tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7117803097697802022024-02-20T17:13:38.473-08:00linked deletionspbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comBlogger93125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-13869147906206710012023-12-29T19:40:00.000-08:002023-12-29T19:40:48.598-08:00<br>
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<font face=Arial><font size=3>Dear Eileen,
<br>Gareth Morgan</font face></font size><br>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> (Slow Loris,
Series 3, Newcastle, 2020)<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br>
<font face=Arial><font size=2>Reviewed by Pam Brown for Southerly, 79.3 July 2022
<br>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
Even though the impact of information technology has reduced smaller postal items to notices, flyers, occasional brochures and ads for Australia Post's assorted products, for me there's still something auspicious in seeing the person in the yellow hi-vis jacket stopping at the letterbox. Each postie on our street uses a different mode of delivery - walking with a push cart, wearing a heavy back sack or riding a push pedal or motorised bike to deliver the mail in all kinds of weather.
<p>
The letter has been a literary mode since the seventeenth century when James Howell published <i>Familiar Letters</i> and Aphra Behn published her novel <i>Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister</i>. In current times the literary form of the letter and, alas, the postcard have become anachronistic, and handwritten material is uncommon and quaint.
<p>
A quarter of a century ago poets began using electronic mail as an art form. Susan M. Schultz and John Kinsella published <i>voice-overs</i> - 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>I'm very into you</i>. Thus, their once-possible letters became emails. At the same time in the 90s Chris Kraus published an epistolary feminist novel called <i>I Love Dick</i>. 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, <i>Every Letter is a Love Letter</i>. 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.
<p>
Gareth Morgan's chapbook <i>Dear Eileen,</i> 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.
<p>
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 <i>Afterglow (a dog memoir</i>) 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 -
<p><pre>
dear eileen
you noted in the foreword to chris kraus' <i>i love dick</i> 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.</pre>
<p>
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'.
<p>
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 -
<p><pre>
<i> 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 ...</i> 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</pre>
<p>
later in a longer letter he declares the influence of reading <i>Afterglow</i> -
<p><pre>
i wonder if i am just doing so much copying or echoing - of you. is that still
art? </pre>
<p>
and he continues with a brief appreciation of Kathy Acker and Ken Wark's email messages, and then -
<p><pre>
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?</pre>
<p>
Gareth's imagined identity as a dog makes the working life more problematic than that of an actual dog -
<p><pre>
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</pre>
<p>
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 -
<p><pre>
... 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.</pre>
<p>
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'.
<p>
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.
<p>
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 -
<p><pre>
... 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) </pre>
<p>
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.
<p>
<i>Dear Eileen,</i> 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.
<p>
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 -
<p><pre>
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... </pre>
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<pre><font face=Arial><font size=1>
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 <i>For Now (Why I Write)</i> 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. <i>Familiar Letters or Epistolae Ho-Elianae,</i> 1645-50 4th Edition, London, Thomas Guy, 1678.
Amazon online docs, 2011
Behn, Aphra.<i> Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Siste</i>r, 1684. https://biblioteca.org.ar/libros/167063.pdf ,2008
Myles, Eileen. <i>Afterglow (a dog memoir)</i>. London, Grove Press, 2017
Kinsella, John and Schultz, Susan M. <i>voice-overs</i>. Honolulu, Tinfish Press, 1997
Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark. <i>I'm very into you Correspondence 1995- 1996</i>. Cambridge, MA, Semiotext(e)/Native Agents, 2015
Kraus, Chris. <i>I Love Dick,</i>. Cambridge, MA, Semiotext(e)/Native Agents,1995
Drayton, Dave. '3 Poems'.<i> Minarets</i>, #11, (June, 2020)
</pre></font size)
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<br><br>
<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Return to<a href="http://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/extras-selected-reviews-and-other.html"> Extras</a> or <a href="http://pambrownbooks.blogspot.com.au/">Pam Brown site</a></span></span><br />
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pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-28310940488686468822023-11-01T22:59:00.001-07:002023-11-01T22:59:41.189-07:00<p>
<font face=Verdana><font size=3><font color="#cc0066">Christopher Brown reviews Pam Brown’s <i>Stasis Shuffle</i><br>
for Cordite Poetry Review 10.10.2023</font face=Verdana></font color="#cc0066"></font size=3>
<hr width=/100%>
<p><font face=Verdana><font size=2> The last poem of Pam Brown’s <i>Stasis Shuffle</i>, ‘(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, <i>Stasis Shuffle’</i>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.<br>
In ‘(best before)’, Brown writes: </font face=Verdana><font size=2> <p><pre><font face=Verdana><font size=2>my feeling is
the planet is losing its real
(like
everyone knows)
(11)</font face></pre><p><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
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)’:
<p><pre><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
r.i.p
icon
of blankness
embracing
inauthenticity
you will be
missed
(99) )</font face></pre><p><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
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)’:
<p><pre><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
how many eyes
go to the gym
its wall mirrors
colliding
with lust
(34) )</font face></pre><p><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
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).
<p>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:
<p><pre><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
you licked a saltbush
out in the scrub –
that’s the photo
that the taste
wasn’t that good
isn’t ‘revealed’
(17) </font face></pre><p><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
As with the decontextualising image/photo, the passage
<p><pre><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
it beggars
belief
that
ipad streaming
was all they did
beneath the campanile
(‘(I can hear your aargh from here)’, 44) </font face></pre><p><font face=Verdana><font size=2>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 <i>Stasis Shuffle</i> 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). <i>Stasis Shuffle</i>’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
<p><pre><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
everyone
should just
leave
everything
&
I do mean
every thing
alone
(‘(I can hear your aargh from here)’, 46)
</font face></pre><p><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
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:
<p><pre><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
life’s more fun
when you
don’t know
what the hell
you’re doing
(29) </font face></pre><p><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
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 <i>click here for what we do</i> of “interstitial thinking” (‘Susceptibility song’, 86). As if to consolidate an early conceptualisation of process, Brown parenthesises each of <i>Stasis Shuffle</i>’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
<p><pre><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
evil boy genius
jack spicer
desired
a peculiar derangement
of experiment
(32) </font face></pre><p><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
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:
<p><pre><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
jack was right
when he said
the imagination
pictures
the real
(33) </font face></pre><p><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
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.
<p>
Many of the poems in <i>Stasis Shuffle</i> 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:
<pre><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
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) </font face></pre><p><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
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:
<pre><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
memory seafoam
hidden expectations
keen accomplice
no provocation
exercise yard
ecco runners
pressure’s on
(72) </font face></pre><p><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
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).
<p>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.
<p>
------------
<p>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 <i>Trap Landscape</i> are allusive, metaphorical, shifting in their signification, a moving and fluid landscape. </font face=Verdana><font size=2>
<br> <br><br>
<font face=Verdana><font size=1>
<b>Chris Brown</b> is from Newcastle, and lives in Bega where he works as a high school teacher. His collection of poems <i>hotel universo</i> was published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2021. He edits the slow loris chapbook series. </font face=Verdana></font size=1>
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<br>
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<p>
<font face=Arial><font size=1> Return to<a href=http://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/reviews-of-pam-browns-books-please.html> Reviews</a>, or <a href=http://pambrownbooks.blogspot.com.au/>Pam Brown site</a><font face=Arial></font size=1>
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pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-81912739129278017772023-06-22T00:08:00.031-07:002023-06-22T21:59:45.224-07:00<br>
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<p>
<font face=Arial><font size=3>Sydney Spleen
<br>Toby Fitch</font face></font size><br>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> (Giramondo,
Sydney, 2021)<o:p></o:p>
<br>
<br>
<font face=Arial><font size=2>Reviewed by Pam Brown for Australian Book Review, September 2021
<br>
<hr width=/100%>
<br><font face=Arial><font size=3>'A creepy little walk' : Toby Fitch's lyricism and versatility</font size>
<p><font size=2>
Sydney-based poet, editor and academic Toby Fitch has spent much of the last decade traversing the field of radical French modernist poets, especially Arthur Rimbaud and Guillaume Apollinaire. That engagement ignited Fitch's imagination. He began inverting, recombining, mistranslating and mimicking their techniques in his own poetry. In his new collection <i>Sydney Spleen</i>, he has made a sophisticated fresh move that enhances his signature playfulness and tongue-in-cheek poetic antics.
<p>
Under the influence of Charles Baudelaire, Fitch has swerved into a mood that is disgruntled, politically disenchanted, derisive and, consequently, outraged. Baudelaire's <i>Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en Prose</i> (which Fitch declares a favourite book) and<i> Les Fleurs du Mal</i> are two sources of animation that fuel the poems in <i>Sydney Spleen</i>, as do Guillaume Apollinaire's <i>Calligrammes</i>.
<p>
Over the last few years the poems have accrued gradually in a desktop folder. In 2020, the beginning of the present-day pandemic was an event which, Fitch says in an author note:
<p>
<font size=2><font color=#556B2F>unearthed all kinds of splenetic moods, and so in lockdown ... I found myself writing into the nights to capture the fragmented emotions I was experiencing with my family ... as we watched and re-watched a world seemingly undergoing apocalypse upon apocalypse – megafires, 1 billion animals dying, massive hailstorms and flooding, the ongoing pandemic, the return of fascism 'like a fossilized piece of moon' (Ernst Bloch); all symptoms of a broken but still all-consuming capitalist system that allows the ruling classes to exploit the Earth unchecked at the expense of minorities and the working class.</font size></font color>
<p> <
That final pronouncement immediately corresponds with Charles Baudelaire's fiercely provocative piece <i>Assommons les pauvres</i>!('Let's Beat Up the Poor!'), written in an attempt to materialise class struggle.
<p>
<i>Sydney Spleen</i> begins beautifully miserably with 'Spleen 1' – 'January, pissed off with Sydney, pours / steaming torrents on the lessees / of Camperdown cemetery and mortal dumps / on the tenants and landlords of suburbia.'
<p>
Though contemporary Sydney is hardly mid-nineteenth century Paris, Fitch - like the most prominent <i>flâneur</i>, anonymous loiterer Baudelaire - goes out on walks around the city. The cool sarcasm of 'New Phantasmagorics' starts 'Went for a creepy little walk. Navigating / a global pandemic, we go nowhere. / The future is shiny but who keeps it shiny. / The sun's not a sphere, it's a runnel / you get stuck in when you stare straight into it. / My eyes are barcodes ... '
<p>
Toby Fitch rarely writes 'An Absolutely Ordinary Poem'. Here he can't resist the pleasures of merging influences. The poem is anything but ordinary. It riffs on Les Murray's 'An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow' where a man's relentless weeping in Martin Place brings the hectic city to a standstill. When the man stops crying 'he simply walks' through the crowd, post-epiphany, and hurries off. In John Forbes' 'On the Beach: A Bicentennial Poem' (1988) trade unionists watch a man behead a chicken in Martin Place and, 'not being religious', they 'bet on how many circles / the headless chook will complete'. To me, Fitch's mashup ironises old schisms. In the 1980s, Murray, 'bard of the bush', expressed hostility to 'inner-city elites' and postmoderrnists like Forbes, who once remarked, countering Murray, that his generation wrote about mining corporations' destruction of the bush, not romantic nature poems. North American Mary Ruefle's poem 'A Certain Swirl' provides the idea for Fitch: 'The classroom was dark, all the desks were empty, / and the sentence on the board was frightened to / find itself alone.' Fitch's version begins 'Martin Place was dark, all the cafes were empty, / an office above flickered with fluoro light / and the poem on the pavement was petrified / to find itself alone ...' The poem, even though 'perhaps it was a shit poem', like Ruefle's sentence, remained unread.
