Pam Brown



Justin Clemens Reviews Pam Brown and Ken Bolton

Brown and BoltonIf there is one true love in the history of Australian verse, it’s perhaps the love of Pam Brown and Ken Bolton. As you should expect, it’s not a normal kind of love at all – or maybe it’s the only normal love, depending on how you’re predisposed to taking the word or the thing (‘normal,’ I mean), and depending whether you think you can tell the difference between the two (‘word’ and ‘thing,’ I mean).

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Two Poems For ‘M’

close to mononia espinacas con garbanzos, a rich pepper. orders have been scrawled in chalk to form a form, yes, it is El Rinconcillo, the oldest tapas dishes, and 30.03 kilometres from Mononia, plates designed to be shared. so I …

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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.

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Shimmy

Short on shimmy they took to the disco with a resounding whomp of white & solid silver waves of wire; a platform to berate from, a wag the dog diorama; wearing only your shadow & shouting to the stomping throng …

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Blue or White

cento for Kate Fagan the world was a little darker before it was blue brilliant as nowhere special to go you could try double blinds machines parody all future empires say goodbye to the supermarket. unbearable authority makes me dizzy …

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(untitled)

in two hundred and fifty thousand years my sludge of waste might lose its poison but nothing’s set in stone except the joy and anguish of being here with one week to practice what we believe but can we sleep …

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The Lee Marvin Readings: An Evening with Edmund Gwenn

The Lee Marvin Readings has run, off and on, since the 1990s. Its venue has changed a number of times – from Adelaide nightclubs like Supermild, to the Iris Cinema, to the charmingly Zurich-1917, bo-ho De La Catessan and the more robustly hard-drinking and confrontational Dark Horsey bookshop at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, where it now takes place. The sessions have been organised, run, staffed and emceed by poet and art critic Ken Bolton.

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What’s the frequency, Kenneth?

a revhead full of vodka slushies, fading bling, the schlock of the old. just don’t hand over the car keys. sampling a fizz of schweppervescence I think of us, you and me, our lifetime lack of fancy salaries. on a …

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More than a feuilleton

the experienced world hasn’t been the world itself for a long time now & now we want to see the world as we want it to be * who’s speaking, saying this about the ‘world’? what ‘world’? * a cute …

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Pam Brown’s Sydney Poetry in the 70s: In Conversation with Corey Wakeling

Trish Salah“Pam Brown is not only one of Australia’s most prolific and important poets writing today, but also one of our richest archives on the history of late twentieth century Australian poetry. Since this is Cordite’s Sydney issue, I thought an interview with her might evince a valuably multifarious image of, perhaps, Australia’s most speedily shifting poetic landscape.”

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Worldless

where’s my donkey : thursday evening catch the train, seagulls circling Central Station catch a bus pick up a paint chart, at the gallery – Korea and Kinglake photography exhibitions (different) a very thin man in Oxford Street in red …

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Liam Ferney reviews Pam Brown and Adam Aitken

True Thoughts by Pam Brown

Salt Publishing, 2008

Eighth Habitation by Adam Aitken

Giaramondo, 2009

Poetry doesn't pay the bills but it does have benefits; claiming your internet and a trip to Melbourne back on tax, for instance. Or the overseas fellowships distributing poets across the globe like water from a sprinkler, as is the case with the authors of the titles under review. Part of Pam Brown's latest collection, True Thoughts, was written in Rome under the auspices of a BR Whiting Fellowship while Adam Aitken's fourth collection, Eighth Habitation, was penned in Cambodia and other parts of Asia with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts.

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