Louis Armand reviews Pam Brown’s Guess the Experience
Including analysis of Ken Bolton, J.S. Harry & Gig Ryan originally for Overland Magazine
(this version revised for Pete Spence's magazine 2026)
ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?
Pam Brown’s poetry has been described as both conversational & deeply layered, its historical consciousness seemingly belied by a fragmentary, diaristic style. An easy comparison might be drawn with the work of her long-time friend Ken Bolton, which often achieves a sense of over-arching unity of vision expressed in monologue form. Consider the winding derives of Bolton’s “Adornments” (Coastlines 10 [2025]):
As Bolton says, “Maybe these are ‘comic turns,’” bridging, for example, the seemingly austere distances that might eventually get us from Adorno to the intellectual ornamentalism of John Tranter (“Tranter might have worn // many masks in his writing... Finally, I’m beginning to feel more and more, as I suppose I expected to, that I’ve been / unfair to Tranter and blind / to his achievements” – which is a fascinating piece of psychogeography that could serve as well as anything else as a backdrop to the situation of contemporary poetry in Australia in general, & Pam Brown’s in particular.
Bolton’s work can appear exhaustive — long prose-like stanzas — where Brown’s seems to flicker down the page like dawn through the mangroves on the drive to Cronulla. This misconception is quickly rectified in the opening poem of Guess the Experience (2025), entitled “It’s a problem,” a 15-page ghosting of Bolton’s poetico-autobiographical mode, which contains lines like,
Brown often dismantles illusions of cultural authority via the mundane & the contingent. There’s a reluctant lyricism, often undercut by bathos or irony. In Text Thing (2002), published by Bolton’s Little Esther Books, Brown writes,
While in “Day and Night, Your Poems,” dedicated to Bolton (Authentic Local, 2010), Brown jokingly avers in inverted Adornoesque,
Like her enigmatic forebear, J.S. Harry (generationally speaking), Brown is suspicious of “dominant narratives” & her style constantly draws attention to the constructed nature of perception & language, without being trenchant or obvious about it. In “Antipodean Default Mode” (in the same collection), this enlarges into a general satirico-political-poetics:
For her part, Harry, perhaps unfortunately, has come to be best known for her Peter Henry Lepus poems — featuring a philosophical rabbit, possibly a nod to Arthur Boyd, possibly to Monty Python. Her work is often considered a strange if brilliant fusion of fable, wit & moral seriousness. She employs apparent whimsy to confront global politics, ethics, war & human destructiveness. Her playful surfaces conceal sharp political edges. Language is questioned, refracted through the poet’s gaze & “restored” to its alien, uncanny animality. In this she shares something in common with Brown, yet to my mind it’s Harry’s capacity to abruptly shift registers, from the meditative & reflective to the jarringly vulgar, that communicates most directly w/ Brown’s mode of poetic incision (language being “shit on schist rock’s mineral aeons” [“It’s a problem”]).
This is a conclusion unlikely to be drawn from Harry’s posthumous New & Selected Poems (ed. Nicolette Stasko, 2021), which omits some of her best work. One example is “Poodle Diplomacy,” originally published in 1983 & recently reprinted in Overland 257 (2024):
While Harry (born 1939) was not one of the three women permitted to grace the pages of Hall & Shapcott’s supposedly groundbreaking New Impulses in Australian Poetry (1968), she is represented in most recent major anthologies, though none succeeds in capturing those qualities of her work mentioned above with the exception of The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, eds Susan Hampton & Kate Llewellyn (1986) & John Tranter & Philip Mead’s Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991), both of which reprint Harry’s 1986 piece “The Poem Films Itself” (likewise absent from the New & Selected):
Pam Brown’s opening contribution to the same Hampton-Llewellyn anthology, “One for Patti Smith,” begins:
There’s a potent synergy here, which recurs, by a kind of atavistic progression, in Brown’s poem-within-a-poem, “I remember dexedrine,” included in the later Tranter-Mead volume –
Brown’s, like Harry’s, is an ironic, destabilising intelligence that interrogates language & (gendered) power through strategies that are often oblique to the mainstream of Australian poetry:
Far from being the measure of some kind of elitism, these strategies bespeak the “authentic local” temper of the guerilla fighter — in Brown’s case, predominantly urban, in Harry’s, increasingly rural, or somewhere on the cusp. In each, the lyric, as embodied cadence, is as far from literary affectation as the physical movement of a language can be. There is no either/or, no binary into which the writing resolves itself, by way of a too-easy hedge, between “poetics” & a self-righteous mode of “social commentary.” Brown, in Guess the Experience:
Narrow separations of an overtly “political” kind (the competing jingoisms of the righteously indignant & the indignantly righteous) belong to a callow Platonic mimeticism, which (for example, in “The Poem Film’s Itself”) Harry unapologetically ridicules. For neither writer is there such a thing as a permitted poetry (as Plato ordains in the Republic). In order to be what it is, poetry has to cross the line & keep on crossing it. In this, both writers occupy common ground with Gig Ryan, a generation (if measured in decades chronologically) further removed, whose poetry is frequently defined by critics as overtly feminist & combative in tone (uncouth, as any poetry worth its salt is). Ryan shares with Harry & Brown a drive to dismantle the smooth surfaces of official (& officiously “poetic”) discourse — the kind of smoothness that has increasingly characterised the kinds of editorial decisions made about framing their work. Ryan uses fractured syntax, jagged enjambment & disjunctive vocab to deny the solace of societal contradictions redeemed by poetic sublimation. Consider “In the Purple Bar,” the first of Ryan’s six pieces in the Tranter-Mead anthology:
There is, in fact, a profound anti-dialectic at work here. Gender & other mechanisms of alienation (the implied culture industry no less than any other: “He’s playing Billie Holiday / unshaven”) never resolve into the poignancy of institutional power structures critiqued in verse. Ryan (“Ode to My Car):
Neither Harry, nor Brown, nor Ryan offer any type of substitute “clarification” — alternative poetic worlds, escape routes, emotionally-purging indignation, or what-have-you. Rather, they pressurise these structures in the language in which they occur, the language through which power imagines & articulates itself, & in which consolation abides. They each advance a poetics within this same language — to drive over the bones of any stable rhetorical formulation that may be said to belong to it — in order, not merely to expose or oppose, but to exacerbate the false comfort of surface meanings. This might sound a little too theoretically clever, but it’s really about taking socalled “everyday” speech, the “unpretentious” vernacular of common sense, of populist media (with all its hidden ideological baggage), & thrusting it back down the poor-mouth of Antipodean “poetry.” As if to say, before anything else, in order to know what it is, the language, this language, in its “base common denominator,” has to become foreign to itself. To grasp the basics as if from scratch, learning to re-see what’s so familiar it’s turned into a parlour trick that PR execs & politicians & every other stripe of con-artist uses against precisely those who think they’ve got it all down pat. This is how Guess the Experience concludes:
As if to say, in order to come to itself at all — in order to be what it “is” (& not some parodic confection of meaning) — poetry, that proverbial foreigner, can never afford to be “the same person twice.”
The weirdest pale reflection of it, ‘the Bourgeois world,’
kept alive in
me, in others
(not ‘of’ the bourgeois class)—
in imaginings informed by literature, study—attaining the kinds of education
Adorno would not regard as education—uncouth, ‘piecemeal-sophisticated,’
piecemeal-dumb, in-
articulate. But
sorry for themselves?
Who’s not? One is always of necessity ‘entangled.’ “Is man
not naturally
good?”—a woman asks.
“No, ma’am,” Johnson replies.
“No more than a wolf!” “It gets worse!” I hear Margaret Dumont
her voice aquaver, fan busy at her neck and face.
“For the intellectual
inviolable isolation
is now the only way
of showing some measure of solidarity.” The gulf between Adorno & me
won’t be bridged: the embarrassment of our different words & thoughts. Impossible!
He can usually see
some double bind.
One imagines him, Adorno,
appalled—his dismay at my reading him—or, as easily, the despair
of all past ages at being read—the permanent rumble of rolling in
graves—protesting, as somebody said,
“the enormous condescension
of posterity”. Fame converted
to quaintness, error. Live long enough & you’ll taste it. One sees,
standing here on the shoulders, how clean this giant’s ears are,
how bad the dandruff.
Shampoos have changed,
mightily.
in here words stuck
in a yawn
between misquotes
poetry’s geographies become
coaching children in sport
someone else gets
sex in the bible
the status quo is the catastrophe
you wanted to be
part of the big picture
but they demoted you
to car pooling
this is the same
project isn’t it?
you just get
older on the job (“The ing thing”)
‘I don’t have a Cruel Theory
in my body’
has become an in-joke between me and myself
they were living in Australia
two heads were better than one
innocently entering
malcolm fraser’s
temporary garden
through the back
wrought-iron
security gate
that is opened
to let in
to ‘his’ lodge
an immaculately-groomed
shampoo-scented
visiting rolls-royce car,
the
small
white
french
(republican’s)
poodle
curtsies deep
to the (australian)
(royalist’s)
ground
it is peeing upon
Down the slimy rope into the impossible!
[...]
The poem as a historical drama or epic
[...]
will be filmed in prose our new technique
one of my friends lost her mind in nineteenth
century novels. i tried to have her take a cure.
i offered your books. i said here are wild dog hotel
poems. cocaine and cooked dog. i said. wild street.
totally present words. here take them they’re for
you. read them now please.
a scrap of paper
where i have written
‘the blank bullet
in the firing squad
is one image
i am sick of’
i tear it up
– & re-echoes in a kind of note-to-self in “Windows wound down” (Home by Dark [2013]):
P
i can’t bring myself to write
what’s in my head
i am splitting up north i guess
i love you
B
a fortnight’s lassitude and more to come
a man who peels his peeled broad beans (“Beyond the Right Occasion,” Text Thing)
that night
we shouted our rendition
of yoko ono
then we collaborated
on deadpanning
later
a car drove through
the front garden (“A love supreme”)
She spreads her pale legs
out across the table
and the beer
while he, the last car accident
red and tight across his eyes,
sucks her off, ungracefully.
But is she happy?
At least the mechanics are honest.
My poor car, baby, you should be in England,
not here, withering. Though in the sun you can still,
not quite shine, but glow from within like a higher state.
should you see less of yourself
how?
this is ipseity in the second person
you carry the machines in your backpack
& you do know
that it’s no use replicating your life
it’s already artificial
never the same person twice
a pale imitation
your former —
Louis Armand is the author of The Combinations.
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