<p>
Fitch has worked for several years as a sessional academic for various universities. Scandalously, university casuals were not granted financial support when classes were cancelled due to the pandemic. The university, which for years had relied on casual labour, deserted them. In Sydney, with union support, the casuals negotiated their dire situation with administrators and departmental academics to no avail. The union took the university to the Fair Work Commission on Fitch's behalf and they won the case. During the months of protest and uncertainty, Fitch wrote impassioned poems ridiculing administrative behaviour. 'A Massage from the Vice-Chancellor', lampoons risible and condescending managerial jargon. The book's other political poems express a general discontent with current Australian politicians. The scathing poem 'Left Hanging at the End of the End of the World Campaign' rails bitterly against the lack of government action on climate change.
<p>
Sydney has been twice-nicknamed - 'Tinsel Town' and 'Emerald City'. Fitch looks 'Beneath the Sparkle', going underground on a tour of the tunnels on both shores of the Harbour. Not quite the Parisian Catacombs but 'unused for the wetter part of the century', the damp atmospherics do lead to an abandoned nineteenth century cemetery below Central Station's Platforms 26 and 27. Fitch makes a mockery of a politician's plan to sell the city tunnels off for subterranean entertainments and eateries - 'a fresh kind of colony in the underworld is being floated by the minister.'
<p>
'Morning Walks in a Time of Plague', the final poem, displays yet another slant – more sanguine in its remarkable familial intimacy, humour and discerning reflection. The alluring versatility and lyrical expansion in Toby Fitch's new poems offer the reader many intricate intensities and illuminating pleasures.
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Return to<a href="http://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/extras-selected-reviews-and-other.html"> Extras</a> or <a href="http://pambrownbooks.blogspot.com.au/">Pam Brown site</a></span></span><br />
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pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-279669365253010842023-02-05T21:20:00.000-08:002023-02-05T21:20:23.545-08:00 <pre><font size=3>W h a t i s t h i s</font size>
<font size=2>
what is this
eco-art craze
for mass replication?
assemblage
bottle tops stickers
brand labels tin boxes
usually colourful
tiny plastic bits
packing the ocean
shiny aluminium trinkets
manufactured reproduction
churning out
the garbage
nespresso coffee pods
for artists
to collect
a couple of centuries
mechanical
production reproduction
& 3D's
thermoplastic
*
saturday morning
at the markets
for vegetables
fruit eggs
&
to visit
big art
at the same place
which seems
kind of 'Sydney'
(coffee organic farmers' market
at an art & performance venue)
over-anthropomorphised dogs
on decorated leashes
hyper-active children
on streamer-decorated scooters
tearing around
squealing in the cabbage leaves
everything's
a festival
calming down
against a sunlit wall
finicking
peeling
a small coloured fruit sticker
from a mango
without damaging either
I think I saw
a Chinese artist
recycling these
working
a kind of woeful narrative
out of thousands of fruit stickers
(or did I imagine it?)
in vast
industrial warehouse
galleries
defunct
railway carriage workshops
converted empty factories
disused powerhouses
hours
& hours
& hours
& hours
of labour
to construct
these heaps & groups of pieces
the effort
is admirable
yes definitely
(does anyone have assistants?)
El Anatsui's
Klimty wall hanging
is beautiful
a very large
wavy glistering shawl
glamorous
made from alcohol bottle tops
sewn together with copper wire
the notes say
the artworks
'examine the complex histories of post-colonial Africa
and the issues of consumption, waste and the environment.'
activist art
could sit well
in luxury 5 star foyers
or exclusive nightclubs
too inured to habit
to know my littering
as a correctional encumbrance
(own your own rubbish)
'activist' art
Ai Wei Wei's
multiple orange lifejackets
hundreds of them
discarded by arriving refugees
attached to the Ionic columns
of Konzerthaus Berlin
seems too easy even artless(?)
gesturing for a headline
what does it do?
(what can it do?)
this must have
(as all else has)
begun with capital
capital's machines
Duchamp
Nevelson
Warhol
failing
into swank exorbitance
maybe
what about
Kurt Schwitters
what about
ready mades
what about
Cornell's boxes
&
junk sculptors
Jean Tinguely
Robert Klippel
Philip Hammial
feral fossickers
smaller scale
non-repetitive
single objects
reshapers
rebuilding machines
from obsolete parts
reimagining
to imagine again
______________________________________________
El Anatsui is a Ghanaian artist who lives & works in Nigeria
Robert Klippel & Philip Hammial are Australian sculptors
</font size>
</pre>
pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-31580779092254143662022-10-16T18:31:00.002-07:002022-10-16T18:31:28.566-07:00'A love supreme' cover<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPGSk-c0xRwK7Zp-DiXrZIGB7aRUfRVDdWFonwux06bfueax8PJgSgqvH8f-fUOgIinUMgwJFABJKCcLZmyJoEFjNZ4hYuS_3VKTqmLWR-YWBlAgJY4WXfyT-u2PqGmzX4e4N9haDIbHsohDsielNKxIiTHWA988-uZkQCcWvvbcAZj_uHwX0IMGbGww/s2486/a%20love%20supreme%20cover.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="2486" data-original-width="1760" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPGSk-c0xRwK7Zp-DiXrZIGB7aRUfRVDdWFonwux06bfueax8PJgSgqvH8f-fUOgIinUMgwJFABJKCcLZmyJoEFjNZ4hYuS_3VKTqmLWR-YWBlAgJY4WXfyT-u2PqGmzX4e4N9haDIbHsohDsielNKxIiTHWA988-uZkQCcWvvbcAZj_uHwX0IMGbGww/s320/a%20love%20supreme%20cover.jpg"/></a></div>pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-17899524379060598402022-06-03T23:06:00.044-07:002022-06-03T23:15:54.837-07:00<p>
<font face=Verdana><font size=3><font color="#cc0066">Jane Joritz-Nakagawa's capsule review of Pam Brown’s <i>Endings & Spacings</i><br> for The Argotist Online 2021 </font face=Verdana></font color="#cc0066"></font size=3>
<p>
<i>Endings & Spacings</i> by Pam Brown<br>
Never-Never Books, Sydney 2021
<p>
<hr width=/100%>
<p><font face=Verdana><font size=2>The very prolific Pam Brown has a signature style that she continues in her latest, <i>Endings & Spacings</i>, but each time while maintaining her distinctiveness she comes up with something fresh, new and intriguing. How does she do it? In part I think it is because the world keeps changing and her books reflect the world beyond the reader. In this book people can't sleep and make herb tea in the middle of the night. It seems to be the perfect COVID book-there is a restlessness here, a kind of jazzy improvised feel yet polished. There is a great deal of movement from image to observation, to details then abstractions. The whole thing works very well; I can't seem to get enough of this book-each time I pick it up I find something new and attractive. I feel the world spinning around me as I read this book, like a camera going in a circular motion. Brown is as magnetic witty and smart here as ever as in this excerpt which illustrates how deftly she moves from observations to ideas to reflections to details:<br>
<pre><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
'cementing a position
as one of the country's leading researchers
with the launch of a first book
&
a raft of fellowship and grants'
`with wry wit the emperors of the anagram
invent imaginative formal constraints
not decor but credence`
alright then got that
at 4 a m
- - -
white white teeth
ping perfectionist bleats
artist talks
idling
on the lonesome internet
- - -
new romantics rusting in the wine bar
- - -
</font face=Verdana></font size=2></pre>
<br><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
Every page of <i>Endings and Spacings</i> is a captivating and fun journey into Brown's observations about the world around her and us.</font face=Verdana></font size=2>
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<font face=Arial><font size=1> Return to<a href=http://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/reviews-of-pam-browns-books-please.html> Reviews</a>, or <a href=http://pambrownbooks.blogspot.com.au/>Pam Brown site</a><font face=Arial></font size=1>
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pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-1447117632260655992022-05-09T04:22:00.005-07:002022-05-09T04:24:29.140-07:00<p>
<font face=Verdana><font size=3><font color="#cc0066">Chris Arnold reviews Pam Brown’s <i>Stasis Shuffle</i><br> for Australian Book Review 3rd May 2022 </font face=Verdana></font color="#cc0066"></font size=3>
<p>
<i>Stasis Shuffle</i> by Pam Brown<br>
Hunter Contemporary Australian Poets, $24.95 pb, 107 pp, 9780648848110
<p>
<hr width=/100%>
<p><b><font face=Verdana><font size=3> What colour is bitcoin?</font size></b></p>
<p><font face=Verdana><font size=2>The reader of <i>Stasis Shuffle</i> 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, <i>Stasis Shuffle</i> wanders flâneur-style through language, politics, and many different kinds of plant life. The central arc of <i>Stasis Shuffle</i>, 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.<p>
<i>Stasis Shuffle</i> 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 <i>After Lorca</i>, ‘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?
<p>
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 <i>Jacket 22</i>, 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. <p>
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: </font face=Verdana><font size=2>
<p><pre><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
acupressure chia seed
equals
the closest you’ve come
to gentrification
in australia
it’s all profit & bigotry
& weevils</pre></font face>
<p><font face=Verdana><font size=2> 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. <i>Stasis Shuffl</i>e doesn’t disappoint in this respect: ‘duchess / pops her muesli / on instagram / (we are not / a muesli)’.
<p>For a volume that, according to its back cover, ‘plays with style and form’, much of <i>Stasis Shuffle</i> 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.
<p>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 <i>be</i> experimental [...] I realised / there’s nothing funny / about comedy / that misery can’t cure’.
