Saturday, June 27, 2026
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
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.”
Return to Reviews, or Pam Brown site
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.
Sunday, April 5, 2026
Liam Ferney, Pam Brown, Shastra Deo - Bio Notes
Liam Ferney's Shark of Messina, was published very recently by Hunter Publishers. Two previous collections, Hot Take and Content, were also published by Hunter. His first collection was Popular Mechanics from Interactive Press in 2004, followed by Boom with Grande Parade Poets in 2013. He also published the chapbooks Career in Vagabond's Rare Object Series in 2011 and The Book of Grogu with now orries press in 2025. Liam is a public affairs manager, poet and aspiring left-back living in Stones Corner Brisbane with his wife and daughter.
More info - Shark of Messina
Pam Brown's Guess the Experience was published in late 2025 by Hunter Publishers. She has published many books and chapbooks over the last five decades. She has been an editor, reviewer, performance text author, silk screen printer and she assembles collage when she runs out of poetry steam. Born in Victoria, Pam grew up in Toowoomba and Brisbane. At 20 she moved to Sydney. She lives with her partner on never-ceded Gadigal land.
More info - Guess the Experience
Shastra Deo, born in Fiji and raised in Melbourne, now lives in Brisbane. Shastra was awarded the 2016 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for her poetry manuscript, The Agonist, which was subsequently published by UQP in 2017. Her second book,The Exclusion Zone, was also published by UQP in 2023. She graduated from the University of Queensland with First Class Honours, the University Medal in Creative Writing, a Master of Arts and is currently completing her PhD in Creative Writing there.
More info - The Exclusion Zone
Sunday, January 25, 2026
Reviews of Pam Brown's Books
(Please click on the reviewer's name to read the reviews)
Andy Jackson, The Saturday Paper January, 2026
Louis Armand, Overland & pete spence magazine June, 2026
Eva Phillips, Plumwood Mountain December, 2023
Christopher Brown, Cordite Poetry Review 10th October, 2023
Jonathan Shaw, Me fail? I fly! 31st August, 2022
Chris Arnold, Australian Book Review May, 2022 No 442
rob mclennan, rob mclennan's blog February 18, 2022
Toby Fitch, Avant Gaga #51, Sappho's, Glebe, Sydney, 14th December 2021
Toby Fitch, Meanjin, Spring, 2022
rob mclennan, rob mclennan's blog July 12, 2021
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa,
The Argotist Online 2021
Abigail Fisher, Australian Book Review January-February, 2022 No 439
Caitlin Maling, Plumwood Mountain Vol 6, No 2, December, 2019
Jonno Revanche, Rabbit No 28, October, 2019
Michael Farrell, Sydney Review of Books November, 2018
Tim Wright, Australian Book Review No 403, August, 2018
Liam Ferney, Cordite Poetry Review August, 2018
Andrew Burke, Southerly Journal, Long Paddock November, 2018
Sally Evans, Rabbit 24 May, 2018
Anne Stuart, Plumwood Mountain Vol 4 No 2, 2017
Janet Newman, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 3 March, 2017
Nathaniel Pree, Cordite Poetry Review 12th January, 2016
Jonathan Shaw Me fail? I fly! May, 2016
Anna Gibbs Parkview Hotel, Alexandria, Sydney, 28th April 2013
Jonathan Shaw Me fail? I fly! May, 2013
Susan Schultz, Tinfish Editor's Blog 2nd July, 2013
Gig Ryan, Australian Book Review July, 2013
Peter Kenneally, The Australian 10th August, 2013
Justin Clemens, Cordite Poetry Review 11th August, 2013
A.J. Carruthers, Rabbit Poetry No 10 Spring, 2013
Philip Mead, Sydney Review of Books 28th January, 2014
John Tranter, Southerly Magazine Vol 73 No 3, 2013
Ynes Sanz, an extract - The Australian Women's Book Review 26 Nos 1&2, 2014
Michael Farrell, The Shearsman Review 15th March, 2014
Angela Gardner, foam:e Issue 11, March 2014
Justin Clemens Cordite Poetry Review 21st April, 2013
Liam Ferney, Rabbit No.7, 2013
Jal Nicholls, Rochford St Review 5th November, 2012
Carl Harrison-Ford, Hat Hill Gallery, Blackheath 20th September, 2008
