Days and Distance

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Peter Rose

So many years ago.
Cruel to dislodge them
like moss in a rockery.
From the plane a vasty view.
First, stretched dawn
like a pink elaboration.
Then, on descent,
sinking and buffeted
(you leaning over me, whispering, closer),
something called the Parthenon –
tiny in our window,
mighty as the ramifications between us.

Posted in 68: NO THEME IV | Tagged

Muster

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Fiona Hile

Every star has its double, different coloured
blood cometing at length. How you will defeat me,
with a scythe or a ladder, a hoked up piece of trash
untucked beneath a raging plinth. Your feelings,
juiced on perforated, in which troops of gentle
thought invest. Come, dear friend, life thinks
it’s spring. Now you have inflated and made me

dependent. Now you sleep, now sit, tender feelings
subside. The lack of printed makes us paranoid.
Winter brings summer to bed with leafy interludes,
quiet fictions tend to piety, no dehiscence of intimate
revelation, the debutante paper unfolding the debited
sweet trolls insist—siphoning joy with a foetal
intensity keeps us fresh, compounds our pains
beyond our proper share. Sounding historical,
the seasons digest, our poorly written biographies

caper sufficiently, seeds from the dandelion unhook
the tortured abundance of cliff-top harmonies.
I stand at the rim of a system of infringements, codes
and punishments to rival the ancient Greeks. Talking down
from a position of differential, the coxcomb coral of six
fingered bounties makes love to the idea of the voice
making love to itself, establishes an iconic, incurable
distance. Now I dream during the day and write all night,
sewing a template for the region of your delirious.

While you spiral freely in the conundrum of lost territories,
harbourless wanderings distill my ingrown love.

Posted in 68: NO THEME IV | Tagged

A Melbourne Letter Poem to Ken Bolton, January 2015

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Peter Bakowski

Dear Ken, I still frequent
Self Preservation.
Dan is there, dressed in black,
always a book on the go.
He’s just finished Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s
“Death on the Instalment Plan”
from which he quotes—
“To hell with reality!
I want to die in music,
not in reason or in prose.”

Tattooed, in his late twenties,
in walks Spencer,
a Canadian New Zealander,
fashionably unwashed looking,
but not pungent
seats himself on the
black vinyl couch,
between Dan and me.

Spencer is
Friday afternoon going into evening restless,
wants someone to go drinking with him
at Lily Blacks,
prefers to talk about girls
rather than books,
says, “I want a girl I can’t have.”
then shows me
several photos of supermodel types
on his mobile phone.

This is the moment
for Sean, the waiter,
to hand me an ice bucket
in which to drown
Spencer’s mobile phone.
But that would be fantasy, not real life,
with its further lessons
around the corner
and, beyond, Lily Blacks.

I walk down Flinders Lane,
pass a sandwich board
that reads, “Grab dinner by the balls.”
I’m not in the mood
and mightn’t be for years.

In Lonsdale Street
“The Burroteca Donkey Disco”,
featuring Zoltar the $2 Cosmic Fortune Teller,
is closed.
I make a note to recommend it to Spencer,
an alternative to Lily Blacks.

In Russell Street
a young Chinese woman
totters out of “Sense Hair Salon”.
She’s wearing bright pink high heels
and a black T-shirt
with two words written on it—
CELINE
PARIS

And The Jam sing,
“In the city there’s a thousand things
I want to say to you …”

Ken, I like your hair,
the reddish tinge that fate and genes
have invested in it.
The people from Central Casting
agree with me that your remaining vestiges
of Anthony Quinn looks,
will bring long queues
to the box office of this poem,
so I place you behind the wheel
of a royal blue convertible.

Tires screeching, you peel away from the kerb,
keen to be at Ruby’s Music Room
for The Vampires’ first set,
which I’ll have to miss,
having a forensic report to write
about the poet’s corpse
found lying on the terrace of Madame Brussels
last Sunday morning,
covered in rejection slips,
from Meanjin chiefly.

I think about subject matter
for Edouard Vuillard to paint this century—

Neighbour with leaf blower.

Still life with microwave.

Used Earl Grey tea bag on white saucer.

Vuillard said, “The painter’s instrument
is his armchair.”
Mine is at
Self Preservation,
the black vinyl couch.
I sit there and write
on small yellow index cards,
small brown paper shopping bags,
bookmarks from The Paperback
and The Hill of Content.

Ken, with your black eyepatch in place,
the complete poems of Andre Breton
tucked under your rhinestone-encrusted belt
and a lime green Citroen garaged in every port,
you continue to sail
the salty waters
of Australian poetry.

There’s an affronted mob
who’d would like to see you
hung from the yardarm,
but before strong rope is found
you get another poem accepted
by Best Australian Poems
and Morry Schwartz
mails a “clean” revolver
to a designated P. O. Box in Adelaide.
You call the revolver “The Equalizer”,
tape it to the underside
of your writing desk.

And The Temptations sing,
“But it was just my ‘magination,
running away with me.”

At The Paperback, I buy
a biography of Gauguin,
walk back to Self Preservation.
Edouard Vuillard is there
sitting on the black vinyl couch,
moves over to make room for me.

Emma takes our order, a Pernod each,
which makes Edouard more talkative.
Noticing the light bulb tattoo on Emma’s right shin,
he says, “Each human heart is a light bulb.
Some try to exceed their wattage,
some remain dim,
some dangle naked from a ceiling,
the chair beneath them kicked away.
In paintings
I reveal the individual,
perhaps challenged, subdued by curtain shadow,
perhaps rising from a comfortable chair
to risk looking out a window,
their venturesome face anointed by morning light.
I wander Melbourne’s central business district,
thinking about the bold and the hesitant,
eventually reach a cafe
I long have favoured.

Alas, I am a dedicated bachelor.
A shift from that position
would dismay my widowed mother.
I cannot accompany Spencer to Lily Blacks
to be his wingman.”

A cafe patron’s long black gloves,
as I consider what Edouard said,
crawl away from her hands
onto her face,
become a mask that she may wear tonight
to a ballroom beneath the sea.

Oh white cuboid napkin dispenser
sitting atop the long wooden bench
at Self Preservation,
you are scratched and scuffed
but steady on your four rubber stumps,
having seen Federal governments come and go.
You serve but are not servile.
No wide gossip,
no high-heeled beauty
turns your head.
You go where needed—
to egg stain and wine spill,
give generously
of yourself.

You tolerate
Melbourne weather,
dainty, absorbent,
and Sean playing
“Rosanna”, “Africa” and “Hold The Line” by Toto
every Friday night
on the sound system.

And Billy Joel sings,
“I love you just the way you are.”

Park bench in the Treasury Gardens,
near where Collins Street meets Spring,
often I pause
to rest upon your slats,
to look up at the sky,
sometimes blue, often grey,
an inverted pasture,
where clouds graze
with their rumoured lining,
the sun, a sulky teenager,
goofing off, not doing his job:
to shepherd each rain-fattened cloud
into the corral of the horizon.

I walk along Russell Street towards Little Lonsdale,
pass Trunk Diner,
their sandwich board that reads,
unpleasantly,
“WE HAVE BEERS COLDER THAN YOUR EX”

And The Velvet Underground sing,
“Who loves the sun?
Who cares that it makes plants grow?
Who cares what it does
Since you broke my heart?”

