An axe stuck mid-arc in my chest ….

I’m on one end 
of the see-saw, our baby girl in my lap

A smile on my face. Is it mine?

1987–2014

As this ‘disorder of the connective tissue’ itself asserts, ‘names are critical’. The naming of subjects, and the naming of the parts that hurt and might give out, humanise diagnostic criteria and reclaim subjectivity from surgeons’ reports. The naming of things as the practice of poetry: for Jackson, this is music that lives in us, that saves and elevates us. As in ‘Geoff,’ he skilfully delivers a sense of transcendence of visceral limitation with a sense of imminent physical consequence:

Guitar amniotic with sweat, drops
of blood, I feel the room tilt, pixelate
Tinnitus screams, my heart thumps
Pain’s shadow looming over my joints- 
I’ve thrown myself around the stage 
Like an evangelist for oblivion, again
But this is the last time I swear …

It is alchemy, this melding of words and worlds, this colliding of systems of language. Medical, vernacular, medico-vernacular, at times mundane and at others, celestial, its expert polyphony makes Music our Bodies Can’t Hold extraordinary. Each poem is a portal to a unique perspective, a soul spilling over with desires for their life, some furious, some shattered, some philosophical, but all touched by the same collective destiny.

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Review Short: Rachael Mead’s The Flaw in the Pattern and Philip Nielsen’s Wildlife of Berlin

Posted on June 1, 2018 by Jeremy Fisher

The Flaw in the Patten by Rachael Mead
UWAP Poetry, 2017

Wildlife of Berlin by Philip Nielsen
UWAP Poetry, 2017


Holding each of these books is a pleasure. Their two-tone covers have different but complementary botanical design motifs while the master design elements of the UWAP Poetry series, pushing on 23 titles, of which they are part gives them a uniform appearance. They are a credit to Terri-ann White and her team at UWAP in Perth. The miserably small print runs for volumes of poetry often lead to scrimping and saving on design and production, but here at least design costs have been defrayed over the entire series and it pays off in the look of the finished product.

Inside, the paper is cream matt with sufficient weight to limit show through, an important consideration for a poem set out upon a page. Again, each book has the same interior design. The font is specified as Lyon Text, one unknown to me but a serif font bearing a close resemblance to Times. It is elegant and does justice to both poets’ poems. It is interesting to see different uses of capitalisation in the titles of the poems in each book, suggesting that editorial style was sufficiently flexible to accommodate each poet’s personal preferences.

Both books also feature extensive notes on the poems, acknowledgements and a liberal use of epigraphs. There are also endorsements from other poets both within the books and on the covers.

Rachael Mead’s book, The Flaw in the Pattern, was first highly commended in UWAP’s 2016 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript.1 It is easy to see why. There is a continuity to the sequences of poems within, surprising when the acknowledgements reveal how widely published the individual poems have been, not only within Australia but internationally.

The book opens with a sequence of seven poems, ostensibly each from a day on a trek though Tasmanian wilderness. As the poems progress the poetic voice grows more accustomed to the bush and natural environment (‘If I misspoke, if I held eye contact too long, these trees don’t care’ ‘On not being lost’ p.17). To me, some discords sounded in literary and artistic references almost forcing themselves into the poems. A reference to Emily Dickinson just works in an image of leeches as dashes she would covet (‘The wild grammar of leeches’ p.16) but a reference to being in a McCubbin painting in “On not being lost’ is an image too far for me. However, that is a rare misstep for Mead and a forgivable one in an otherwise flawless poem.

Then there are the poems like ‘The water tanks’ (p. 63) which have no such quibbles. Here, those iconic constants of rural Australia are transformed into saviours ‘still cool and full, standing guard/among the fresh acres of ash.’ ‘What the fire didn’t touch’ (p. 47) doesn’t mention the flames. Instead, it recounts the scenes after a domestic fire, the family home ‘a charred nest’, a childhood bedroom now ‘a post-apocalyptic theatre set’. Fire also features in the final poem in Mead’s book, the five-part ‘Smoke signalled death threats’ (p.87). This poem chronicles the stages of a bushfire from ‘the drone of fire bombers’ to the uncertain ‘survival plan burned out with the pump.’ The final part, ‘Next of kin’, also contains the superb opening lines: ‘Morning drags itself in like a wounded soldier/but I’m taking no prisoners today’ (p. 90).

Philip Neilsen’s Wildlife of Berlin is arranged in five sections, though this is not indicated on the contents page. The reason for the sections is theme. The first section deals, broadly, with love and death; the second contains poems that feature birds, though this is a far from adequate description of the beautiful poetry therein; the third section, often in first person, features character narratives with poignant humour or sharp irony as in ‘The University Makes a Poem (‘a student seen reading Proust on the quadrangle lawn/is hailed as a guru’ p. 58); section four contains elegant musings, some such as ‘Testimonial’ (‘You wrote today of loneliness. / But I did not like you then, / I would not like you now’ p. 73) revealing the poet’s darker side; while the last section almost wearily ponders youth, aging, climate change hope and regret. The poems traverse the world, but Queensland is a constant throughout, not merely as a lace but as a state of mind. Take ‘Guitar’(p.64), for instance, set on Kelvin Grove Road in Brisbane at the scene of a traffic accident witnessed by the first person narrator; ‘A man in shorts comes out of the nearest house’. What else would a man in Queensland wear?

Nielsen’s humour is apparent in ‘Messaging’ (p. 90) where in seven two line stanzas he flays those who ‘peck at their phones like birds’. Again drawing on digital technology for thematic material, he also flays an apparent rival poet in ‘My Enemy has asked to be Friended on Facebook’ (p. 96). This is a gleefully malicious poem: ‘your chagrin at being passed over, failing/to make a bigger splash in the shark pool of poetry –’. I laughed out loud at that frank image; it evoked so many memories of overblown egos waiting their turn to bore each other stupid in dank and chilly rooms.

Both of these books are fine contributions to Australia’s literary culture. I shall return to each with pleasure. What I particularly enjoyed was how contentedly Australian each is. Both show that the poets are worldly; Neilsen’s title references the German capital and other European locations feature in his poems while Mead has the Cook Islands and Antarctica as settings. Yet Australia is home. For Mead, it is the Western states: ‘The eastern states seem separate as islands.’ (‘Homecoming’ p.29). For Nielsen, it is Queensland’s beauty and ugliness that underpins his poetry: ‘By the mangroves/at the far side of the airport, a steel crane/like a stranded stegosaurus lifts its head’ (‘Sunset at Brisbane Airport, p. 70). Each book is dangerously familiar, and we could ignore their place poems for foreign places. However, I recommend them as guides to a current, vibrant Australian literary consciousness.

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Johanna Featherstone Reviews History and the Poet

Posted on May 25, 2018 by Johanna Featherstone

History and the Poet by Robert Wood
Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2017


Although Robert Wood’s History and the Poet is described as essay, it defies being labelled as one genre. Perhaps like the definition of poetry itself, which shifts and changes between individuals and contexts, language and culture, so do Wood’s words. With sincerity and curiosity, Wood invites the reader into a personal journey, asking us at the start: What is Australia? What is poetry? and What is poetry in Australia? In search of answers, what follows is heartfelt discourse; meditations, manifestoes, letters, mythical stories and, at times, academic hyperbole that is steeped in the author’s philosophical, poetic and political relationship with the natural world and its languages.

Wood’s work is a terrific survey, a wordy appraisal of Australian poets past and present. It is refreshing to read a collection of essays from a practicing poet that celebrates his contemporaries like Omar Sakr, Clare Nasher and Michael Farrell. This inclusion of emerging poets – a category within which Wood places himself, ‘taking language from all over to make its nest’ – suggests that poets are investigating their histories, the derivations of languages, the richness of land in multi-dimensional ways. And yet, Wood calls poets to look further, deeper into their histories as denizens of this land.

The chapter titles are often ambiguous and the essays follow the patterns of someone thinking aloud rather than chronologically. Wood’s subjects include whiteness in the Australian poetry bureaucracy, the epic, poet laureates, crayfish, genius and money. All essays are written with care and honesty yet the shortness of each piece results in skin-deep research. By the book’s close one is left feeling a sparky, interesting conversation has been had rather than an intellectual and provocative reading experience. The audience of poets that thrive outside the academic arena may not venture further than the title History and The Poet, accompanied by an image of introspective suburban architecture. Meanwhile, poets in the academic space may find books such as Philip Mead’s superlative Networked Language cover much of the same territory as Wood but with finer articulation and razor-sharp perceptions. Still, Wood’s voice is earnest and energetic and anyone who cares about poetry will find something to appreciate.

Wood’s many questions, assertions and experiments with ideas are infectious. Fellow critics and essayists could be inspired by his attempt to reframe academic writing. For example, he intersperses satirical pieces that break up some of the critical posturing with ironic playfulness. Although the satire won’t bring about social change, it reminds us how comedy can expose our own foolishness and the limits of scholarly prose. In these sections, Wood includes an epistle, flashbacks to childhood reading lists and personal reflections on his own identity. In doing so, he gives the collection a warmth and friendliness that almost compensates for more abstruse expressions: ‘The fetish for the search of influence as answers. And hence originality as an anti-mimicry that privileges an ur rupture, fails as common sense Socratic imperative’.

When not being inscrutable, Wood’s writings are a courageous attempt to reframe how we read and write essays, they are attempts to create a new scholarship of poetics by addressing our history as Australians living on this continent, country or nation. Wood’s poetics are a poetics of the body, the bones and the cells as they connect to and flow on from the history in the earth – be it the earth of Tagore, Robbie Burns, or Wood’s own feet on Western Australian desert. At its best, his writing aims to be evocative and musical: ‘I know that my country home is Redgate. Here are the crayfish, abalone, herring; white belly frogs, black and red cockatoos, skinks; loam, limesetone, karri and cave.’