Les Wicks, Famous Reporter #42, February 2011
Kevin Brophy, Australian Book Review No 159, April, 1994
Cath Kenneally, Australian Book Review 1991
Jan McKemmish, Australian Book Review No 99, April 1988
Bruce Beaver, The Australian September, 1984
Moya Costello, Womanspeak 1979
Reviews of other publications -
Stephen Lawrence on 51 Contemporary Australian Poets, edited by Pam Brown, Jacket2, January 2012
Ann Vickery, Ghostly Sisters - on feminist collaborations, Axon, issue 10, May 2016
Lyn McCredden, Pam Brown's Ghostly Signature: Half here/Half gone - Feeding the Ghost - Criticism on Contemporary Australian Poetry, (Puncher & Wattmann), 2018
Tim Wright, swim/swam December, 2008
Jennifer Strauss, Australian Book Review June, 2009
Gregory Bem, Rain Taxi, Spring 2009 (seems incomplete)
Kerry Leves, Overland magazine #197, 2009
Liam Ferney, Cordite Poetry Review 28th December 2009
Ralph Wessman, Famous Reporter #40 December 2009
Ken Bolton, Southerly Magazine Vol 69, #3, 2009
Tim Wright, Mascara Literary Review, Issue7, May 2010
Astrid Lorange, 'Vigilant under fluoro' 4th September, 2011
Chad Sweeney, Jacket2 27th November 2012
Heather Taylor Johnson, Mascara Literary Review #10, April 2012
David McCooey, Australian Book Review June/July 2003
Brian Henry, Jacket 23, August 2003
Steve Evans, Salt 2003
Naomi White, Verse December, 2004
Lyn McCredden, Australian Literary Studies Vol 22, No 2, 2005
Jonathan Shaw, Me Fail? I Fly!, April, 2026
Bev Braune, Cordite Poetry Review, May, 2004
Bec Braune footnote 1 addendum - Pam Brown's author notes in Jacket 2004 can be accessed here.
Brian Henry, The Republic of Sprawl 1999
Steve Evans, Arras November, 2001
Susan M. Schultz, HEAT magazine No 8, 1998
Heather Cam, Sydney Morning Herald, 31st January 1998
David Kelly, Muse News April 1988
Linda Marie Walker, Otis Rush No 2, February 1988
Rosemary Sorensen & Jenna Mead, Age Monthly Review 1990
Judith Rodriguez, Sydney Morning Herald 1st September, 1984
Ron Silliman on Amnesiac recoveries by Pam Brown & Susan Schultz, 2003
Return to the deletions or Pam Brown site
Andy Jackson reviews Pam Brown’s Guess the Experience
for The Saturday Paper 24-30.01.2026
It’s apt that Pam Brown’s latest book is titled Guess the Experience. There’s a slipperiness to these poems that revels in the allure of the cryptic and the everyday strange. They track the disrupted fluency of urban attention, where in one moment we might be “cradling takeaway / like a babe in arms” (“It’s a problem”), the next confronted by “squelching / drain pong” (“A love supreme”). Anecdotes of miscommunication in shops and cafes segue into deconstructions of thought and aphoristic provocations, such as “is anyone / still doing ok / in the blur” (“Keep guessing”) and “the status quo is the catastrophe” (“It’s a problem”). The atmosphere is one of both ironic resignation and spirited resistance
These are unpredictable poems of association and non sequitur. Meditations or scenes are either diverted elsewhere or are elongated, rarely lasting the duration you expect. The reader who wants clean resolution or cohesion could be frustrated by this asymmetry of elements. At times I was, but it’s the kind of frustration that feels apt for these times, generative in its effects. As Brown writes in “What a shaman”, “so much can happen in an aside”.
It’s also erudite poetry, though Brown would likely resist the term. Her poems reference or sample Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Keats, Gig Ryan, Michael Farrell and many others, but they also bristle with quips against “spoken vanillanelles” and an “academics-showing-off / symposium”. If at first this feels like the poet taking a position, it is – and at the same time it isn’t. Guess the Experience is concerned with the ways in which culture, and life itself, has been simplified and undermined from multiple angles, remembering “the gay club / in tatters / arson anonymous” and noting how “poetry’s geographies become / coaching children in sport”. It prioritises the question, the prod.