My painter friend Antoine recently won a coffin
in a poker game.
He’s painted a self-portrait on the lid,
which now hangs in his room.
At night Antoine sleeps in the bottom half of the coffin,
his on-going packet of Benson & Hedges
within easy reach.
We talk about
drinking glasses and vases,
how their careful placement in our paintings and poems,
may make the individuals portrayed in our work
consider where they place themselves
in a room,
in a gathering,
in this chessboard world
of the regal and the pawned.
Antoine feels he’s ready, almost, to include
a paper napkin dispenser in his next painting.
I’m excited for him.

And Gene Allison sings,
“You can make it if you try
You can make it if you try.”

I craft this poem,
add and erase
until it’s ready to email to you, Ken,
in Adelaide,
where you sit
in your regular cafe,
perhaps thinking about
a favourite Wayne Shorter composition,
ordering scrambled eggs on toast,
wanting them to be
marvellous rather than everyday,
but the shape and detail
of the light green sugar bowl
on the cafe table
have caught your attention
and where you are
and what you’re thinking
ceases to be
everyday
and now you’re searching
for a notepad and a pen.

Posted in 68: NO THEME IV | Tagged

‘in the elevator, heading for the 23rd floor’

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Autumn Royal

[After Hong-Kai Wang’s A Conceptual Biography of Chris Mann]

‘i mean am i Wrong to prefer your version of me?’ – Chris Mann

‘It begins with affections. It departs
from one’s desire to construct a biography
of an artist’s life or singularity in various modes
of cooperation with his friends & it ends
with encounters & exchanges with others
in tracing a much larger cultural space
that he is part of. The artist is my longtime mentor
& friend, the Melbourne-born composer Chris Mann’ – Hong-Kai Wang

[Notes from a rearrange/r: this is a cento
from the expressions of Warren Burt,
Jim Denley, Eva Karczag, Rik Rue, John Shone,
Amanda Stewart & David Watson.
All references to Chris Mann have been: ______ ]

1949
‘Take a conceit, a title or a line: what you might call
social tics—heckling people loudly, public
manifestations, against the idea of documentation,
slang & everyday talk, don’t follow word to—
it was either late 1973 or early 1974]

5 bottom lines: social, economic, environmental,
cultural & civic: ASIO had files on all [I thought
ASIO meant Australian Surrealist Intelligence
Organisation]. A now defunct theatre: The Pram
Factory, cardboard cut-out mannequin[s], the basis
for collaboration, love the fact it was free.
[A contract with the Victorian State Government—

Videotaping—someone should really record
this. I have mixed feelings about being
any kind of biographer, that’s a measure of time
we might abandon. We sit & chat, I have the video camera.

Cutting up tapes, the cutup culture
from the past, audio collage—it was Herbert
Brün: experimental music is not problem-solving
music, it’s a problem seeking processes
designed to embody failure. We did fail:
an unending stream of successes—

1994
I’ll send you a link to an article I [wrote]
on [Australian] experimental music history,
make decisions later, an archive, talking
in a very unedited way, ramble, ramble,
ramble—I don’t know what your question
was, but here’s your answer: 10 artists
meet with 5 property developers
& 5 trade unions in a little bar in Melbourne.

How can you bring normally competitive capitalist
interests together without a conversation
about ideology to pursue the common goods?

Video conferencing from different parts of the world.
[She] went to work at a delicatessen to support us.
Courageously creative & idiosyncratic, if not mad
that reputation of mine has continued.

Peacocks, huge tails, beautiful colours, outdoor
life. A time of heavy Marxism or pseudo Marxism,
a lot of friends who were Trotskyites in Australia,
at that time, we didn’t have a name.

I’m a dancer & for me, ______ dances,
the listening [is] bodily, response, words,
silences, empathy & the way ______ gives an impulse
or takes an impulse, a charged space, starting out on chairs.

1999
Who gives a fuck? You think I know what the words
are? Did ______ say “questions are portable, answers
are sedentary?” Did I say?

[His] parents started the first commercially viable folk
music company in Australia in the 60s, before they started
the record label, his mother ran a business, created capital:
went around schools recording children speaking a poem
or singing, the professional reel voice recorder. Funny part
was no one had a reel to reel, buying a reel of child’s
voice they could never play, told you she was a good salesman.

A consciousness of speed & not tripping over yourself,
you make your own hole—I saw the application
the other day, going through old files: “What is the difference
between a rock [&] a stump?” Ethics was the subject
of the group ______‘s text was often like a grid:
a sequence of paragraphs, more like a tarot reading,
gonna get the same cards, just don’t know the sequence.

Is it music? I‘m not even sure it’s a music group.

In sound work, things get flattened into the same space
wide junction of understanding, in the context
of what was referred as avant-garde music
at the time, free jazz voicing & improvisation,
that was the beginning, I don’t remember much more,
our friendship is not time-based, like a race caller.

2014
I don’t believe in avant-garde,
it was a period that existed & it’s been framed.

______ stepped through the doorway yelling:
the meeting got underway. [In]1981, we started
the conversation about what we now call ‘internet’.

Little text duos, very fragile, sensitive, totally
unpredictable & unstable moments, strange,
halting, pausing logic between long conversations
on the phone a whole range of ethical issues
to do with language, of when the audience
is the medium, text & speech, speech & music]

We were not polite, we were searching—conversations
haven’t finished, like a functional/dysfunctional
family, just pick up the phone & talk
in the context of Machine for Making Sense.’

Posted in 68: NO THEME IV | Tagged , ,

Poem Assessment Rubric Summer 2014

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Cathy Wagner

Is the poem activated by context?

Is the poem resisting containment by the textual grid?

Is the poem insurrectionary, activist, informed by a neo-Marxist economic and historical perspective?

Is the poem in conversation with verbal art traditions of native peoples of its continent?

Does the poem’s language frustrate, complicate, and reinvent common sense letter by syllable by painstaking word?

Does it exhibit an advanced ability to manipulate form and content to a well-chosen intentional effect?

Does it evoke an intense somatic response in the reader?

If the poem borrows, copies, plagiarizes, appropriates, etc., does it do so with what the Situationists called détournement (provisional artistic attempts to turn the capitalist spectacle against itself)?

Is the poem attentive to ways that punctuation polices the body?

Is the poem littered with a few glam-tags of theory or academic jargon, “personal” references to everyday experience (often involving name dropping), and expertise on commodity fields of various kinds—especially pop music, but dabs of high culture, too?

Does the poem demonstrate stylistic and formal sophistication?

Has the poem acclimated itself to intensifying struggles in crisis-produced terrains of breakdown and ever-increasing privatization?

Does the poem represent the human and animal creatures it describes as persons, as objects, as metonyms, or as vehicles for metaphor?

Does it blend the jargons of social economy and sexual taxonomy?

Does the poem revise patriarchal narrative tropes, patriarchal histories and patriarchal language structures?

Does it come from this place of inter/ruption, of eruption and irruption?

Does it use enjambment and composition by field to explore alternatives to the limit of the sentence?

Does it capture the young artist struggling to survive?

Does the poem overturn the longstanding presumption of difficulty and intransitivity in avant-garde writing, the product of outdated models of oppositionality and alienation?

Does it highlight the raced and gendered body?

Does it push beyond commitments to certain rigidly process-based notions of conceptualism?

Does it show evidence of understanding basic conventions of the genre of poetry by employing elements of craft, e.g., pacing, point of view, imagery, and characterization, at a basic level?

Is the reader changed by the ritual that is the reading of the poem, and therefore, to a minuscule degree, the world changed accordingly?

Does the poem show awareness of: collage techniques; paranomasia; “field composition”; oneiric logic; appropriative strategies; the problematics around lyric subjectivity; prosodic temporality as a flexible architecture or volume?

