linked deletions

Jacket2 commentaries 2012

2012-01-25T19:39:00.000-08:00

In early 2012 I was invited by J2's Jessica Lowenthal to revisit the original Jacket magazine over a few months by writing occasional commentaries for Jacket2. Click on the listed titles -

Two poets who write about art - Ken Bolton and Eileen Myles (13.01.2012)

New Russian Poets - Peter Golub's Young Post-Soviet Poets (26.01.2012)

2011-12-14T21:35:00.000-08:00

This page is under construction - there are many reviews to be added.

Meanwhile, you can read my review of New Poets 1 - Emma Rooksby, Scott-Patrick Mitchell and J.P. Quinton - edited by Tracy Ryan, Published by Fremantle Press, 2011.

2010-12-31T22:06:00.001-08:00

Rolling Column written for the Australian Book Review, August 2000
Rolling Column ABR August 2000

2010-12-18T16:25:00.000-08:00

Notes for talk on self-publishing at the 1982 Women & Arts Festival, Seymour Centre, Sydney

PB1982Women&ArtsFestivalSeymourCentre

2010-12-17T22:11:00.000-08:00

farewell favourite reflections & shadows of blackheath

2010-10-27T20:07:00.001-07:00


Eyes on potatoes

on the eighth day of April or
is it the ninth            after equinox
at any rate         everything’s moving
smoothly through these dailinesses,
I've got my eyes on the potatoes
and my finger, unfaltering, on
the saucepan     outside, the bucket men,
in traffic-blackened floral shirts,
fraying jeans, rubber thongs ,
persistently,       at every set of lights, 
set their coins towards a dreamy goal -
some piercings and a Pulsar

 _

downloading Laurie's poems,
pages flutter off the printer tray
and get mixed-up with bits of Bolton’s.
I walk out to look up at the vast sky
lit by a huge full moon      the night
is tranquil      everyone's indoors watching
crap tv        the muffled sounds of soaps 
lulled by wintry fossil fuels and 
natural gas,      sleepy dwellers lounge tonight, 
cooking aromas on this side of the building 
aren't nearly as good as Stella's 
smoky herring and pirozhki    on the opposite

  _

times are improving   and, for the moment, 
my blood pressure too,  from nothing to none,
my temperate cells unexcited       I recount
today’s small events     at the lunchtime reading 
I was not too disappointed when 
Jennifer Maiden introduced her poem 
about the Monaro        and it was not, 
as I'd hoped, about the car     only about
the region near Canberra     -  a lyrical
and ‘political’ pastoral -   remarkably placid,
my mood,     a little deflated,      maintained
equilibrium  -     I returned to work -

 _

coming, as the poet does, from Penrith -
poor rail service, and far away -   reliant
on a sleek and dreary motorway,
it’s entirely reasonable to imagine the poem
to be about a car       in fact, a beautiful,
streamlined idea           I mutter, mentally,
as I resume a ruinous posture on the lime-green
ergonomic chair       to collate & staple while
both librarians suffer fou rire     as does
the wheat-grass enthusiast     here to research,
so requiring their help            not mine,     I
who, when in the workplace, laugh privately

 _

in the city of my rebellions         a swayback iron bridge
spans the powerful river                Teneriffe sugar mill -
redundant,          like most first-world port city mills,
another conversion to flats.    cool river air streams through louvres,
& up-to-date young poets choose Europe’s leather coats -
in 30_ heat, clothes maketh the poet    -    I select a flimsy blouse, 
subfusc, to wear against the glare.     so, to wonder   -   why did
Gwen Harwood wear those wide, white, lace-trimmed 
reformation–style collars ?                             was she a quaker,
a shaker,   a musketeer                 were the collars a joke ?
like her most famous acrostic        from which,          in this,
Gwen’s city,       one poetry editor differs,       definitely …

  _

the bottle-os   (now called ‘recyclers’)  tinkle & thud their way
up the road            through smog-filtered sunlight, that seems,
this morning, tangible      as I recollect last night’s radio program
about, coincidentally, Gwen Harwood’s re-collected poetry  -
that inexpectantly, & against a babbling earnestness, I switched off, 
preferring to dawdle in contemplation of appreciable names -
like Gwen, short for Gwendolyn,         or Vera, a beautiful 
Brisbane kind of name,     or Amélie    as in Amélie Mauresmo,     
but should I continue          my poem will be construed
as “funny”       like my inclusion of some notes on a reading
by Jennifer Maiden   -  a complex, critical poet I admire  - 
in  this short sequence of fattening 12-line sonnets
          
   _


maybe it is          it is             yet, moving quietly backwards 
along Heliopolis Street’s green footpaths        seasonally littered
with luscious, gluey mangoes       past wide dark weatherboards
made mysterious by their distance           all set right back 
from the dusty gravel road         bottling tadpoles   in a downpour
from newly gouged & flowing roadside channels - walking that way
to Mitchelton primary school      my second, Gwen’s first    school.
and later, cycling those miles     past market gardens       grubby ibis
grazing on scraps on the sports oval       to humble Mitchelton high school
featuring now, I’ve heard, in an anthology of schooldays -    there recalled 
by Janette Hospital,   old humble-school-tie novelist.       did Gwen   or   
Janette, heat-struck by summer, vomit & pass out (like I did) in 40˚ shade?

   _

rushing towards fresh notebooks      ardent contributors 
all fired up      wanting to fill up     recalling, recollecting, 
reinterpreting, retelling       finally        ready for retailing -
thematic anthologies   -  like love like schooldays like travel
like war like dope like childhood –   leave them to Granta.
how fascinating is a writer’s life ? a poet’s life ? an Australian
poet’s life ?   brilliant memoirs of teeth clicking on biro shafts,
travelling the rocky road to digital fridge poems     horrendous
line-losing magazine experiences            profoundly lonesome
proofreading     under starlight, under halogen      too long alone,       
often concluding mid-process         in demented philosophising :            
what is swept out the door coming back through the window

2010-04-09T21:06:00.000-07:00

TRUE THOUGHTS — Pam Brown, Salt Publishing, 2008
Reviewed by Ken Bolton in Southerly magazine, March 2010.

Beginning is the hardest part—so I’ll let another critic make the initial hard yards. Here is Lyn McCredden on Pam Brown.— “There they are, those devastatingly onion-like little poems, with furled skins and layers, offering up biting street-scapes and cafes, half-remembered far-away places, distant friends … lost, ordinary cities; that deceptive, seemingly autobiographical voice cruising between wit, boredom, disillusion, nostalgia, paranoia, irony. Always irony.”

To this listing of characteristics one would add “humour” as a central element in Brown’s writing and thinking. Ever-present, I think, it hovers at the ready when it is not in fact driving the poem. (Having said that, I realise that most of these poems are driven, each within its own compass, by a succession of ‘engines of response’, not usually by any one humor or take. Probably none of these poems is jokey all the way through, or philosophical, critical or elegiac either.) But the latency in them, of humour, is a large part of the poems’ lightness and feeling of mutability.