History and the Poet brings to our attention aspects of poetry or writing about poetry that may otherwise sit below the surface. In ‘New Mimicry’, Wood critiques the accent that many Australian poets use when they perform, noting that ‘today’s young Australian poets sound positively Yankee’ while his friend visiting from the US remarks that ‘They all sounded like they were from the Mid-West, that kind of newsreader voice, not as serious but still.’ Wood proffers we need to be active listeners on the lookout for imitation in all parts of poetry and in ourselves, too, if we are to make sense in and of the world. In ‘Reading Performance’, Wood attempts a discourse around performance poetry and questions why there are no critical reviews of readings, performances or talks. Working through various lenses (a sociologist, an economist, a poet) the piece ends with a surprise phrase, more disconcerting than illuminating: ‘That is why a reading is not best described in the metaphor of the market. It is all invisible hands in the poetry world and reading is simply a magic trick that pulls the rabbits from the hat that was never seen to begin with.’ This is a statement that snares the reader in a rhetorical trap, which seemingly fails to progress the questions at the core of this collection: What is poetry?

Wood encourages us to find poetry in the everyday, to inhabit poetry as a language of performance, to see poetry as ‘noticeable asides’. Throughout the book, one senses Wood is lost in wonder at the possibilities of what poetry is or what a poet can be. Potentially this is anything and everything, if we reframe how we think about language. There is always poetry in our daily lives and this, he asserts, is what poets can do: expose this everyday poetics and enable us to time-travel, to see the world anew without ever leaving the lounge.

Most meaningful in the collection is Wood’s call to all of us to learn Indigenous languages. ‘It isn’t just the cult of forgetfulness but dismissal of that which is actually difficult’, he writes, explaining why this learning hasn’t happened. Wood acknowledges there are difficulties to this engagement, such as the necessity of of cultural protocols and the ‘complicated and confusing legacy of new settlement governmentality’. This seems a rather polite way of acknowledging that the actual loss of Indigenous languages are rooted in colonisation and racist policies of assimilation. In the piece, ‘You Must Let Go of the Anger in May’, he asserts that ‘No poet working in Australia today has realised the potential of the available linguistic material’ in the country, which almost suggests Wood is that poet. However, it may be that the task is impossible for any singular poet, and that many poets whom Wood cites are exploring their own languages and linguistic heritage – Ali Cobby Eckermann and Jeanine Leane, for example. If one looks at the contemporary landscape of poets and poetry producers and publishers in Australia it seems that many are creating and promoting work that reflects the exciting multiplicity of voices and histories.

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Submission to Cordite 88: TRANSQUEER

Posted on May 21, 2018 by Stuart Barnes

Transqueer

Poetry for Cordite 88: TRANSQUEER is guest-edited by Quinn Eades and Stuart Barnes.

I give myself a poet’s right, otherwise I would not dare to speak. The right of poets is to say something and then to say, believe it if you want to, but believe it weeping – Hélène Cixous

TRANSQUEER is a call for you to say something that maybe you haven’t been able to say before. It asks you to find poetry in / between lines, binaries and stultifying categorisations; from the life of flesh, from inside the bleating, many-chambered heart of gender and sexuality. It follows from Joy Ladin’s request that we ‘explore trans identities not as positions to defend but as modes of becoming and thus ways of being human’ (Trans Studies Quarterly, 2016: 640).

Poetry has always shown us where the gaps / gasps lie, where the line does (not) end, how the margin teaches the centre what it is to be always-becoming, always coming-to (writing, the self, the other, each other…). We ask you ‘[to] believe that the world is QUEER, or that oneself is, or both, [and that this] is a window of doubt through which all creative possibility comes into being’ (Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word).

We want transgressive poems, transonic poems, transmontane poems. Transmissible, transitory, transhumanist poems. Poems that transpire. Poems that transact. Poems that transpose. Poems that translate what Mark Doty refers to as ‘that which is not business as usual, not solid identities founded on firm grounds.’ We want poems as transducers, transmuters, transponders. We want to be transported, we want to be transfixed, we want to be queered by your poems. We want poems that queer(y).

We think of gorgeous-sounding words: transalpine, transistor, transmigrate, transfusion, transatlantic, transaminate, transcultural, transmogrify, transcutaneous.

We think of a few lines from Sylvia Plath, ‘Balloons’ – ‘Yellow cathead, blue fish— / Such queer moons we live with / Instead of dead furniture!’ – and of their elegant translucence.

We think of two lines from Tori Amos, ‘Blood Roses’ – ‘You think I’m a queer / I think you’re a queer’ – and of their gaspy / gappy transmission.

Come into being. Send us your gasps, your yells, your manifestos, your moments in the mirror – say something. Send us your work, and ask us to believe it, weeping. The time for TRANSQUEER poetry is here.

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 …

submit


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Review Short: Shastra Deo’s The Agonist

Posted on May 18, 2018 by Paul Hetherington

The Agonist by Shastra Deo
UQP, 2017


Shastra Deo’s first volume of poetry, The Agonist contains many poems about corporeal life, and about the separation of bodies, problematising the connections between body and thought. The poems often turn the inside out, as it were, opening up a poetic anatomy of internal organs and interior life. They dwell periodically on in-between states – to some extent symbolised by skin, space and emptiness – and they persistently return to tropes of rupture and penetration. As they explore such territory, they tend to alienate usual notions of humanity, asking the reader to consider whether their mind/body assumptions hold true – and intimacy itself is sometimes viewed askance through such perspectives, as in the lines: ‘You may be forgiven/ for thinking that love/ is a butcher’s ritual’. For Deo, it is not so much that the human body has a life all of its own, but that the flesh ‘speaks’, as it were, of human experience and human circumstance in lateral ways.

To give a couple of early examples, the opening poem in the volume, ‘Five’, addresses ‘what lived in the space between/ our bodies, our words’ and the second poem, ‘Scorched Earth’, sets ‘The body/ and the space it occupies’ alight. Following Emily Dickinson’s examples in her poems ‘One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –’ (quoted by Deo as an epigraph to one of her sections) and ‘I dwell in Possibility –’, this poem imagines the body as a house. While Deo’s metaphorical and metaphysical concerns are generally very different from Dickinson’s – Deo’s is dominated by the evocation of certain kinds of burning – she is, like Dickinson, interested in notions of haunting and absence: ‘your heart is a house/ with the doors left open’, and there is a ‘stranger roaming the hallways’. Because the narratives in ‘Scorched Earth’ are not explicit enough to give the reader the full context for such expressions, it conveys a sense of scorching and damage, and of failed relationships, while challenging the reader to connect with its uncompromising tropes.

The book also explores the disjunctures of family life and, as mentioned above, various exigencies associated with intimate relationships. As it does so, it adopts what might be understood as a mythopoeic stance towards much of its subject matter, emphasising the strange and unknowable rather than the familiar, and creating various narratives with tropes of violence and loss at their heart. It is not that we cannot know the subjects of Deo’s poetry, but she continuously shifts the focus of her work away from the readily explicable.

This means that even the poem ‘Road Trip’, which starts with an apparently simple idea – ‘In the summer of 1995 my mother and I took/ a road trip’ – soon morphs into a kind of fable, in which the lives of the speaker and her mother, ‘bundled up / in garbage bags’ are thrown ‘into the river’. It is characteristic of Deo that these thrown bags are simultaneously the real thing and a metaphor for change and dislocation. It is also characteristic that the poem introduces a sense of uncertainty and occlusion: ‘I don’t remember the trip back, but I imagine / it must have been like the drive past the redgum wharf’. For Deo in this volume the known, the quotidian and the mysterious are usually entangled, and there is a persistent sense in her work that what is remembered is not the whole story.

Deo uses images drawn from mythology to achieve some of her effects, such as in the lines, ‘My lover, blinded by his tryst / with the sun, crafted cartographies / of the labyrinths in my brain’ and is preoccupied by ideas of divination and ritual. She is also interested in the Tarot, writing a sequence that briefly evokes Ovidian metamorphosis (‘I lived in the woods so long my ankles / tapered into hooves’) before rewriting the symbolism of The Hanged Man, The Priestess, The Emperor and Death. Deo’s alertness in crafting a contemporary and transformative version of these tropes prevents them from being a recycling of received notions and imagery. The Hanged Man, for instance, finds his ‘god in an oil spill, poised / to light a match’ and Death ‘escapes / our mythology’.

Further, the body and written and spoken language are intimately – indeed viscerally – connected in this volume. For instance, ‘Anatomy of Being’ opens with an account of what makes up the physical body, inflected by sometimes unexpected ideas – ‘organs, / constructed of cells and stored in the / dorsal and ventral cavities, lined with / epithelia and ebullience’. The enjambments of these lines are unusual, emphasising prosaic rhythms – suitable to a kind of catalogue – but what is most interesting about the work is its accumulations of abstractions, especially effective in: ‘Rumination held, always, in the / stomach, in its roils and rugae. The / trachea tight with every kept secret.’

There are four poems entitled ‘The Soldier’, depicting someone who remembers ‘the war through crosshairs’ and who was ‘awake when they sawed / through your humerous’. These are complemented by a series of found poems drawn from the index of titles and first lines from The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. The found poems are quirky and sometimes poignant, but the poems about the soldier address troubling issues connected to the loss of human identity, the manner in which bodily life continues despite alienation and crisis, and the way memory becomes encoded in corporeality:

                                            Your bones are the topography
of a hidden landscape; your pale blood
vessels run rivers beneath
your skin. Your muscles, your
tendons, your delicate joints
hum with memory.

Overall, this is a thought-provoking debut collection that is perhaps overly encumbered with notes at the end and is occasionally prosaic in its expression, but which addresses serious issues in imaginative and original ways. Deo’s gestures at other writer’s work – for example, she writes a response to Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’ – do not always produce her strongest poetry, but, overall, her interest in intertextual gestures deepens this volume’s preoccupations. The Agonist is a book that risks considerably more than many contemporary volumes of poetry, and when these risks succeed Deo creates startling and inimitable poetry.

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Review Short: Tracy Ryan’s The Water Bearer

Posted on May 18, 2018 by Anne-Marie Newton

The Water Bearer by Tracy Ryan
Fremantle Press, 2018


‘… the poem / will cover a multitude of signs.’ This line, appearing early in West Australian author Tracy Ryan’s ninth poetry collection, can be read as connecting directly to what’s been posited as the very purpose of poetry: to confound or thicken language, to free it from its mere communicative dimension, as Walter Benjamin might put it, and allow it to bump up against things-in-themselves. In fact, this line also bears witness to what the volume as a whole achieves. For the remarkable poetic field that is The Water Bearer sets in motion a multitude of signs and their constellations, but importantly, through the skill of a poet at the height of her powers, also leaves them covered. A line from a later poem (ostensibly about the function of windows) illustrates this achievement differently: ‘Hold threads under tension, a frame.’ With the multiple readings the collection provokes it becomes evident that the volume itself performs as a frame, holding together threads of signs, objects, meanings, but always ‘under tension’: the essential muteness of the outside – the overflow side of language, or what Rilke designated as ‘unsayable’ – feels ever pressing.

