Rory Green, the attentions

Rory Green is arguably another O’Hara inheritor, memorialising their feelings:

it is hard to feign rigour when
poems are just zoos for feelings???
and my feelings hate poems

(4)

Green posits a productive anti-poetic that, to continue the EP analogy, would make this chapbook electronica. Some of the poems have been composed with on-line tools, and a game-like logic, assembling phrases, even turning poems sideways and upside down like Tetris bricks. Yet none of them require screens to work and, like Wong, Green examines contemporary attention, distraction, and dispersal by following new (askew) logics. The poems often work themselves up to superlative final lines, including “if I had the time I wouldn’t write any poems,” which isn’t as glib as it sounds (expressing a lyrical yearning for unmediated existence) (21). There’s definitely a body and a psyche in these techno poems too, which “comes curdling up” (16). Green has skin in this game.

With a familiar cut up logic, and filled with playful non-sequiturs, Green clearly has big feels about the future and ways of infusing their poems with sensory images: “a bath calling mutely through me” (16). These are poems that have been carefully whittled and stacked, rather than merely programmed, and they speak to the limits of all-too-human signposting, as if “language succumbed to a cairn” (12). ‘futurity blues’ is a fabulous riff on the ecology of technology and mounting anxieties (11). While Green deftly generates and sustains philosophical and questioning poems critiquing “emissions targets dead on arrival,” they also take a post-ironic approach, evident in the poem title ‘pete wentz came to me in a dream and told me to title this poem like a mid 00s fall out boy song’ (7; 4).

I’d have loved to have received this EP from the poetic future when I was a regional teenager in the time before the internet (well before the mid 00s) and played it on my graveyard shift community radio show, where, as Green writes, or perhaps screams into the void: “THE PAST IS JUST A THIN CREASE NOW” (17). Green’s poetry is both generous and generative, and their work on the page shows how poetry isn’t an ‘either/or’ when it comes to technology, their attention to craft proving “there’s no point flogging a dead attention!” (15).

Siân Vate, feels right

feels right opens with a prescient poem about Ukraine, Russia, and the US, establishing its geo-politics early with poems like ‘was edward snowden,’ and later ‘if stalin was poisoning lenin,’ and ‘trump crumbles’ (5; 15; 21). Suddenly ‘feels right’ is an obvious political double entendre (I should have gotten earlier) and this collection explores the nexus of political affect, incorporating real life actors. Vate’s in media res conversational style is no longer particularly experimental, again like O’Hara she ‘does this and that’ and assumes a mode of address not dissimilar to ‘personism,’ but for contemporary poets chattiness is now all over the internet (O’Hara, ‘Personism: A Manifesto’). More critically, Vate is chasing moments of aperçu (or intuitive insight) fuelled by what she knowingly terms her “boutique motivators / as in / poetry formalism / fucking & marx” (8).

While global in reach, the poems are also indubitably local in their taxonomies:

            / & he was an anti-fluoride &
anti-vax / anti-chemtrail / anti-gov guy
would he be in the anti-lockdown crowd
though? Kind of? except likely in byron
or tas or one of those spots near tilba

(8)

They are also part travelogue (poems referencing Greece, Narita airport, and, in the final poem ‘marina marina,’ Bali). If the poems are addressed to someone in particular it’s a certain kind of reader – her ideal reader is perhaps Gig Ryan (I imagine a Melbourne School to O’Hara’s New York School – there are trams, a Brunswick warehouse squat, ‘kennett’s ‘public / art’’ (20)). Vate dispenses with notes (other than quoting Ryan inside the poem ‘onus’ (14)) leaving the political and cultural references up to reader literacy. There’s something liberating about this unapologetic and uninterrupted flow, a thinking through/out loud in poetry that takes on a processual living politics. I don’t know that much about Lenin and Stalin, or Australian trade unionism, but I trust that Vate does and as a vicarious reader I enjoyed my stakes being lifted, as if I could partake in an ironic tête-à-tête about the Labor Party:

thanks for your patience. we
fought for the weekend / i’m going to like it

(22)

There’s so much life bristling in this collection. Indeed, in all four of the Series 4 collections notions of the expanded lyric are amplified. Vate perhaps squeezes the most into the chapbook parameters, though Gareth Morgan’s Dear Eileen (from Series 3, 2020) has also pushed the envelope here, with his series of epistolary prose poems to Eileen Myles. Across all series so far, Slow Loris is typified by a permissive editorial openness when it comes to form and recognition of the particular in-between niche the chapbook occupies (keeping in the spirit of real slow lorises, catapulted to fame in cute animal videos, while wielding a toxic bite).