Of McCredden’s list I would argue against “little”. McCredden’s description likely pertains to earlier of Brown’s books. Fifty-Fifty may have had more small poems, but not True Thoughts. That said, if one considers the Pam Brown back-list, there is plenty of continuity between one book and the next. Every now and then a distinct rupture or watershed occurs in Brown’s work and the style changes noticeably. This World, This Place, for example, might have been the final consolidation of Brown’s early 80s manner. With Fifty-Fifty, her next collection, the style became leaner and somehow tougher—the thinking, too, took a sharper, more incisive tack. The same manner has continued since, but with developments that might mean, now, change in the offing—might in fact be seen as change, as our perspective on her work is properly drawn.

For some time Brown’s poems have had their connective tissue, so to speak, much reduced: there is not any padding and the segue or bridging between parts is minimal or non-existent. We experience these poems, typically, as a sequence of mini vignettes, a succession of details, observations and nostrums. The connections between the segments that make up the poem seem, though, 'true' rather than tenuous, true though hard to name. The sequence is unforced and is true in each poem to a genuine pattern—of association, of experience, of thought—so that they are not hard to follow. Except possibly for the nervous reader who must ask always, How did we get here?

What usually is going on is a testing—of opinion, ideas-held, ideas-available (generally from the sharp end of Western modernist tradition), against the poem’s posited fragments of experience or really. These things—formulae, propositions—are shown to be on the money but somehow not adequate (shown not to provide plenitude at any rate), though they are often all we’ve got. What is found wanting is contemporary spin. Brown is a poet of consciousness, of ideology tested, examined, probed, and of change.

Tiny registers of the fall of civilization—hair-line fractures—are observed. The instances of false consciousness with which these cracks are bandaged-over are all observed—sometimes by seeming chance. The pillorying, the eviscerations in True Thoughts seem to be much less the point than in previous Brown volumes: they occur, but the poet now seems less interested in trumping falsehood than in noting how she feels in the light of this clarity, or in mapping how that feeling is revealed by the pattern the observations make. This is how the poem ‘Existence’ begins—


from here on in
if I follow
the girl in the
        ‘your tv
         hates you’
sweatshirt     as her motorcyclist
warms his darkly bubbling engine
ready to blur
into a field of speed,
it’s probably 
one less path 
to torpor 
         for me

        *

a dishwasher whirrs above me
a slab separates us   —    water restrictions
                               mean nothing
war
is
imminent,
Sydney goes sailing

        *

a thousand people
are surveyed—
how many vehicles on this freeway
that traverses the sprawl
around the swamp
we want to conserve  


        *

under a nasty sky,
rhetorical uncertainty 
dogs me

        *

the 326 
is never on time.
the bus interchange
          uses up
evening’s best hours

        *

all afternoon in a car
parked at the ferry wharf
gazing at sparkling waves,
not reading
not listening to the car radio,
just looking out           at the boats
and at the sea planes      setting off
and returning

        *

his email began
‘i thought of you
 while i was
 driving to Blockbuster
 last night’—
now, 
where is that?

A moment later the poem has—


the kitchen man
agrees
it’s all about oil

        *

a sandwich board
outside Rose Bay Afloat
advertises the sunset bar—
 ‘relaxed atmosphere
  and tunes’

Note the different worlds each small picture conjures: contemporary excitement and anomie (the girl on the motorbike, her T-shirt’s diagnosis) with its implied urban street and traffic; next the private prison of an apartment, of concrete, the neighbour’s noise (a washing machine whirr) penetrating. Note the move from private to global worry—about war and water—though entertained here by the individual, and then Sydney’s collective individual response: go sailing (giving, as well as sarcasm, the travel-poster image and space of the harbour)!

There follows some clouded Sydney sky, some time awaiting the 326 bus (and a complaint which conjures a series of such evenings—“the bus interchange / uses up / evening’s best hours”); then the strange and bleakly pretty urban landscape of an afternoon spent waiting in a car near the water, idly watching seaplanes. Next the mental space of memory: someone’s cited Blockbuster trip—not the poet’s, another’s. (This last, interestingly, has someone offering a sketched experience-and-memory—to the poet—just as her poem is doing to us: a slightly en abyme effect.)

These mini vignettes diminish and swell out again, morphing from private, constrained, to wide-horizon shots, from philosophical unease, to shorthand exchanges between people, interior to exterior to interior, private thought to casual exchange, the casual exchange of “the kitchen man/agrees/it’s all about oil”. The last quoted, like the first with the T-shirt, seems to me at home in any of Brown’s poems of the last decade: it’s all about oil, as does the Sunset Bar, its “relaxed atmosphere / and tunes” so inert, inept, and perfectly indicating music aimed at pleasing no one in particular: the promise of generic ease, generic food, generic ‘atmosphere’. Are the tunes relaxed, or are they just tunes?

Formally—that is, apart from the interest and intuitive ‘logic’ of this sequence of scenes or segments—what I notice is the alternation of space and perspective and kind, from one segment to the next, a kind of constriction and release as the poem moves from inner to outer and back again, from personal to public, shared to private, present to memory, and so on.

Fifty-Fifty, and Brown’s next collection, Text thing, encountered the world as ideologically coded. They did other things, got other work done, but a vicious deconstructive eye was at work in those books. It made them exhilarating and also rather testing, bracing. This consciousness, latent like the humour, is on hand in True Thoughts, too, fleshing out, colouring the images, but it is, here, only a part of the poet—available, along-for-the-ride—offering commentary but not holding the reins. A different attitude and its agenda are running these poems. A little more than hitherto the poems here follow a track of thought and do so to gauge feeling.

Accident, distraction, digression, are allowed intervene, are, in fact, the staging posts of the poems’ journeys or trajectories. This is what True Thoughts shares with immediately preceding phases in the poet’s work. (Brown is brilliant at this tracing of logic, thought, intuition, which rarely needs to be stated.) A part of her oeuvre’s shared manner is the pared, spare, unrhetorical language, cool, uninflated, yet dexterous where it needs to be, able to register change in attention.

Another poem has this scene early in its progress:—


in the block next to mine
            a gang of workmen
is hurling the walls
              and the tea break
              and the lunch
                        out the windows,
bricks and door frames
     plastic forks and curry packs,
               like storm debris,
hurtling
      like   broken twigs
                across the car park

It is a great image: so disturbingly callous is the action described, that it shocks. Some of the initial shock is in the grammar, which, for a moment, feels wrong: “a gang of workmen / is hurling the walls”. Contemporary usage would allow “are” in place of the more correct “is”. The plural “walls” sounds too much. Hurling a single wall would be a lot, hurling plural walls is a bigger task. “(A)nd the tea break / and the lunch” sounds horrible partly because it is a shift in categories, from building material to foodstuffs, perishables. It produces a kind of shudder in the reader. It is also a matter of the repeated "and"s, connectives onto which the line throws its weight. But it is ‘the shock of the new’, or of the contemporary: we see the plastic forks, the silvered and cardboard food trays, the rice; we see the pile of rubble of which they become part. (Everything must go! All that is solid melts into air. Etcetera.)