The word ‘overflow’ is entirely apposite here, for the volume’s metaphorical linchpin is water. Water, we might think, is a particularly pure element, and could be dealt with more plainly than the muddied subject of Ryan’s previous book, Hoard (the Irish boglands). But purity is not realisable, and Ryan’s rendering of water is a dexterously admixed one. Given her feminist poetics, an Irigarayan notion of fluidity could be expected to drive the work; indeed, many poems do depict the maternally figured intersection of herself and her son. But for this reviewer, some classical conceptual undertones are more perceptible: an Ovidean deployment of water as a symbol of perpetual metamorphosis, for example, and a Heraclitean vision of water as change and flux. Throughout these poems water fluctuates through a concatenation of material forms: snow, ice, storms, vapour, rivers, clouds, household water, swimming pool water, and more. Never a stable entity, neither is water independent: it coexists (as in Ovid) with its elemental counterparts – air, fire and earth – and is explicitly or implicitly manifest in portrayals of how the changing seasons impact both the human and non-human. This attention to the materiality of water and its position in nature fuels one of the work’s marked topical concerns: ecopolitics in the context of the anthropocene. The sequence ‘Self-Supply,’ chronicling some of Ryan’s vexed efforts to live responsibly ‘off’ the scheme water system, evidences, with compelling irony, her committed ecopoetics.

But to return to a larger current: there is a distinct, overarching metaphysical focus on the unrelentingly paradoxical nature of life – for which water acts as a trope. From this thematic superstructure several sub-themes flow, constituting numerous explorations of always/already and both/and situations. Much of the diverse subject matter arises from Ryan’s personal experience, and place is important (the poems’ settings are about equally distributed between the northern and southern hemispheres). But the presence of place is always unsettled / ing: the pressures of time and memory, the eternal return of both newness and loss, and the way travel invokes sensations of both here and there, all put any sense of locatedness under strain. The very first poem ‘Carousel,’ set in the ‘foreign city’ of Paris, establishes some of these motifs: ‘looking out / from my still point, dead as a cyclone’s eye,’ the poetic I/Ryan watches a child spin around her, ‘hurdy gurdy,’ on a roundabout:

… I am what I was 
and he is what will be, launching eternally 
into a churning future … .

A later poem, speaking of a particular ‘sensitive’ plant on Réunion Island, observes the ‘fragility of interface,’ and tells us ‘[e]verything shut will open again.’ In the Australian-situated ‘View from Below,’ whose form (a line by line accumulation of load) superbly matches its content (the damming of rivers), the I, who is ‘aware of the vast loss for every valley flooded,’ acknowledges ‘the arch or edge / we teeter on … .’ If paradoxes are circumstances that suspend us between many possibilities at once, these poems effect the oxymoronic: floating the I again and again between childhood memories and the present, between staying and going, between seasons and lands, between self and other; and on it goes, continuously.

We must, however, acknowledge one realm of possibility that the text seems to move toward foreclosing; in a telling gesture, this matter is brought to the fore at the end of the volume. Holy water – the form of water consecrated by the church – has already been splashed intermittently throughout (‘Christian,’ ‘pagan,’ ‘secular,’ ‘absolve’ ‘unchristened’ are but a few of the cognate allusions), but in the last pages the issue of organised religion is faced head on. These closing pieces (which include the titular poem) autobiographically explore some of Ryan’s early Catholic church experiences: being influenced by Thomas Merton to join (briefly) a convent, enduring the ‘upright coffin’ of the confessional, and being marked as a penitent on Ash Wednesday. Finally, though, in ‘Crossing Myself,’ Ryan announces that the ‘God-shaped’ stoup at the door of the church is wholly bereft of water: it is now a ‘cracked plastic shell, with nothing to offer.’ She emphasises:

Though it lodge in the brain and beg for
response, I repeat: it is empty – no drop will grace 
my ingressions, transgressions … .

Such a vigorous declaration leaves the reader to consider whether this, indeed, represents the resolution of one significant paradox. Does this signify a true stoppage, for Ryan, of the powerful force flow deriving from her involvement with religion? Methinks the poet doth protest too much. The last poem is not the last: the vociferousness of this issue, as covered by the book’s signs, indicates its propensity to live on, for this writer, as a negative demand.

This review leaves much unsaid regarding how The Water Bearer augments Ryan’s already long list of fine accomplishments. Poem after poem here demonstrates beautifully honed linguistic arrangement, haunting affective intensity, and stunning formal control. It is for this unsaid, and much more, that the reader should turn to this volume, many times.

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Review Short: Bulky News Press Chapbooks from Andrew Pascoe, Chris Brown and Marty Hiatt

Posted on May 8, 2018 by Jack Kelly

Cones by Andrew Pascoe
Bulky News Press, 2017

Slender Volume by Chris Brown
Bulky News Press, 2017

The Manifolds by Marty Hiatt
Bulky News Press, 2017


Words and phrases in Andrew Pacoe’s cones, emerge and float through the page’s whitespace like ‘vacuum packed clenches / listing downstream’. It seems that if you were to unfold this book, so that all the pages were arranged on the same plane, phrases would flow from their current position and create new combinations. Thus the physical barrier of the book itself seemingly restrains this collection from achieving formal synergy. In this way, cones makes us aware of how the physicalness of the book itself artificially restrains it’s content. This tension between content and form is emblematic of cones’s greater consideration for how the artificial restricts the natural.

Language itself embodies this tension, as it simultaneously allows for and restrains expression. Exemplifying this is the table that floats halfway down page 10: 


  

    weaving
    through
  

  

    harvested
    networks
  

  

    reclearing
    my

By enforcing artificial unity on the six words, the amount of syntactic permutations that the table is cable of producing is capped. However, without this artificial unity, the reader would likely only produce one, linear reading of the words. Thus, as a result of the table, the reader is forced to pause and consider multiple interpretations. Paradoxically then, it is constraint that produces this multiplicity.

This collection goes on to consider the limits of this relationship between restraint and multiplicity. Towards the end of the collection, Chinese, English and Arabic phrases disperse across the page like ‘various acacias, hurtling … // thru wormholes’. This explosion of language continues until it reaches a black line that extends across the top of the last four pages. These ‘strewn vapours’ are unable to permeate across this barrier and instead gather together like ‘springs buffering in space’. The result is a ‘p a rt ia l pressure loss’ as language’s expressiveness is normalised when pressed against this barrier. Reading this collection thus causes one to consider where other arbitrary barriers are and how they work to normalise the periphery.

The poems in Chris Brown’s Slender Volume employ dissonant phonics, conflicting semantics, and ‘extended [metaphors] covered in barnacles’ (‘Popular Classics’, John Forbes) to create a dynamic reading experience that demands both alacrity and intensity. However, these poems are not made up of disparate parts simply left for the reader to assemble. Rather, when reading this collection, one receives an awareness of things happening without being able to intellectually determine exactly what these things are. It is this Ashberian evasiveness of subject matter that unites the collection’s aesthetic disparity: movement and surface tension are the ‘point’ of the poems. The success of this collection is then that it maintains its fluidity whilst also achieving unity.

An awareness of temporality allows for this balance. The second poem ‘City circle delay’ exemplifies this. Here, the poem transcribes the poet’s subjectivity whilst trapped on a bus in a Sydney traffic jam. The forced physical sedentariness (‘Find a seat (perforce) and B R E A T H E’) causes the poet’s mind to wander as it firstly considers and then creates the surrounding cityscape: ‘Down Broadway shows / whole buildings in yellow flour’. In this state, thoughts simultaneously occur and disappear without any value judgement attached to them: ‘the beach a thought and traffic a thought …’. The denouement of this journey occurs when the:

                                                                                               ‘…street splits cheek firm
against glass lies the looming self-important face of a city.’

The poet’s own reflection and a reflection of the city are unified in this syntactic amalgamation. In this way, considerations for how we read this text; how we move about a city; and how we consider our own thoughts all collapse into a ‘tree blossom drift’.

In Hiatt’s previous collection, Hardline, the poet arranges abstracted phrases sequentially. This forces the reader to make synaptic inference between each line. The sensation created is an ‘ongoing halting’ of phrases layered on top of one another. This causes meaning to ‘appear to be approaching.’ Although these phrases are arranged episodically, insistent refrains create a sense of volume like a ‘swarming springtime tombstone chitchat’. In his latest collection, The Manifolds, the poet interrogates and expands the possibilities of this poetic form, by allowing it to embody a book-length poem.

Kant describes synthesis as rationalising what is manifold into a single cognition. In mathematical terms, a manifold is a three-dimensional space that can be imagined as a flat surface. If something is ‘manifold’ it has many or varied parts, forms, and features. In this collection, Hiatt shows that Poetry is a mode of thought capable of combining and expressing this multifarious concept.

The centripetal force binding this kaleidoscopic form is the poet’s own subjectivity: this collection is ‘not interested in your narcism… only [its] own’. ‘Narcissism’ in this instance does more than signpost a wry self-awareness for how intensely solipsistic this poem is: it is emblematic of the contradictions and ironies that this ‘rotoscoped diagram’ of subjectivity reveals. For instance, the assertion that you are ‘more than just a cog in a wheel’ only leads to the circular realisation that ‘im a cog in a wheel that says its more than just a cog in a wheel.’ In this feedback loop of poetic consciousness, internal awareness and external reality layer on top of one another and form an irreconcilable dichotomy.

This dichotomy exemplifies cognitive dissonance. Investigating this dissonance moves the collection from being enigmatically confessional to politically sensitive. One option for reconciling the tension is to ‘force yourself’ into ‘going to many personal and business trainings’. Although this will please the ‘big beleaguered american arsehole’ it likely won’t align with an ‘innate sense of superiority’. However, the necessity of ‘tryna make up a living’ will force compliance with the ‘amazing enemy’. This in turn results in ‘buying your inability … so variously’ that you become ‘powerless’ and ‘wholly abstract’.

