Louis Armand



Conspiracy Theory is Contemporary Genre Literature

1. the task isn’t to tell the truth / but to induce in the reader / the belief that they’ve discovered it 2. only the poet finds Abyssiania inside the toe of their shoe 3. there are / worlds / …

Posted in 97 & 98: PROPAGANDA | Tagged

A House for Hanne Darboven

I’m not. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. Describing. And. Sundial. Three nine seven one five. Drei neun sieben nul funf. And. No. She spent her childhood in Hamburg. She spent her. Five zero zero zero one. Plus. Funf nul …

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

Truck & Trailer Approaching a City

(Jeffrey Smart, 1973) Europe in a thousand container terminals – the sat-nav recalibrates, the one language. Tollgate, tunnel, interchange. Who knows which roads get switched in the confusion. This welfare city or that doppelganger on the other side – this …

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Review Short: Louis Armand’s East Broadway Rundown and The Rube Goldberg Variations

Louis Armand’s poetry is unbending in its loyalty to the aesthetic and moral responsibilities of the avant-garde. In these new chapbooks, both published by Vlak Records, Armand mines culture for its buried messages, showing how fraught with uncertain track is any search for truth and authenticity in a world made knowable by language.

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Unitary Pleasures: Masturbating in Space

The day Apollo traded his pipe for an appearance on the Eurovision Song Contest: “Living on Borrowed Time.” Absolutism isn’t the solitary pursuit it once seemed. Out of hours, display receipt. There’re other words for con- tainment, she said, but …

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

Unsanitary, or: The Candy-Coloured Clown

Solo for Dennis Hopper Light everlasting! Jacked-up on a century’s backwash, knee-deep in it. The Cambodia of their dreams lay on a dirty mattress, amputated at the hips. A whole nation could bury its heartbreaks there & never know they …

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

COLLABORATION Editorial

From the beginning, ‘collaboration’ was raised as an interrogation, not an answer: What is poetic collaboration? And does collaboration (whatever it is) make a difference?

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Brunswick Street Nocturne

(for Bill Moussoulis) Gamblers and parrots in polyvinyl acetate. Heads on blocks. The film runs backwards from the dénouement, a profile en face like a filled-in Rorschach blot coming closer. The street’s all hard encroachments, things ricochet, blur, united in …

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Cassidy on with Feature Reviews and Future Themes

The bad news first … I am sorry to see the departure of Lisa Gorton as Cordite’s Feature Reviews Editor. Over the past 18 months, her astute eye, impeccable judgement and gracious style has produced – and leaves us with – a superb legacy of robust and engaging feature reviews. Gorton’s work is testament to what can happen with excellent writing from reviewers and an engaged editorial acumen.

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X Marks the Parataxis: Louis Armand, John Kinsella and Jessica L Wilkinson

Displacement is apparent both geographically and textually in Letters from Ausland by Louis Armand, The Vision of Error by John Kinsella (subtitled, ‘A Sextet of Activist Poems’) and marionette by jessica l. wilkinson (written here all in lower-case and subtitled, ‘a biography of miss marion davies’). All three poets are or have been editors of literary magazines: Armand edits VLAK, out of Prague; Kinsella, SALT; and Wilkinson, Rabbit (why does this name always remind me of Wittgenstein’s drawing of a rabbit that can also be perceived as a duck?) Armand and Kinsella have also collaborated on a number of books.

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John Hawke Reviews The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey: Culture After the Avant-Garde

The dream of a compact between revolutionary politics and a poetics of radical experimentation has haunted the avant-garde since its inception in the wake of the failed European uprisings of 1848. Rimbaud’s activation by the events of the Paris Commune, and Mallarmé’s sympathies for the Bakuninite anarchists of his day, signal an alignment between Modernist aesthetics and extremist politics (of both Left and Right) that is central to debates within twentieth century literature. The politics of the Cubo-Futurist avant guerre movements were notoriously unstable, informed by a mélange of Nietzschean and Sorelian violence, an apotheosis achieved in the cataclysmic events of the Great War.

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Submission to Cordite 47: COLLABORATION Open!