<p>‘(stasis shuffle)’s melancholy tone simmers through the collection. <i>Stasis Shuffle</i> 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, <i>Stasis Shuffle</i> doesn’t show it. This is a lively, sharp, and entertaining collection from a veteran poet who has mastered her craft. </font face=Verdana></font size=2>
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<font face=Arial><font size=1> Return to<a href=http://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/reviews-of-pam-browns-books-please.html> Reviews</a>, or <a href=http://pambrownbooks.blogspot.com.au/>Pam Brown site</a><font face=Arial></font size=1>
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pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-19331174355676280092022-04-19T04:25:00.020-07:002022-04-19T16:14:28.914-07:00<p>
<font face=Verdana><font size=3><font color="#cc0066">Toby Fitch's Slightly Impromptu Launch Speech for Pam Brown’s <i>Stasis Shuffle</i><br>
at AVANT GAGA #51, Sappho Books, Glebe, Sydney. 14 Dec 2021 </font face=Verdana></font color="#cc0066"></font size=3>
<hr width=/100%>
<p><font face=Verdana><font size=2>Welcome back to the book launch part of the night. No one was invited to give a launch speech, partly because this event is less of an analytical space and more a performative one, and I wasn’t invited to either because I’m sure Pam didn’t want to impose, but I’m going to say a few words anyway to give this excellent book, <i>Stasis Shuffle</i>, a polite nudge into the world …
<p>Pam Brown is an adept, probably the best in Australia, at writing poetry using very subtle surface effects. Accumulating observations, found language, punning, and self-conscious questioning, building each poem fragment upon fragment, she is able to critique a vast array of things, across politics and culture, including, most centrally in my opinion, how we see and interpret the real. The opening poem of the book, ‘(best before)’, in one of its fragments, alludes to this poetic process: </font face=Verdana><font size=2>
<p><pre><font face=Verdana><font size=2>
the
it's-interesting
bla-bla
question is -
is your slowly accreting poem
morphing into a larger cloud yet -
a major poem
ghosting in to sydney
past the heads,
making its way to ashfield
darker & darker
birds swirling around in it -
leaves
rubbish & debris
full of menace & meaning?
(what to answer -
nup
or
I wish?)</pre></font face>
<p><font face=Verdana><font size=2> It’s difficult to say what any one Pam Brown poem is about, because they are always about lots of things, as the best poetry is. Their multiple meanings are found in the rubbish and debris of each poem, as she undercuts the inclination of poems and poets to be deemed “major”, preferring a much more “interesting” poetics of the minor, the fragmentary, and the “slowly accreting”. Once you “get” how a Pam Brown poem operates laterally, you start to see the “darker & darker / birds swirling around in it / … full of menace & meaning”.
<p>
To give you an idea of her use of form, <i>Stasis Shuffle</i> is in three parts, each with their own titles, titles that are thematic but that also work as metacommentary. The middle section, called ‘pressure’s on’, is the most formal of the book with its 6 thin double sonnets across 6 pages, which are cleverly disjunctive and pressurised in their use of bricolage and the restrictions of the sonnet form, restrictions that she also manages to elude by doubling the sonnet form to 28 lines. This light middle section acts as a neat divider between the first and third sections, which are each full of poems in Pam’s more signature accretive, fragmentary, discursive late style.
<p>
The first section is titled ‘one idea on each dragée’, a dragée being “a bite-sized form of confectionary with a hard outer shell—often used for another purpose in addition to consumption”. And here they are being used for another purpose: we have another metaphor for what’s going on in the poems, each fragment becomes a dragée, a morsel, that you can savour, turn over in your mouth-brain. Or, with the poems becoming bags-full of dragées, you can, like I did, binge on the lot all at once. But of course Pam’s dragées are not all sweet—she eschews all those cloying narrative and lyric conventions, preferring sardonic asides and ruminations: “whatever happens / don’t read me / any rumi poems / at my sick bed”.
<p>
The final section is the title section of the book, <i>Stasis Shuffle,</i> a title that alludes to the pandemic, isolation, the congealing of thought and body under various restrictions both local and global, contemporaneous and of a lifetime. The title also alludes to the urge or desire to move, to shuffle, within such restrictions. And so the book, while being about many things, is definitely concerned with living and observing and experiencing time. And time has been particularly discombobulated since the beginning of 2020. So, as ever, with Pam’s work, her timing is up to the minute.
<p>
To finish, I thought I’d read all the little dragées from the book that concern time. I read the book from woe to go, picking out all such instances and accreting them, in order of appearance, into a kind of index poem about time in <i>Stasis Shuffle</i>. It’s called
<p>
<b>Nostalgic Block</b>
<br>(<i>a supercut of all mentions of time in Pam Brown’s</i> Stasis Shuffle)
<p>
my body will know what to do with the vaccine in two weeks’ time <br>
warm winter night all wrong I borrowed history I’ve been to 1981 <br>
autumn started in the dark finally got you to sleep around 4 a m <br>
by late morning you’re lying in a park the other side of the equinox <br>
it’s maundy thursday morning not monday thursday morning <br>
mournful maundy a shadow showing the time before quantum physics <br>
brought telepathy to imagery that time you licked a saltbush<br>
next time quantum physics might try different senses<br>
it’s spooky knowing how it ends in advance goodbye january<br>
too soon in the night blood red and blue moon coming much later<br>
in the early hours five gadgets in this room display the time<br>
the city’s lake fountain turned off every day before 11 & after 2<br>
across some years it’s sIll holidays here progress is a phantasm<br>
in full bloom illusion you spent ages learning to love<br>
life’s more fun when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing<br>
coming down with mondayitis as soon as tomorrow<br>
so the apparent stability of the everyday isn’t actual, right? <br>
it’s summer solstice it gets late early walking back around ten thirty<br>
talking to yourself all the way in the dark seen any lately?<br>
suddenly collected by a rogue wave trapped in an air bubble<br>
woke up face down watching time dribble down the wall<br>
as we stretch together into a timeless misery delay’s okay<br>
the bus meanders arriving late in another city of spare parts<br>
it’s happy new year again seven months since january<br>
twenty-something years since that time in paris meanwhile<br>
an instant harmony on imaginary pavements one year’ll be great<br>
the next year you’ll have to travel through and then slam the door<br>
on external memory is this 2003 again<br>
memory seafoam <br>
memory seafoam<br>
take your time <br>
saving daylight<br>
memory seafoam<br>
nostalgic block<br>
memory seafoam<br>
time & continuity <br>
memory seafoam<br>
memory seafoam<br>
this is the way the portal works <br>
prime time’s grotesque flash back july is the psycho month<br>
keeps on aching telescopic nightlight robbery this afternoon<br>
I shuffle in my room’s stasis from flux until sunrise a while ago<br>
the other night at the reading everyone seemed under pressure<br>
last week a friend recommended ‘aesthetic trauma’ <br>
happy xmas suckas!<br>
the sustained breath of time shared & ceremony invoked etcetera<br>
cultural becoming anticipates futures inscribed in the present<br>
& counters what we mean when we mean ‘pastime’ <br>
a myth machine retronymical everything’s different now<br>
you bluesky the content & short lines get you <br>
to the next day evolution leads to</font face=Verdana></font size=2>
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<font face=Arial><font size=1> Return to<a href=http://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/reviews-of-pam-browns-books-please.html> Reviews</a>, or <a href=http://pambrownbooks.blogspot.com.au/>Pam Brown site</a><font face=Arial></font size=1>
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pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-11149192917898849782021-08-21T00:36:00.001-07:002021-08-21T00:36:48.961-07:00Endings & Spacings<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHVOzK-7oLJWi0ijfIhOzQ_ffCnVEO5Ql5myOFm7IzVhV4d0pqINyfrdI57g19qGi5P-CY8mnrE0BVhmdjK4Owx_DABVlOfGQummO-q64_LSsKz3vDG1wR2kejGXdm2vlJrrEC8taMjPa0/s1052/Endings+%2526+Spacings.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="747" data-original-width="1052" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHVOzK-7oLJWi0ijfIhOzQ_ffCnVEO5Ql5myOFm7IzVhV4d0pqINyfrdI57g19qGi5P-CY8mnrE0BVhmdjK4Owx_DABVlOfGQummO-q64_LSsKz3vDG1wR2kejGXdm2vlJrrEC8taMjPa0/s320/Endings+%2526+Spacings.jpg"/></a></div>
<br>
<br>
<font face=Arial><font size=2>fragmented poems from the lost months<br>
between the summers of 2019 and 2021<br>
what's 'summer'? a climate anachronism<br><br>
---<br><br>
parts of the poems<br>
emanated from<br>
a nocturnal space<br>
not always 'at night'<br><br>
---<br><br>
presented together -<br>
some underthinking<br>
a series of contingencies<br>
a small event -<br>
an uneven booklet<br>
endings & spacings<br><br>
<p>
never_never_books@gmail.com<br><br></font size=2>
<font face=Arial><font size=1>photo by pb - road crosses - west perth 2019 <br>
</font face></font size>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyQHpt5wRpQKNYuzQxSZc1KBj7bGSIf_ZRSRh0K0M33hlS8OaHs9XewLxmTh3kfc4r1GI10JXx1ZEG9kltHtEd0pqAkOsGwAb7rCMwR9YnwSfroPkYShvb33m4VtrMEFOrQRM_a8Kidx8A/s2048/30.6.19+Road+Crosses+Perth+.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyQHpt5wRpQKNYuzQxSZc1KBj7bGSIf_ZRSRh0K0M33hlS8OaHs9XewLxmTh3kfc4r1GI10JXx1ZEG9kltHtEd0pqAkOsGwAb7rCMwR9YnwSfroPkYShvb33m4VtrMEFOrQRM_a8Kidx8A/s320/30.6.19+Road+Crosses+Perth+.jpg"/></a></div>pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-71430895611795944332021-08-06T23:29:00.002-07:002021-08-06T23:29:45.704-07:00Required reading<pre> <Font face=Adobe Garamond Pro> <font size=3>
across the fly screen
insects & I
chase the breeze
as the big day shrinks
the cool is coming on
the book is sitting there,
its blue cover
clashing
with the tea towel's orange,
stranded
they've had their
heydays,
the fading teatowel,
the book of poems
translated
& re-translated
an aesthetics of the surface
sliding towards
evening, only one language