Black humour dignifies this typically millennial paranoia. Like finding ‘a flash of joy’ amongst ‘a slag heap’, this collection consoles those caught in this state with the empathetic assertion that there is no way to escape.

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Review Short: Susan Hawthorn’s Dark Matters

Posted on May 8, 2018 by Hayley Singer

Dark Matters by Susan Hawthorn
Spinifex Press, 2017

Where, as Jovette Marchessault asks, is the Tomb of the Unknown Lesbian?

Susan Hawthorn’s Dark Matters is a culmination of over thirty years’ lesbian feminist activism and fifteen years’ research focused on violence – specifically torture – against lesbians in a global context. Hawthorn’s embodied experience and creative-intellectual rigour bring politics and poetics, desires and denials, silences and protests, bodies and implements of torture, intimate meditations and research expeditions, productive rage, testimony, speculative fiction and ficto-criticism together in a single novel.

The novel is framed in ficto-critical terms as a creative writing research project called Diagonal Genealogies. It is a project that examines ‘the ways in which women passed down memorabilia through their families, particularly looking at women who do not have children.’ Desi, the writer-researcher, has inherited boxes of writings by her aunty Kate (Ekaterina). On the verge of ‘junking the lot’, Desi sits down to read what the boxes contain. In them she discovers writings that document, in fragments and with enormous gaps, the abduction and torture of Kate and the attempted assassination of Kate’s lover, Mercedes.

From the decayed fragments of Sappho (Psappha) to the works of HD, Monique Wittig, Anne Carson and Marion May Campbell, fragmentation has been developed as a deeply political and poetically significant way to write stories of how lesbians live and die. The importance of fragmentation for writing lesbian stories derives from diverse, but entangled, situations: 1) the under privileging and active silencing of lesbian stories, cultures, histories and identities; and, 2) the activist practice of turning sites of oppressive silence into zones of speech and creativity.

Denial of stories is an agile way to nullify histories and identities. Desi discovers that lesbian lives are not something that can just be researched, they must be investigated because the gaps in the official, and unofficial, archives are enormous. She puts it like this,

That’s the thing about lesbians, it’s a kind of detective story that unwinds in scraps but half of the pages are shredded and the rest are so destroyed as to be unreadable.

Drawing on this history of poetic fragmentation, Hawthorn produces a generically hybrid and polyvocal novel with interloping stories of missing girls, abducted and assassinated women, silenced mothers, institutionalised aunties, as well as the abandoned and profaned monsters and goddesses of ancient myth. In Dark Matters these fragmented narratives cross over and into each other’s stories; they begin to read as a live archive of lesbian histories. In this novel, Hawthorn shows that the stories of women who refuse to live by the confining codes of heteropatriarchy can be entered through the portal of countless names which are not often spoken of within the dominant cultural scene: Vera Rubin, Demeter and Persephone, Baubo, Ekhidna, Sappho, Hecate, dyke, Monique Wittig, HD, Virginia Woolf …

While fragmentation as a writing strategy has often been theorised in relation to the white space of the page that surrounds it, Hawthorn situates her fragments in relation to dark matter. It was the American astronomer Vera Rubin who proved, in Western techno-scientific terms, that dark matter constitutes most of the mass that exists in the visible universe. Furthermore, Rubin showed that dark matter binds visible matter. Hawthorn activates dark matter as a potent poetic trope in Dark Matters. It is a trope that allows Desi to think through the invisibilisation of lesbian lives and deaths in social, cultural and political domains. ‘Imperceptibility’, Desi writes, ‘is not a clue to non-existence, as Vera Rubin discovered.’

So much can be discovered in silences, deletions and detectable absences. Each fragment in Dark Matters maps into histories and imaginaries that are carved out of gendered and sexualised violence. Violence in Dark Matters is considered on physical, conceptual and representational levels. Hawthorn is acutely attuned to the way the animalisation (or dehumanisation) of lesbian lives, loves and acts work as a conceptual violence that paves the way for physical violence. When Kate is first locked in isolation she is hit by smells,

… the smell of animal urine mixed with fear

… the smell of an abattoir or of a place where animals are slaughtered.

I shake and I sprout feathers. I take off and soar: a wedge-tailed eagle. I leave this horror behind.

For her torturers, Kate-as-lesbian makes Kate an animal. But Kate finds life in animal identifications. Reflecting on Kate’s writings, Desi notes,

She describes a range of animals from a lesbian-centric point of view. She is creating a universe in which lesbian symbols lie at the centre.

In isolation and after torture sessions, Kate tells herself stories about animals. She recounts animal visions from myth, she dreams-up narratives of other women who gather around her, who become her animal familiars. Dropping in and out of sensibility, and to escape the reality of torture, Kate becomes a myriad of animals:

I’m a wolf, loping (louping) through the forest.

My arms are growing wings. Wings of heavy metal. Collapsing wings. Too heavy like the wings of the Hercules moth …

… colourful fish swim by like a pack of women. Others travel singly or in pairs. Their sides, rainbow-streaked. Parrot fish. I am floating free in this tropical water. I am swimming back forth and around, over the bommies. Mushroom and brain coral dot the shallow sea floor.

In Kate’s lesbian imaginary, there is hope in multiplicity, in mutability, in stories about bodies that come undone and become-other.

Nowhere in this novel does Hawthorn seek to resolve the political and literary erasure of lesbian lives and deaths, but every page of this novel works to make those erasures visible. It might only take hours to read Dark Matters, because it is so often paced like a thriller or detective novel. But it will take many more hours, weeks or months to reckon (really reckon) with the myriad intertextual citations Hawthorn includes; all of which offer storied paths that lead toward ever more stories that track through the hidden lives and deaths of lesbians.

This is a book of underworlds and infernos, places of execution, practices of erasure and sites of desire. It documents the practicalities of attempting to break lesbian cultures woman by woman, finger by finger and story by story. Against such violence Hawthorn offers poetry as activism, as remedy, as mode of repair.

Dark Matters is a meteoroid. When it hits, it will make a different world of you.

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12 Works by Sue Kneebone

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Sue Kneebone


Sue Kneebone | Harmful benefits, 2013 | mixed media | 150cm x 50cm

My mixed media tableau incorporates the transformative process of bricolage and photomontage to draw the viewer in to consider more insidious subtexts such as disturbed ecologies and dispossession from colonial incursions. A combination of field trips and archival research into my family past have fostered a deeper understanding of the inherited and ongoing legacies of colonial settler culture. This landscape of contrasting brutality and gentrification has inspired a broader personal investigation of this colonising period. The works seek to reflect an admixture of the genteel entangled with the darker undercurrents reflecting the lives of colonial ancestors.

Images 1 to 4: Naturally Disturbed

For the exhibition Naturally Disturbed Sue researched historical narratives in relation to the pastoral frontier of the Gawler Ranges in the north west of South Australia. Left with little tangible evidence of their past, Sue’s research has taken on a speculative kind of journey where, by attending to the past through the combined engagement of photographs, archival material and field trips, she has searched for ways to reach a more nuanced understanding of the cultural mirage that lies behind colonial settler culture and its relationship to the land.

Images 5 to 8: Dark Manners

Dark Manners seeks to embody the notion of Australia as a nebulous laboratory at the far edges of empire where gentlemen scientists became the shadowy subjects of their own curious predilection for collecting. The material hybridity in Dark Manners seeks to create an uneasy tension between the unspoken interiority of polite society and the duplicity of dark deeds committed ‘in the interests of human kind’ which continue to haunt the present.

Images 9 to 12: Deadpan

John Mansforth, known as ‘the sergeant’, was a distant ancestor who worked as a shepherd on a farm by Skillogalee Creek. He was brutally murdered after a drunken argument at the nearby Port Henry Arms hotel. The Port Henry Arms was a watering hole for bullock drivers carting copper ore from Burra to ships at Port Henry (now Port Wakefield) as well as for a mix of gnarly characters such as miners, farmers, shepherds, hut keepers and troopers. Gothic names such as Hellfire Creek and Devil’s Garden defined other sites along the bullockies’ copper route to the gulf, recorded today on stone steles by the modern highway.

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NO THEME VII Editorial

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Lisa Gorton

No Theme VIImage by Nicholas Walton-Healey

‘DELETED’

Four years ago, writing an essay on David Malouf, I learned that Hawthorn Library held a copy of his first poetry collection, Bicycle and Other Poems (1970). I borrowed it, and, sadly, I returned it, too. Today, I rang the library to find the book. The friendly librarian on duty told me that it had been ‘deleted’ from the catalogue. She could find no record of whether they had given it away or thrown it in the recycling bin.

She asked whether I’d like them to order it back in. I said yes, I would. It was an edition limited to a hundred copies, and rare, though I had seen one available. She said that she would need to ask permission to order in a book like that. They had ‘deleted’ it without realising that it might be hard to replace.

This librarian told me that she was not sure whether (or not) she had the authority to tell me what other poetry books they had ‘deleted’. She said that the library did keep a record of what they had ‘deleted’, but only until each record was superseded by the next. She didn’t know why they had no record of what they had done with Bicycle and Other Poems. She said that she would need to ask a ‘Specialised Collection Development Librarian’ whether their record of ‘deleted’ poetry books was confidential.

The friendly librarian on duty referred me to the Boroondara Council Policy Document that governs such decisions:

Section 4.5 De-Accessioning
Materials may be discarded due to damage, poor physical condition, inaccurate factual information or lack of usage. Resources in high demand or of enduring interest will be nominated for replacement. If these items are no longer in print or available for re-purchase, library staff, if possible, will repair the item, or it may be sent to a professional binder to ensure its longevity.

Materials removed from the open shelves are disposed of in several ways. They may be allocated to the Stack collection, donated to other libraries, interested parties and charities, or recycled. This policy statement on de-accessioning is supported by internal procedures.

Boroondara Library Collection Development Policy
Responsible Directorate: Community Development
Authorised by: Kate Brewster
Date of Adoption: June 2016
Review Date: June 2017
Policy Type: Administrative.

