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.