spoken here
fructose to coma -
undissolved granules
spuming
in a grubby glass
on the table top
the poems say
more
than I want them to,
no clarity really, can't decide
which way to read them
everything left
as it is,
the fridge compressor
gurgles</pre></font size>
<p><font size=2><font face=Helvetica Neue>
<br>
Pam Brown - from <i>Missing up</i> (Vagabond Press 2015)</p></font face></font size>
<br> <br> <br> <br><br><br>
pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-38613901949066079612020-07-19T21:37:00.001-07:002020-07-19T21:42:00.201-07:00VLAK Magazine, Issue 5, 2015<p>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinP7gm8WuFJg9NO0S_b4UhNiLtS4GxEfoeX9Z-kP4aFoq8XcW2gM6aq6473SlCYFK73OsiUNz8qIpGNOdxuhcRZIkkuCCkvoyqHN5AWjri4oL5vsBwLIrdY9L5e76datyp8Oigsqa6danC/s1600/VLAK+Issue+5%252C+2015.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinP7gm8WuFJg9NO0S_b4UhNiLtS4GxEfoeX9Z-kP4aFoq8XcW2gM6aq6473SlCYFK73OsiUNz8qIpGNOdxuhcRZIkkuCCkvoyqHN5AWjri4oL5vsBwLIrdY9L5e76datyp8Oigsqa6danC/s320/VLAK+Issue+5%252C+2015.jpg" width="320" height="282" data-original-width="734" data-original-height="646" /></a>
<br><font face=Arial><font size=1>click to enlarge</font face> </font size>
<br><br>
<font face=Arial><font size=2>return to <a href=https://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com/2009/05/poems-online-on-listings-to-connect.html>Poems Online</a></font face=Arial></font size=2></p>
<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br>pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-24070799354638385582020-07-19T21:30:00.002-07:002020-07-19T21:42:09.693-07:00VLAK Magazine, Issue 3, 2012 <p>
<br><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvyYLDT18kRRUtjZU5LLHJbImSElD1UcI9Z-ZlX_MvBoFvWJbQ8QLhl-T-YJSlpbZt_TY-sNpxrosj9mC3vjs3WxHIrhmloQbceBOSUllSg2F6Ip5QMgDmrq7B8sICiXfgikNEF17_snwP/s1600/VLAK+3+%2523+2012.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvyYLDT18kRRUtjZU5LLHJbImSElD1UcI9Z-ZlX_MvBoFvWJbQ8QLhl-T-YJSlpbZt_TY-sNpxrosj9mC3vjs3WxHIrhmloQbceBOSUllSg2F6Ip5QMgDmrq7B8sICiXfgikNEF17_snwP/s320/VLAK+3+%2523+2012.jpg" width="320" height="315" data-original-width="620" data-original-height="610" /></a>
<p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjytd-On-e1XLRFnonkx2ny7cspefrCuYQ6vaTxXSoV6uJ6aW9KwNuJU1WCfKU-xSW6sasZ-OlGgbyHX0454F8Cy2XlCGayWJ7RZ9NPIKYfpRdU72Abro1A2f6Br4IItJDBv2H7sqNhufzO/s1600/Vlak+3+2012.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjytd-On-e1XLRFnonkx2ny7cspefrCuYQ6vaTxXSoV6uJ6aW9KwNuJU1WCfKU-xSW6sasZ-OlGgbyHX0454F8Cy2XlCGayWJ7RZ9NPIKYfpRdU72Abro1A2f6Br4IItJDBv2H7sqNhufzO/s320/Vlak+3+2012.jpg" width="320" height="304" data-original-width="762" data-original-height="725" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSjSJiWxxUY2Bht-YL316mMDHj6vcajIbJYwanvPArPFek2PXTNF3O8V2BdmGFwb0SEi2qG3Tha_zH8CXk8ycYQ41I7CX24sjnD6RrfPMZouEjf0QBH_IKG8U8KyFWziy2C_hf0aODG5pP/s1600/VLAK+3+2012+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSjSJiWxxUY2Bht-YL316mMDHj6vcajIbJYwanvPArPFek2PXTNF3O8V2BdmGFwb0SEi2qG3Tha_zH8CXk8ycYQ41I7CX24sjnD6RrfPMZouEjf0QBH_IKG8U8KyFWziy2C_hf0aODG5pP/s320/VLAK+3+2012+1.jpg" width="320" height="306" data-original-width="763" data-original-height="729" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsNoIWYvityMxEIHh0cEGeBycj6h8RATdTbizngGJEHBFIaXKPgKxx0yoGVvHS7FOAPoKnNZl32m6UYaPtKnPthMN4IXlyPaUcS1bqhI8Q4JyGBI4LAv52vQ9F3m4rxQLU6laecXg9u7Eq/s1600/VLAK+3+2012+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsNoIWYvityMxEIHh0cEGeBycj6h8RATdTbizngGJEHBFIaXKPgKxx0yoGVvHS7FOAPoKnNZl32m6UYaPtKnPthMN4IXlyPaUcS1bqhI8Q4JyGBI4LAv52vQ9F3m4rxQLU6laecXg9u7Eq/s320/VLAK+3+2012+2.jpg" width="315" height="320" data-original-width="683" data-original-height="693" /></a>
<br><font face=Arial><font size=1>click to enlarge</font face</font size>
<br><br>
<font face=Arial><font size=2>return to <a href=https://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com/2009/05/poems-online-on-listings-to-connect.html>Poems Online</a></font face=Arial></font size=2></p>
<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br>pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-16879579525385873642020-07-19T21:23:00.002-07:002020-07-19T21:42:42.803-07:00VLAK Magazine Issue 2, 2011<p>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_69szBdsb73CmGxxPx46VStKcg9w4TSiLxo1RahOilnicR-B_MKI2td8Rxr-FFbvRxcaq6wmQc1I69qsjhVkHreDLxyM1hchu89uXHRtb8Zwky7fM91n8emqZ-YuN222dc5OC_oUbqP6y/s1600/VLAK+2%252C+2011+1.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_69szBdsb73CmGxxPx46VStKcg9w4TSiLxo1RahOilnicR-B_MKI2td8Rxr-FFbvRxcaq6wmQc1I69qsjhVkHreDLxyM1hchu89uXHRtb8Zwky7fM91n8emqZ-YuN222dc5OC_oUbqP6y/s320/VLAK+2%252C+2011+1.png" width="320" height="317" data-original-width="776" data-original-height="769" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP5h3PKk09a_6iA00wXGisvAU4jhSSj0PwAIWuVXP7nQ2tDz84g3Jlk9EEvpxuXJc4OCtRKjA8wti-N-zi2GVBiR5vaZR-8xjynPbonGW9JUWGjnuMpvbqd7ZhXlrMzb_-WwrTqlS03r_G/s1600/VLAK+2%252C+2011+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP5h3PKk09a_6iA00wXGisvAU4jhSSj0PwAIWuVXP7nQ2tDz84g3Jlk9EEvpxuXJc4OCtRKjA8wti-N-zi2GVBiR5vaZR-8xjynPbonGW9JUWGjnuMpvbqd7ZhXlrMzb_-WwrTqlS03r_G/s320/VLAK+2%252C+2011+2.jpg" width="306" height="320" data-original-width="749" data-original-height="782" /></a>
<br><font face=Arial><font size=1>click to enlarge</font face><font size</p>
<br><br><font face=Arial><font size=2>return to <a href=https://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com/2009/05/poems-online-on-listings-to-connect.html>Poems Online</a></font face=Arial></font size=2></p>
<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br>pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-85841699932558034712020-05-18T05:08:00.000-07:002020-05-18T14:19:06.974-07:00<p>
<font face=Courier New><font size=2>This time of pandemic brings my mother's young life closer to me, now, as I'm about to turn 72 in a week or so and we are living in such a difficult time.</P></font size>
<br><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn4V5_LsF9Pq1UtWpy1s3tiiRmHk_ffVNl77HMV8cL9IagaKl8xEpAA0Iih59h3AriapjfLbS9LFln-j9zrt6RcBYwatOwhx6kfIohUbLQ8BehOfYLRFHIUpayqaLsUIpD_JVLt9mAubx1/s1600/JBB+Heatherton+Sanatorium.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn4V5_LsF9Pq1UtWpy1s3tiiRmHk_ffVNl77HMV8cL9IagaKl8xEpAA0Iih59h3AriapjfLbS9LFln-j9zrt6RcBYwatOwhx6kfIohUbLQ8BehOfYLRFHIUpayqaLsUIpD_JVLt9mAubx1/s320/JBB+Heatherton+Sanatorium.jpg" width="320" height="309" data-original-width="657" data-original-height="634" /></a></div>
<br> <font size =1><i>my mother, Jeanette Barclay Brown (née Vinnicombe),on the left - her toes in the sun</font size></i>
<Br>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMKqQQqUdz0dN2PyqHnVlfoPMDccPDMLQgOM6BznmkBz8qnvE9N73l0kSumUfNdgzx2VRDnnzqU47y8zLgxTC2qFrTxR-IE4yDfW9CFuuA8_TB2WND9mCL6qKpS0ZmHPd2rdNUmcWCsFll/s1600/JBB+Heatherton+Sanatorium2b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMKqQQqUdz0dN2PyqHnVlfoPMDccPDMLQgOM6BznmkBz8qnvE9N73l0kSumUfNdgzx2VRDnnzqU47y8zLgxTC2qFrTxR-IE4yDfW9CFuuA8_TB2WND9mCL6qKpS0ZmHPd2rdNUmcWCsFll/s320/JBB+Heatherton+Sanatorium2b.jpg" width="320" height="237" data-original-width="1058" data-original-height="782" /></a></div>
<br> <font size=1><i>mum, on the left, in February 1952</font size></i>
<br>
<br>
<p>
<font face=Courier New><font size=2>In the late 1940s, the Commonwealth Government Health Department took over the Heatherton Sanatorium in Cheltenham, Melbourne, in order to address a tuberculosis epidemic.In the early 1950s, the increase in the number of people suffering from tuberculosis created a need for additional beds. To alleviate overcrowding at Heatherton two new modern hospital blocks were built on the site. One was known as "North Block", where female patients were accommodated and the other was called "South Block" where male patients were housed. Children infected with tuberculosis were hospitalised in Wing 2. The sanatorium housed around 300 tuberculosis patients. A five-storey nurses’ home was built. Tuberculosis reached its peak in the late 1950’s and the patient intake was on the decline by 1958.
<p>
My mother was one of the long term tuberculosis patients. She was in her 30s. She had surgery to remove the damaged upper lobe from one of her lungs. These are photos of mum in confinement in 1952 - getting some outdoor sun and air (with other women, several of whom became her lifelong friends). She would send cheerful photos to me and my brother and sister. I only knew mum from photographs and felt toys that she made and would send me. My brother and sister lived with our maternal grandparents. At this time my dad was oceans away for some years in the U.K. obtaining a military promotion. I lived with my paternal great aunt and uncle in Brisbane from the age of 18 months until I was six. When we reunited, in spite of her trials (& whatever unknown troubles to come), the mother I met was determined to look after & nurture us kids. I loved her dearly.
<br>
<br>
Pam Brown, Sydney, 18th May 2020</font sixe>
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<br><font size=1><i>click on the photos to enlarge</font size></i>
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pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-60775305051704186632019-11-16T21:41:00.004-08:002019-11-18T15:37:49.972-08:00<p>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo4p_jRWwIT_ItI0hSWUOV7bPB31f7PcNp3LgC_W1cpnrDPqXKhkJXMu_nsMA0hYu6y5qFWK4-hAo8kwBzM56p6ibCiiNLWnKhTiVf3xnJwagj0vTl7RkzO65fp1090ueUu4zAEv8Q5VbE/s1600/Turn-Left-at-Venus_cover-for-publicity.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo4p_jRWwIT_ItI0hSWUOV7bPB31f7PcNp3LgC_W1cpnrDPqXKhkJXMu_nsMA0hYu6y5qFWK4-hAo8kwBzM56p6ibCiiNLWnKhTiVf3xnJwagj0vTl7RkzO65fp1090ueUu4zAEv8Q5VbE/s320/Turn-Left-at-Venus_cover-for-publicity.jpg" width="213" height="320" data-original-width="1065" data-original-height="1600" /></a>
<p>
<font face=Arial><font size=3>Turn Left At Venus
<br>Inez Baranay</font face></font size><br>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> (Transit Lounge
Press, Melbourne, 2019)<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Launch talk - Pam Brown at The Old Fitzroy Hotel, Wooloomooloo, Sydney,
3rd October 2019</span></div>
<hr width=100%</>
<p>
I’ll start with a poet’s disclaimer -<br>
I mostly read non fiction and I should say I’ve often not finished reading some contemporary Australian novels so I have no proper knowledge of where a novel as unconventional as <i>Turn Left at Venus</i> might take its place in the genre. Perhaps I’m not really the most appropriate person to talk about the work, <u>but</u> I am pleased to be here to celebrate the book’s publication and to salute Inez Baranay’s unwavering commitment to writing over many years.