Is the poem accessible?

Is the poem a ritual work masquerading as a conceptual work? is it masquerading as something else while doing another kind of work (how african spiritual and cultural practices have survived the hostile societies of the afrospora, and how certain indigenous cultural practices survive the present day christianization and islamicization in africa)?

To what degree does the poem trouble notions of productivity and generativity as concepts associated with progress and industry?

To what degree is the poem marked out as having been generated by a dominant culture? a nondominant culture?

Is the poem generatively difficult?

Is the poem employing rhythm and soundplay to induce a somatic reverie in the reader?

Does the poem assert heterosexual norms?

Does its relationship with authorship signal an antipathy to notions of authorial control as means for false individualist consciousness or even fascism?

Does the poem touch you?

Does its relationship with authorship show awareness of the exploitative potential of appropriation?

Does the poem show awareness of itself as a commodity in a chain of supply and demand?

Does the poem address taboo subjects?

To what degree is the poem consciously participating in responsibility for climate change?

Does the poem show awareness of its lineage and influences?

Does the poem rake the angle of convergence between financial lingo, the latest Marxist terminology, and commodity culture?

Is the poem participating in human reproductive labor by refreshing minds so that they can look anew at the world and feel able to go on?

Posted in 68: NO THEME IV | Tagged

Cabin Near Stirling

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Anders Villani

Vision crowded with mass
coronal
injections
—the pit he’d kicked in
the snow behind their untreated log cabin so shallow
he was shitting
on himself— skin too numb to notice,
was this one of the welcome numbs—White
Sallee copse too young to shield him
(had the window fog been cut)
from her, in that Norwegian wool
sweater of his she had on
and nothing else, mineral openness
of what they’d drifted downstream in, naked,
after the last thaw.

(They’d found the outhouse
abused, vengeful: racked
magazines white as though never inked;
sunbeams—loping through
clapboard gaps like
frost—crystallizing the cobwebs.
On balance, unusable.)

If I could live every moment with a blistering winter wind on my face

Hairy, maladapted, numb
at its office. With winter he imagined breaking
fresh bread—and the crumb steam
went to ground, to ice, the taste of crust. Of salt.
He felt lust for himself.

Posted in 68: NO THEME IV | Tagged

Observable Phenomena

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Chloe Wilson

‘… it is human nature to believe that the phenomena we know are the only ones that exist.’
– Marie Curie

Twenty observations from the séance:
in approximate chronological order: One:
a dim room: a chair upholstered: in Utrecht velvet:
presumably for our hostess: Two: a semi-circle
of spiritualists: they wave to me: genteel
and credulous: Three: here comes: the medium:
her gown: a millefeuille of tulle and silk: I am confident:
from a visual inspection: that the pocket space: is ample:
for a dagger: or: a vial of eau-de-vie: or both: Four:
a curtain rippling: without the assistance: of a breeze:
Five: the table that arises: from the lush Kashmiri carpet:
Six: a zither: without zitherist: it emits
a familiar refrain: Seven: I cannot explain: the source
of the bottle: which whooshed over my head:
and dashed itself: to shards: against the tiled
hearth: Eight: the room: falling dark: at the snap
of her fingers: Nine: a blue haze: it: illuminates
her face: she appears: to sprout: additional limbs:
excess appendages: bonus heads: Ten: her eyes flit:
she floats: wrenched up: suddenly: the way the hanged drop:
but in reverse: Eleven: I see myself: with an iron rod:
stirring the cauldron: those tonnes of dirt: from
an Austrian bog: I make them: into a miracle: small enough:
to fit: into a teaspoon: fifty times: Twelve: the substances
I touched: the burns which appeared: days later:
like saints’ faces: in bread or wood: rewarding faith:
Thirteen: Pierre and I: our wounds: which healed:
but in reverse: a red blotch: would grow redder:
scale and scab: then fall away: to reveal: a fresh ulcer:
Fourteen: we were overjoyed: at our fingertips:
swelling up: like tight red grapes: Fifteen: after a time:
we touched: one another: and felt nothing:
Sixteen: My husband’s skull: pulverised
by a carriage wheel: Seventeen: my cheek: against
his coffin: the attempt: to absorb: whatever:
might emanate: from his remains: Eighteen: oh
my hostess: you can’t scare someone: who
has already guessed: what it is we mean:
by ghost: Nineteen: what’s left behind:
after matter: changes state: Twenty: that fraction:
of the original: which manages: to escape.

Posted in 68: NO THEME IV | Tagged

Inner

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Rae Armantrout

Heaven, if it exists,
is when

there is no difference
between watching

and being watched.

*

“Show-off!”

*

Then quark and anti-quark
auto-correct

and I get
“glaze-hog”

for my inner
Santa

Posted in 68: NO THEME IV | Tagged

Civil Wrong

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Kate Lilley

Coming to the nuisance a house falls
abandonment (of residence)
abandoned intellectual property
know-how and the tort of false light
spreads falsehood freely and without recourse

Eggshell skull, trespass to chattels
reprobation, reversal of approval
the face of the earth and everything
of a permanent nature over or under it
including structures and minerals

Discontinued search engines
tenancy at will and at sufferance
freehold, nonfreehold and concurrent estates
incorporeal interests and trade secrets
wrongfully acquired by another

Detinue: an action for the wrongful detention of goods
negligent cryptomnesia, injurious falsehood
the phrase “white-collar crime”
coined in 1939 to include
persons of respectability and high social status
As a curtain raiser to future losses
entrapment and mental troubles
disappointment and inconvenience
headlines are people who have fallen ill
with subpar results​​

Posted in 68: NO THEME IV | Tagged

Separate Hearings

Posted on May 1, 2015 by John Ashbery

1.

We’ll put a hundred million dollars over the
Brno chair
that I remembered seeing it
after they couldn’t find them
The principle of a lifetime

The oft-embargoed news—
You gonna do it now?
In 1946
these men and all women
First
they won’t see anybody

2.

Already attempted, is not gonna hold you in there
The governor had an issue with it
eating their supplies

Any day is yesterday
one of Dad’s geraniums
no more than a foot away
looking sane
and reveal herself just a little bit
had been there for at least nine years

hope you haven’t done anything outside

Posted in 68: NO THEME IV | Tagged

Empirical

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Lisa Gorton

I
A factory, the train line curving off
to cross the motorway—
between them this falling away of ground—
two or three acres where for years
the council trucks brought building rubble—
mounds of shattered concrete, brick shards,
bluestone and steel mesh overgrown with grass
and now I walk into the wreckage, its tricks of scale—
broken horizon stone, its outcrop weeds
and head-high grass, hulls frayed with light,
dry fennel stark from the mounds, dandelion,
sow-thistle the colour of barbed wire self-
seeded in wind-shale, in soft mortar at the level of my eye,
its closed array—and it is the first place, place itself
grown inward to my sight—
along the side of the house, in the playground
where dry ground slants to the fence,
out of the history of their names
where these same weeds thrive
which have made for me a heraldry
of my forgetting—Tussock rampant in field azure—
and set me here in its abyss
as though there were some vanishing point
in what we have named landscape
giving the bright scenes place—
Which is to say I have not seen it yet—
this wilderness to me which is to itself single,
closed in its processes, happening over and over
though not to itself, being to itself a storm
perpetually in the front of light—

