Chris Arnold reviews Pam Brown’s Stasis Shuffle
for Australian Book Review 3rd May 2022
Stasis Shuffle by Pam Brown
Hunter Contemporary Australian Poets, $24.95 pb, 107 pp, 9780648848110
What colour is bitcoin?
The reader of Stasis Shuffle is immediately confronted with the collection’s naming convention. Titles of poems and sections are parenthesised, for example, ‘(best before)’, ‘(weevils)’, ‘(& then). More than simple stylisation, this convention suggests that every poem is a fragment, a meander through consciousness. "e first poem, ‘(best before)’, begins ‘liberated / from the drudgery / of usefulness’, a quote from Walter Benjamin. From there, Stasis Shuffle wanders flâneur-style through language, politics, and many different kinds of plant life. The central arc of Stasis Shuffle, however, is its self-consciousness about subjectivity and process. ‘(best before)’ asks ‘is your slowly accreting poem / morphing into a larger cloud yet’? As the collection unfolds, poems begin to comment on themselves and the writing process.
Stasis Shuffle is divided into three sections. The first, ‘(one idea on each dragée)’, roughly does what it says on the tin. The notes explain that a dragée is a hard-shelled confectionery that often has a second purpose. Each poem dwells on a relatively contained locale or time, and thinks through a cluster of connections. ‘(the real)’ considers linguistic connection itself. Its speaker wakes ‘in my / kind of golden / kind of biscuity / actually kind of / bitcoin-coloured pyjamas’ and works toward a Jack Spicer quote from After Lorca, ‘the imagination pictures the real’. The quote comes from Spicer’s letter on the separation and correspondence between poetic images and their referents. As Brown puts it, one ‘can’t / make poems / out of real objects / that’d be sculpture’. This reasoning throws the representation of the pyjamas into question: what colour is bitcoin? It’s a fascinating question about the nature of phenomenal experience in a world saturated by digital media – what colour is “bitcoin”, a currency that only exists in 3D render?
Nouns are unstable in Brown’s poetry. The correspondence between a thing and its name is always under pressure, and punning is a serious game. John Kinsella interviewed Brown in 2003 for Jacket 22, when she spoke about enjoying spelling as a child. Nouns carry an ‘undercurrent of meaning because whatever you spelled, it had a significance for you’. To tinker with spelling and syntax – to produce ambiguity – aligns with deeper questioning of her subject matter. In ‘(canberra drains)’, a ‘blood red & blue / [super] moon’ dates the action to 31 January 2018. The poet takes refuge from barking dogs and humidity in a room with too many clocks. Time and place coalesce as political reds and blues are absent: ‘it’s still / holidays here / progress / is a phantasm’. Progress, here, refers coincidentally to a ferry on the lake, but also to the fact that ‘nobody’s governing / no barking dog / eat barking dog’. This tension is characteristic of Brown’s poetry: the tranquil scene contrasts with a turbulent period of government (or lack thereof ) around Australia’s same-sex marriage plebiscite.
Another tension in Brown’s poetry concerns the lyric. Brown spoke to Kinsella about her practice of ‘undermining the notion of this “important figure”, the author’. Despite an unwillingness to privilege her subjectivity, Brown’s poetry is rooted there. As such, associative thinking speaks to personal questions of value: Associations are personal, but they are also connections to bigger, transpersonal issues. Another way that Brown undermines ‘the Author’ is with humour; not taking the self seriously. Stasis Shuffle doesn’t disappoint in this respect: ‘duchess / pops her muesli / on instagram / (we are not / a muesli)’.
For a volume that, according to its back cover, ‘plays with style and form’, much of Stasis Shuffle is recognisably Pam Brown: uniformly short lines, shifting indentation and alignment. The second section, ‘(pressure’s on)’, is different: a series of six double sonnets. Each begins with the same line, ‘memory seafoam’, and spears off in a different direction. The poems are, if the collection’s title poem is to be believed, ‘fake double sonnets, / free-associated / a while ago’. These poems don’t make the thematic or tonal turns one might expect from sonnets. Rather, it’s as if they’re entirely made of turn. They are relatively light, and much of their appeal is their refusal to distinguish between linguistic and political connection.
The eponymous poem ‘(stasis shuffle)’ also lends its name to the final section, and it’s here that the collection comes together. Brown’s rhizome spreads wide, and these final poems explore tensions in relationality and process. Correspondences and relationships generate energy: a long passage is dedicated to Amelia Dale, ‘whose strategy is to retire / from poetry’. Dale’s performances are hilarious, but they are also thoughtful reflections on authorship and performance – a good fit for Brown’s poetics. Community has its disappointing side, too, as ‘at the reading / everyone / seemed to be under pressure / to be experimental [...] I realised / there’s nothing funny / about comedy / that misery can’t cure’.
‘(stasis shuffle)’s melancholy tone simmers through the collection. Stasis Shuffle works with fatigue: the poet persistently wakes groggy, feels alone, suffers mondayitis. It’s a tribute to the sheer torque of Brown’s language that fatigue is never boring. If Pam Brown is suffering Covid fatigue, Stasis Shuffle doesn’t show it. This is a lively, sharp, and entertaining collection from a veteran poet who has mastered her craft.
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acupressure chia seed
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