In the 1999 anthology Landbridge: Contemporary Australian Poetry, Brown wrote, “writing poems is one of the things to do in these high-density, activity-laden, entertainment and information-packed times”. Since then, the times have only become more dense and laden, and her poetry continues to mine subjective experience and its political-linguistic dimensions with laconic verve.
In Guess the Experience, she seems to me to be incorporating more white space, her voice more liable to interruption and hesitation. Is this a maturing, intensifying shift in her aesthetics in this, her 23rd book? Her answer comes with characteristic kick in “Water on the brain” – “Fuck ‘late style’ ”.
Hunter Publishers, 98pp, $24.95
Friday, December 29, 2023
Gareth Morgan
(Slow Loris, Series 3, Newcastle, 2020)
Reviewed by Pam Brown for Southerly, 79.3 July 2022
The letter has been a literary mode since the seventeenth century when James Howell published Familiar Letters and Aphra Behn published her novel Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister. In current times the literary form of the letter and, alas, the postcard have become anachronistic, and handwritten material is uncommon and quaint.
A quarter of a century ago poets began using electronic mail as an art form. Susan M. Schultz and John Kinsella published voice-overs - a chapbook of their exchange of email poems. Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark continued their relationship, borne of a brief sexual encounter in Sydney in 1995, via emails to each other. In 2015 their correspondence became the book I'm very into you. Thus, their once-possible letters became emails. At the same time in the 90s Chris Kraus published an epistolary feminist novel called I Love Dick. The obsessive, infatuated, yet ultimately table-turning author, writes to Dick, "Dear Dick..." Dick never replies in spite of her stubborn persistence. The second part of the book is titled, paradoxically, Every Letter is a Love Letter. Today in Australia 'the post' continues as a historical trope in the conceptual work of Dave Drayton whose poetry interplays with Australian postcodes and delivery routes.
Gareth Morgan's chapbook Dear Eileen, is an illuminating and kinetic discourse on social, political and aesthetic connections between employment and a life in poetry. It engages with the aforementioned writers Chris Kraus, Kathy Acker, Ken Wark as well as others. The addressee of his letters, 'Eileen', is, of course, the self-described 'most famous poet in the East Village', Eileen Myles.
Gareth, a young Melbourne poet, works as a postie. Eileen Myles' father was a postie (or 'mailman' as they're called in the USA). In their recent memoir Afterglow (a dog memoir) Eileen's father reincarnates thirty years after his death as the dog Rosie. I'm pretty sure that most posties don't relate to dogs with the finessed anthropomorphism that Eileen Myles poured into their love for Rosie, but the memoir so captivated Gareth Morgan that he wrote a series of letters, or as he says, 'google docs' to Eileen -
dear eileen
you noted in the foreword to chris kraus' i love dick that the novel
interestingly took place at the birthtime of email. i.e. the death of mail.
1997. i was 4. i can't remember your point about email but today i am
thinking about the death of mail. it has become clear that our days are
numbered. which feels poignant and odd to be typing here. because
naturally these are not letters but... google docs.
Gareth is a 'delivery only postal delivery officer'. In a slang acronym that's a 'dodo' and so, he says, 'a cute dead bird'. As he rides around the mail run on an electric pushbike listening via iPhone to Spotify recordings and podcasts of Eileen and other poets, there's the glaring irony of using internet content on the job when it is a main cause of the demise of the material his work depends on. In the first letter Gareth, in the context of his generation, writes 'life was so much posturing. i hated the internet, for example, yet i lived there. by which i mean: social media'.
Letters have a colloquial tone, as if the correspondents are talking to each other. Gareth's letters meander easily through various referential topics. For instance, here he quotes Bertolt Brecht -
each morning, to earn my bread, i go to the market where lies are sold and,
hopefully, i get in line with the other sellers ... so i am writing you these
letters, and going to work... i was all right. i didn't have any dependents. i
had my poems, a rental home, a beautiful girlfriend and a steady job. time
and space, time and space. like a dog, i did my rounds.
love,
gareth
later in a longer letter he declares the influence of reading Afterglow -
i wonder if i am just doing so much copying or echoing - of you. is that still
art?
and he continues with a brief appreciation of Kathy Acker and Ken Wark's email messages, and then -
but so, now i remember what i am up to: i am reporting from the ground,
that is my difference. i am a dog and sniffing. i'm gauging the field. is
that right?