It looks as though – during the ‘internal procedures’ that ‘supported’ Hawthorn Library’s ‘de-accessioning’ – nobody considered whether poetry books might count as ‘resources … of enduring interest’.

On LinkedIn, the ‘Manager, Community Information and Libraries’ at the City of Boroondara describes herself as ‘an innovative and results-driven leader, with a track record of success in management consulting …’. She manages ‘five contemporary libraries’, including Hawthorn Library. From May, 2016 to the present, she ‘advocated for and received $850K of additional funding to implement state-of-the-art technology.’ She also ‘implemented best practice staff training for dealing with difficult customers …’

From the Boroondara Library website: ‘Everybody knows the library is the place to be if you have a love of reading. But did you know we offer much more than just printed books?’

The poetry books are vanishing from other libraries, too. I went to Carlton library to look out a poetry book. They used to have shelves of anthologies and Australian and overseas poetry collections. It was never comprehensive but it was interesting – they had Jennifer Maiden and Pi O and Antigone Kefala and Robert Adamson and Gig Ryan and Vicki Viidikas and Ouyang Yu and Brendan Ryan and John Kinsella and Jill Jones. I went to the place where their collection used to be. They had one poetry book on the shelf. It was by Clive James.

I asked the librarian on duty, where their poetry collection had gone. She said some may have gone in a ‘pop-up sale’ in the foyer. Some may have been donated. The rest went to the recycling bin. She said that if I wanted to fill out a request form, the library would be happy to buy more poetry books.

Gig Ryan’s Pure and Applied is available for £234.30 on Amazon. ‘Former library book’, starts the description of it. Will the library order that one in again?

That same week, Jacinta Le Plastrier of Australian Poetry (AP) had an email from the friend of a prisoner in Western Australian who likes poetry. ‘Seems they’ve emptied their library of what he enjoyed.’ His friend was contacting AP for reading recommendations. Apparently, he had been told that he could order a new poetry book in.

Is this happening everywhere? AP accepts contemporary and heritage poetry book donations for its library, open by appointment. And the Carlton Library is planning a series of poetry readings.

Meanwhile, I was reading the astonishing range and number of good poems submitted to this NO THEME VII issue – almost 2000 of them. This is a tribute to poet and ,em>Cordite Poetry Review editor Kent MacCarter, whose integrity, open-mindedness and constant commitment makes this publication vital to poetry in Australia.

If you submitted to NO THEME VII, thank you. I am sorry that I could accept only about 3% of submissions, which meant turning away a lot of poems that I liked and admired. There must be something random and wilful built into acceptance at those odds. In acknowledging that, I tried to put together an eclectic lot of poems – individual, unlike each other, memorable to me, and sparky on each rereading.

I don’t feel like singling out single poems, beyond drawing your attention to the work of Ngankiburka-mekauwe (Senior Woman-of-Water) Georgina Williams, Traditional Owner and Female Elder Clan-to-Country Custodian Narrung’Kaurna Yerta (country). She has carried this poem ‘Coming Home’ with her for many years, and it is a honour to publish it here, with a recording by artist and curator Lisa Harms.

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Bone Shame: Grief, Te Ao Māori and the Liminal Space where Translation Fails

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Anahera Gildea

‘Waiho mā te whakamā e patu. Let shame be the punishment.’

Wherever there is a need for translation there is discomfort – a chasm that must be scaffolded, or connected by branch, bond or bridge. There is almost a desperation in the need to both enlighten and to be understood. In te reo Māori (the Māori language) the concept of te wheiao represents this liminal or transitional space. It is a term that has appeared in our incantations of mythology from the beginning of memory. It is a phrase that acknowledges a place between places, a third space, a chamber of waiting and uncertainty and one that has no set time, nor prescribed gestation period. It is also a place that is unavoidable and through which we must travel in order to gain full understanding. It is after darkness, but before light. It is the birth of all ideas. It can be the site of great discovery, or rampant anxiety, but regardless, it is a necessary place. There is no other way to reach te ao marama (the world of light). And it is in no way associated with shame.

The corridors of hospitals are long, wide and sterile. They are places of transition and traverse, but little else. People don’t gather there to mingle or pass the time of day; they simply perform the mundane act of crossing over, moving beyond, passing through. By the time my infant son died, this simple concourse had become the staging ground for my grief. In the adjacent rooms of the maternity ward, women clung to their living children and hid themselves from my public wailing as I slumped down the walls and sat marooned in this prosaic causeway, bereft of the apparatus of language.

Later, when they felt it was appropriate, the nurses came to tell me that they had never seen a mother so publically and openly display her grief, her agony, her loss. Their confession had a twinge of shame in it but I wasn’t certain if it was their own, or something they felt I should bear. I did not offer absolution. In te ao Māori (the Māori world), grief like this is allowed. It is necessary and visceral and shared. There is no shame in the mess of yourself when you are grieving, when you are emotion, when you are lost for words.

The Māori word whakamā is often translated to mean ‘shame’ though there is acknowledgement that this is not an accurate definition. Equivalency of meaning across cultures is routinely impossible. Language is a political distinction and translating from one culture to another, one language to another, one relationship to another, does not often capture the nuance of the origin language. Languages are constrained by what has to be said, by what must be articulated – because it is unavoidable, because sense cannot be made without it. In the case of te reo Māori, what must be articulated are relationships, whakapapa (genealogy), and ones that often stretch from the beginning of time. In te reo, I cannot truly explain to you what I’m doing, without also having divulged who I am in relation to everything else. I do not exist solely as an individual, I am part of a tribe, a clan, a larger collective. When required to translate between languages, therefore, I am required to translate not just between two cultures, or sets of words, but between two identities. And the liminal space between those identities is often immense and always uncomfortable.

When my son was born, I gave him the name of one of my ancestors. An important person in the history of our family. When you do that it’s like you call on the spirit of that past loved one to reappear in some subtle way through the life of the new carrier of their moniker. And to take the weight of their past great deeds. You will them to have the strength and good fortune of that relative. You don’t choose a name of someone who befell misfortune. Often, in the years following his death, after I had visited his grave, my grandmother would ask me if I’d seen him. She would say ‘How is he?’ – as if he was still alive and I’d just had a cup of tea with him out on the front porch. I was never sure if she meant my son, or the ancestor who had long since passed. Time had no meaning in that conversation; everything was just a state.

Whakamā has received considerable academic interest and various attempts at definition have been made, most notably in the field of psychology. It is expected that non-Māori therapists will be aware that the feeling state of whakamā cannot be simply exchanged for the term ‘shame’. Psychologist and researcher, P. Sachdev, stated with assurity that what makes whakamā unique is that it ‘… results from a charge of impropriety in the eyes of others, irrespective of the presence or absence of guilt.’1 He draws on interviews and case studies to try and articulate the inarticulable. Whakamā is no more elucidated by the end of his research than when he began.

Rosenblatt (2010), writing two decades later, is similarly given to caution, warning that trying ‘… to translate a term from another language as though it could be glossed simply as shame in English is risky. A term in one language has implications, connotations, metaphoric links, and overlaps with other emotion terms that would be obscured … for the Maori of New Zealand, at least in the past, the term applied to the dead (‘mate’) was also applied to men who were in some way weak. Men who were, among other possibilities, overcome with shame (Smith, 1981, p154). Thus for Maori men (sic), feeling shame was a kind of death.’2

The Native Schools Act was introduced in New Zealand in 1867. My grandparents’ generation were forbidden to speak their native language, te reo Māori, at school and punished if they did so. Continued aggressive education and political policies meant that although at least ninety percent of Māori could speak te reo in the early 1900s, by 1955 that number had dropped to around fifty percent, and by the 1970s only five percent were fluent.

In mainstream schooling in the 1980s, learning or using the Māori language was considered inferior, base and contemptible to the point of being shameful. Our cultural cringe had deeply self-sabotaging overtones. Te reo was not valuable and wanting to speak it was tantamount to proclaiming to the world that you were aligning your number with the pool of the marginalised, doomed to lower socio economic statistics and status.

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Re-imagining Place: A Psychogeographic Reading of Carmine Frascarelli’s Sydney Road Poems

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Jake Goetz

Suburbia

What can the original concepts underpinning psychogeography lend to a discussion of the relation between poetry and place in contemporary Australian poetics? Can the Paris-based wanderings of Guy Debord and the Situationist Internationale (SI) bring to the fore new meanings of being and creating in urban Australia? To delve into these questions this essay conducts a psychogeographic reading of Carmine Frascarelli’s 2016 book, Sydney Road Poems (Rabbit Poets Series), using key concepts put forth by Debord and the SI. Through such an approach, I believe particular psychogeographic motives – often of a political nature – will allow for a more comprehensive understanding of the approach taken by Frascarelli in writing his poem. Beginning first with a short historical survey of the interrelation between walking and artistic creation, and how Frascarelli’s writing practice can be regarded in this tradition, the essay will then use the SI’s concepts of dérive, the idea of play, as well as touching on detournement and the effects of collage, to demonstrate how a psychogeographic writing practice can be considered a socio-critical tool – one which has allowed Frascarelli to re-imagine place through a de-spectacularisation of society, or more specifically, Sydney Road in the Melbourne, Australia suburb of Brunswick.

Written in forty-seven poems, the sequence juxtaposes the history of Sydney Road in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick to Frascarelli’s own observational writings of the street. In Frascarelli’s own words, the poems began being written during night time walks along Sydney Road after recurring hurtful fights with his partner (68). It was during one of these nights, while waiting for food in the street, that Frascarelli heard everything begin ‘to hum with a story’ (68).

Everything started to come apart in my mind: the nature of violence in history & 
society; violence against women … the influence/distortions/purpose of money, 
religion, sex, ownership & how it’s played out in the past, present and future; the way 
all these things interconnect & play out under empire (past & present) & shape 
people & the globe.