The poem—whose title is a quote attributed to Daniel Thomas, ‘Today there is much more heritage than there used to be’—is addressed to a friend and begins by noting that ‘we’ live in old housing built between the wars, houses that now are sought after (that are “sought-after charm emblems”, in the words of the poem). So “mine”, in the next line, “in the block next to mine”, has some of that meaning: the block next to mine, next to my block, sure. But also, it is the block next to my ‘charm-emblem’. This sets up the destruction that follows to register still more as shock, or affront.

The next two sections of the poem remember, and re-envisage, the addressed dedicatee (writer Sal Brereton)’s view of the harbour, from her rent-protected charm-emblem. It is the naval end of the harbour, though, and a ship is returning with some pomp from the Persian Gulf—so the current wars, and the tensions within the post-New World Order of the second Bush enter in.

The poem moves next—taking ‘night’ and ‘harbour view’ with it—to television and cooking, and home cooking in the light of tv’s own ideas of, and shows dealing in, high order ‘cuisine’. (Is your meal “cuisine”, or just adequate—if tasty—food?)

It is a poem about making do, reconciliation to the given (the ‘charity of the hard moments’?). So, there is this accommodation, of one’s own ideas of nice meals and the media’s more exulted, or ‘racy’ at least, ideas on same. Yes, one could do these things, if one paid more attention—but who can? is the poem’s attitude. If one had studied, like the nurse, say—and an image of Brereton’s ongoing health regime is offered. One could, if one had studied ”like I know the little nurse / who taps your vein / and caresses your scar / has studied”.

It is a token of understanding and empathy on the poet’s part, of intimacy even—though the image had begun, I expect, as an illustration, merely, of ‘study’. But not study of the tv-recommended accomplishments of life: essential, work-related study. Begun out of this need of the poem’s argument, the weight of the image of course becomes the personal, empathetic essaying of imagination: and while Brereton, it is imagined, is “stretching out / the hospital days”, Brown tells her that she herself is waxing the coloured tiles of her own bathroom floor—flooring that ‘resembles’ heritage, that is “as near as we’ll get” to heritage. (Pace Daniel Thomas.)

The poems in True Thoughts relate to each other—link and affiliate—in much the same way as the parts within Pam Brown’s poems do. True Thoughts is an emotionally cohesive book. Each poem notes, and critiques, takes its own pulse, works out how to live, how to cope—at any rate, how to respond. The answer seems, increasingly—perhaps as the poet has aged—to detach a little, to avoid commitment to failure, and to observe. There is a lot of lying down, small rests, boredom defeated—but also, to a degree, a withdrawal from the game, beyond maintaining solidarity with others’ humanity, and a choosing of causes. There are of course flashes of anger—and there is humour throughout, as I have said—but not so much the humour of joke-making but such humour as stems from the irony that perspective makes available. Brown can be ironic about humour, too, about the need for it: the reflex resort to it is observed as a tic, neither admirable nor not.

‘Peel me a zibibbo’ is a more relaxed poem and slightly more expansive in style (the language bears less pressure of meaning, is less interrogated). It begins with a, perhaps desultory, taking stock—and with images of weather (heat, moths, jacaranda petals “stuck / on the windscreen wipers”). It is another poem of segments. The end of the poem’s sequence are segments in which various (male) friends impinge upon Brown's consciousness. Demandingly? disruptively? distractingly? The first is simply quoted, unacknowledged—“awake & refreshed / tho with nothing on the page”—and without comment. Next “John T phones / this cloudy gloomy / early summer day / is ‘like the fifties’ he says. / every day? / miserable childhood? / photographic weather memory / a la recherche du temps inclément” (the poet wonders). Next Brown reports on reading about “the sweet potato farmers / of Osaka / living such long lives”—to be interrupted again:


when Kurt called in with his new book
                      Hyper Taiwan
        Taiwan   —   it’s  ‘sweet potato island’

hi Kurt,                        hi John T,
    hi Nick, Paddy,          hi Shakespeare,
                peel me a zibibbo
                               would you,
    one of you guys?

What a great ending, and shift of mood. “Peel me a grape, Beulah” is the riff invoked and alluded to. Amused by these guys, Brown smiles and addresses them, from her now relaxed frame of mind.

As I have said, the centre of the poems is an emotional stock-taking in the face of the judgements, bets, and bets hedged, that the poems make. In the light of bets made in the poet’s past, too. If it were the bets and judgements themselves the book would be harder and more cutting—as Brown’s poems have been in the past and for most of the last decade. This mode is still available to them, but is only one among the many modes or registers these poems adopt or pass through, part of their armory. Thinking is what the poems do—and hence the title—though it is what Pam Brown’s poems have consistently done. “Autobiographical” then? Yes, but only incidentally. There is data here that is probably autobiographical. We assume it is. But autobiography is not Brown’s business. This is true thought.

What more to say? The book looks beautiful, one of the nicest looking books of Australian poems around at the moment. Well done, to Salt, the publishers.

Carl Harrison-Ford launches True Thoughts
at Hat Hill Gallery, 20th September 2008

    I read this book on generous PDF printouts; Pam Brown for the visually impaired.

    I’d like to thank Pam for asking me to say something at the off-Broadway launch of True Thoughts. There will be a bigger launch in Sydney later in the year, doubtless with heavier hitters, but as someone who hasn’t had much to say or write about poetry for some time, not formally, I am delighted to make a few brief observations on why I enjoy this book so much. I’m delighted, and the book is delightful … though I suspect ‘delight’ is a word used more often these days to describe poetry that is more anodyne than Pam’s. But one of Pam’s great skills is the ability to be delightful and demanding at the same time. And roundabout and direct. I’m not always on her wavelength, aesthetically, but with most of Pam’s poetry I get static-free reception. More accurately, I feel great affinity for the way Pam negotiates the static of our everyday life, on the small scale and the big scale — and for this book the big scale events include a war — and finds the language to capture mood or an emotion … to assemble some ‘true thoughts’. I think this is different from what people say when they talk about a poem or a song capturing lightning in a bottle. She wants to capture something, but not in a bottle, just in the essence or on the wing. Sometimes it seems that what she captures is a mood shift, and the shift is more important for this reader — or as important — as the points between which the shift took place. This has some relationship with what some cap-T Theorists call ‘slippage’ [mention John Kinsella interview], but for me that association has negative implications — the Freudian slip (cliché!), the error (a slip-up), a falling-out with a cultural norm (too complex for an aside here), or worse still … the result of a lack of balance. But what I’ve enjoyed so much reading these poems over the last few days is how loose-limbed many of these poems are, making full use of the space available on the page, and the sure-footedness. These poems are nimble negotiations, precise and resonant.