II
What is a place other than where things happen?
I met the photographer at the station and we walked out
into those scrappy grasslands
where between the train line and the gully
tyre tracks lead away into that wreckage
which was our starting place—
Who are you to me to say what I should dream?
A vault of light in which every thing appears
down to its last detail—the smell of fennel, even,
rising where we stepped over the railway line
and climbed the cutting’s side
when with single cries wrens
scattered up out of the grass—a movement
like the reverse of something breaking
or that idea of place which persists
behind its uses—self-effacing, capacious, forever
inventing a centre elsewhere—as if to say
What the future will keep of this place
will be its innocence, a hunger as undeliberate as rain—
Do you see them out there, figures among the stones
and their names for grasses?
Out in that unimaginable field
in which wrecked worlds heap their monuments—
an accumulation of fragments which only here
convert themselves into a scene—
The two of them stilled like figures on a vase—
painted Caesar smiling at the curve,
This victory I call peace and remember in stone—
Only I have vanished into my life again
the way a photographer walks off into his photographs—

Posted in 68: NO THEME IV | Tagged

White Sauce

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Cameron Lowe

A stormy romance ends in the arms
of another, ends with ‘too long at the bar’.
Am I marrying for money?
Should I hire a wig? I buy a book
on ways to disappear.
She licks the stranger’s face.
I raise two flutes at the camera.
Snap, snap. You pretend indifference,
study the table of gifts.
‘Stand and deliver or lie down
like a pig’. I love your shoulders,
but detest the cake.
Why is Vladimir attending the priest?
Who is that priest? You say:
‘I’ve just popped in from Alaska’,
and slip the ring from your finger.
It gets hot waltzing and I’m the one
wearing the white gown.

Posted in 68: NO THEME IV | Tagged

(a) those that belong to the emperor

Posted on April 26, 2015 by Aden Rolfe

I

There are those you expect him to own and those of which he is
not yet aware

those catalogued and counted and those he hasn’t thought to
dream up

those he tolerates on account of his daughter and those in which
she takes no interest

those permitted access to the inner palace and those who are
denied it

those who have names and those in whom no names can be found

those that divide into like parts and those that don’t

those that announce their presence, waiting on the threshold for a

sign, and those which cannot be perceived by the senses

those that are singular and those whose numbers increase without
limit

red ones

and finally those that hesitate between this world and the last, that
exist only in the mouths of those who should know better. So it
is that when he hears of a water demon made of the parts of
other animals––the body of an otter, the spurs of a rooster, the
bill of a duck––he nods in approval, dismisses the consul. In
such an animal, he wonders, perhaps even he cannot believe.

II

You say you name things according to their nature
but flat-foot doesn’t half describe it. Water-mole
is better, but you wonder if you don’t need
new ways of seeing, especially when the teapot
tells more about the room than it does about the tea
when the stables disclose the eastern gate but don’t
lead anyone to water. You scrawl
your name
on a scrap
of paper, drop it in the stream.
And then, unwrapping folds of silk
among and amongst the reeds
again and against the clouds
thudding you think: the parts correlate, but where’s
the integrity? Better to see properties as qualities
a felt reality, wet ankles. You know
you could spend all day
describing the colour of the doorframe
or just say duck-egg––either they get it
or they don’t.

So turn the page, feel the stiffened fur. You think:
this beast now belongs to (b) embalmed ones.
You think: only motives are ulterior.
You think: tomorrow
the provinces.

Posted in HEBK | Tagged , ,

Review Short: Alex Skovron’s Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems

Posted on April 19, 2015 by Caitlin Maling

Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems by Alex Skovron
Puncher & Wattmann, 2014

While I was walking in the Museum of Fine Arts Houston with my cousin, I found myself discussing the conversations I seem doomed to repeat, the seemingly circular unending ones I’ve had over years, with myself and others without resolution. My cousin pointed out that to her a difference exists between two types of circular conversations, those truly round, and those that are elliptical, where with each repetition we reach a point closer to some type of truth before arcing out again. To me the joy and richness of encountering Alex Skovron’s Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems is in travelling with the poet through these elliptical orbits as Skovron’s poems return and return to key motifs of European history, life in Australia and always, always, music.

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Review Short: Jennifer Compton’s Now You Shall Know

Posted on April 19, 2015 by Julie Maclean

Now You Shall Know by Jennifer Compton
Five Islands Press, 2015


Jennifer Compton’s ear and predilection for the colloquial is one of the threads linking the poems in this latest collection of apparently autobiographical works. Poems further cohere around irony, sometimes translating as humour. There is reflection triggered by the death of her mother in the opening sequence, culminating in a rustic philosophy that questions mortality within the context of the natural world in the final act ‘… somehow urgent’:

You are blossoming

with an endstage intensity?
It’s a thought.
Everything I ever learned 
was from gardening.
                    (‘The Lemon Tree Syndrome’).

Now You Shall Know is divided into sections or acts (titles derived from poems in those sections) and address bereavement, alcohol abuse, family life in the suburbs, travel, gardening and ageing. These memoir poems are neither sentimental nor maudlin, but instead are infused with vitality. This collage of free verse by a New Zealander is vintage Aussie larrikin at times, and can nuance the voice in another era. In ‘As Far As Dandenong’ a new arrival is lost and tries to ask for directions in broken English.

His cheap white shirt and cheap grey strides and cheap trainers.
This is what they wear – his brother or his cousin said in Kmart.

The poet’s skill as a playwright informs what feels like a multi-act drama. In vignettes on human folly, shock and loss the poetry draws attention to itself in the use of interjections and direct quotes where the lyrical and profane rub up against each other for effect. In ‘The Drink’ a memory unravels in a wave of watery metaphors, long vowels and hard consonants; the poem hinged on ‘and the rivulet’:

The gin clear waters
as cave divers put it
of notorious caverns
yawning sinkholes

and the rivulet
the creek the brook the beck
that bubbled past his shack
spoke his idiolect and

in coastal waters when 
whales trumpeted loneliness
he shouted back

swim you little fuckers

swim!
there is no boat
you did not miss it.’

Choice of the word ‘idiolect’ so close to ‘idiot’ that it cannot be mistaken for some feeling towards the subject, like the poet’s love of the sounds and rhythms that language affords in verse like Compton’s.

We are drawn into unpunctuated theatrical streams of consciousness in ‘oh yes’ and ‘oh well’; both poems are pacy, fragmented and capture the chaos of the domestic with surprising constructions in ‘… the news was very hideous’ (‘oh well’). There is musicality in the consonance of ‘critical mass’, ‘nicholas on her tit’ and ‘big raw mess’ with its final lines of: ‘then a polish woman with a fuckyou face said to my nakedness/ hold still pls’ (‘oh yes’). Snappy phrasing and end-stopping render these poems easily digested although a rereading helped to fix the tone in context in ‘oh yes’ and the ‘polish’ did make me do a double-take. The overt echoes and chiming that characterise much of the poetry here might be deemed intrusive in some contemporary circles but are executed with a kind of ‘I’m having fun’ and ‘This is what I do’ attitude which takes it out of forced metre and into another sphere altogether. The same goes for a rogue employment of cliché in some poems and a rebel telling and loose quality in the monologue ‘The Narrative Arc of Christchurch’: ‘… How I wept. I wept buckets.’

Scene-setting in the first stanza of ‘The Craic in the Bar’ seems overwritten, but Compton’s lines can also be taut and startling as in ‘a thrusting vernacular of blue’ (‘Pink Forget-Me-Not’ ) to describe the flowers. There is accessibility and dexterity in this range that gives the whole collection an energy while concurrently diluting the more sombre and philosophical works.