<p>
Given the exigencies of a book launch I think it would be impossible & would probably take way too long to give you a full account of what’s between the covers so I’ll make a kind of precis –
<p>
You should definitely know that this book is eccentric and that the tone is conversational. It totally disrupts narrative and proceeds via segments.
We meet the main character – a very old Ada lying prone in a care home. She’s tended by two nurses, one of whom realises that the patient Ada is actually A.L. Ligeti, a science fantasy author.<br>
Linked with Ada’s condition in the first segment there’s a swift segue to a new section that’s a mini treatise on the ageing body’s symptoms and indignities. Then the next section is what we discover is an extract from A.L. Ligeti’s science fantasy of a space traveller’s expedition to somewhere in the galaxy named Otzey - a planet where elderly women celebrate with a glittering festival leading to a final ceremony called ‘The Going Out’ – meaning death.
<p>
Next, and, again, quite swiftly, the reader is on a ship that was introduced in the book’s prelude. This is the ship carrying, among the passengers, two little eight year old girls from different backgrounds, Ada & Leyla, heading for
Australia – quote - ‘a country where it is always summer, always sunny, where they would go to school and speak English all the time.’ Leyla declares that she
& Ada will always know everything about each other. They’re European migrants and will live at first in a hostel and then in separate houses in the outer suburbs of Sydney.
<p>
As teenagers, Ada and Leyla dream of becoming respectively, a writer and a dancer. Ada will become the science fantasy writer and she’ll travel to many parts of the world.
<p>
Soon it’s back to the care home where one of the nurses relates their discovery of Ada’s identity as A.L. Ligeti by reading an online pdf of the story that we, the readers, have just read - about the planet Otzey.
<p>
The book zig zags through a kind of continual enquiry - from examinations of how to die, what death might be, and building a life towards it. Many of the sections are only two or three or four pages long. Some passages are longer. It’s a fragmented narrative and it’s metatextual – the actual writing process is often dissected.
<p>
In Europe somewhere Ada’s deceased father had been jailed for his anarchist activities – so there is a short introduction to anarchism which leads briskly into an explanation of the origin and uses of the title for Ada’s-as-A.L. Ligeti’s novel <i>Turn Left at Venus</i>. The phrase has various euphemistic uses. For instance, I’ll quote a few of them - it can indicate ‘where not to tell the joke about how you know where the anarchist in the room is...’ or function as ‘actual directions on another planet on which the story takes place’ (but A L Ligeti insists that you do not arrive at one of the planets, Lueshira, by following directions in three dimensional space). It can also mean ‘leave your usual way of seeing things behind’ or ‘you are not making any sense’.
<p>
As young women Ada & Leyla go dancing together at a multicultural night club, the Club of All Nations, where they meet a camp society dress designer called Charles who befriends them and begins to make interesting clothes for them to wear. This is their entry to the world of bars and drag that once was Kings Cross, Sydney.
<p>
The book circles unceasingly through time and place. It moves from mountain villages in Bali, to Randwick race course, to galactic planets in outer space where gender is mutable just like Kings Cross where Ada meets Ray. They marry for a short time and in that time Ada spends the nights writing her book <i>Turn Left at Venus</i> which she posts off to a publisher in San Francisco. It gets into print and is noticed briefly before it simply vanishes.
<p>
Ada is a dreamer – she walks around the streets of Kings Cross fantasising - quote – ‘She did not ever want to describe what she barely saw around her, the dun-coloured world, she only wanted to describe the conjurings of her mind’ - which is a clue to the entire novel and to the imaginary other worlds like Lueshira, a gender-fluid utopian planet where there is no evil and where the idea of underestimating a woman cannot exist.
<p>
So - Kings Cross figures prominently – Leyla returns here after seven years of living in Los Angeles. She and Arda become happily reacquainted. Then Ada is inspired to move to San Francisco and, once there, she declares ‘People come to San Francisco to be free’. Here she learns, via a vibrant literary agent called Sophie Stein, that the publisher of <i>Turn Left at Venus</i> had become defunct which explains that novel’s sudden disappearance. Following Sophie Stein’s suggestion, Ada decides to write a sequel.
<p>
Ada encounters many kinds of people - an anthropologist, a neighbour who’s a cadet reporter, Roger and Gail, the witnesses at Ada’s wedding, an influential maker of very dark movies known only as SK who suggests that her sequel
novel could be called <i>Turn Right at Mars</i>. Ada also meets Julius, an artist, a painter seeking fame. They engage in an affair of “extreme heterosexuality”, for a time, until Ada stops going to see him and starts to plot her sequel. She also has a close friend and confidant, Noemi, who writes about architecture, has an answer for every proposition put to her, and will become Ada’s lover.
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Meanwhile, her lifelong friend Leyla turns up in San Francisco. As they make their reconnection and remember times past Leyla encourages her to write the sequel. So Ada’s, or A.L. Ligeti’s book <i>The Shelf of Bone</i> is finished and will be published.
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Having experienced a brief lesbian sexual encounter at a women-only party in San Francisco Ada next time-travels to Denpasar, Bali and on to Rome, Italy where through a whirlwind of reminiscence Leyla makes a final appearance. Portals open onto memories and to further discussion of gender, feminism, the body, the purpose of writing, the concept of utopia, relationships with life-like robots, and dying.
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Poignantly, Ada and her close friend Noemi make love and form a close relationship. I won’t reveal their dénoument except to say that this is where the story concludes - but not before it turns full circle as Inez gives the fictional future to the younger people we met at the beginning, the two nurses who work at the care home.
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<i>Turn Left at Venus</i> is labyrinthine and often quite puzzling and at times confronting as it keeps the reader alert and wondering ‘where will it lead?’ It’s a sprawling spontaneous tale that embraces the long, imagined and real, unplanned life of a fiction writer and the enduring connection between two women and their life long friendship across many changes in many years and in many places on earth and elsewhere...
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I hope I’ve conveyed some of the myriad aspects – now there’s no more for me to do than encourage you to buy a copy and to say Congratulations Inez – & now over to you -
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Return to<a href="http://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/extras-selected-reviews-and-other.html"> Extras</a> or <a href="http://pambrownbooks.blogspot.com.au/">Pam Brown site</a></span></span><br />
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pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-32989203697589116322019-11-05T03:31:00.000-08:002019-11-05T03:32:07.213-08:00<p>
<font face=Verdana><font size=3><font color="#cc0066">Anna Gibbs launches <i>Home by Dark</i><br>
at Parkview Hotel, Alexandria, Sydney 28th April 2013
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<p><font face=Verdana><font size=2>I’ve always been a huge fan of Pam Brown’s special mix: ‘country and eastern’ with its ‘automatic sad’, the ‘true thoughts’ that come with being ‘authentic local’ in ‘this world, this place’ on which she opens ‘a small blue view’ of something that could go either way, ‘50 – 50’. Even her titles are so quotable collaging them in this way is irresistible. It’s a ‘text thing’, ‘dear deliria’, this ‘correspondence’, this between you and I play that Pam Brown sets up. ‘Keep it quiet’ – if word gets out there’ll be trouble, and besides, a certain stillness allows something else be heard and something more to happen.
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In <i>Home by Dark </i> we start out with ‘Windows Wound Down’, a ’white paper poem’, an authoritative guide to this particular kind of Brownian motion in which you’re ‘parked under/a chalky old light pole/windows wound down/dozing on the front seat/on the radio/ Chinese classical music’. Rather than roaring through the world in a perpetual rush of hot air towards the ‘latest in new’, the world comes to you through the open window and you’re given the opportunity both to be part of it, feeling the music, and to observe what’s going on a short distance away, ‘as across the road/a man is wearing/his hat, indoors’. There’s always an oscillation in Brown’s writing between being porous to the world, completely in tune with its rhythms, and those moments of pulling back a little to observe and comment on it. There is also mimetic relation ‘so you want/to write in a cave/ _&_/take your source material/with you?’ Small incidents and images like that of the man wearing his hat inside come to represent the signs and symptoms of the times, a ‘Holiday Guide to Everything’ - when a holiday means you’re staying home cleaning, since after all ‘recessions [either the economic or the back of the fridge kind] don’t stop/for Sunday’.
<p>
Brown is renowned for being a poet of the local, but what this way of thinking about her work runs the risk of forgetting is that the local like other things is not what it used to be. Once one might have been able to equate it with the parochial, but in these days of mobile phones and pervasive media, the local is always permeated by the wider world (‘way too many/concurrent points of view’), and even, sometimes, indistinguishable from it.
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From this vantage point, the present is adroitly diagnosed – for example through witty recalibrations of the hortatory imperatives of magazine speak. After receiving this suggestion: ‘why not/ recalibrate your life?’ the possibility that occurs is clearly not something anticipated by the rhetorical question. ‘How <i>did </i> Jean Genet/live in hotels/for so long?’, the poet wonders. Taking things seriously, taking them at their face value and taking them to their logical conclusions – all these ways of being a model citizen - ‘a unified I’ full of ‘anecdotal sincerity’ – turns out to make them unravel, exposes all their pretence an pretention so much more effectively than turning terrorist and chucking a Molotov.
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No cures or conclusions are offered, only ‘imaginary solutions’ in the pataphysical way, where the prognosis remains open and who knows what will become of the present in the future. ‘The past/the past/is heritage brass//Now is always/only now’ in the ‘dog and bub burb’ (37). Nevertheless, ‘You’re the same age/as the ugg boot’, one more piece of the ‘schlock of the old’ and even more yourself than you were before. This is not armchair expertise, in spite of Brown’s disclaimer: there’s a hard won wisdom when you’ve put your body on the line and done a postgraduate degree in the university of life. You don’t come out of this educational process unchanged, with your ‘gamine haircut/for older persons.’
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Need I say that these are really funny poems? They make you just want to quote and keep on quoting. There’s a certain laconic, understated, sly dry wit, and a wry irony that derives from this very engaging, conversational style of writing and the witty repartee it creates between voice and voice. In this constantly moving montage of voices it’s not always clear ‘who says that’ about this or that and who is talking to you when you feel yourself interpolated. Who’s speaking?, you have to ask when the poetry phone rings. Sometimes the lines are crossed (as we used to say in the 70s) and you get to eavesdrop on conversation between peers, for example in the form of Brown and Bolton, but in this b & b there are many rooms and it could be pretty much anyone prowling the corridors disguised as some one else, and spreading gossip.