    In ‘Amnesiac recoveries’, which I like as much as any poem in the collection, Pam notes that ‘shouting for trust’s / like demonstrating for peace’ but she prepares to demonstrate anyway, against war, though the poem is set before the Second Gulf War, then ends the poem with a rally not a demonstration: ‘we rally for peace / we play with the kids / the armada heads off for war’. It’s a sad ending, almost resigned but not quite, in a poem that’s as far from sad as it is from being triumphant. I like the poem for its capture, for the process of capture. It’s got recovery in the title — ‘Amnesiac recoveries’ — and a rally at the end. And of course a rally is a form of recapture: ask any stockbroker. I was going to say ‘ask you stockbroker’ but I doubt that many of us here this afternoon have one, want one or need one.

    I hope I’ve got this right — not the bit about the stockbroker but the bit about capture and the process of capture. Many of the poems are for me about the nature of thought and the process of thought as they are about the thought itself, or its content. [Am I repeating myself here? Largely. Hope I don’t again] At times the main concern seems to be the flickering lights of association that might attach to a word, then change as the word remains the same. Though like most mainstream editors, I am wary of authors putting too many words in quotes, Pam does so brilliantly and usually wittily. To give one example, in ‘Amnesiac recoveries’ when she writes ‘not what you remember, not like that, vague, shadowy, / even “dim”’, it seems to me that putting ‘dim’ in quotes helps capture a shift in associations relating to the word, even as it is spoken, mid-stream as it were … from dim as in distant to dim as in not so bright. The trouble with saying it like this is such skill, and it is everywhere through this book, loses its lightness and loses its ease when it is scrutinized. Sometimes when I try to talk about what I like in poetry these days I feel as if I am explaining a joke. Worse still, as if I am explaining a joke to someone who has already got it! This is to do a disservice to the quicksilver quality of Pam’s poetry, to the ease with which she can play with a perception — e.g., regret in ‘No action’ that she cannot return to Australia to join some fight against the Howard Government, and then write ‘but here I am / for half a year, / (only five months to go)’. The ‘only’ here is brilliant. The nuances are beautiful in a poem that is unambiguous, even about its ambiguities.

    But as well as these quicksilver strengths there are what I might perhaps call slowsilver ones as well. Take ‘Train train’ for instance, which is set on a train trip from the Upper Mountains to Sydney and chocka with detail that is as resonant as it is one-off — the noises, the silences, strangely self-conscious sound of suitcase wheels at Central, ‘the hillsides dotted with / green plastic-encased saplings’ seen ‘through the window / stained with the gels / of drowsy workers’, the four Italians who get on at Wentworth Falls and begin praying out loud (‘a woman leads, the others chorus / Santa Maria something something Dia’. The details are not Blue Mountains specific in any resonant way, though ‘Train train’ is a deeply resonant poem. And the ‘something something’ in the recollection of the chorus lends a wonderful, merely feathery touch of authenticity. [Cf ‘creative writing’ approach to ‘authenticity’, which would be mine in circs other than this] But a different trip would have led to different events, perceptions. A reader who had never been to Australia is not necessarily at any disadvantage. It probably helps to be able to associate the poem, via its title, with the song ‘Mystery Train’, but I wouldn’t want to stretch that too far either. Invoke the Junior Parker version and I might be seen to be confusing Pam with Ken Bolton; invoke The Band’s version and Laurie Duggan suddenly appears; Pam’s part of a cohort who know their rhythm ’n’ blues. But what this poem is more than anything else is a ‘mind at work’ poem, working as the mind must — surely — off information. And I say ‘surely’ in two sense of that word … as in ‘I hope so’ and as in Pam is, I repeat, sure footed though to the poems’ beautiful ending:

    if and if only
      if and only if
    that’s my track

The track can mean a number of things by now, all the way up to and including those associated with the idea as life as a journey. A good way to finish the book, as these lines do.

    Having isolated a poem or two I now wonder if I should have been more general, for there is a lot to say about the book’s range. The poems are political, they are domestic, they are about travel — ‘“true thoughts” from abroad’ and, in ‘In europe’, ‘“true thoughts” for abroad’, but meditative travel pieces rather than decorative. The lightness of touch is often downright unfair, and I’ll return to an instance. How can one hope to end a poem ‘“frenzal rhomb! / what kind if a name [for a band] is that?”, / just doesn’t work’? Well, it’s the end of a poem called ‘Death by droning’ that in its own way answers its final, apparently slight, question in advance. In the middle of the brief poem Pam notes ‘droning is not / my way’, ironically in a few lines that have a drone to them, says her way is ‘to make art / through spaces / without notes to myself’. For all her seriousness I can invoke one of the most overrated poems of the last century when I say of Pam, she’s not droning, waving.

   At which point, it’s with great pleasure I declare the book open. May it do well and bring pleasure to all who sail through it.

2010-02-27T15:12:00.001-08:00

Petersham Days

Laurie Duggan introduced me to John Forbes sometime in the early ‘70’s at the Forest Lodge Hotel, a happening place where everyone went to drink, score, shout, pose and, mostly, be political. Although this was years after James Dean had been a teen idol, John’s style was definitely Deanesque – he wore a tight white t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and had a packet of Camel Plain cigarettes tucked under one side…add blue jeans and a crew cut to this and the pose became James-Dean-joins-the-U.S.-Marines. ‘Aha, so this is the TEK toothbrush guy’ I thought, meaning the guy to whom Laurie dedicated one of his poems in 1972 -

Cheerio
    for John Forbes

I think continually of those who were truly great
in the supermarket    these canyons of
soap powder    holy frozen split peas
e.g. write a conceptual poem, imagine
the woman fingering keys of a cash register,
all day long   Instant Pudding.
Everyone’s in my new movie
a huge TEK toothbrush soars above the opera house
flies crawl across the T.V. tube
bridging the gap between illusion & reality like
the little cloud on the screen where Terry’s spit
narrowly missed the prime minister.

That big red neon toothbrush has disappeared but, luckily, not before Max Dupain had photographed it. You’d see it as you left the Harbour Bridge to enter the city - up in the sky above the entrance to the Cahill Expressway - a sign of the times, linked indelibly, for me, with Laurie and John.

Although I was reading his poems and we were on ‘how're-you-going’ terms, it was quite a few years later that I became socially friendly with John - in the days I call ‘The Petersham Days’.