The title poem, among the more demanding and rewarding for its complex imagery and language play, where an airliner, aria and ambulance are juxtaposed to create a sense of containment, performance and urgency as the death of the mother seems imminent, works well: ‘… Something tells me she is about to throw/the performance of her life’.

Significant events like those surrounding the death of a parent put us in some kind of limbo before the crash. Compton’s notion is captured truthfully in ‘… we seem to inhabit a thrumming stillness, but we believe we are travelling/ forward,’ its use of the present participle achieving the feeling of movement. ‘Clever’ is a word that crops up three times in Now You Shall Know which is arresting not only because of repetition, but because it plays into the title of the collection and foreshadows a similar element in the penultimate section ‘… wrenched backward …’ in the poem ‘Free Books’ where ‘Someone had said to my mother that/ I was a clever little girl …’ These lines suggest a rift, a lack of understanding, with the ‘little’ giving a sense of vulnerability.

Poems in this collection seem predicated on what the mother failed to understand ‘I read that poem … I didn’t know ’ (‘Now You Shall Know’) and what becomes known is revealed by the poet through remembering. Compton’s use of the word ‘clever’ seems to signify less a garnering of knowledge and more a gaining of wisdom.

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Cordite Books

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Kent MacCarter

We’re pleased to tumble out into the world these first four print collections in the new Cordite Books imprint. We had considered print collections for a few years, but the tipping point to actually publish them came in late November 2014.

Buy them here!
Use 53_the_end discount code for 30% off until 9 October.

It all began with Alan Loney’s Crankhandle, which was just too good not to get out there in the world. But why do one book when you can do four? John Hawke’s Aurelia, Ross Gibson’s Stone Grown Cold and Natalie Harkin’s Dirty Words followed soon thereafter. These are excellent and challenging collections.

Cordite Press Inc. enlisted the exquisite talent of Zoë Sadokierski to create a series design, and the additional editorial whizbangery of Penelope Goodes to ensure the books are as perfect as a new print publisher can make them.

These books are not print on demand, limited edition only. We wanted to produce literary artefacts, and so we have.

Books are $20.00 AUD each, and this includes shipping within Australia.

Read the introductions to each book:

Alan Loney. Crankhandle. Introduction by Michael Farrell.
Natalie Harkin. Dirty Words. Introduction by Peter Minter.
Ross Gibson. Stone Grown Cold. Introduction by Pam Brown.
John Hawke. Aurelia. Introduction by Gig Ryan.

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Review Short: Anna Jackson’s I, Clodia, and Other Portraits

Posted on April 12, 2015 by Amy Brown

I, Clodia, and Other Portraits by Anna Jackson
Auckland University Press, 2014

Early in this collection, Clodia demands to be ‘loved by one of the new poets’ (4). Instead of beginning with the poet’s invocation of a muse, the muse of I, Clodia seems to summon the poet. Over 34 pages, Jackson imagines Clodia Metelli, the witty, promiscuous Roman aristocrat generally believed to have been the subject, ‘Lesbia’, of Catullus’s love poems – his interlocutor – her voice dovetailing easily with his. This biographical sequence is followed by another, observing an unnamed photographer during ‘the worst disaster of her career –/ this photographing of faces, this creation/ of ‘portraits’’ (41). The poet’s potential as portraitist and biographer preoccupies I, Clodia.

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Review Short: Derek Beaulieu’s Kern

Posted on April 12, 2015 by Caren Florance

Kern by Derek Beaulieu
Les Figues Press, 2014


I must admit: the first time I flipped through Kern and looked at the various swirling typographic entities, two thoughts jumped into my head; how similar the pages looked to work by Australian book artist Lyn Ashby, and the other was jealousy at how much vintage dry-transfer lettering (Letraset) Canadian poet Beaulieu obviously has access to. It’s hard to come by here in Australia, and what we can still get comes only in very restrained font styles.

Both of my thoughts are valid, since the author’s note to Kern positions this ongoing body of work as being typical of Lettrism (without actually naming the field), a graphic practice that emphasises the ‘glyphic nature of the visual sign’ and ‘proliferates meaning through its visual properties’1: ‘viewers need not read, they only need momentarily stare and receive’2. I received comparative thoughts and emotional flare. Other viewers, of course, will have differing receptions. I say ‘viewers’ because these are letterforms that dissuade reading. This is confusing: such visual typographic play is common amongst graphic designers, but this is poetry. Isn’t it meant to be read?


from Kern, p 17

The overlap between experimental poetry publishing and artist books is fascinating, and still quite un-probed. If Kern were an artist’s book, I could talk about the sequence of images, how its march from small entities floating in white through to the overwhelming and crackling obliteration of the page space is a pessimistic foreshadowing of apocalypse. As a poetry volume, I can still say that – it’s hard not to think of societal breakdown when the object on the page is taking full advantage of its material origins by falling apart during the process of its very creation (cracking and failing to adhere, which is what Letraset does when it is rubbed too hard or not hard enough) – but there are ruptures in the sequence that undermine a clean visual reading. A book artist would allow the final images to move past the white borders of the page – bleeding out of the book – and would move back the vertical works on pages 82-85 so that they did not break the flow of disintegration. So, maybe not a straight line to dystopia.


from Kern, p 88

Instead, we are offered other points of reference: ‘logos for the corporate sponsors of Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel’, ‘airport signage’, ‘way-finding signage’, ‘semantic detritus’ (90) … all pointing to surface engagement, speed, and nonsense.


from Kern, p 78

Again, my mind returns to Lyn Ashby’s book, called Ideo(t) Grammatica, which offers such visual similarity but with completely different intentions. Ashby is also way-finding: ‘the changes here gradually lead the reader, if they are willing, into stranger territory’3, the book itself offering itself as an ‘experimental petri dish’, growing letterforms that are meant to be read, and can be, if you move slowly from the start through the typographic cosmology to the aftermath of a big bang. The end (indeed, bleeding outwards) becomes a beginning, whereas Beaulieu’s end feels like an end, with no room to move (except the white gutters).


page spread from Ideo(t) Grammatica

There is exquisite care taken in both books with the placement of letters; Ashby has painstakingly used screen and software, working with visible circular grids that underpin the page. The only horizontality is a quote from Shakespeare that offers ‘a kind of life line back to the surface of normal reading’. Beaulieu has no grid for his circular movements. He seems to start with a letter, perhaps any letter depending on the day, and muses his way along its anatomy: ascender to descender, bowl to bowl, over and over, pulled this way and that by line, curve, darkness and negative space. Ashby’s language is a system, cleanly yet lushly growing, chaotic yet tidily manufactured. Beaulieu embraces the faults and problems as his lettering stumbles: Letraset promises neat black letters but so often delivers crumbs, cracks and angsty imperfection, and makes you think that it’s all your fault. Others would patch, scratch off and start again to achieve a chimera of perfection. Here on the pages of Kern, the flaws are poetic, and part of that poetic is materiality. They are simultaneously charming and terrifying in what they imply, bringing us back to apocalypse.


from Kern, p 30

This is not the first of Beaulieu’s Letraset volumes, and unless he runs out of his raw matter, it probably won’t be the last. With or without meaning, they are hypnotic, and more so if you try to retrace his movements through the patterns. The process must be consuming; the mystery of them is how, in any of them, he managed to stop. In that thought, I see the craft of the poet.