The idea of walking, of being out in the world, as a catalyst to thought and artistic creation, is not a new idea. As early as the 19th century the term flânuer was used to describe a man of reasonable wealth who wanders about the streets of a city taking in the sights and sounds. Honoré de Balzac believed the flânuer considered as an artist was someone who poured ‘his experiences in the city into his work’, and similarly Charles Baudelaire believed the flânuer as artist sung ‘of the sorry dog, the poor dog, the homeless dog, the wandering dog’ (Elkin para. 4). This pouring of an urban experience into a poem, or the singing of a street’s life, can be seen, for example, in section ‘#31’ of Frascarelli’s poem 

SYDNEY ROAD STREET PARTY) songs! songs! (the human as instrument

Ray Bans © & coloured bottles & American surf music
 	                      (the plastic lei doesn’t need water!
 				      the blond guy over dubstep blows through (trom)bones
     					               kitschy technological appropriations of nostalgia
 	 							                                           the: “quick! sing! ” of the age
 				           Cumbia! & the girls this afternoon spin like cosmonautas 
 				African drums, Greek bouzouki, Indigenous Hip Hop
 		        gozleme & chorizo & chips & rice paper rolls & pizza
 	                      & grilled corn & baklava & chapatti & bhajia & jerk chicken
filling faces with speared lamb, we walk & Leonidas looks on.

This walking approach to writing also relates to Tim Ingold’s suggestion that our knowledge of the world is not shaped by the ‘operations of mind upon the deliverances of the senses’ but ‘grows from the very soil of an existential involvement in the sensible world’, allowing us to consider the very act of being, and the writing of such being, as an inherently active way of engaging with one’s environment (3). This idea of being actively engaged with one’s environment further relates to psychogeography: ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment … on the emotions and behavior of individuals’, as defined by Guy Debord, a key representative of the SI (Waxman 133). Lori Waxman in his dissertation, Writing a Few Steps in a Revolution of Everyday Life, also goes on to stipulate that ‘changing the world was only possible by being an active participant in the world’, and that the technique which lay at the heart of all the SI’s concepts and aims was ‘reification + walking’ (111, 124). He suggests that it was this approach which allowed the SI ‘to see through the smooth façade of functionalist capitalism’ and ‘move beyond the university and a reliance on books, to get out from behind the table and go out into the world’ (111).

The SI formed in 1957 from various subversive artistic groups throughout Europe and set out to unite their political ideologies and concepts of art to develop a new approach to being and creating in the contemporary consumer world. A world which, as Adam Barnard suggests, ‘ensures that people do not engage in self-directed or autonomous activity’, and which Debord would come to call ‘The Spectacle’, or the ‘colonisation of daily life’ (Barnard 107). The SI believed that prior to their commencement, ‘philosophers and artists have only interpreted situations’, whereas the point now, ‘is to transform them’ (118). This idea of transforming situations though was not new in its own right, but was built upon ‘generations of revolutionaries and vanguardists before them, from Charles Baudelaire to the Paris Communards, from Walter Benjamin to surrealists André Breton and Louis Aragon …’, all of whom claimed ‘the street as the real space of urban life’ and demanded the right not merely to access what already exists, but ‘to create utopia in the space of their own streets’ (Waxman 92).

This approach to the environment, which sought to empower the individual with the right to change the city one lives and ‘to construct life out of one’s own desires’, Waxman compares to artistic practice (92). From this we can perhaps better understand the correlation between walking through everyday life and writing, and how it is in this tradition which I believe Frascarelli’s poem can be situated. Take the following line from the 14th section of the poem – which plays on both the influence and restriction of the page and road:

And, again, in the 22nd section, there is the playful admittance of place’s effect ‘on the emotions and behavior of’ Frascarelli (Waxman 133):

& those who could match my mo(ve)ments

what the green arrow does or doesn’t

& why the cars 		                    do or don’t

All this              moves me

in the shell of the tortoise by the road.

‘The walker uses the body as a divining rod’, Nandi Chinna suggests, to pace ‘through time and the city, noticing what demands to be noticed, and stitching together maps which link sense perceptions with histories in order to build a greater dimension into the narrative that defines place’ (8). Her definition of the walker relates directly to Guy Debord’s idea of the dérive (meaning, literally, ‘to drift’), which was just one of the ways the S.I. attempted to counter the idea of the spectacle and create a utopia in the space of their own streets.

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‘Geelong checks its modernist warranty’

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Jo Langdon

You go to Geelong / I’ve been everywhere, man
—Dick Diver

In 1890, an American aeronaut named Millie Viola departs the Geelong showgrounds in a hot air balloon, in order to give an assembled crowd of onlookers a parachute jump display. Her ascension followed foiled attempts earlier in the week, but, according to the Geelong Advertiser’s archives, ‘Mademoiselle Viola’ at last ascends – to the gratification of ‘an increasingly dubious crowd’ – to around 5000 feet (1540 metres), and comes close to being swept into Corio Bay. She manages to swing her way to land and alight in Pevensey Crescent – a few hundred metres from the space in which this essay’s authors currently live and write – though another archival source suggests she instead alights on the beach. In either case, the event has an impact on her next display: The Kyneton Observer reports, on 31 May, 1890, that preparations were prolonged ‘owing to the balloon being wet, it having dropped into Corio Bay in the early part of the week, on the occasion of an exhibition at Geelong.’

Millie is one of two, or three, sisters: according to Errol W Martyn’s A passion for flight: New Zealand aviation before the Great War (2012), ‘[n]ot a great deal of accurate information is known about the women’s origins; Viola appears to be a stage name, a common practice in the circus world with which ballooning and parachuting were often closely associated.’ Martyn goes on to note that ‘American newspaper reports of April 1897 about Millie’s marriage in San Francisco that month … indicate that the sisters were in fact Ruby and Essie Horaker (or Hawker)’ – with Leila Adair, who toured New Zealand as a balloonist in 1894, also claiming to be a sister.

The balloonists, in various news articles of the 1890s, are described with notes of sexist admiration true to the zeitgeist. One article opens:

Two lady-like vivacious girls, such as are to be met in any lady’s drawing room in the United States of America; two graceful girls, overflowing with that charming self-assertiveness and love of everything American which is so marked a characteristic of the daughters of Uncle Sam; two thorough little Bohemians, who can look a man fair and square in the eyes, and contradict him with a frank spirit of bon camarade that at once puts him on a footing of good-fellowship.

Another account, this one from Western Australia, describes Millie’s reaction to her balloon failing to inflate as follows: ‘Miss Millie Viola (horrible name, isn’t it?) proved herself very much a woman by having a good howl.’ The feature story makes rather emphatic note of Millie ‘howling’ three more times, citing mishaps that include her descending directly onto a horse’s back in a stable yard, and then into black river mud.

Historical archives are, of course, full of curio – of remarkable and often wonderfully obscure figures and events – and the balloonists’ visit was only fleeting (part of their tour of the ‘Australasian colonies’). Millie’s presence, however evanescent and now distant, feels striking, stirring – perhaps in part because it’s so novel to representations or accounts of Geelong and its stories. Millie offers a surprising vantage point.

Geelong is a town (in fact a city, though ‘town’ always feels truer) whose discourses tend to centre on industry, although when Millie ascended in her balloon the Shell petroleum refinery at Corio would not have been there, nor would the Ford factory at North Shore, nor Alcoa’s aluminium smelter at Point Henry. Exactly what Millie would have seen while she remained airborne in her balloon and parachute is difficult to know without extensive historical research, but it would undoubtably have been a radically different vision than what you would see today. Nor would it have been the landscape that existed for the Wathaurong prior to European invasion: the Geelong region, like all of Australia, is a space complicated by colonialist history and colonialism’s violent legacy, as well as an ongoing process of globalization that continues to construct the space that is ‘Geelong’.

The book Poets and Poetasters of Geelong (1967) provides an interesting collection of ‘poetic’ representations of the Geelong region. The first poem in the book, presumably situated first as a gesture to Geelong’s Indigenous heritage (though the introductory section also advises that the book is laid out chronologically), is purportedly an 1840 translation by one Reverend Francis Tuckfield of an Aboriginal girl’s articulation of love and loss:

Now you leave me, you forsake me.
We have walked in the moonlight
But you go never to return.
You have shewed me the dew on the leaves
You have said it shone like my eyes.
You were my only beloved,
Another you love has seen your spirit
But I have taken it from her.
Your hair shines like the green leaves
Your eyes are like the moonlight
More soft than the men of our tribe.
Now you leave me, you forsake me
So young, never to return.

(1967, p. 17)

What is most poignant about this poem may well be the details in its margin notes – which reference a ‘Mission Station on the Barwon [River], up-stream from Winchelsea’ – and the enquiries that encircle the poem. Is it actually a translation, as it claims to be, or a projection? And in its romanticised language and evocation of European poetic traditions surrounding the ‘love’ poem what does it gloss? It’s also difficult to read the poem and not feel that there’s a kind of elegy being enacted that reaches far beyond the two lovers, but an elegy whose symbolism is problematic and, to say the least, disturbing. As Bruce Pascoe writes in his preface to Convincing Ground (2007), ‘[t]oo often Aboriginal Australians have been asked to accept an insulting history and a public record which bears no resemblance to the lives they have experienced’ (p. ix). Suffice to say, after Reverend Tuckfield’s initial ‘translation’, the rest of the book doesn’t engage much at all with Indigenous ‘voices’ – though the closing poem, ‘Elegiac Melody’, does purport to speak to/of ‘the “vanished Barrabool tribe” of aborigines [sic]’ (1967, p. 13).

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John Ashbery’s Humane Abstractions

Posted on May 1, 2018 by David Herd

JA
Image courtesy of Stern.

1

The focus of this essay is The Double Dream of Spring.1 In the context of John Ashbery’s long career it is possible to a claim a particular significance for that book. Published in 1970, it was the first volume he wrote after re-settling in the United States in 1965, having lived in Paris for the best part of a decade. It was also the book in which he arrived at a kind of poem – ‘Soonest Mended’ is an example, but so are several others, ‘Evening in the Country’, say, or ‘The Bungalows’ – that established a way of configuring voice, narrative trajectory, human relations and cultural reference that would become recognisable as characteristically Ashberyan. It is not, though, within the context of the narrative of Ashbery’s development, that I want to look at The Double Dream of Spring. What I want to consider instead is how, as a stand-alone work, that volume enables us to think, the kind of intellectual act it allows us, now, to engage in. To do that, it is necessary to shift the historical angle of vision just a little. I want, that is, to read The Double Dream of Spring through, or rather in the light of, Olson.