The painter Ken Searle and Laurie Duggan both lived in a large house in Palace Street with its owners Jan Chambers & Greg Maguire. John lived in Albert Street, a street parallel to mine – both of us within short walking distance of Palace Street. Laurie, Ken and I did stints as the Gleebooks bookshop early morning cleaners as well as our usual jobs - Ken- painting pictures, Laurie studying Fine Arts and writing The Ash Range and myself teaching film, writing poetry and collaborating on performance pieces with the composer Elizabeth Drake & sound poet Amanda Stewart. John worked as a removalist and taught poetry part-time. Jan who was also an actor and a painter and her partner Greg were high school teachers. Greg had entered into a pact with his students at Leichhardt High – ‘I'll stop smoking if you all do’. Jan and Greg provided the hub for these days of beer & pool after work, and weekends of cricket, poetry, dope, painting, music ( Laurie's eclectic collection of LP records was stashed in milk crates under his bed), cooking (John’s famous and only dish – a good curry), lover-swapping and lots of parties. Poetry readings were sporadic events then, usually organised ourselves - until around 1986 when Harold Park Hotel’s ‘Writers in the Park’ readings started up. The rest of the cast of hundreds included the real Mark O’Connor - poet and scholar, Landon Watts - zen maniac, dip-ed student and painter, Carl Harrison-Ford – critic, ex-poet, editor and storeman and packer, Morgan Smith - tv scriptwriter, Nicky Ellis - artist and John's lover, John’s brother Mick - fiction writer, Chris Burns – ships chandler and poet, and others.

group photo here

One summer afternoon, walking home together into the inner west sun along a bleakly hot Salisbury Road, John and I discovered we had a military connection. John’s father had been a meteorologist working for a time at Butterworth Military Base in Malaysia. My father was a professional soldier in Victoria and Queensland. We’d both spent parts of our childhoods living on military bases.Because of this revelation of our shared experience of army camp life I think John began to take me seriously for the first time since I'd known him. He certainly took the military more seriously than I ever did. There was a kind of boy’s-own tone to his interest in weapons and planes that I found puerile. Though I assumed he was a pacifist underneath. I was anti militarism. This military machismo could perhaps explain the kind of boyo fan or cadet club which would turn up at readings if John was on - nice guys but...After John had read and come off-stage to get a drink they'd surround him like footy-fans in a hubbub ..’hooby hooby good one John -that was a great line John hooby hooby’ accompanied by affectionate shouldering. Together, they seemed like a bunch of schoolyard bullies. I used to think – ‘Come on fellas - it's poetry- - it's not the Bledisloe Cup’. But I think that kind of competitive spirit was endemic. In spite of their awareness of feminism and its valiant attempt to alter that world-view (sigh) it was still their world and, really, still is.

You had to pass John's poetry test to actually get any proper communication. For instance, he'd say to me about one of my books – ‘There's a couple of good ones in there Pam’. (Gee- thanks). I didn't really mind this as there were enough other poets, publishers, readers and friends who liked what I was doing. But, I knew, without any particular aspiration on my part, that I'd finally passed his test around 1994 with a book called This World. This Place. He rang me up to compliment me on it. John had published some of my stuff a decade earlier in Surfers Paradise magazine - I guess he must have picked ‘a couple of good ones’. But I think John had this kind of pressurised, competitive stance on all his contemporaries and in an awkward and sometimes fractious way he let other poets know.

                     #

John’s flat in Albert Street was very under-furnished. He and his good friend, the poet Gig Ryan, called in to my place on a day that I was rolling up a cheap rug I’d bought & actually didn’t like enough to use. John was living on a Literature Board grant and as he needed a rug and had some money, he offered to buy it from me. We agreed on $50 and he promised to pay me later.

Not long after this my book Selected Poems 1971-1982 was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award. The other nominees were Martin Johnston, Robert Gray and Kevin Hart. Les Murray was the poetry committee chair and as I considered him a weird alien I was incredibly surprised to be nominated – and, obviously, as the only woman. The announcement was made at an exceptionally rowdy dinner - Kevin Hart won the poetry prize. Two days later I received a letter and $50 from ‘Gerry Gleason’ the adviser to the NSW Premier -

Well, of course, I have to wonder - if I'd won some prize money would John have considered my rug as a gift to his home or not ? (Yeah, yeah - we know the answer)

John, as everyone who knew him knows, was hopeless with money. I'd often bump into John up at the 24-hour chemist at Enmore buying his not-so-cheap thrills. He also liked quality whisky and cigarettes, especially those imported unfiltered Camels - both pleasures became more expensive with every year’s government budget .But, in his way, John was quite materially generous - once I met up with him at an ATM in King Street, Newtown after he’d had to give up his job because he’d injured himself in a bicycle accident and his dole hadn’t arrived. I lent him $20 and we crossed King Street to a café for a coffee. He paid the bill with the $20!

Just lately, as I was walking past the University of Technology at Broadway I remembered that John had asked many poets, including myself, to talk to his students in the poetry class he was teaching part-time in the early ‘80’s. Later, one of the tenured senior lecturers in the faculty told me that everyone else was really pissed-off with John because he’d used their entire guest lecturing budget on the poetry course ! Beautifully spent !

(This piece was published in ‘Homage to John Forbes’ edited by Ken Bolton, Brandl & Schlesinger, 2002)

2010-02-27T14:45:00.001-08:00

Towards the ’70s

To be a teenage beatnik folkie was a difficult ambition in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, in nineteen sixty-five, with the police opposed to youth staying out late, (risking arrest for vagrancy after 11pm) plus, almost-tropical weather’s not conducive to beat fashion – duffel coats and blanket coats, corduroy skirts, black stockings. Our outfits had an airing for about one week in August. Generally though, heat-defeated, we had to aim for being hip rather than looking like we were.

Was Morris dancing hip ? Morris dancing on speed, our method, probably was.

I lived in a Swedish prefabricated house on Enoggera army base. My friendship with communists and other civilian peaceniks displeased my father, extremely. His battalion was training young soldiers, kids really, volunteers and conscripts, for the war against Vietnam.

I was opposed to the government call-up for troops to join the U.S. war against Vietnam and I was against war, entirely.

*

As it happened dad retired early from the army (the Vietnam war continued).
Perhaps it was also his attempt to retire from alcoholism. He went to work for the state roads department collecting soil samples and hiring gangs to build cattle-truck roads in outback Queensland. He bought a new house across town in a northern suburb called West Chermside.

So my final year at school took me through the city every morning and afternoon.
After school, I could stop for coffee at the Primitif cafe or browse the beats in the American Bookstore on Edward Street, although the French - Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus (an Algerian) – were the ones on my mind, at the time.