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Anne-Marie Newton Reviews L K Holt

Posted on April 6, 2015 by Anne-Marie Newton

Keeps by L K Holt
John Leonard Press, 2014

Melbourne poet L. K. Holt’s third collection, Keeps, is an expansively intertextual and complexly layered work. Published as part of a substantial volume that includes the reissue of her two earlier collections, this is often dense and intellectually oriented poetry. There is, however, an intriguing personal thread interlacing the ensemble, wherein the poet – perhaps more so in this collection than in her earlier works – offers a view into some of her deeper existential concerns. Continue reading →

Pages: 1 2
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Experimental Review: Dominique Hecq’s Stretchmarks of Sun

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Noëlle Janaczewska

Stretchmarks of Sun by Dominique Hecq
re.press Books, 2014


At primary school we had a class called Scrapbook. We drew, coloured, traced, glittered, and glued material cut from magazines, to create new pictures uniquely our own.
           I scrapbook.
           You scrapbook.
           S/he scrapbooks.
           We may have made the noun into a verb, but it still has chalk-mark of the hobby or junior project.
           Unlike collage, montage, even bricolage – those vaguely French-sounding words associated with literature, film and fine art.
            ‘Collage, the art of reassembling fragments of pre-existing images in such a way as to form a new image, was the most important innovation in the art of the twentieth century.’ That’s Charles Simic quoted by David Shields in Reality Hunger, a book made up largely of quotations from other texts.

           Quotes and paratexts pepper Dominique Hecq’s Stretchmarks of Sun. Seven poems which tilt at the voiceplay. Seven poems that to-and-fro across time and geography. And – like Reality Hunger – deliberately blur the line/s of authorship. Stretchmarks of Sun contains some delicious wordplays, but Hecq also plays with references, with citation, paraphrase and interpretation. Is this literary sampling a subtle – or perhaps not so subtle – critique of academic writing? That was my first thought. Second thought was the kaleidoscope of received ideas; how the mind processes information, and the piecemeal nature of memory …
            ‘According to Anatole France, it is scissors and glue, and not the traditional pen, that are the true emblems of the writer’s craft.’ That’s
Sergei Eisenstein in The Psychology of Composition. Pioneer of cinematic montage.
           Where meaning is created not by the content of an individual shot, but by juxtaposition and patterning, by the relationship of shots to one another. Used by film-makers to condense time, Hecq translates the technique to stretch as well as short-cut time.

            ‘I was the dust blowing from the interior out/I was the interior ousting particles of dust and/molecules of wind/I was the wind.’ The first poem in the collection, ‘Before I Became a Woman’, reads as a dialogue conducted with/in the self.
           A series of rhapsodic fragments.
           The voice latching onto specific images or moments before changing register.
           This performative quality runs throughout the book; it’s an energising and distinctive feature that brings the past alive in the present. It’s there in the prominent first person. In the theatricality of settings. Where lists transmute into stanzas. Where scenes break into beats. It’s there in the dramatis personae.
           Real people.
           Fictional characters.
           Historical figures.
           Ghosts.

           In Scrapbook class Miss urged us not to overfill our pictures.
           Space could be eloquent.
           In Stretchmarks the connectives are fragmentary and the between-spaces are expressive.
            ‘What am I doing, talking, having my figments talk, it can only be me. Spells of silence too, when I listen, and hear the local sounds, the world sounds …’
           That’s Texts for Nothing by Samuel Beckett.
           Fracture opens up a dreaming space.
            ‘Read the energy that is in my silence,’ wrote Clarice Lispector in Água Viva, a book composed of shards that ultimately resolve into a kind of long prose poem.

            ‘Come to think of it/I might be making it all up//Memories//of someone who never/was.’ That’s from ‘Off the Edge of Love’.
           Stretchmarks hovers over genres, makes play with unreliability, and folds together theoretical reverie, memoir and mythologies of multiple types.
           Two poems, ‘Unsouled’, and the afore-quoted ‘Off the Edge of Love’, lay bare ‘the sheer business of surviving a child’. Cartographies of loss and breakdown, they are raw, sad and incredibly moving.
           When ‘language gaps/splinters into uneven shapes/loses its footing in its own progression –/see how it slips?’
           The poems gyrate towards resolution – not narrative, but musical. The way we experience the completion of a piece of music.
           Stretchmarks takes the clutter of myth and post/modernism, marries it with ‘autoficional fragments’ and transforms it into something quieter and more thoughtful.
           Poems that demand re-reading.
           Poems rich in colour.
           Poems that are playful with pronouns and proper nouns. Imanuelle becomes Im – no dividing apostrophe.
           Poems that explore the kinship between first and third person, self and persona, foreignness and its counter/parts. The dissections of a Renaissance anatomist and the acquiring of a tattoo.

           This is erudite writing with a reflexive impulse.
           With flashes of humour – in even its darkest material.
           Writing with a restless heart.
            ‘The choices a writer makes within a tradition – preferring Milton to Molière, caring for Barth over Barthelme – constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.’ Or her. That’s Zadie Smith’s Fail Better from 2007.
           In those childhood scrapbooks, we assembled and took apart and reassembled our world, in order to understand it and our place/s in it. Is collage or the gathering of fragments the adult equivalent? A literary approach that best fits our particular digital moment? When much, maybe most of our online reading is punctuated by hyperlinks, adverts and other interactive elements. But then writers were experimenting with short nonlinear forms way before the world turned digital, and poets have always understood the whole ‘less is more’ thing – a phrase which comes from an 1855 poem by Robert Browning.
            ‘Tell me how will it wear … ’
           In the final poem, ‘Wearing the World’, thanks to a gift voucher from her daughter (perhaps also a giver of the titular stretchmarks?) the writer visits a tattoo artist.
            ‘Everything you ink on people, Shauna says/is already inside them//You only open the skin and let it out.’

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Experimental Review: Chris Edwards’s After Naptime

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Eddie Hopely

After Naptime by Chris Edwards
Vagabond Press, 2014


PREFACE Page references to Chris Edwards’ “A. N.”* are imposed—i–viii (Front cover–Contents), 1–22 (Text), ix–xiv (Sources–Back cover)—according to its Contents’ functionally reflexive bracketing. The central text operates, in the majority, through ten two-page spreads of apparently sourced (see “Sources” (x)) and assembled language and b/w illustrations and clipart that ‘invite’, through formal, typographic, scalar, and iconic cues, a handful of mutually interruptive reading strategies to convey a loose, visually intensified, and theatrically structured ‘story’ whose principal driver I interpret as a kind of adaptive, paranormal virus invested with a relationship to sexual desire by the detective-generic narrator. Although a source list is provided, any restrictive or procedural ‘commitment’ to these texts is indeterminate.

PREFACE TO CORDITE EDITION

REVIEW [ … ] As adolescents know, ‘multistability’ is a non-durable baffler of liquid, ‘open-ended’, parental inquiry; without recourse to a sophisticated rhetorical composition, lethargic or unresponsive to the face of interrogative contingency and capable of sublimating registrations of referential ambiguity upon formal self-closure, real (situational) escape is required, lest the “subnormative” creativity of a protective testimony—its provisionally illegible honesty—manifest as the ‘joke’ it virtually is, bringing “forward what is hidden”: the fact of an alternate stability (Virno 73, 79). This dissemblance—a demotic, interpersonal mode of InfoSec—is not the manipulative ‘simulation’ of a fiend or apathetic amoralist; it manifests, instead, within an aghast, puritan logic where any ‘omission’ that takes place is, crucially, of the (‘called-for’) lie; it is underwritten by both a tacit accusation that an inquirer would have the dogmatically honest subject generate falsehoods and an understanding that any dismissal of this integrity as duplicitous or legally spiritless (refusing mediation by operating ‘to the letter’) precipitates a (claim to possess a) ‘right to know’ that itself founds ‘spiritless’ (despotic) law. Although the youth-dogmatist requires that hir testimony “sustain ambiguous readings”, a capacity attributed to the “gestalt principle” of multistability and co-terminus solely with an absence of vivid feedback that continues to characterise circulated texts, s/he further requires that “all the elements of the work [be] directed toward a single reading of it”, such that it both enunciates the ‘case’ according to ‘juvenile’-personal law (or an absence of authority in the mature world) and remains singularly interpretable (‘closed’) by adult power as innocuous (e.g. ‘I am going out’; ‘just some friends’; ‘yes’) (Drucker 9; Hejinian 42).