Gareth's imagined identity as a dog makes the working life more problematic than that of an actual dog -
dear eileen
there were times i felt i couldn't piss while on my rounds and was indeed
made to feel my pissing should be rationed against the streets i'd passed
thru so it was that i was like a dog. i measured my route in relation to the
bladder which was a mean and dominating organ and tho you'd think to
be outside and yes to be a dog one would be free to pee wheresoever,
which is why i am telling you now: according to our bosses, whom we
naturally obeyed, and some of us even adored, we pissed like clocks.
love, and solidarity
g
Weather is a continual menace for posties. Gareth gives clear-cut context to the task of working in dire climatic situations in a letter that embraces the rant -
... the post is an important, powerful aesthetic, or: importantly aesthetic. it
is part of what holds a nation together both literally (in THINGS (waste))
but also symbolically. the post is colonial! it's capitalist it's evil. it's an
advertisement for the happy country, and well, like, we WORKED thru
the BUSHFIRE SEASON, chugging poison smog. what better heroes for
capital can you get? the postal service is a poetics of capitalism.
This letter goes on to quote from the late radical anarchist poet Sean Bonney and then returns to lament the dog-life of a worker - '...we are not free dogs'.
Gareth conveys anxiety and an angry awareness of the effects of class, the precarity of his job, actual job losses resulting from 'profit squeeze' and a weariness that has him quoting Newman, the mailman in the Seinfeld comedy series, saying "the mail never stops". He rails against everyday difficulties like 'SHIT letterboxes' and the huge number of parcels and inane ephemera ordered online by wealthier people. The volume of these packages sometimes causes his left shoulder to ache from the delivery work load. An 8-hour day is really 10-12 hours.
Eileen Myles has written often about their own background as working class Boston. Towards the end of the series of letters, after a particularly hard day's work and feeling peeved, Gareth addresses Eileen about the money problems that are analogous to a poet's life -
... you said when you were broke you could go knock on john ashbery's door
and ask him to help you get a grant! i could meet michael farrell for coffee
at the nova cafe, and sometimes i do. and then there's 'working in a totally
unrelated field', which i, like melinda,(1) do. how nice, or i know i
enjoy it. it sucks to be an insider i believe, at least for today. let me ask, did
you get paid to run St Mark's?(2)
today.... today i have been delivering SO many parcels of crap to the
wealthier houses on my route and have been wondering over the virtue of
being poor, which i feel you and others are proud proponents of, or were, in
the 70s say, when things were allowed to flourish a little... stinkily... but you
are no longer poor, and are in fact the most famous and probably richest
poet in the east village, or marfa - and probably america! which is like the
world... and it is time i think to return the rent controlled apartment to the
people, as if such a thing were still recognised, the people, or rent controlled
apartments in new york city.(3)
This small turn where a fan, or in this instance, an acolyte challenges aspects of the life of the subject of their admiration is unexpected and touching. It is also fundamental to Gareth Morgan's candour in writing in the moment. Letter writing releases a spontaneity that's mostly antithetical to the work of devising the structure of a poem.
Dear Eileen, is teeming with daily fragments that are sometimes vivid, sometimes casual, often referential, sometimes disagreeable, though not altogether only constituting acts of thinking aloud. Some parts are also simply observational.
Publishing letters to a living idol is a vulnerable move. Here though, the revelations of instantaneous thoughts and reactions work to reach not only the recipient but also the readers. Gareth Morgan's good nature takes us right in to his particularly readable, never humdrum, everyday world -
dear eileen
i have told myself - and now you: the reason i am a postie is the potential in
it for pleasure. the great outdoors, suburbia's unruly sheen, the sublime pain
of the elements. the mythic, loner's journey into the blue. to be the cutest
kind of hero. and each day like any other, at one with the footpath...