Walking up from the last tram stop at Chermside was despairing for me, at seventeen. After a short strip of small, less-than-thriving shops the houses thinned to paddocks, a tannery and a chest hospital that would remind me of my mother’s past illness and her potential fragility, and the TB tests, X-rays and shots we’d had as kids (although never at that hospital). I felt like a character in the Sartre trilogy, except that I wanted an escape. (I guess I faked existentialism).

*

Some time that year,1965, my first published poem (outside the annual school magazine) appeared in Hemisphere magazine - sharing the page space with Bruce Beaver.

*

For a brief period mum and dad separated. Six months ? A year ?
My brother and sister had already left home.
I finished my time at high school desultorily.

*

A year later, in trouble. In my first flat in "Chale Apartments" on the river right near the Storey Bridge, opposite Evans-Deakin shipyards, away from home with two drag queens and a suicidal pill popper who wrote poems, spoke Greek and sang Buffy Sainte-Marie songs. Nothing lasted long - I called the ambulance after her suicide attempt and knew I should go home.

*

Not much later (although rushing this sequence omits some further adventures-in-a-small-city traumas) I was evicted from a Milton flat I shared with Petal, a Sri Lankan law student, for noisy music – most of my friends were singers and musicians.

And as for my "career" - I had already been ditched from student nursing for waking a ward in midnight humidity by swimming with friends after end-of-year exams in the pool of a motel next to the hospital where I lived and worked.

I got a job in the Thatcher Library at Queensland University. Even though the librarian, Joy Guyatt, was a wonderful socialist and political activist who encouraged me to study librarianship, eventually, around two years later, I came to the youthful conclusion that it was a tedious profession for a beatnik, and by then, also a published poet. So I ditched my brief pursuit of a career as a librarian.

*

I moved to a weatherboard house with a big verandah, at Fig Tree Pocket near the sluggish river, with Evan, my med-student boyfriend, and a friend, a Scot called Norman, architectural draughtsman, big drinker, raconteur and poetry recitationist.

We held a housewarming party - a strobe light suspended in the eucalypts, speakers perched out on the verandah, a night graced by Harry Zetlin’s portable party, kings of Brisbane cool. I tried hashish for the first time, a dark green lump dropped onto the edge of an electric stove plate, the smoke inhaled through a Bic biro tube – spotting hash.

I already knew how amphetamines dissolved and the particles floated, descending the pale yellow liquid of a flagon of sauternes.

*

Not so sexual, Evan and I, not hot at any rate, he could be jealous if I seemed to be sexy elsewhere.

Like once, Evan was at his summer holiday job driving a Mr Whippy ice cream van, I went canoeing with Norman and somehow we capsized the canoe, and nearly drowned laughing, ciggies floating out of our pockets bobbing all around us out in the middle of a shark-infested bay between Bribie Island and Redcliffe.
We dripped homewards, still laughing, happy survivors.

Perhaps that humid Queensland day had not been good for Mr Whippy. Evan was in no mood for tales of happy exploits, nor for his girlfriend-enjoying-herself-with-a-housemate. It seemed so Archie-&-Jughead … but … no … it was much worse and the apparently serious domestic ritual of “where's-my-dinner?” was hours off, not even considered. So - Evan opened the fridge, grabbed the lamb chops and hurled them across the kitchen in a mini-rage … what a disaster … etcetera …

A short while after that, I kissed a lesbian one night behind the café where actors and others (people like us) regularly played late-night charades - Evan was much more angry about that and we broke up not long after.

*

My cue to leave.

*

I declared I was going to Melbourne, where I was born (or near enough - I was born in a small base hospital at Seymour just up the highway a bit north of Melbourne.) I had decided I should live in a garrett and become a poet in Melbourne.
Instead , I caught the interstate bus to Sydney.

*

I carried a vinyl suitcase and two vinyl records – Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced. This Bob Dylan record was the double album where he first went electric with the musicians who were to become The Band. I had been to Bob Dylan’s cross-over concert in Brisbane and was blown away, lost in rock.

I’d obtained Blonde on Blonde by swapping a dulcimer with Mike O’Rourke, a public servant and folksinger-songwriter who stuttered markedly unless he was singing. Mike taught me to play guitar – the first song I learned was a Dylan song - Farewell Angelina.

Here I was with two LP records, a suitcase full of clothes, a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the Faber Book of Twentieth Century Verse, a Moscow Foreign Languages Publishing House pocket-sized edition of Vladimir Mayakovsky:Selected Poetry in English, a beaten-up exercise book full of poems-in-progress and a job to go to at Prince Henry Hospital out on the bleak and weather-beaten cliffs alongside Long Bay Jail at Little Bay, Sydney.

*

Every few days pallets of loaves of sliced bread wrapped in plain pink greaseproof paper from the jail bakery were delivered to the kitchens for the hospital staff and patients. Prisoners in green uniforms maintained the hospital grounds.

A couple of months after arriving in Sydney I turned 21. Jude, a friend from Brisbane, gave me a birthday party at her Tintern Road terrace house and a bag of yellow dexedrine pills – 1969. G-roo-vy.

That was the year I became a vegetarian. I was chewing on a piece of overcooked steak in the hospital dining room when it was suddenly so clearly dead flesh – surprised, repulsed, I renounced meat eating.

1969 was a big year –I was “discovering” my sexuality as a bisexual with the wrong girl – a kind of prefect type. And then I met Nina.

Nina looked as though she’d stepped out of an Aubrey Beardsley drawing – all pale and angular - although she’d really stepped out of a family home at suburban Peakhurst. Nina lived in the nurses’ quarters too – we spent our off-duty hours together constructing a Dada Machine from found art objects like old telephones and wall clocks.

Pam Brown and Dada Machine, 1969.

*

Nina and I fell in love. And we knew we were each destined for a-life-of-art.

We rented a two-room ground floor flat, with a bathroom up a flight of stairs that we shared with an argumentative Maltese couple in a large converted terrace house at 88 Gordon Street Paddington near the Oxford Street entrance to Centennial Park . On weekends I tried to be a hippie at Jumping Sunday – Johnny Allen’s big weekly Happening in Centennial Park.

Marijuana and speed were the dietary supplements of choice for most young people at that time. I tried mescalin with a long-haired blonde Yippie in a grey U.S. confederate army coat. At night he used to paint grey metal playgrounds with bright colours (this was a new idea then - now, coloured swings and slippery slides are the norm).

And, of course, zillions of other things occurred in between these paragraphs, as things might in optimistic times.

Nina and I bought little red Suzuki A70 motorbikes and, for the New Year holiday, on these fragile locusts of machines, we rode all the way from Sydney, down six hundred kilometres of the Hume Highway, to Melbourne to welcome 1970.

Pam Brown and the A70 Suzuki. Paddington 1969.

