Toby Fitch



Rock Bottom

after Rimbaud The first dawn of June was a dark aquarium belligerent submarines hurled themselves at my chest. The National Security Agency had trumpeted my grave and branded my ass with an ardency we couldn’t run off in the fields. …

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Review Short: Toby Fitch’s Rawshock

Sydney-based poet Toby Fitch’s first book-length collection, Rawshock, is a lively, artful and conceptually engaging excursion into the underworld of a profound poetic imagination; through the eponymous poem sequence, Fitch offers up the viscera and vital organs of the Orpheus myth for the delectation of contemporary readers. Everyday Static’ and ‘Oscillations’ – the two chapbook-length series that accompany this myth – present a sensuous and affable rendering of Fitch’s key theme; the relationship of the present to the poetry of the past.

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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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Alchemical

Your electric moon breast My black-trunked, gold-leaf slip Fall into flux Dissipate like white plumes You’re especially wild With a strange malaise for more Metallic aches, we moor Ourselves to a daisy, sit two abreast: Brush strokes of willed Grass …

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Toby Fitch Reviews Mathew Abbott

The organisational body Australian Poetry Ltd, formerly the Australian Poetry Centre, has reintroduced its ‘New Poets Series’ as a ‘new voices series’ via first books of poetry by Mathew Abbott and Eileen Chong., Both books are around 30-40 pages, and repeat the same production errors of the 2009 and 2010 series. This review focuses on the poetry of Mathew Abbott’s wild inaudible.

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The 15 Great Dog Pisses of Paris

(after Brett Whiteley)     1. Off in the distance, a twig, the syphilitic finger of Baudelaire pointing towards any number of vague symbols — his spleen? the soul? an invitation to Pigalle? It’s a mystery. 2. Trailing down in …

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