Knocks by Emily Stewart
Launch talk at Frontyard, Marrickville Sydney,
Sydney 14th August 2016
I met Emily a year ago at a lounge room reading
called 'cell' that Elena Gomez hosted. Emily gave me a copy of her chapbook LIKE published
by Marty Hiatt's bulky news press in Melbourne. This is the scale I've loved
all my poetry life - lounge room readings, chapbooks, generous book giftings
and it's great that Emily's poems have been brought out via a quietish
no-big-fanfare competition (in memory of Noel Rowe) at Vagabond Press - a
genuinely independent small press. Meaning that Vagabond doesn't ask for money
from institutions, government or private, to publish books. Much praise goes to
Michael Brennan, Jane Gibian and Kay Orchison at Vagabond Press.
The cover art for Emily's book by Liang Luscombe
quotes Linda Marrinon's famous early 1980s abject post-punk anti-aesthetic
painting "SORRY!". In the thirty or so years since the initial
artworld-shock-effect of that deliberately faux-naive picture everything has
become super-corporatised and 'marketable' and these days the painting
functions as an acceptable kind of cool apology offering comfort to
no-longer-shockable gallery visitors. Emily's poems carry something of the
initial disruptive intention of Linda Marrinon's statement as a kind of
continuum of subversion.
Jumbled popular culture,
immediate and anxious in its self-consciousness of certain decay, and highly-mediated imagery fills up 'our'
internetted lives. Contemporary poems seem compelled to constitute various
personal conditions and reactions as 'we' push to realise 'our' distinctive
individuations in an often inattentive, impulsive, demanding
and exhausting quest for 'newness'. Without inflating the term's retro
connotations Michael Farrell says Australian poetry has a 'new wave' and that
Emily's poems are part of it. He says 'the generation you didn't know you were
disappointed in not arriving has arrived'. That's a very good middle-aged
perspective on it. A long view might be that recent imagist ozpo is paying its
dues to the old Anglo-American modernist guys with an added pinch of French
symbolism, a dash of James Joyce & Gertrude Stein, a teaspoonful of the
Beats, a squeeze of the Johns - maybe
Yau maybe Ashbery, a ladle of Gig Ryan (grand mistress of metaphysical
metonymic artistry), all garnished with feminist influence like, say, the
gurlesque. I'll explain - though many of you are probably already familiar with
the term -
Over a decade ago, U.S. poet Arielle Greenberg developed an aesthetic
theory that she called the "Gurlesque". That's
'gurl' with a 'u' - a mild mimicry of burlesque. The term describes
women poets raised during the feminist years of the 1960s, 70s and into the 80s,
who now, although they're from different backgrounds, share a commonality in
their writing. Poetry that combines "the serious and the frilly" and
that has "a particular way of writing through and about gender".
Greenberg says "In Gurlesque poems, the words luxuriate: they roll around
in the sensual while avoiding the sharpness of overt messages, preferring the
curve of sly mockery to theory or revelation. Gurlesque poems are thoroughly
enmeshed in the visceral experiences of gender; these poems are non-linear but
highly conversational, lush and campy, full of pop culture detritus, and
ultimately very powerful".
Recent ozpo seems to be a
considered continuum rather than a brash arrival which is why, apparently, we
didn't know we were disappointed. Emily's poems are a definite and special
component of an enlivened continuum.
I read recently that Paul
Valéry said something like 'the purpose of poetry is to recreate the poetic
spirit in the reader' - a kind of transaction occurs - poetry makes poets - and
when that occurs the poems can be called 'generous' - for me Emily's poems have
that effect. Or what, to make yet another quote, Chris Kraus says - I am 'struck by the thrill of transmission'.
So - Knocks - about, back, on the
door, on wood, school of hard ? There is
no title poem - it's up to you. And meaning can be as various as the poems.
I won't go through an interpretation
of each of the poems (you'll be pleased to know) but I will single out the
tonesetter - the first poem presents the familiar and exasperating dilemma of
how to live in this world that we've all had a hand in so-entirely fucking-up.
'My Place in the Anthropocene' is set in the recent past, it's dated '2014',
but like a flashback from the future it's a report and a lament that navigates
the troubles or anxiety around a destiny of failure without seeking solution -
'The capital's new arboretum/made us see peril mortality-wise/so we sopped up
legalese via/television ...' and 'Recapping further/we were told to
'thank Edward Snowden'/and embraced another Wiccan craze/while Siberia began to
turn into 'Swiss/cheese' not because of magic but/climate change.'