THIS IS NOW CLOSED. Cordite 48.0: CONSTRAINT is accepting submissions. Poetry for Cordite 47: COLLABORATION is guest-edited by Helen Lambert (Moscow) and Louis Armand (Prague). What kind of poems are we looking for?: Two (or more) people working together to …

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Notes from New York, New York

New York Diary, 6 November 2013 The day begins at the Hollywood Diner on West 16th and Sixth. I used to keep office hours at Joe Junior’s down at 12th but they closed it two years ago and shifted it, …

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged

Monument

1. Play the fluted column. Treasury of the consciousness of Man. Ring the emperors’ bells. The disappearing hat-trick. Replace chipped crockery. One copy among others. Animal furnishings. Will make nature obsolete? And so they cluster. Picture, fresco, miniature and stained-glass. …

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged ,

Wandering through the Universal Archive

One of the sequences produced by the collaborative entity, A Constructed World, renders the phrases ‘No need to be great’ and ‘Stay in Groups’ in a range of media – silk-stitch, screen print, photography and painting. One of the painted versions of the image shows a naked woman covered in yellow post-it notes overseen by a hulking, shadowy male. These figures represent the artists Jacqueline Riva and Geoff Lowe. The image appears again in the form of a photograph and the installation was staged in various places around the world – as if the only way to get the message across would be to subject it to constant repetition in as many different formats as possible. Indeed, a number of the collective’s performances and installations attest to the impossibility of communication – even as these take the form of images that can’t fail to deliver. Avant Spectacle A Micro Medicine Show, 2011, features skeleton-costumed performers inexpertly singing and playing instruments while six knee-high wooden letters – S, P, E, E, C and H – burn like small condemned buildings at front of stage.

Posted in CHAPBOOKS | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Juvenilia

Standing in line with haircut to join the Air Corps circa 1989 – & failing that, a George St boarding house (firetrap w/ kindling for stairs), shoesole counter-dinner, chips, tomato sauce. Squadron Leader says lost cause, gulping schooners & ducksoup …

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Ryan Scott Reviews Louis Armand

To say Louis Armand is a thoughtful poet is both obvious and an understatement. His reach extends beyond the expression of an idea to capture the sensation of the thought itself. He gives thought its heft, urgency and gravity and thus separates himself from being a mere poet of ideas. In his latest collection, Letters from Ausland, he finds that elusive ground between intellect and artistry.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged

Ryan Scott Reviews The Return of Král Majáles

This book positively brims. With words, with pictures, with experiments and experiences. At eight hundred pages plus, it is as a definitive testament to Prague’s so-called International Literary Renaissance. Apart from the prose and poetry, there are photos of those involved and an extensive bibliography of journals, zines and newspapers which have been published in Prague over the last two decades.

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John Kinsella’s Poetics of Distraction

Like Rauschenberg’s Dante drawings, John Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys through a Regional Geography has firstly had to address the question of its status with regard to “the allegorical requirement of a master text.”

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged ,

1. sleepless thirty days:

there was a fork sticking out of my orange wires and random messaging the language of television and the synaptic schizophrenic snufflings of streetlights where crows in bad taste laugh at death and electric eels writhe in delight But overlapping, …

Posted in 38: POST-EPIC | Tagged

Realism. Four Preludes

1. sleepless thirty days:

Posted in 37: EPIC | Tagged

Louis Armand Live at the Globe

[audio:http://cordite.org.au/audio/Louis_Armand_Prague.mp3] Louis Armand live at the Globe Bookstore (15:29) Prague, 15 April 2009

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Stephan Delbos: The Prague Micro Festival Poetry Series

prague_festival_poster1In our latest feature, Stephan Delbos recalls some highlights from the inaugural Prague Micro Festival Poetry Series, held in Prague and Brno between 14-18 April 2009. To accompany the words and images, Cordite presents five live recordings of readings by Australian poets Jill Jones, Philip Hammial, Michael Farrell, Pam Brown and Louis Armand at the Globe Bookstore on 15 April 2009.

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Michael Aiken Reviews Louis Armand

The title of this book is an early manifestation of its endless intertextual referencing, as well as one example of the author's restrained penchant for relatively silly puns. It is also an understatement of the viciousness of some of this poetry.

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