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In fact these poems are obsessed with communication in all its forms: with telephones and television, with the internet and with poetry itself. Brown is an engaged participant in conversation as a pleasurable form of everyday sociability between equals or peers (or those rendered as such by virtue of the type of conversation in which they engage in certain situations – like the much vaunted democracy of Bondi Beach or the virtual neighbourhood constructed by the poetry magazine). This is what nineteenth century French sociologist Gabriel Tarde would call ‘voluntary conversation’. This kind of conversation is the medium of social contagion, making things spread. To be engaged in conversation, for a poet like Brown, means to be alert to what’s catching on, that is, to the traffic of opinion, the very <i>stuff</i> of conversation. Opinion, according to Tarde, it is ‘something as light, as transitory, as expansive as the wind’, palpable and potent in its effects and yet hard to grasp until it’s almost passed. It is in the nature of opinion to want to expand and spread: it always ‘strives to become international, like reason’ (299). Brown’s poetry is ideally suited to grasping it, at once able to get it and to seize and identify it. It is, after all, in the middle of its own conversation, fully engaged with a particular poetry world, one extending beyond state and national boundaries to the US and Europe (via her roles with with ‘Jacket2’ ,’VLAK’ & other magazines)
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But Brown’s work also has an ear out for the ‘obligatory conversation’ (Tarde again) which regulates relations within social hierarchies, and which so often comprises ‘the monologues pronounced by superiors’ – and all those reports, predictions and warnings beloved of the media, of political leaders and experts of various kinds, perhaps most proximate, including art critics and curators. Brown’s work is alert to this and works to undermine its authority, for example with striking, accurate, little darts of feminist analysis: ‘men make man made/you can study them/making memoir/under the summit’ (70).
<p>
Of course it’s also been said that scholarship is a kind of conversation. The poet’s professed ‘lassitude’ when it comes to undertaking certain kinds of scholarly research is more than compensated for by wide ranging reading: this work is full of references to other poets, living and dead. Sometimes their words are taken and twisted, sometimes simply reported or repeated in another context. This is part and parcel of a reflection, after half a lifetime spent doing it, on what poetry can do, especially in the brilliant last sections (iv and v) of the book. Precisely because this is poetry and it is hyper-alert to the history of its own medium, this question always tends to suggest its own reversal, rebounding on the poet to ponder what you (the poet) can do for poetry: ‘maybe/leap/drop/slip and slide/like a penguin/on Antarctic ice’.
<p>
Try to understand things, or something, anyway, not to tune out but instead to ‘give popular culture another chance’, or simply try to get by on the tricky terrain of the present. It’s getting late now, though: shadows grow a little longer and it’s just starting to get dark. There’s ‘another phone call/more cancer/and another/a month later//like Michael said/now we’ll spend/ the rest of our lives/watching our friends die’
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And as for ourselves, well sometimes ‘Leaving the World’ actually seems all too easy: it’s ‘not as bad/as you’d think// the grand movement/ masks/ the small movement/ you pull your swifty/ and disappear – it’s as easy, in fact, as putting your ‘body on a bed and/ going out of the room’.
<p>
After all this we realise that to be ‘home by dark’, as we were all no doubt enjoined by our mothers before being turned loose in – or on - the world in the days when summer holidays seemed endless… to be home by dark is about having somewhere to go and something to do in the face of the fact that we’re all going to hell in a handbag. Meanwhile, thank god, even though we’re in the end times and ‘all fuelled out’, at least we’ve got home with a box of wine.
<p>
So ‘get a half life/or whatever’s legitimate’ (37), read Pam Brown’s work, and you’ll never be short of a good line in either convivial literary small talk or serious talk about the state of the world.
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<font face=Arial><font size=1> Return to<a href=http://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/reviews-of-pam-browns-books-please.html> Reviews</a>, or <a href=http://pambrownbooks.blogspot.com.au/>Pam Brown site</a><font face=Arial></font size=1>
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pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-61874176047553500372019-08-14T00:30:00.002-07:002019-11-16T21:40:08.327-08:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: small;"> And What?<br />
Ken Bolton and Kurt Brereton
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<br /><br /> (Jellied Tongue Press, Currarong, NSW, 2019)
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Launch talk at Woodburn Creative Space, Redfern, Sydney, 11th August 2019
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Ken Bolton & Kurt Brereton have been friends and accomplices in the unpredictable realm of art, poetry, culture and circus for over forty years. The question they have asked each other, their friends, their families, their fans and even, very occasionally, their foes, remains unsatisfactorily unanswered – ‘And What?’ or ‘And <u>What</u>?!?’
This friendship & its resultant entanglements are clearly re-presented in this book - (<i>pb shows audience A3 prints of tangles</i>)
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<br>I know this is supposed to be a farewell at the end of nostalgia but allow me some nostalgia as I recount the cultural background to this book (which, by the way, is replete with nostalgia ...) - <br>
A few decades ago Ken became the founder of the leg-pulling school of Australian poetry. Not long after, having tinkered with the concept of leg-pulling while studying at art school, Kurt spent some years as a keen participant. Together the friends extended the application of leg-pulling to other media – video, photography, embroidery, drawing, painting, writing, <i>son et lumière</i>, slam, folksong and so on. However, due to an unforeseen national incremental increase in Australian poets’ serious self-importance accompanied by a quest for old traditions, the leg-pulling school, after putting up a strong resistance, started to pare back its opposition to those wearying trends and so began its gradual organic demise. But Kurt, being of an idealistic & utopian outlook, defied this turn and began anew. He created the forensically-researched, inclusive & influential Pathetic Manifesto. Over the past 10 years or so both Kurt & Ken have utilised this important manifesto’s approach, not only in their daily perceptions of the world-at-large but also in their own prolific practices of art making.
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In this collaborative work <i>And What?</i> alongside contemporary tv celebrity sunday painters like Anh Do, you’ll find plenty of nostalgia as several pathetic & well-loved age-old motifs recur throughout. One of these is the early twentieth century comic strip character Krazy Kat. Krazy was a simple-minded, “heppy go lucky” cat of indeterminate gender. Non-binary Krazy was passionately in love with Ignatz Mouse. Ignatz, though, hated Krazy – so he invariably, & <u>often</u>, demonstrated this sentiment by throwing a brick at the ‘fool kat’s’ head. The third player in this bizarre love triangle was the gruff, ‘kanine constable’ Offissa Bull Pupp, who secretly held a candle for Krazy and tried to protect them from Ignatz’s brick-throwing violence. Affectionately, portraits of Krazy Kat appear a couple of times in this small volume.
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There are also many references from across the centuries. Like 17th century French Baroque in Nicholas Poussin’s <i>et in Arcadia ego</i>, also Krazy Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Cezanne (anyone nostalgic for him?), Oskar Kokoshka, cool artists like Ed Ruscha, famous for his book full of pictures of gas stations, & New York School abstract cartoonist Philip Guston’s famous sideways painting of a big-headed man smoking a cigarette, together with many more famous figures - philosophical, poetic, arty – but but - what? no Giorgio de Chirico!!? unless – this? <i>(pb shows audience A3 print of head curly haired woman or a putti...)</i>
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This book is utterly irreverent in its revelatory application of the comical to the weighty enquiries about philosophy in our age –
<br>one poem asks –<br>
Who’s funnier, Sloterdijk<br>
or Adorno? Or is that like<br>
‘Who’s funnier, Jennifer<br>
Saunders, or Jack Benny?’<br>
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Or is it somehow different?
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Is it philosophy’s task<br>
to make us laugh, properly speaking?<br>
Or is that poetry’s.<br>
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And in an earlier poem there’s a useful note, almost a warning, on living in Australia -
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Shit-faced & stung by a zillion flying gnats<br>
Australia has a super dry brownish complexion<br>
Cracked, lined, flushed, ruddy and burnt –<br>
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if you live here long enough you will wear<br>
The stare of Existentialism<br>
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<br>Prominent in their appreciations and analyses are the personal tributes Kurt & Ken make to two beloved symbols - the enduring ampersand, the origin of which can be traced back to old Roman cursive in the first century AD
& the exceptionally useful question mark that, in the late 8th century, was known as <i>punctus interrogativus</i>.
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The authors revel in jokes, lots of them – they do a lot of what used to be called ‘goofing off’ as they speak to us with jellied tongues of times past and of their current pastimes.
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Not one of these books is the same as another – there are different images in each one (so everything I’ve just said could be completely irrelevant to the version you acquire). But do buy one today and you’ll get a bonus linocut and a bookmark. ‘And What?’ is a uniquely goofy spoofy hoot - enjoy a chuckle & don’t go away after the performance without getting your copy signed & your own personal dedication. Congratulations Ken & Kurt.
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<br>Click here for <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/kurt-brereton/the-pathetic-manifestocuteology/ebook/product-20923140.html">The Pathetic Manifesto</a> - it's free! </font face></font size>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Return to<a href="http://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/extras-selected-reviews-and-other.html"> Extras</a> or <a href="http://pambrownbooks.blogspot.com.au/">Pam Brown site</a></span></span><br />
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<br>pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-68864143772917470022019-07-13T20:34:00.000-07:002019-08-14T01:38:48.179-07:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: small;">AXIS Book 2 Music Made Visible Where Only the Sky had Hung Before<br />
a. j. carruthers Jessica Wilkinson Toby Fitch</span> <span style="font-size: x-small;">
<br /><br /> (Vagabond Press, Sydney, 2019)
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Launch talk at Knox St Bar, Chippendale, Sydney, 13th July 2019
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These days we’re addicted to a desire for all kinds of ephemeral newness. Everything - meaning every commodified thing - has to be groundbreaking, new, new and different, even thrillingly brand new. But these three books, although each is fresh, state of the art, and totally distinctive, are traditional.
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Not traditional in the Ramsay Centre notion of tradition – yearning for the great transposition of received English or so called ‘Western’ poetries into formal, high-diction, obfuscated poems of Australian national identity but they are part of a continuum of one of the twentieth century traditions that began even before Stéphane Mallarmé threw the poetry dice to perform an aleatoric or chance approach to poetry making. At the dawn of modernism, in the late nineteenth century, or the <i>fin de siècle</i>, the activity of avant-garde artists often resembled rival expeditions to an expanding universe beyond the milky way. The goal was to discover novel spheres of expression: unspoken word, unpainted image, unheard sound. Mallarmé's explorations of chance & discontinuity influenced poets & also composers like John Cage & Pierre Boulez. Modernism declared an end to history and Ezra Pound released the maxim ‘Make It New’. He has a lot to answer for. Recently, in ‘<i>Writing Australian Unsettlement</i>’ Michael Farrell brought to light experimentation in Australian writing from 1796 until 1942, via an eclectic assemblage of indigenous, early settler, both white & Chinese, ‘modes of poetic invention'. There's a parallel to the <i>fin de siècle</i> northern hemisphere irruption. So that’s a bit of a back story.
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A couple of weeks ago Alice Notley tweeted ‘Why should poetry or anyone or anything do anything?’
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Well - what can poets do on this planet that we’ve all had a hand in fucking up? What about politics and poetry with regard to the polis? What appeal or relief do these books offer?
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a.j. carruthers, Andy, has challenged himself with the brave ambition of making a life-long poem called <i>AXIS</i> in which the poems are systems. The first book, subtitled <i>Areal</i> was published in 2014. Not wanting to design any futuristic progress Andy told us then that ‘the origins of this project, <i>AXIS</i>, are obscure’. <i>AXIS 1</i> forensically dissects & reassembles multifarious facets of the letter ‘A’. Today we’re celebrating the publication of Book 2.