NOTES 1. Melinda Bufton is another Melbourne poet with a non-literary day job. 2. St Mark's Poetry Project in the Bowery, NY NY is a venue for new and experimental poetry readings, memorials, workshops and a quarterly newsletter. Eileen Myles was the Director from 1984 until 1986. 3. Eileen Myles recently received an eviction notice after 42 years of living in a rent controlled apartment in East Village, NY NY. They wrote about it in For Now (Why I Write) published by Yale University Press, September 2020. They also own a house in Marfa, Texas, where their current dog Honey, rescued from an animal shelter, resides. WORKS CITED Howell, James. Familiar Letters or Epistolae Ho-Elianae, 1645-50 4th Edition, London, Thomas Guy, 1678. Amazon online docs, 2011 Behn, Aphra. Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, 1684. https://biblioteca.org.ar/libros/167063.pdf ,2008 Myles, Eileen. Afterglow (a dog memoir). London, Grove Press, 2017 Kinsella, John and Schultz, Susan M. voice-overs. Honolulu, Tinfish Press, 1997 Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark. I'm very into you Correspondence 1995- 1996. Cambridge, MA, Semiotext(e)/Native Agents, 2015 Kraus, Chris. I Love Dick,. Cambridge, MA, Semiotext(e)/Native Agents,1995 Drayton, Dave. '3 Poems'. Minarets, #11, (June, 2020)
Return to Extras or Pam Brown site
Wednesday, November 1, 2023
Christopher Brown reviews Pam Brown’s Stasis Shuffle
for Cordite Poetry Review 10.10.2023
The last poem of Pam Brown’s Stasis Shuffle, ‘(fundamentals)’ begins with the lines: “make a distinction / between imagery / & reality” (103). As much as the distinction in question evokes the verisimilitude of the fake, a need to separate unreliable image from truth, Stasis Shuffle’s interest in reality and authenticity goes deeper. The lines above resonate with the book’s cover, a photo of an urban landscape so carefully constructed that the photo (especially its forward half) might be taken for a planner’s sketch or impression. Myth’s claim to truth has been an important part of Brown’s work, though a focus here is the way the real world comes to relate as something less than authentic.
Beginning with the personal and possessive, such words imply a primacy of individual expression alongside matters of the planetary and existential. Alternately, if the kinds of things that everyone knows signal resignation, they can do with reiterating. The idea of the real is extended in ‘(last known location)’:
This balances a timely scepticism (“blankness”, “inauthenticity) with an image of misguided reverence, idolatry. It’s the inauthentic in this case with which the world is enamoured. Brown critiques a culture of individualism in ‘(mme nhu)’:
And this critique might be considered with the following on ecology, “earthmovers that never said, ‘sorry rhizome’,” if we think of self-sameness as monoculture (14). Together such examples suggest totalising political structures, according to which “the systemic management / of culture” occurs as much from a self-regulatory within, as from a governmental without (20).
Consumerism and digitalisation are presented as cultural forms toward the degraded experience of the real, which in ‘(next time)’ is mediated, literally diluted, juxtaposed to the sensory real of the poem:
As with the decontextualising image/photo, the passage
ironically engages the diminished status of high culture yet points to the relocation of experience to digital contexts, with the effect that “there’s no history / there’s (only) allegory” (‘(best before)’, 8). It’s here in part, in a context of experiential inauthenticity, that the title Stasis Shuffle gathers meaning, suggesting a recombination of existing elements, perpetual sameness attended by superficial change, production and reproduction, “old […] faking new,” the kind of change implied by the streetscape on the cover (65). Stasis Shuffle’s 2021 publication coincided with COVID-19 shutdowns in Australia and internationally, with their impact on world production, and as much as the title calls to mind an unchanging political reality, it also hints at a welcome stasis, one “liberated / from the drudgery / of usefulness,” as ‘(best before),’ quoting Walter Benjamin, puts it (3). In this perspective
Brown’s work has often questioned poetry’s social efficacy. (See for example ‘susceptibility song’ from 2018’s click here for what we do, and its ambivalence around poetry’s agency for change.) While Brown writes “not a poet for nothing” in ‘(best before),’ the idea of liberation from usefulness alludes to poetry itself as a non-productive activity (4). Untethered from economic or cultural duty, poetry becomes a site where “nobody’s governing” – permissive, potentially anarchic – a sense conveyed in Brown’s tonal ease and delightfully irruptive logic (“eat barking dog”, “drink / your shingles / if all else fails”) (‘(best before)’, 4; ‘(plastic & tragic)’, 27; 27). There’s an air of abandon, a trust in impulse, intuition:
Brown begins the poem ‘Might as well’ from her 2015 collection Missing up with the lines: “born in parenthesis / raised in an interstice” (42); she writes in click here for what we do of “interstitial thinking” (‘Susceptibility song’, 86). As if to consolidate an early conceptualisation of process, Brown parenthesises each of Stasis Shuffle’s poems’ titles – locating the poem at the gaps and apertures of systemic culture, while implying clarification, revision, an imposition of terms and conditions on the otherwise culturally acceptable or legitimate. In this revisionist space Brown can assert a value for poetry. If the phrase “daydreaming […] good for you” in (39) ‘(mme nhu)’ tends to the political, values for poetry are further communicated in ‘(the real)’ (39; 32). The images of Jack Spicer and experimentalism
critique the masculine, intellectual exceptionalism – a tradition of literary experimentation, and within which Brown herself can be said to write – it’s the ending that’s most interesting:
The underline highlights a concession, but a conditional, an ironic one, something like a backhanded compliment (he was right, for once). Poetry diminishes myth, as well as poetry’s myth-making (“not every / mundanity makes into a poem”) (‘(looks like)’, 85). But in ‘(the real),’ the rewriting of myth progresses to a truth or ontology (the nexus of imagination and reality) yet caveated by “the imagination” and “pictures,” whose connotations of the dream-like, and cinematic, shadow any transparent idea of the real.