To a degree that has been obscured, and is quite difficult even now to recover, Olson’s perspective on American poetry of the 1960s held a certain dominance. One measure of that dominance was Donald Allen’s anthology,2 The New American Poetry. Published in 1960, while Ashbery was in Paris, Allen’s anthology was the defining event of the postwar poetic avant-garde. With British publication following a year later, the anthology projected a body of experimental work to new audiences in a way that no such body of work had been projected before or has been since. For reasons to do with geographical distance perhaps, but also, no doubt, for reasons of editorial taste, Ashbery’s presence in the anthology was minimal. Where O’Hara was represented by 15 poems (‘In Memory of my Feelings’ and ‘Ode to Michael Goldberg (‘s Birth and Other Births)’ among them) along with a statement of poetics, Ashbery is glimpsed through ‘A Boy’, ‘The Instruction Manual’ and ‘How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher …’.3 Relative to several major careers that were clearly already under way at the moment of the anthology’s publication, Ashbery’s trajectory, as anticipated by Allen’s selection, would have seemed far from certain.

The major figure of the anthology was Olson. This is apparent from the range and aesthetic assurance of the poems Allen presented and with which the anthology opened, among them, ‘The Kingfishers’, ‘Maximus to himself’, ‘As the Dead Prey Upon Us’ and ‘The Distances’. More than this, in his introduction (and with reference to the statements on poetics) Allen proclaimed Olson’s centrality:

Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay and his letter to Elaine Feinstein present the dominant new double concept: “composition by field” and the poet’s “stance toward reality”.4

Behind this double-concept, and behind the concept of ‘composition by field’ in particular, was the principle Olson had established as early as 1947 in Call Me Ishmael:

I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy …5

There is much to argue over in the American vision of space Olson offers in the opening sentences of his treatise on Melville (much that Olson himself at times contested), just as there is much to dispute in Allen’s construction, in his anthology, of a national poetic project – and in ways both explicit and implicit some of the argument will be had here.6 What I want to recover at the outset, however, is simply the prominence of Olson’s thinking, of his conceptual framework, in avant-garde North American poetry of the 1960s. Such prominence was subsequently underscored by Olson’s headline appearances at two of the key poetic gatherings of the mid-sixites, the Vancouver Poetry conference of 1963 and the Berkeley conference of 1965; events that were followed by the publication of Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, the second volume of his major work, in 1968. It was a degree of influence, moreovoer, measurable by the urge other writers felt to differentiate themselves from his position. As James Schuyler wrote to Chester Kallman, with reference to the prominence of Black Mountain poetics in Allen’s anthology, and explaining the impulse behind the upcoming New York School journal Locus Solus:

I and ‘others’ (it is a deep secret; the other is John Ashbery) are invisibly editing an anthology-magazine … Part of its unstated objective is as a riposte at The New American Poetry, which has so thoroughly misrpresented so many of us – not completely, but the implications of context are rather overwhelming.7

In light of Olson’s dominant framework, then, with its radical implications for poetic method and its complex implications for political geography, I want to propose that in The Double Dream of Spring, Ashbery presents what we might think of as a counter poetics of space; a counter poetics that can help us to understand the construction of space in our own, geographically fraught moment. Here is an example of Ashberyan space, sampled at length, from ‘Sunrise in Suburbia’:

And as day followed day the plainer meaning of it
Became a constant projected on the emigration.
The tundra seemed elaborated.
Then a permanent falling back shapes, signs the residue
As a tiny wood fence’s the signature of disgust and decay
On an otherwise concerned but unmoved, specially obtruded hill:
Flatness of what remains
And modelling of what fled,
Decisions for a proper ramble into known but unimaginable, dense
Fringe expecting night,
A light wilderness of spoken words not
Unkind for all their aimlessness,
A blank chart of each day moving into the premise of difficult visibility
And which is nowhere, the urge to nowhere,
To retract that statement, sharply, within the next few minutes. (DDS, 50-51)

Taking a series of pointers from Ashbery himself, the aim of this essay is to re-construct the narrative of twentieth-century space that this poetry calls on and enables us to understand. The contention is not that, in arriving at such a poetry, Ashbery was in any direct sense (whether reactive or otherwise) influenced by a close reading of Olson, but rather that in the Olsonian moment of the mid- to late sixties, The Double Dream of Spring (like Ed Dorn’s Geography and like J H Prynne’s The White Stones) offered a vision of space that in some sense meant to measure up to Olson.8 One way to discern the scope of that vision is through the author’s notes at the end of the book. By no stretch of the imagination a surrogate statement on poetics, and certainly hardly an Eliotic consolidation of literary intent, Ashbery’s notes are nonetheless subtly co-ordinated, pointing us, if we are willing to go there, toward an aesthetic of dislocation.

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Shattered Writing: 4 Translated Valerie Mejer Caso Poems from Edinburgh Notebook

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Michelle Gil-Montero


Image courtesy of Propellar

A Key

Early in my translation of Edinburgh Notebook, the fifth book by Mexican poet Valerie Mejer Caso, I find a key. It is the epigraph to the final section, a line by Edmond Jabès: ‘All shattered writing has the form of a key.’ Not only is Jabès – the 20th century Jewish Egyptian poet who was long exiled in France – a fascinating reference point for Mejer Caso, whose own migratory poetics extends from a family history of immigrations and disrupted ties to place. It is Jabès’s notion of “shattered” writing, his model of writing brokenness, that unlocks the book for me.

Mejer Caso wrote the intensely autobiographical poems in Edinburgh Notebook after a series of painful personal events in 2012, just after temporarily moving to the United States with her young daughter. That December, she had left her marriage after discovering a long-standing infidelity.The previous December,, her brother had committed suicide by jumping from a window in Edinburgh, Scotland. Throughout Edinburgh Notebook, she writes about these events – or, rather, she writes the rupture and dislocation that they effect in her – by turning to collage rather than unified narrative. The poem ‘December, 5 p.m., Edinburgh,’ for example, is composed in part from sentences taken from her brother’s suicide note.

That poem, as metaphor for the broken body of her brother, as effigy for his unreturned remains, is shattered writing. It refuses to succumb to the expectation, which comes with trauma, of closure; much less to the expectation, which comes with autobiography, of a unified self. Instead, like the work of Jabès, it is marked by shifts, deflections, unanswered questions: ‘Last thoughts? / The strange arrangement of clouds? / The window, waiting? / Nothing, nothing, nothing? / Or the faces of his girl and boy?’ With these questions-answering-questions, the poem remains open, in motion: it refuses to settle for the closure and false security of answers.

Translation, also a kind of shattered writing, answers a question with a question. No translation is ever the final word, but one phase of a necessarily incomplete process, a deferral that compounds meaning instead of resolving it. Incompleteness, in this way, is what makes translation an ongoing and repeatable art, a perpetual migration. Through translation, the poem is really never finished.

Collage

The method throughout Edinburgh Notebook is collage, coordinating exiled pieces in startling ways. But mostly, collage holds us at the edge that confronts what is no longer present. As Chilean poet Raúl Zurita writes: ‘It is that confrontation with loss, and how what is lost endures in memory, that lends this poetry its profoundly autobiographical dimension.’ The autobiographical self in Edinburgh Notebook is, mostly, a negative shape, contoured by loss. ‘I will introduce you to my dead, one by one,’ Mejer Caso writes in her long poem This Blue Novel. And here, in the poem ‘The Creature,’ a series of negations cobble a body together: ‘I’m not this’ ‘I won’t be that’ ‘I don’t have this.’ The poem’s accompanying visual collage is similarly a portrait of absence: disparate objects float in white space, hands reach for nothing; a single shoe sits lost, belonging to nobody in particular.

Entredeux

Mejer Caso offers that the book started with its title: a blank notebook, named for a city she has never visited. How do you make loss present? I think of how the painter Robert Rauschenberg painted absence, not as blank paper, but as an erasure of a prized De Kooning drawing. All shattered writing, including translation, arrives at creation by way of destruction.

In these poems, absence is far more than the opposite of presence, more even than the loss of something that should be present; it is the destruction of what was once beautiful, through violence. It is Mejer Caso’s brother, whom she imagines gazing out his window, just before jumping, at a boy across the street. The boy, who resembles him as a child, calls up his own destroyed sense of possibility, renders his past suddenly present, and thus prompts his jump: ‘a blonde boy running in the park, a flash of his own ruined perfection, but that boy will never be the object of cruelty.’

His death, and every foreshadowing violent event in these poems, makes the past present. As such, the poems sidestep traditional elegy’s charge to lament, to express and facilitate grief. Instead, they write brokenness: the brutal newness of trauma, the language of being plucked out of the rhythms of daily life and tossed into an unrecognisable present. Trauma is the ultimate displacement, and continuing to live is to be an immigrant in one’s own life. As Hélène Cixous writes:

Human beings are equipped for daily life, with its rites, with its closure, its commodities, its furniture. When an event arrives which evicts us from ourselves, we do not know how to ‘live’. But we must. Thus we are launched into a space-time whose coordinates are all different from those we have always been accustomed to. In addition, these violent situations are always new. Always. At no moment can a previous bereavement serve as a model. It is, frightfully, all new: this is one of the most important experiences of our human histories. At times we are thrown into strangeness. This being abroad at home is what I call an entredeux.

I offer this translation, then, if I may, as a work in kind. In English, the language of the book’s title city and deepest grief, the poem might learn, again, to live inside new coordinates, to be ‘abroad at home.’

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4 Translated Laia Llobera i Serra Poems

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Amie Weiss


Image courtesy of Time Out Barcelona

Untitled

And everything that could portend
clarity.
Ceiba trees, twilights, winged
stallions, cities, solstices, citadels


…

I tot el que pugui anunciar
claredat.
Ceibes, crepuscles, cavalls
alats, ciutats, solsticis, serrals.

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‘We mirror what we see’: Holly Childs Interviews Cristine Brache

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Holly Childs


Image courtesy of Cristine Brache

Cristine Brache is a Latin American poet and artist newly based in Toronto. Her work explores the nuanced power dynamics inherent in many of our relationships. Brache’s practice incorporates video, sculpture, poetry and a multitude of limited edition objects, prints, t-shirts and publications. She and I met online in 2013, when she was living in Guangzhou, China, and making videos and taking photographs of unexpected and emotional English-language phrases on t-shirts. I was working in a temporary office for writers in Docklands, Narrm (Melbourne), writing a novel set in a twisted version of the area in which I was writing. There was a connection both emotional and about the notions of the pages we were inhabiting – whether offline or on – Brache and I chatted online, sharing poems and artworks, and she would send me images, links and stories from the places she was travelling to.