Is it an error to interpret proffered ‘adult’ dissemblance and multi-stability with provoked vernacular-‘juvenile’ security frameworks? Consider, for example, (a reading of) Melanie Klein’s speculative account of infantile defence mechanisms. Upset by internal agitation, possibly due to an occasion of negative relations with the (~ only) object, I defensively project (spit up) or externalise this ‘negativity’ onto (some element of) my surrounds; to protect myself from the negativity now in my environment, I defensively introject (consume, devour) this negativity, internalising it as an agitation; upset by internal agitation ( … ). Although this wreath of logic appears to be founded, in part, on an irrational column of fear, that of retributive consumption of the infant by the breast-function (subtended by the hybrid-parent-function), Sianne Ngai’s analysis of the ‘cute’ as “an aestheticization of powerlessness” grounded by an “aggressive desire to master and overpower the cute object that the cute object itself appears to elicit”, a “tie between cuteness and eating”, and edibility as “the ultimate index of an object’s cuteness” evokes a genuine, if disavowed, provenance of terror subject to infantile intuition (64, 78–79). Something does want to crush and consume the pseudo-entity and it is precisely what s/he has identified, through hir first act of differentiation, as a threat.

(Fig. 1) Concordance pp. 1–3.

(A) 1, 3; (a) 1, 1, 2; (aah-choo) 1; (accompanied) 3; (acquainted) 2; (actually) 1; (all) 1, 3, 3; (already) 1; (amazed) 3; (among) 1; (and) 1, 1, 1, 3, 3, 3; (anti-) 3; (arranged) 3; (arriving) 2; (as) 2; (ask) 3; (at) 2, 2, 2, 3; (B) 1; (be) 2, 3; (be-keepers [sic]) 2; (because) 2, 3; (becoming) 2; (bee) 1; (been) 1, 2, 3; (began) 3; (begin) 2; (believe) 2; (born) 3, 3; (branch) 3; (but) 1, 1; (by) 1, 3, 3, 3, 3; (catalogue) 1; (certain) 1; (checked) 1; (civil) 3; (clock) 3; (Clockwise) 3; (closed) 1; (coming) 2; (communication) 1; (companion) 2; (corner) 1; (cottage) 2; (cow) 1; (cry) 3; (day) 1; (deposited) 1; (destined) 2; (Detective) 1; (did) 3; (discovered) 3; (during) 1; (e) 1; (either) 3; (Enter) 1; (exhaustless) 1; (falsified) 3; (father) 3; (fifteen) 1; (first) 2; (flax-plant) 1; (fling) 3; (followed) 1; (for) 1, 3; (garden) 2; (gender) 3; (germs) 1; (ghost) 1; (ghosts) 3; (gifts) 3; (gone) 1; (had) 1, 2, 3; (have) 1, 3; (having) 1; (head) 2; (her) 1; (here) 2; (highly) 3; (his) 3; (hours) 3; (human) 1; (I) 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3; (if) 2; (in) 1, 2; (inarticulate) 2; (inclination) 3; (informed) 3; (inhabited) 3; (innocent) 2; (inquiries) 3; (Inspector) 1; (iron) 1; (irritated) 1; (is) 1, 1, 1; (it) 1, 2, 3; (king) 1; (Lady) 1; (less) 1; (letter) 1; (life) 2; (little) 3; (low) 3; (m) 1; (made) 1; (manner) 2; (me) 1, 2, 2, 3; (means) 3; (meet) 2; (Mercury) 1; (merits) 1; (mind) 3; (mirror) 1; (money) 3; (more) 2; (my) 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3; (name) 3; (No) 1; (no) 1; (nothing) 2, 3; (o) 1, 3; (of) 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3; (On) 2, 3; (on) 2; (open) 3; (or) 3; (our) 2; (out) 2; (ow) 2; (oyster) 1; (papers) 3; (person) 1; (personally) 2; (pockets) 1; (point) 2; (posting) 1; (prearranged) 2; (price) 3; (purse) 1; (question) 3; (result) 3; (retreat) 3; (ringing) 1; (sailors) 1; (sculptor) 3; (sealed) 1; (second) 3; (secondly) 3; (see) 3; (servants) 3; (shall) 3; (shared) 3; (she) 1; (sheep) 1; (silkworm) 1; (simultaneously) 3; (small) 3; (so) 3; (something) 2; (sounds) 2; (spirits) 3; (stare) 2; (still) 1; (successful) 3; (telephones) 1; (Temple) 1; (that) 1, 2, 3, 3; (The) 1, 1; (the) 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3; (their) 1; (Then) 1; (Therefore) 1; (this) 2; (those) 2, 2; (Thousands) 1; (To) 2; (to) 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3; (touched) 3; (turn) 3; (turned) 1; (unlucky) 2; (until) 3; (up) 2; (upon) 2; (verified) 3; (virulence) 1; (w) 1, 1; (wardrobe) 3; (was) 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3; (were) 1; (Whether) 3; (which) 3; (whose) 1; (with) 1, 3; (years) 1; (yes) 3


(List 1) Unordered list of plausible reasons for the ‘meaningfulness’ of variable letter capitalisation (‘a’/‘A’) in the title leading to its unreliability as a piece of citation *[“after Naptime” (i), “AFTER NAPTIME” (iii), “after Naptime” (v), “After naptime” (vii), “AFTER NAPTIME” (8), “After Naptime” (xiv)].

List 1. Edwards is an editor according to external biographical notes and is credited here with “design and typography” (vi); the uniformly lowercase utensils in a landscape (2001) is consistently cited as such and listed in an “Also by Chris Edwards” section (iv); the sometimes non-standard lowercase a following the colon in A Fluke: a mistranslation of … (2005), listed in the same section (weak); (?).


A quality-luxury continuum, invoked by the scarcity of an Edwards-‘contacted’ edition—“a limited edition of 111 copies / numbered and signed by the author” (xii)—and the sub-titular phrase “profusely illustrated”—gleaned, it seems, from the final provided source title—is interrupted by the blatantly ‘poor’ reproduction of an oil lamp image on the cover (i) and title page (v). Outline asperities, beyond prefiguring a ‘real’ underlying lack of smoothness and enclosure that will be taken up as a key predicate of all content within the text, preyed upon there by a phantasmic-biological entity represented by pictographic and illustrative collages of ‘enhanced’ (close-up) fibrous nerve endings and ‘distant’ (small) human-animal bodies, confirms that Edwards’ materials have ‘passed through’ the bitmapping of digitalisation; ‘edges’ of elements appear jagged because of resizing rather than collage-‘cutting’ issues; included visuals exist as transmittable image files, elsewhere. Nine dots left open for edition numbering (“number . . . . . . . . . of” (xii)) ‘call back’ to the coupon dashes-and-scissors that frame the text’s preface (1)—embedded prompts for physical transformation of the object by the reader and author-publisher-function respectively, the latter of which, if intended to be constituent with Edwards’ hand, takes up the commercial-language gesture of an ‘I’ speaking of ‘oneself’ in third person (“signed by the author” (xii)); this copy states, for example, that “‘Edwards’” is “the narrator” when narration and the perspectival accounting of emotional investment implied by this position are occupied from the outset by an ‘I’ that references an “Edwards” (e.g. “[ . . . ],’ says Edwards” (9)), a figure or position that continues to potentially, jokily, multiply (e.g. “E at work” (7) or “Ed. Note:” (16)) and a reference to the common inter-community practice of providing requested biographical notes in third person.