Emily's poems are urgent but
the tenor isn't. Most of them are packed with cryptic imagery so they come into
focus gradually like Canberra does from the Federal Highway. They are 'a
thinking thing' - meaning, and this is also about poetry in general, that a
poem is something instrumental, a thing to think with and it's processual -
meaning that it is part transference part temporality - made of moments, spots
of time (from W. Wordsworth's 'The Prelude'), part of the scatty continuousness
of living.
What is a poet's
intuition - an integrative intelligence,
tracking, offroading, unfastening imagination. Does Emily track, pick,
pinpoint, isolate? Yes she does and she also erases. The erasures are fun,
plus, they 'make sense'. They're condensed renditions, discerning digests for smooth
reception. Lydia Davis's stories get down to 'I sit/I will/I will/I found/I go/
I have' or 'he lives/his car/he's not/his apartment' & VirginiaWoolf - 'the reflections one
might have let glom. it was impossible .'... Susan Sontag's Where the Stress Falls is
erased to the quick - 'Collect poems, produce superior poems/writing poetry is
writing prose but it is the margin/Poetry kills in the province of the
difficult' - well, that's saying something isn't it?
Emily mostly avoids aphorism
but it's great when it does appear 'A good honeymoon/is when the vacay lasts
longer than its transit.' ('Always the Bride')
There are a number of
holidays/ short trips/flights in this set of mobile poems. In the skinny poem
'Red-Eye' - 'inflight enter-/tainment guide/say 'chillax'' 'chillax./we're/not
going to the/moon./more hum/drum locale & vicious/civic primacies call/now
next aisle over/son argues with/father/attendant inter-/venes, bends/& tone
firm/confiscates/his gilded wings'. I like the way Emily lineates on enter
& inter with hyphens like enter dash tainment, inter dash venes. She cuts
into the quickening poem, draws your attention - what's coming next ... And
another poem that is the, quote, 'Now I need a holiday from my holiday' poem is
'The Fish Underwater Had Great Colour' - 'Did you see my photo of the horizon?'
to its summation 'But I missed my pets/ All of my postcards were mailed from
here.'
Emily uses a Steinian or
Brainardian or simply a repetition-device for her long poem 'Today' (which
appropriately quotes the grand dame de longpo - Rachel Blau duPlessis -
'multiple exposure to the bright debris').The word 'today' begins each line in
a series of sonnet length stanzas that run on at a good pace. The word 'today'
gives the experiment a slight breather. It's over eight pages long. It's a
great list poem - 'today an employee tries on Judith Butler's chapstick' -
'today a princess bites off her plait' - 'today a group of friends witness
bioluminescence' - 'today absenteeism is an ongoing problem' - 'today I give
away my copy of Barf Manifesto'
(actually, that's by Dodie Bellamy, I don't know why Emily would give it
away...)
Is 'blue' for poets - is it our word - is it our colour? Just like 'yellow' is there
poetic implication in simply saying the word? 'Blue'. Emily has a distinctive
take on this truism and on blue associated with
Sydney in particular, like, say, the clichéd association of exaggerated
"harbour" blue in, in my opinion ghastly, Brett Whiteley paintings.
In her poem 'Blue' Emily says 'Yet the
word blue I can't stand thinking about/though I can mouth - blue - on or off mainland.'
Emily Stewart's poems
provoke all kinds of connotations at the edges of meaning. They knock into each
other both by design and by chance. The blurb says "this is poetry that
moves" - it does - but I'll change that to "this poetry has
kinesis". These poems provide a
variety of stimulants for any time of day and any kind of mood. I wish Knocks every best possibility
and open reception on its coming trips through the ozpo zone and I wholeheartedly
commend this remarkable debut book of poems to you.
______________________________________________________
Notes:
arielle greenberg, "On the Gurlesque", a talk delivered at Small
Press Traffic, San Francisco, April 2003
paul valéry - fin de siècle French
poet & philosopher (1871- 1945)
'a thinking thing' - karen volkman via brian
blanchfield to here...
William Wordsworth Spots of time
There
are in our existence spots of time
That
with distinct pre-eminence retain
A
renovating virtue, whence . . . our minds
Are
nourished and invisibly repaired;
A
virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That
penetrates, enables us to mount,
When
high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
This
efficacious spirit chiefly lurks
Among
those passages of life that give
Profoundest
knowledge to what point, and how,
The
mind is lord and master–outward sense
The
obedient servant of her will. Such moments
Are
scattered everywhere, taking their date
From
our first childhood.
from The Prelude
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