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As for politics it’s there straightaway with the dedication - ‘for Disarmanent’.
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There were many explanatory notes in <i>AXIS 1</i>. Now though Andy trusts his readers’/thinkers’ responses. Continuing from the ‘A’ of Book 1, Book 2 titles begin with B C D. ‘Blazar’ is the first section – what is a ‘blazar’? Here we need Andy’s quote from Thorsten Glusenkamp, a young astrophysicist working in Bavaria – ‘Blazars are active galactic nuclei with relativistic plasma jets whose symmetry axis is pointing towards Earth’ So, Yes!
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<i>AXIS 2</i> poems are neatly minimal scrutinies of language-excesses that enable you to shift reading paradigms without trying too hard.
Despite the <i>appearance</i> of a controlled procedure there are ‘spasms’ in Andy’s works – sometimes in performance they are literal – in the spasm, sound collapses into noise, into a vocal tangle.
Section ‘C’ is ‘Chorastics’ – <i>chora</i>, from Plato via Elizabeth Grosz, is ‘a space that engenders without possessing, that nurtures without requirements of its own’. It’s a liberating, yet self-conscious, (for the poet) space of multiple artistic possibilities.
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Disrupting his own processes, after the letter-‘D’- poems that end with a complex machine poem called ‘Disc’, the last group diverts from the alphabetical system. It’s called ‘Music’. It’s a set of mini-compositions or line-scorings, neumes, small musical settings resembling percussion scores each with a title dedicated to influences including bp nichol, Jackson Mac Low, Robert Lax & to performative poetry friends Alison Whittaker, Melody Paloma, Hazel Smith, & so on.
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Andy applies a discipline in his poetry that’s similar to the fastidiousness of a classical pianist (which he is) where a single note of music has the ability to alter the entire composition. The work he makes is procedural, Oulipoian and charged with provocation but also, sometimes disarmingly sweet – for instance, from the poem ‘Canon’ -
</span></span>
<pre><span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span arial=""><span style="font-size: x-small;">
gunshipZone
quantum
choros
TO HAVE KEPT GOING
AND
GAINED A VANTAGE
POINT
FROM
WHICH
TO
VIEW
DOCUMENT
can
condense
to this -
you
cannot
tell
the ants
to leave
your kitchen
counter
alone</span></span></span></span></pre>
<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size=2">
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Andy’s gestures, reshuffling of semiotic patterns and interventions have set him up to become an original Australian poetry antagonist. And we <u>do</u> need so much <u>more</u> of that!
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Similar to the obscure origins of <i>AXIS</i>, Jessica Wilkinson says that her poetic biographies, previously of Hollywood actor Marion Davies, and composer Percy Grainger, and now, <i>Music Made Visible</i> - that they arise from chance encounters. In this book’s case the iniator was a postcard of the dancer and choreographer Georgiy Balanchivadze or George Balanchine, pinned on her office wall.
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<br>
This is a book of his life. He was a Russian-born Georgian who defected to Germany in the early 1920s and began working with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, a trailblazing dance company that defied classicism and used innovative music and visual art as part of its aesthetic. After the Ballet Russes collapsed, Balanchine created the company Les Ballets in 1933 and migrated to the
USA. He went on to form the New York City Ballet and became one of the most influential 20th century contemporary choreographers.
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<br>
Jess uses various techniques to present her topic. She found a problem in tat there was an excess of material about him & his work. Balanchine had listened to Igor Stravinsky’s advice not to us<u>everything</u> in a work. Astutely, Jess decided to follow that as well. Music was Balanchine’s main love. Jess encompasses this by meticulously including details of the music he used at the beginning of each poem.
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<br>
Balanchine made at least seventy-two ballets – though some of them were short – like ‘Allegro Brillante’– he said ‘This ballet contains everything I know about classical ballet in thirteen seconds’.
<br />
<br>
Apart from his methods of choreography, his adventures with his company & his many daring costume designers in Europe, New York, Broadway, Hollywood, Cuba, & other countries, <u>and</u> his wittily favourable opinion of his skill– ‘I could represent America in an artistic way better than ice boxes or electric bathtubs can’. Of course, there is gossip. these poems tell us about his many liaisons and marriages. In 1922, young Balanchine married a 15-year-old ballet student. This was the first of four separate marriages to dancers, and for each of his wives, Balanchine made a ballet. The older he became, the more consuming his love affairs with young ballerinas. You could say Balanchine was a man of his times.
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Throughout these poems there are borrowings - Jess attributes her many stealings or what used to be called ‘appropriations’ to the example of George Balanchine who did it a lot.
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Graphic collage, montage, visual overlay, eccentric lines that bend like dancing limbs, poetic graphs that both mirror and imagine choreographic maps and every other technique that Jess applies gives us a kind of paratext, a world outside the text in which the ‘characters’ or ‘players’ move and speak, putting them on display just like a dance performance.
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This a dense, deeply researched & vivifying book. Given the exigencies of a triple book launch I have hardly scratched its surface – so, please read <i>Music Made Visible</i> and become absorbed in its pleasures. It’s chock full of variety and surprise.
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In Toby Fitch’s <i>Where Only the Sky had Hung Before</i> Mallarméan chance is prominent, as is the scintillant brilliance of Guillaume Apollinaire. Toby designs an imaginative lyric – borrowing, discarding, quoting, recombining, & totally serious tongue-in-cheek assembling. He turns poetry sideways so that the lines look as if they’re falling on the page wondering ‘Therefore Wherefore Should One Use The Question Mark’. His abstracted calligrammes float on the page like stars in the night sky.
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<br>
The philosophical is often set in a kind of freely-associated, malleable, worldly everyday – quote -‘Feel Like I’m Somehow Related to Everyone on the Internet’ or ‘Zeitgeist moves all the way down’ - and in the closer, intimate domain of family -Toby’s daughters and his partner. ‘Bear the Sky’ is an altered sonnet made from selected and jumbled words from his daughter Evie’s first two hundred.
<br />
<br>
In ‘Vague, or I Can’t Explain It Any Other Way’ – quote ‘The system only dreams in total dankness./ There’s an overflow of green/apricots in the back alley where I walk/ most days with my daughters to Black Star./The sun’s not a sphere it’s a tunnel./I just wanna get past all the squashed hearts,/I tell my eldest. No they’re hearts of Te Fiti, /she rebukes, asking me to carry one.’
What I loved about walking to Black Star in this touching yet sophisticated poem is that it’s not only a well known pastry shop in Newtown, it’s also the title of David Bowie’s final album – it’s a lovely ambiguity.
Then, in the same poem, after ruminating on Pacific missile tests and earthquakes, Toby thinks up a solution to studying poetry in an academic context– ‘The vision on the USYD gym screens was unclear/ (and nuclear) and I’d been thinking/ I could make the basketball team to avoid my PhD’ - fortunately he’s totally diverted from this idea by a shooting pain in his left big toe - a small karmic accident on the treadmill keeps him on the treadmill, so to speak.
<br />
<br>
‘Argo Notes’ seems to me to be the core of the book. A sequence of eleven poems, graphically arranged, it’s a clever, contemplative, political, slanted confessional. It swerves around a personal analysis of gender and a reaction to the condition of pregnancy and its possible and real effects on parents’ lives in a world-at-large - quote- ‘blockbuster Oedipal bad/ met by ordinary devotion/ my anti-interpretive delinquent mood/ my dirty mirthful/ queer as pregnancy itself’.
<br />
<br>
Toby’s titles are as often as wicked & as witty as the poems . Like ‘The Left Hand of Dankness’. Frank O’Hara had ‘In Memory of my Feelings’, I had ‘In Memory of my Stealings’ & here Toby has ‘In Memory of my Furlings’ – ‘scrolling up and/ down through rippling neon hills which/ presciently come to resemble/ the furlings and unfurlings/ I continue to save and put down.’
<p>
And as I’m right over the word limit again - I want to emphasise that <i>Where Only the Sky had Hung Before</i> offers really deluxe mind-bending <i>joie de vivre</i>.
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+
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There is so much more I could talk about. So yes, these books are part of a continuum <u>YET</u> each poet also puts pressure on our expected or comfortable notions of modernist & post-modern poetic experimentation.
These works offer an opening, an entry into the enigmatic. There is a totally considered graphic component in all three works – please buy the books to see this. It’s a positive obsessiveness that re-presents and delivers a revitalising agency to ozpo.<br>
This threesome give huge credence to poems that challenge and are difficult and unconventional and go way beyond a square and miserly normal or super normal writing – a condition I call ‘schmormal’.
<br>
Congratulations to Andy, Jess and Toby - three brilliant anti-schmormalists!
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Return to<a href="http://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/extras-selected-reviews-and-other.html"> Extras</a> or <a href="http://pambrownbooks.blogspot.com.au/">Pam Brown site</a></span></span><br />
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<br />pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-28669984197730783922018-12-19T02:31:00.000-08:002019-11-05T02:27:28.697-08:00<font face=PT Serif><font size=4>
Andrew Burke reviews Pam Brown’s<br>
‘click here for what we do’</font size=4>
<br><font size=3>
Southerly | 6 Nov, 2018 | Long Paddock |
<hr width=/95%>
<p>
<i>One can only write if one arrives at the instant towards which one can only move through space opened up by the movement of writing.</i>
Maurice Blanchot
<p>
Two books sit on my desk with my favourite pages marked like kite feathers: Pam Brown’s <i>click here for what we do</i> and Ken Bolton’s <i>Starting At Basheer’s</i>, both published by VAGABOND PRESS in 2018.
<p>
These two poets have been publishing through many different publishers at regular intervals since the Sixties <font color=#11CCEE>[Seventies]</font color>, both with titles numbering <font color=#11CCEE>[if pamphlets & chapbooks are included]</font color> in their twenties. The world around them has changed markedly and yet their creative personalities still shine through these new collections as it did in yesteryear. And their secondary creators in this creative stream are their readers – an ever expanding coterie who delight in the seeming simplicity of these pages and enjoy the cumulative effect of their collections one after the other. They write in the moment without conclusion in mind.
<p>
‘The means is as much part of the truth as the result … the true quest is the unfurling of a truth whose different parts combine in the truth.’ Karl Marx (quoted in Georges Perec’s THINGS: A Story of the Sixties)
<p>
Pam Brown’s title – <i>click here for what we do</i> – is illustrative of her use of today’s language and her sense of humour. The ‘here’ is highlighted as if you could get into the text by pressing it. With a smile I’m tempted to try it. And the ‘we’ is plural – maybe speaking for contemporary poets? And readers? Or simply her urban colloquial clique (including Ken Bolton)?
<p>
Pamela Brown was born in Victoria, grew up in Queensland and now lives in Sydney.
<p>
I have read many of Brown’s collections: over 20 since her first publication in 1971, including French, Italian, Irish and Vietnamese editions. The advances I notice here are not so much content – her everyday world, including world news and the local arts and environment– but the sharpening of her style. Example: as she reads an essayist:
<pre><font face=Times>
muttering irritations
irritated by the essayist -
I'd say 'second last'
rather than 'penultimate'
maybe 'brokered' or, even, 'supervised'
for 'proctored'
(context depending)
(when did ‘proctoring’ begin?)