Many of the poems in Stasis Shuffle use the divided shapes and forms for which Brown is well-recognised; there are also some key variations. The stepped lines of ‘(next time)’ and ‘(drinks)’ share a visual likeness with the poems around them. Their enjambment, line-by-line grammar, and reflective parenthesis build, however, to a more firmly cumulative impact. ‘(drinks)’ seems most notable in this sense. Picking up about halfway through, it reads:
The later section ‘(pressure’s on) six mini double sonnets’ reflects further variation, only whereas ‘(drinks)’ extends the fragment through sustained grammatical impulse, the poems here reduce it. Lines are mostly stand-alone phrases:
There’s the feeling of speed, at odds with or in response to the stasis of the title. Brown writes in ‘(fundamentals),’ “it’s insane it’s fast / it’s fun,” which perhaps sums up the spirit of ‘(pressure’s on)’ (105).
It’s fun but there’s also a keen discipline at work here. In their unstinting documentation of the moment, Brown’s poems read like maps of exemplary (sustained) concentration, both individually, and then together, as a rich and extraordinary oeuvre.
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A comparison - Each published by Hunter Publishers, Nicholas Powell and Pam Brown write in two very different modes. Brown’s poems chart shifting thought in appropriately notational form. Open to the moment, they come to suggest the possibility of the poem, beyond thematic, to picture the scope of experience. Powell’s poems in Trap Landscape are allusive, metaphorical, shifting in their signification, a moving and fluid landscape.
Return to Reviews, or Pam Brown site
In ‘(best before)’, Brown writes: my feeling is
the planet is losing its real
(like
everyone knows)
(11)
r.i.p
icon
of blankness
embracing
inauthenticity
you will be
missed
(99) )
how many eyes
go to the gym
its wall mirrors
colliding
with lust
(34) )
you licked a saltbush
out in the scrub –
that’s the photo
that the taste
wasn’t that good
isn’t ‘revealed’
(17)
it beggars
belief
that
ipad streaming
was all they did
beneath the campanile
(‘(I can hear your aargh from here)’, 44)
everyone
should just
leave
everything
&
I do mean
every thing
alone
(‘(I can hear your aargh from here)’, 46)
life’s more fun
when you
don’t know
what the hell
you’re doing
(29)
evil boy genius
jack spicer
desired
a peculiar derangement
of experiment
(32)
jack was right
when he said
the imagination
pictures
the real
(33)
kept up, & alert
by an urgent
contingency
& (possible) opportunism
that could be
slowly dismantled
by the friendship machine
or even
(boring perhaps to some)
the very isomorphism
agamben or derrida
or
some other lacanian or other
warned us against
before
we desublimated
into a cool, casual enjoyment
(though not without
emotional labour)
of
too many drinks
(59)
memory seafoam
hidden expectations
keen accomplice
no provocation
exercise yard
ecco runners
pressure’s on
(72)
Chris Brown is from Newcastle, and lives in Bega where he works as a high school teacher. His collection of poems hotel universo was published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2021. He edits the slow loris chapbook series.
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