To order books

2009-08-22T14:20:00.001-07:00

Keep It Quiet                           $9.95

This World. This Place          $14.95

50-50                                       $15.95

Text thing                               $23.00

Dear Deliria                             $21.95

Let's Get Lost                         $15.00

can be requested by email from Gleebooks
Phone: 61 2 9660 2333
Email: books@gleebooks.com.au

50-50 and Text thing
are also available from Dark Horsey Bookshop
Phone: 61 8 8211 7505
Email: eafbooks@eaf.asn.au

This World.This Place.
is also available directly from
ETT (Editions Tom Thompson)
Phone 61 2 9327 2435

Authentic Local
is available from Papertiger Media
True Thoughts
is available from Salt Publishing and Inbooks
Dear Deliria
is available from Salt Publishing and Inbooks
Let's Get Lost
is available directly from Pam Brown
eleven 747 poems
is available from Wild Honey Press
Drifting Topoi
is available from Vagabond Press

Cafe Sport and New & Selected Poems

Little Droppings

My lightweight intentions

Peel Me A Zibibbo

are as cheap as chips & are available
directly from the author

farout_library_software is available from Tinfish Press

(all prices are in Australian dollars)

Back to home page

2009-05-25T23:51:00.000-07:00

Funk descending
for Eileen Myles

celebrating
a wobbly
new world declaration,

I've ordered fireworks
& methode champenoise,

but
my soubrette's
been crossed out !

(the mini-series's set
in an insurance agency)

like grumpy
Jurgen Habermas,
I feel a funk
descending,

&
I miss whisky too,
Eileen.

on Ritalin,
banished by
Ma Po's tofu's
flatulence,
in the museum
I stand before
an activity station
& make a wish -
hexed by
an unexpected
power surge
we were all
brought up on
"I Love Lucy"
wherever we lived,
new worldlies.
every gym buddy
produces a steroid rage
when the strategic plan
becomes the mission statement -

in a parallel universe
I've ordered a thought burger

Not the town

as in a colonial outpost
local do-good cablers
on pass-the-microphone-tv
make Rimbaud's
'oxidise the gargoyles'
sound like the butler
in the 'Red Dwarf' -
not the town,
the walls, are painted red
for years & years
the households suffer
bloated ill-temperament,
the way personal crises
can continue in an
underlying manner -
the reminder is
'don't ignore the abject.'
that reminds me -
these parliamentary candidates
are those Baudrillard
would call

chaotic music backgrounds
their flaggy luncheons,
their floral tributes
deny any opposition,
their militaristic hobbies -
fokkerschmidt submachine
diesel boot the bottom line.
scanning the windows
of Cash Converters
for stolen cell phones,
the ground trembles
as traffic exits the shopping
complex parking station,
in fuck-the-reader-Timezone
the premature ejaculators,
their fingers on the game,
hoot for joy every time
they destroy another animation.

No Junk Mail Except For Pizza Things

says the sign on the letter box across the road
straggly flowers trailing cellophane & fading ribbon
stuck skew-whiff to the telegraph pole - planets
fade like fading planets, a sickly hue smears the sky,
this day a cool-to-mild one.

20th century

When the couch became a sofa
we sat down in front of pay-TV
& replaced our 'hmmm' with 'wow' -
It's all just clothes, makeup and hair.
And as we were the tootlers,
we tootled along to the popular
anytime anyplace big brown & orange
inflatable bouncy castle to contest
the awards for untrammelled enthusiasm.

return to web site

2009-05-19T21:38:00.000-07:00

Vapours

little delirium the first

a woozy clarity
adorns
all liars -
sucking
a nettle lozenge
in peril
of being
found out
(the lowest fear)
& so intensely
self-enclosed
maybe you'll
implode,
your
diction's
eccentricities
increase
with each fresh glass
of vile verdelho
& you make
a dark confession
I'd prefer
not knowing

little delirium the second

is nearly
as bad as
a eurovision song contest -
an awful something
grips the crowd
which, turning ugly,
boos
a feathery-minded
politician
announcing
his proleptic vision
to a world
of shrunken
bandwidths
where
everyone's called
'andrew'
& you have to
bring a plate

little delirium the third

a Tibetan jalopy
rolls across
the silvery sky,
the Sea of Tranquillity
fibrillates
& those
algae-coloured
hormones
make you sick,
your stability
collapses
like a stinking
puffy fungus

(Note: The lines "a woozy clarity /adorns/all liars"
are from Kenward Elmslie's poem "The Champ")

In Ultimo

leaving nature's
barbarism (spider
in a glove) behind
me   I enter   my
paved city -
pocked concrete
& traffic carbon -
sky's all
coppery    night's
coming up

I follow
the man-in-the-dress
along a lane
littered
with litter
where
Carlo & Zanzi
have signed
the sub-station
roll-a-door -
more than a tag -
a declaration -
white strokes
wide brush

no lights on,
no one home -
downstairs
short striped rows
neatly arranged,
more organised
than the library
I work in -
I stand before
my bookshelf -
wonder if
I'm a little crazy.

anyone on
the answer machine ?

up to the third floor
for a lean
& a musing -
what colour's my posture ?
what colours my posture ?

here's the view
from the balcony -
grey & darker grey
brick wall   office
windows   computer
screens & tv screens
nearly always on

an office cleaner's
smoky silhouette
gently inverting
wastepaper bins
under large
cibachrome photos
of American
stars

look skywards
imagining -
every passenger
has taken
the holding pattern
to heart

I should
show some vim! -
drive the car
somewhere,
walk into Chinatown,
loop the city
on the mono-rail,
decipher
an ignoble idea,
cook dinner -

toss
the colander of penne,
careful
not to steam
the B. Smith
& B. Holliday records
stacked
on the dish drainer -
all washed up
'n' ready
to spin.

How To

work after work
without moping

let me drink
a blue ruin

in your lint
filled café

then gather
my decorated pencils

who knows what
determines what ?

Seven Days

The afternoon darkens
like a disappointing holiday,
only colder.
Ten years ago the road
I walk beside
like a docile cow
wasn't here.
From the windswept zenith
of the adventure playground
I look out
at a kind of lump of sky
& the old hospital,
to those relics
Queen Victoria & George V
peering heavenwards
through the treetops
above the Saabs.
Who knows who
they are
anymore ?
I don't know
who Prince Alfred was.
Albert was the consort.
"What's a consort?"
the area code 047 kids
in those Afro-American
hip hop baggy
video clothes,
want to know.
"What's
a fucking consort?"
What's this stuff
for anyway -
this whacky genre,
this poetry ?
In a fiction,
I turn
& shamble off.
At the lights
a fashionably tattooed
queer
tells his dalmation
"don't be nosy"
when it wants
to sniff my fudge.
Past
the cheerless
used-can collector
pushing
his clap-trap trolley,
doing the lanes.
Home,
where my entrance
to the garden
startles the birds.
I feel insulted
by their taking flight
from the birdbath
I installed for them.
Some English poet
might have
parked a caravan
out the back,
someone not unlike
Lawrence Sail,
wittily Oxford,
in love (he thinks)
& in doubt
(the what-is-god-enquiry).
Last year I met
the actual L. Sail
& from the second day of six
he called me
Brown.
I suppose I should have
called him Larry,
seeing as
I liked him,
or Laz or Loz
or    Mr. Sail
or    Mr. Yachting
or something
rather ho-ho-british-butch.
Neighbours roll in
the tumbril-sounding
rubbish bins.
Monday
evening's coming on,
Walter Benjamin's
mild boredom
of order
lowering down
its dampened powder.
Switch off
the radio,
Renata Tebaldi's
plangent tone
doesn't help.
I'm enjoying
this Nicorette -
its slow transport
from the sublime
to the subliminal.
I begin to wipe
last night's circles
from the table
almost sorrowfully .

