Let us for a moment attempt a new understanding of ‘internet poetry.’ It might be called a subgenre of a contemporary form of Australian poetry that blends spry lyricism with playful experimental techniques. The short poem that opens Holly Isemonger’s Greatest Hit is an Instagram caption: ‘Nice Pic of Me In the Sun’ in which “this is a hell poem,” Instagram is “for positivity!” and, of course, “this is the poem” (7; 7; 7). It immediately prepares us for what is to come: a series of playful poems that intersperses bouts of earnestness with a sharp critical eye for the conditions that create our resistance to that very earnestness. If this sounds complicated, it’s perhaps because its execution is too sophisticated to render into plain language. Besides, as the speaker asks in ‘Sweat’: “when did summer? why is this / person?” (8). In fact, that poem ends with these lines, which are somehow more moving than they appear to be:
I miss you my god, this bed I love it (9)
Then again, it’s not such a mystery that these lines are moving; it might be more accurate to say this is an effect Isemonger has created with the precision of her tonal shift.
Elsewhere, poems such as ‘The Drowned Woman vs. Ted Hughes’ remix and reconstruct found text from sources such as, in this case, Ted Hughes’s poem ‘The Drowned Woman,’ Walt Whitman, and Jørgen Leth’s film dialogue. Isemonger tests this fragment-citation approach in different ways. A distortion of the fragment citation can be found in ‘sad witch psalms ;(’ taking place on several pages that appear periodically in the collection, sporting a dense sans serif, sentinel, and tablet-like in the middle of each page, a sort of astrological poetics of self-aware sincerity, where “light leaks like pus through windows onto nudes,” gently echoing the earlier poem ‘Sweat,’ for whose speaker “this is a mode of leakage” (14; 8).
Similarly to Carmody, Isemonger reveals a suspicion of the Australian tendency towards romanticising nature. Remember Carmody’s colonial sheep? Here, “A pastoral morning stomps into the room” while “Verdant trees shake outside the window” in ‘The Varieties of Melancholy Experience,’ a poem that meditates on each day’s sadness, from “Sunday sadness is indignant” to “Thursday sadness appears a day early” and “Saturday sadness is a performance conducted for others” (15; 15; 15). It’s subtle but the critique sits below the surface. Settler poets can no longer unironically take up the pastoral without recognising the logic of its underlying violence (think of the loudness of ‘stomps’ in the aforementioned line), even when it’s a mere fleeting mention.
Despite these meditations on sadness, on recovery, on the tenderness in reaching to another person for love and comfort in dark times, Isemonger remains committed to her poems as a site for playfulness, too. In contrast to Carmody’s poem, the poems in Greatest Hit tease out the knife edge of sad and absurd or comic more thoroughly. There is a corporeal reality at the base of these poems, too, so that when, in ‘Genesis I: I–VIII,’ “The poem woke me up this morning. Rude,” the speaker soon wonders (43):
Where does my body end and a new day begin?’ I don’t want to rest or write anymore. You are. I want to play! With feeling! (43)
Many of the poems use remixing of language and phrases to form subsequent stanzas, often presented as paragraphs with few to no line breaks. In ‘My Life As an Artist,’ which in fact plays with shorter couplets, the line “I lost sleep last night – so tired my head is a potato” becomes “I lost my night working potatoes,” and “thick plants bud” but later “my depression is a much-thickened underground part bearing buds from which new plants arise” (27; 27; 27; 27). Isemonger’s use of the exclamation mark often feels careful and precise: “don’t harvest my labour!” immediately breaks us out of the poem’s emotional state into a sort of silly clarity (28). The ostranenie-like techniques employed, the interest in contemporary film (several poems respond to director Lars von Trier), the commitment to luxuriating in bedsheets and reaching for the nearby body; these reveal a commitment to the poetic form as a site for holding many things at once. The result is both delightful and moving, and the silliness I keep referring to often feels deliberate in the construction of a complex texture.
While this review did not set out to be a comparative reading of the two collections, it’s hard to unsee thematic parallels and divergences across them. One curious parallel is the hinge of the word ‘which’ that serves to pull in the excess for a line. For instance, in Shouldering Pine:
The wind speaks louder here. Which is to say, it sounds like the ocean. Which is to say wallaby grass touching wallaby grass. (33)
Compare this to ‘Sweat’s:
this is a mode of leakage by which I mean linkage, by which I mean: if we arrange our bodies like this (8)
Is this hinge of “which is to say”/“by which I mean” a move to encompass excess? A way of opening up the poem so it can contain more? In each case the phrase allows restatement, emphasis, but also reorientation: from the wind to wallaby grass, or from sweat to bodily arrangement. I’m not sure what else can be said apart from noticing and wondering about each instance. Perhaps that is the point.
Both Carmody and Isemonger are interested in exploring contemporary experiences of messy and unromantic feelings: anxiety, grief, depression, abjection, but in formally different ways. Where Carmody prisms these through a lens of an ‘I,’ road tripping, living, loving, in a loose but momentous long form, Isemonger takes up forms of play and experiments, leaning into the aesthetics of online speech and poetry games. Where Carmody’s work follows the cool mountain air of Melbourne and regional Victoria, Isemonger’s poems are splashy in the spray and sea foam of New South Wales’s South Coast. Where for Carmody, moving through place feels somewhat embedded in the work, Isemonger’s surf aesthetic geography is a minor presence, where handwriting “looks like writing for the beach,” and “if you have a wound salt water will aid the healing; / if you have a beach the tide will erase / the whole thing” (46; 46).
They are full of rude hipbones, ultradian rhythms, and extreme sensations that remind us of the fluidity of body and mind, and the futility of Cartesian dualism.