We met physically in London in 2014, where Brache was working towards an MFA at Slade School of Fine Art and I was in residence at Arcadia Missa working towards publication of the aforementioned book, Danklands, and an exhibition to accompany it. In Brache’s apartment we shared time, tea, mixed gummies and stories, deconstructing our perceptions of the strange city we’d unexpectedly come to share. We continue to correspond and below is a conversation regarding poetry, power and practice.

Holly Childs: Your work uses, and subtly repurposes, stories and tropes traditionally given or marketed to people who experience misogyny as tools for engaging with men or the male gaze. I’m thinking of your sculptural work of the past 18 months, in which viewers encounter traces of a dozen games, spinning dice and cards on tables and in cages, word games across languages, playground rhymes, often alongside abstracted self-portraiture, a ‘who is she’ self as subject, as muse and mirage. I like your work ‘Jailer’s Keys’ – six keys constructed from mother of pearl, one engraved with the message ‘NOTHING BUT VIOLENCE’.


‘Jailer’s Keys’ (2016)

Cristine Brache: Making is a game of communication and language for me. I find there is a lot of room to play with various modes of speaking: associations, words, symbols, context, histories, self-portraiture, etc. Each mode is rife with its own respective bank of meaning. For example: I am the mirage. With each body of work my intention is to create a personal syncretised subset that can be readily decoded if the viewer is able to connect and allow their own meaning to answer to the holes between the objects or words in question.

With ‘Jailer’s Keys,’ there’s a gender role reversal. Mother of pearl is often considered yonic due to its delicate appearance and texture, as are escutcheons, since their keyholes function to be penetrated. I wanted this feminine material to occupy something phallic, a key. They’re phallic beyond their physical appearance and function, as they allow passage to restricted areas. Their presence is authoritative, defining boundaries and distinctions between public and private space. The etched words on the key come from a poem I wrote: 

FEMALE TROUBLE

them blues
that nothing-but-violence
just nature
just moon

HC: I am also curious about your work ‘Self portrait without bed’. The objects on each bedside table appear to be expressions of games and riddles of absent figures sleeping on two sides of an absent bed: a set of playing cards with queen of hearts revealed on one table; two keys alongside a glass of water and a clock with no hands on the other. From these sparse elements I get a feeling of the unique and nuanced relationships of people who share a bed, as well as the games we play, the intimacies we reveal, and the positions we come to occupy when we share personal space.


‘Self portrait without bed’ (2017)

CB: ‘Jailer’s Keys’ led me to begin thinking of my body as both a public place and home. I am not sure if my body belongs to me still. So much is read and taken from it based on its appearance. Elements of the home are deeply personal, maybe the bed is the most personal place that a person can physically occupy. Bedside tables say so much to me. The last and first things you need before and after sleep are located on them. Things you keep nearby when nights are sleepless. I tend to have cycles of insomnia and when I do the clock preys on me. Clocks keep counting minutes even if it feels as if time has stopped moving:

FALLEN HANDS

a clock with no hands
keyhole mouth
carefully inlaid with 
no one will notice

Cards can be used for divination but also invite chance and risk. On my side of the nightstand in ‘Self-portrait without bed’ I wanted to give myself hope on a sleepless night, when inside it feels as if I have no bed, nothing to hold me. I placed ‘western playing cards’ made of porcelain and replaced the suicide king’s (king of hearts) face with my own on the top half of the tile. On the bottom half of the ‘card’ or porcelain tile, I did the same thing but with the queen of hearts, who holds a flower; the suicide king holds a dagger or sword to his head. The idea for this came from the title of the exhibition these porcelain tiles first made their appearance in: ‘I love me, I love me not.’ The opposing images on the ‘card’ is a pendulum that swings between self-love and self-hate.

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Posted in INTERVIEWS | Tagged , ,

President Donald J Trump at the Western Wall, Jerusalem 2017

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Benjamin Goluboff

The kippah sits as strangely
on the artifact hair
as the look of reverence
on the features
lapsed and porcine.

His hands are on
the ancient stones;
his mind on
the photographers,
perhaps.

His Israel is not a country
on the map;
it is the adjunct
to a fantasy,
a figment
of his base.

There were only
two words
on the folded note
the President placed,
beyond the camera’s reach,
in a crevice of the wall.
To the God of the Patriarchs,
the Shield of Abraham,
Trump wrote:
Believe me.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Diary Poem: Uses of Dreams

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Jennifer Maiden

I have been reading Coleridge on dreams
-in an email to the author from Lisa Gorton)

I dream that the dead are living.
Katharine says soft dreams where the loved dead seem
reciprocal and living are really nightmares to suffer, feel
anguish to awake to the bitter real. If no-theme were dream
I think now I would offer: a Commonplace Book in tatters:
Kurosawa’s fox wedding, Yeats’ quote: in dreams begins
responsibility, or how Confucius laments and exclaims
he has fallen from himself, too long has not seen
in his dreams the Prince of Chang. Not long the foxes sang
for Coleridge on the death-cold Nepean. He explains
in my sleep once more that the dusk reverses the dawn:
that by day the being expresses in words, but unity again
combines that with his night eyes’ yearning vision
fed deep by the body’s random sensations: he would term
‘double-touch’ how the body feels feeling. And a dream
in itself is double-touch, I’m seeing. How tight are the rhymes
in sleep, the subconscious — if you call it that and not a thing
like acetylocholine, when the visual and the emotions
revolve to replace norephinephrine-serotonin neurons:
but the effect as he described it is the same.
Rhymes tighten when
the sleep-brain curls up on itself, as in the womb
or death. I would offer the no-theme stream an explanation
too of Shakespeare’s we are such stuff as dreams
are made of: that it is our function to comprise them,
not their function to be us, and then who does become
the dreamer? Is it as in Bergman’s Shame, when Ullman
alive at the end on the war-exhausted ocean
asks what if the dreamer of all this wakes realising
it was a dream and is ashamed? ‘Living catacombs’
is how Coleridge describes the dream’s comprising.
Lying down, with an opium groan, his fear a leaping
‘great pig’ from sense-data, a frightening woman.
The fox wedding is as formal as the staged imagination,
as if bones are stacked in labels with street signs.
Does this make it sinister, or safer? Sometimes some
unconsciousness overtakes the double-touching,
and despite the nightmare nature of the daring,
the dead can become the living once again.

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Neutral Bay, New South Wales

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Christopher Snook

The full throated thrum of the service trucks
and i am swimming in frangipani
with sprays of white aster against green foliage
on the stone walls of Neutral Bay, the odour

of rubbish bins like stale piss behind
the bus shelter and the relentless high
speed arboreal rat-tat-tat of the
cicadas. The young carry the sun about

in their bodies, bright-seared and deathless,
savouring mangos like edible stars and
five-dollar-a-cup coffee. The continent
is prodigal of wonders — pouched animals,

billed beavers, shaggy trees dropping their skin
or iron-barked; and not these only but
urban stylites like latter day saints atop
their third story Thai restaurants and weeping

from the first bitter sip of ale, through
the spring roll starters, weeping over their
minced chicken salad and cheap bubbly.
The cicadas’ hum is the cantus firmus

of a city at song, chanting the hours,
the blessed bodies, the sacred hearts of Neutral Bay.
The service trucks stop under a window where
the stylites meet to weep the city all aflame

from the inside.

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

OK GOOGLE

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Kit Riley

Oh, yes, how I long for the days
those good old days
those golden days of yore
those simple times
when I’d walk ten miles in the rain
without the need of a map
whilst holding a fistful of pennies and a fishing line
and a clear sense of myself in an unspoiled world.

Oh, yes, how I long for the days
those good old days
those glorious days
when I’d read by the light of a filament bulb
and write ten miles of shopping lists
with a simple ballpoint pen.
Those days when the textbook of human anatomy was full of bone and blood and
brain and
oh, those distant and lost-forever days
oh how I long for them
trapped as I am in the now.

Oh, alas, I’m a normal human being
a normal, flesh-bound, breathing human being
a normal human being of the olden kind
who can walk ten miles in the rain
with a fistful of shopping lists
by the light of a ballpoint pen.
Oh, how alone I feel in our world
where the textbook of human anatomy is full of screens and circuits and
applications and
speech-recognition technology.

Oh, how alone I feel with my friends
oh yes how alone
with their fingerprint identities
and their unbreathing personhood
and their turn-by-turn, synthetic-voiced instructions
for walking ten miles by the map
with a fistful of filament bulbs.

Oh, how alone I feel
oh how alone
trapped
trapped as I am
in the circuit of the now.

Alas, I am a normal human being
a fact I can easily prove by the way
just look at the information I know
the information that only a human could know
that only a bone- and blood- and brain-filled human could know
in my direct sensory experience
of those good old glorious days of golden yore
when I’d read by the light of a filament bulb
in a rain of pennies
without the need of a map.

Alas, I must prove that I am a normal human being
beset as I am by a digital new world order
that denies my flesh
in favour of a corporate expansion of personhood
an existence-by-technicality
in which my ability
to walk ten filament bulbs
to my friends’ rainy houses
with a fistful of ballpoint pennies
is rendered insufficiently impressive
in the face of an ontology
in which anything that cannot be found
by a simple internet search
cannot be said to exist at all.

Oh, my friend, I’m a normal human being
so OK here I am in this fingerprint filament world
here to regale you in human language
with tales of those glorious golden good old days
when I’d walk ten miles
with a map about fish
I can easily show you a map about fish
here I am
oh my dear friend
my dear
OK.

Oh, my friend, my friend, my [insert name]
I am a normal human being
and all I want
is for you, and me, and every person
human or otherwise
to be OK
to be OK
in these simple days
of golden screens
and rainproof circuits
this good old simple fingerprint world
that’s free for all
for a fistful of pennies.

Oh how I long for you
oh my friend
oh friend, oh [insert name]
OK.

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