Drucker, Johanna. (2009). ‘Entity to event: From literal, mechanistic materiality to probabilistic materiality’. Parallax, 15:4, 7–17. Pdf.
Drucker, Johanna. (2012 [1984]). On writing as the visual representation of language. New York Talk, NY, June 5, 1984. PennSound. Mp3 file.
Hejinian, Lyn. (2000). The rejection of closure. In The Language of Inquiry. University of California Press. Print.
Mitchell, Juliet, ed. (1987). The Selected Melanie Klein. Simon and Schuster. Print.
Ngai, Sianne. (2012). Our aesthetic categories: Zany, cute, interesting. Harvard University Press. Print.
Scalapino, L. (1993). Objects in the terrifying tense longing from taking place. Roof Books. Print.
Virno, P. (2008). Multitude: Between innovation and negation. Semiotext(e). Print.

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Dan Disney Reviews the deciBels Series

Posted on March 24, 2015 by Dan Disney

These ten tiny tomes from Vagabond Press each speak (squawk, swoon, glitch, muse, lyricise, confess) of how there is something not ticking precisely inside the reality machine. Or perhaps these books shine light onto how we’ve all gone slightly spectral within our anthropocenic phantasmagorias, lost and unmoored in an experiment that’s become dreadfully strange. Some of these books turn exclusively toward the world, others perhaps come from particular critical engagements; each serves to extend conversation both on what poets do, and what poems are for. Continue reading →

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Introduction to Natalie Harkin’s Dirty Words

Posted on March 18, 2015 by Peter Minter


Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski

Natalie Harkin’s poetry is deeply felt and profoundly moving. Emerging from the clearest wellsprings of life to bear witness to the richness, complexity and anguish of the human condition, her work is a clarion call to our conscience and hope.

At first glance, Dirty Words is an index to the harrowing ledger of colonisation, its ruinous legacy and the echoes of despair and desolation that reverberate through to the present. Dirty Words is also a codex of the fabric of filial memory and cultural law, traces of stories on the wind and tide, the songs and sacred knowledge of Elders and Aunties and Nannas and Sisters that weave through that ruin to reconnect, resprout and relive. At their heart, the poems in this collection are songs to love and to the eloquence and strength of resilience.

Natalie Harkin joins a great chain of voices that for generations have stirred and risen and cried out against tyranny, shaking their shackles to the earth like blood that blooms in seeds of power.

If language is a virus, Dirty Words is an inoculation, the alphabet jabbed by a ‘sing-chant-rage’ that liberates the breath and restores the heart and mind. Justice is better, not bitter, but cuts the tongue to tell it like it is. Country might be cleared and carved and consumed but Harkin’s poetry restores the beautiful strong ‘blood-memory-land’ to its sovereign wellbeing, free from ‘industry’s radiation-health.’ Above all, even in its anger and sting, Harkin’s is a poetry of ardent sympathy and compassion. This is where its true power lies: in the solicitude that swells eternally from quiet and determined dominion; in the invitation to community and treaty, to wisdom. Dirty Words unravels the knots of history and makes us feel all there is to be felt in the years and years of living and being Aboriginal.

Always was. Always will be. It will not be quiet here, each letter sent sincerely, respectfully and with the finest aim. The challenge is ours to read Harkin’s Dirty Words, to let them fall across our skin and seep into our creases and folds like fine red dust. Then the air we move through will speak with their colour, our dreams and memories will germinate and join the song, our flowering heads held high and proud.

GET YOUR COPY HERE

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Introduction to Ross Gibson’s Stone Grown Cold

Posted on March 18, 2015 by Pam Brown


Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski

The works that Ross Gibson has written and edited over the past thirty years could be classed as political aesthetics. In books like Seven Versions of an Australian Badland, chronicling the wretched historical miscreants of Queensland’s Brigalow country, or 26 Views of the Starburst World: William Dawes at Sydney Cove 1788–1791, speculatively tracing English astronomer William Dawes’s scientific work and his relationship with the Indigenous Eora people of Sydney Harbour in a few late years of the eighteenth century, Ross Gibson’s method is procedural. Seven Versions and 26 Views form a compositional design that he has described as ‘fractal’, allowing unfixed multiple views and patterns. The author’s practice of creative fragmentation, applied to the poems and short prose pieces in this new collection, eschews linearity and dull chronology.

The epigraph from modernist North American poet William Carlos Williams presents a complex and strange concept of redemption linking the ghosts of genocide with authenticity. The stanza works to feature a universal Western historical quandary. Ross Gibson’s fascination with history is reflected in the quote, and often his sombre choice of language forges a kind of early modern trait that informs particular effect or mood throughout this book. For example: using a rare word like ‘stochastic’ when he could have said ‘random’, or writing ‘prodigious’ instead of ‘huge’ to describe some fruit bats flying over the inner Sydney suburb of Redfern. I think, in the author’s lexicon, ‘random’ and ‘huge’ would have sounded too mingy.

In the preface Gibson tells us that everything here takes place in a chimerical town that we, the readers, ‘know well’. The first poem is a short, notational, prosaic piece that riffs on twentieth-century Sydney poet Kenneth Slessor’s well-known World War II poem ‘Five Bells’, as a minimalist remix of anthropomorphised tugboats, mists and pile lights. In spite of the minimalism the intent is serious and leads directly to a 2014 hostage incident in a chocolate cafe in ‘Martin Place’, one that Sydneysiders now call ‘the siege’. There is topicality here but it’s agreeably unpredictable. Gibson’s fragmentary style favours standalone single lines or short sentences to exemplify episodic thinking and the discontinuities of broken narrative. He engages culture in scraps and shards.

The performative and visual are prominent in Stone Grown Cold. Gibson is also a filmmaker and creator of audiovisual installations. Sometimes his poetry can be imagined as film, sometimes as song. His lyrical adverbial phrases enhance narrative possibilities that relish the abject, the perturbingly awkward and the disaffected, sometimes in archetypical ordinary suburbs like Rooty Hill – ‘The street’s a tract of sump-oil’ – and Miranda Fair – ‘Go set a suburb on fire.’ In one deliberately unmannered poem everyone is so far off their faces on ‘meth home-cook’ that they have become embodied spectres whose ‘thoughts waft all misshapen.’ Other situations or scenes have haunting eerie undertones that are deliciously creepy – ‘They brought a cold mattock up from the basement’.

Not everything is gloomy though. There’s plenty of genial humour and wit in the sets of Zen-ish lists of tasks and personal superstitions, in an experimental rendition of pop songs like Russell Morris’s seventies classic ‘The Real Thing’ and in some celebratory sinning – ‘Sex in a church. Minutes later: a hailstorm.’ As a bonus, Gibson gives seasoned advice to the bewildered – ‘Bluff your befuddlement with droll savoir-faire.’ These are some of the many unusual pleasures to be found in this savvy and unique collection.

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