*

We
whoever we are
can't be anything
other than children
surrounded,
as we are,
by all these
freedoms -
little howling babies
rattling at the bars
of the playpen.
I'm sitting on
an air-conditioner
under this window
framed by the silvery arc
of the bridge
beyond the city's valley
on this
dusty purple evening.
I've just turned
46
in my stupid
Eiffel Tower t-shirt.
A frosted glass bottle
emptied of
its pale green wine
sits here too.
In the foyer
the receptionist
is having a nosebleed -
she has booked
a holiday in China
for her
miserable fiancé
who has lost
her lazuli bracelet
somewhere
between the sea
and the suburbs -
now everything
is ruined -
blotting the desk
with the sodden
red tissue.
Life drifts on
between
palpitations
and
good advice -
you need
activities
as if activity,
in the sense of
becoming
more active,
is a worthwhile
aspiration
& morally sound
as well ( more
howling-baby
homilies).
I finger
these lovely
little fakes -
my Coles pearls,
my spare time,
my smalltime activities
which occupy
like drawing.

*

Wednesday evening.
The newish neighbours
play
a mildly annoying
version of
"Quando Quando
Quando Quando".
I fill out an order
for books
from Normal
(Illinois)
& abandon
the low-bun project -
a series of poems
counter to
the haibun.
At the library
this morning
I read a poem by
Floyd Skloot
or was it
Skootl ?
Curiosity
tires me,
it takes
a lot of effort
to set
your own
curriculum.

*

A fog  this morning
drops over Camperdown
like a sedative.
At work  the office walls
are being painted
blue !
The colour decided
at our staff meeting -
the first consensus
in five years -
blue !  it has to be
an optimistic indicator
& should supply
a kind of
comic satisfaction
as we scan the screens
for abstracts
for the users.
*

Friday,
& today,    as
the union rep says,
is p.o.e.t.s. day -
"piss off early,
tomorrow's saturday"

*

On the train
from windy, empty
Bondi Junction,
I meet Sal -
in her bag
a mesh-wrapped
custard apple
under a bunch of spinach
looks like
a miniature
bonneted baby.
Sal looks
more beautiful
these days,
since Japan
& since writing
her polished
high-density book.

*

On my way
to help Gill
film the park
I walk by
the Hunter Baillie spire,
a monument
to love & piety
(I don't know
if Mr.&Mrs. Baillie
loved piety - it's said
Mrs. Baillie loved him)
On arrival -
a dog-chewed bone
on the front steps,
in the hallway
a dog-chomped
pvc cocacola bottle
a shoe
the pink guide
& a trail of water
across the kitchen floor
to the mobile phone
on the table
next to road maps
of the west coast
of America
& Fodor's "Let's Go USA"
(last year's edition).

Return to WEB SITE

Brief Profile of Pam Brown

2009-05-16T16:50:00.000-07:00

Pam Brown was born in Seymour, Victoria in 1948 and, due to her mother contracting tuberculosis and her father's military commitments overseas, she spent six formative years in the care of a great-aunt and uncle. She rejoined her family at the age of seven and grew up on military bases in Toowoomba and Brisbane in Queensland. After finishing high school at Mitchelton in 1965 she didn't know what she wanted to do. She got a job in the external studies library at the University of Queensland and, inadvertently, set out to become a librarian. But that career was short-lived and since then she earned a living variously as a silkscreen printer, bookseller, nurse, publisher's assistant, postal worker, artworker and a teacher of writing, multi-media studies and film-making. In 1990, serendipitously, she returned to library work in the life sciences library at the University of Sydney and worked there three days a week for the next sixteen years. She has also been a rock musician and a short film and video maker.

Since 1968 she has lived mostly in Sydney with stints in Melbourne, the Macdonald Valley, the Dandenong Mountains and Adelaide where she worked for eighteen months at the Experimental Art Foundation. In a parallel life, she lives in Hellbourg, La Réunion - in this life she relocated to the Blue Mountains just to the west of Sydney in 2007.
In 2003 she spent six months living in Trastevere, Rome in the Australian poets' studio. She has travelled to Asia, Europe, USA and Québec, Canada and the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions.

In the 1970s and 80s, like many of her generation, she engaged in left-wing and feminist political activity.

Since 1966, her poetry has been published in many journals both in Australia and internationally. Since 1971 she has published fourteen books and six chapbooks of poetry & prose. She has also written reviews, essays, filmscripts & performance texts. In 1991 she taught Australian poetry at the University for Foreign Languages in Hanoi, Vietnam. In 1993 Pam Brown was a guest at the Festival Franco-Anglais de Poésie in Paris, France and at the inaugural International Literature Festival in Berlin in August 2001.

In 2003 she was a guest at the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona, Spain. In October 2008 she was a guest at the Trois Rivières International Poetry Festival in Québec, Canada and at the University of Richmond, Virginia. She also read poems at Robin's Bookstore in Philadelphia Pennsylvania in October 2008.
She travelled to Prague and Brno in the Czech Republic to participate in the Micro Festival Poetry Series in April 2009.

In 2004, after having been shortlisted twice before for earlier books, her collection Dear Deliria (Salt Publishing, UK) won the Kenneth Slessor Prize, the NSW Premier's Award for Poetry in 2004.

She edited four poetry chapbooks in the Rare Object Series for Vagabond Press, Sydney in 2001. For five years, from 1997-2002, she was the poetry editor for the Australian literary quarterly Overland magazine. She is a contributing editor to the U.S.-based annual of poetry and poetics Fulcrum and is associated with the international online journal How2. She is also the associate editor of the online journal Jacket.

Crusty old statement on poetics:

To quote the Australian poet, critic & publisher, Ken Bolton, 'she is a longstanding member of that disorganised band, the leg-pulling opposition in Australian poetry.

Pam Brown in Prague, April 2009 (foto by Trevor Joyce) :

That's all folks

2009-05-15T20:15:00.001-07:00