&
I don't like the 'pur' in 'purview'
- 'scope' would be fine -
there are
lots of these -
…
oh well my slip of flair
(<i>ipse dixit</i>)
it's a style thing</font face></pre>
from 'Left Wondering'
<p>
Here we are focused sharply on language, down to the syllables themselves.
<p>
Reading her intimate musings is highly entertaining, as are the various registers of her language, all enriched by narrative streams as cross currents in the journal-like entries. At one stage Brown is …
<pre><font face=Times>
saving for a spoiler
& sheer line
panel design
shelf-stacking
cool rooms
to make the money</font face>
</pre>
<br>
It follows on from this a page before –
<pre><font face=Times>
sold to a wrecker
for a speck
carless in car city</font face></pre>
<p>
Robert Graves said, a long time ago, that there’s ‘no money in poetry’ – so like many Australian poets not caught up in academic limitations, Pam Brown has had many jobs, from teaching English in Vietnam to stacking shelves in supermarkets. All these life experiences have found their way into her poems, delighting readers with many environments (exotic and local) and a gallery of characters. Illuminating little snatches of autobiography are woven in to the fabric of this rich language, with allusions to all avenues of culture – television, film, literature and alternative music.
<p>
Here she personalises her reaction to a TV documentary on Chomsky, a contemporary American linguist, and philosopher –
<br><pre><font face=Times>
documentary –
the teabag tag
jiggler dangling
from
Noam Chomsky’s
cup
endearing</font face></pre>
<p>
Brown’s understandable language sings in a gentle way about life – its many moods, its paradoxes and surprises – people’s actions, her reactions.
<p>
The best definition of her poetic comes from an interview published by International Poetry Web in 2011:
<br>
‘I hope to ‘BE poetic’ without being ‘rarefied’; that is, to say what I mean rather than obfuscate with some over-embellished line or phrase. I expect a critical engagement that even while using apparently fairly straightforward words, doesn’t exclude language play or surprising, unexpected use of language, or, say, the elision of odd and exciting concepts and images, and digressions from the general drift in a poem. I guess, like my early influence, Mayakovsky, I’m not ‘TIED’ to it but I can’t deny that the poetic is very much a part of social and cultural critique.’ *
(Quoted from https://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/cou_article/item/19669/Interview-with-Pam-Brown)
<p>
There are not many collections of poetry that echo in today’s supermarket aisles, but Brown’s lines leapt out at me as I shopped yesterday afternoon:
<br><pre><font face=Times>
lonely bowl
of tom yum goong
time
makes your life
fiction
like
steepening chicken
with spicy slaw
steamy yet
impossibly
untrue
</font face></pre>
<br>
Depending on the order in which it is put/read, the previous verse can be seen as a great metaphor or a jump-cut narrative: I read it as consecutively both. This is one of the ‘poetic’ tricks in Brown’s toolbox.
<p>
Lou Reed’s song ‘Some Kinda Love’ has a pertinent lyric: “between thought and expression lies a lifetime.”
<p>
I can see Brown smile as she edits, adding little witticisms to spice the text:
<pre><font face=Times>
there’s a saying in russia –
the past
is unpredictable</font face></pre>
<p>
<i>click here for what we do</i> displays such moments of laughter, moments of joy and sorrow, and flashes of experience mixed with unpretentious intellectual asides – it’s a rich and lively collection , poetic without stylistic scaffolding and poetic flourishes. It is a further Brown gallery of wit and life, extending a 47 year writing career.
<br> </font face>
______________________________________________________________________________
<br><br><font face=Lucinda Grande><font size=2>[...] annotations in blue are by Pam Brown who, although writing poems, was still in high school in the mid-late 1960s.<br>
Pam Brown has never worked as a shelf stacker in a supermarket - the situation in the poem is imagined...</font face></font size>
</pre>
pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-19060141948957729612018-08-11T00:39:00.001-07:002018-08-11T00:39:45.291-07:00<p><br><font face=Liberation Serif><font size=4><font color=110066><b>Tim Wright reviews 'click here for what we do' by Pam Brown</b></font size></font color>
<p><font size=2><font face=Liberation Serif>
<i>click here for what we do</i> by Pam Brown<br>
Vagabond Press, $24.95 pb, 147 pp, 9781922181343
<p>
____________________________________________________________________________________
<p>
A few pages into this collection we read the line: ‘all of it is lies’. ‘It’ signals the irritation that motivates much of Pam Brown’s writing in <i>click here for what we do</i>. Memory, in these poems, is a problem. Brown’s is very much a poetry of movement: she desires to stay light and mobile, not to be detained by memory (in this way she sometimes brings to mind a serious hiker, weighing the items in her pack by the gram). And yet, she cannot help but take on that extra weight of the past; her present is perforated by it. This dialectic of memory and forgetting runs through the collection. For Brown especially, there is no satisfactory point of rest or synthesis: it is not only memory’s burden that she has to contend with but also the particular ways that the memories of her own generation of sixty-eighters have been imagined and historicised.
<p>
The third poem, ‘Susceptibility Song’, contains the most extended invective against ‘the past’: ‘discarding the discarded / tired of the past // finished with recounting’; ‘erase / remembered moments’; ‘forget it // never retrace steps / cancel the lot’; ‘the past is / stifling’. On the page following this imperative to ‘cancel the lot’, illustrating this double helix of memory and forgetting, Brown describes some of the things to be forgotten, thereby remembering them. Her circumspection in the poems comes across as honouring the integrity of that collective and individual past. Memories appear, but only as glimpses, as if the door must be quickly shut lest they escape and mutate. And yet, for the reader, the excursions into the past are gifts amid the otherwise predominance of present tense. Following a discussion of spartan furnishing aesthetics, a beautiful, brief memory appears of an empty room from Brown’s past, its two occupants, ‘high on cleanskin / & cynar’.
<p>
Brown’s poetry, particularly of the last twenty years, works the realm of the minor and the non-transcendent. It proceeds by hesitation, doubling back, self-questioning, and is heavily shaped by the time of its writing. The form of swaying, concatenated fragments is continuous with Brown’s previous collections; the difference is in the dimensions. Each of the four poems that make up this volume are longer than any single previous poem of Brown’s, and are interconnected to the degree that the work could be read as one long poem in four movements. One result of this increased length is that there is simply more <i>middle</i> to these poems; they keep going, past the point that close readers of Brown’s work might expect them to begin shaping towards an endpoint, creating an effect palpably reminiscent of the infinite scroll feature of web design. (Incidentally, some of the material in <i>click here for what we do</i> was first published online: a format which suits these longer poems well, being able to present their verticality in a way the codex book cannot.)
<p>
The poems acknowledge various horrors, as these are relayed through the news cycle. At times Brown seems to throw her hands up in desperation. What there is not is a wintry acceptance of the status quo. In ‘Susceptibility Song’, a moment of hope appears with news of the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’, which was finalised in May 2017. As the reader of this poem knows, and the Pam Brown writing this note of optimism does not, the Statement’s recommendations were summarily rejected by the Turnbull government several months later. And yet this section and its situational irony remain in the poem, testament to Brown’s loyalty to a process ethos, to thinking and emotion within the time of writing. This loyalty can at times be exhausting; when a different tense appears – a past tense, a conditional – it comes as a relief. There is anxiety in this mode of writing, and simultaneously composure, steadiness. The poet may throw her hands up, but the poem continues.
<p>
The second poem, ‘Left Wondering’, transitions between fragments of lived duration and observations on a variety of topics: fragments of a letter, a discourse on ‘rejectamenta’, a note of gratitude for having lived ‘in the time / of so many / women of influence’, and four pages ruminating on the topic of the painter Agnes Martin. Right at the end, the poem arrives at the contention that to understand abstraction you have to ‘ask the women’. The rightness and clarity of this is immediate but it is also underwritten by the ‘working out’ that has preceded it, the poem’s rhythmic, overlapping thinking. We are fruitfully ‘left wondering’, encouraged to track back to work out how it was we arrived here.
<p>
Which brings us to the imperative title of this collection, in which the ‘here’ to be clicked is non-compliant, a dead link: tap it and nothing happens. As with so much of Pam Brown’s poetry, we are not offered an elsewhere, but attuned to where we in fact are.
<p>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbLLqDmDxYbzuGQHXh8xt4r21bjp0gQ2RK5nWMCW4s986ow-PKYxF1Vv4Csf1_cnXviKTjGgdfqV-92e4jr1zvtfm6lt8gVVceKbT4mHxFpg84yLq_mVfebnvIyos555m80X1-Ldpj2DOF/s1600/Picture1.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbLLqDmDxYbzuGQHXh8xt4r21bjp0gQ2RK5nWMCW4s986ow-PKYxF1Vv4Csf1_cnXviKTjGgdfqV-92e4jr1zvtfm6lt8gVVceKbT4mHxFpg84yLq_mVfebnvIyos555m80X1-Ldpj2DOF/s200/Picture1.png" width="200" height="200" data-original-width="156" data-original-height="156" /></a>
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<b>Tim Wright</b> is a reader, scribbler, and occasional university tutor. He completed a thesis in 2015 on the poetry of Ken Bolton, Pam Brown, and Laurie Duggan. He is the author of <i>The night’s live changes</i> (Rabbit, 2014). His collection <i>Suns</i> will be published by Puncher and Wattmann in 2018.
<p>
Published in <i>Australian Book Review</i>, August 2018, no. 403</font size>
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Return to <a href= http://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com/2014/03/reviews-of-pam-browns-books-please.html> Reviews of Pam Brown's Books</a></font size></font face>
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pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-40637498570523295522018-06-03T19:06:00.002-07:002019-11-16T21:27:28.462-08:00<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE8NW7Gzhm4coWNU92Pk4uNOMf4f2c8KYgFBAUTUTQl63O6s7WObr_k_P4-OH9i5bwSKkR8LO0tAQMv6ikDwv0ou9DCybkptLRsTPtOklWsFjBb3bP5CAo843fqvrXINn7hfXP0DSI5QMT/s1600/Subtraction.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE8NW7Gzhm4coWNU92Pk4uNOMf4f2c8KYgFBAUTUTQl63O6s7WObr_k_P4-OH9i5bwSKkR8LO0tAQMv6ikDwv0ou9DCybkptLRsTPtOklWsFjBb3bP5CAo843fqvrXINn7hfXP0DSI5QMT/s320/Subtraction.jpg" width="320" height="236" data-original-width="703" data-original-height="518" /></a></div>
<p>
<font face=Arial><font size=3>Subtraction<br>
Fiona Hile</font size> <font size=2>(Vagabond Press, Sydney, 2018)
<p>
Launch talk at University of Sydney, 28th May 2018
<hr width=/100%>
<p>
I last heard Fiona Hile read poetry here alongside six other shortlisted nominees for the 2017 Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award. It's a bequest that offers a modest cash prize and publication for the winning manuscript by an Australian woman poet. Fiona received the award and so that also funded the publication of her poems with the dedicated, diverse and dynamic publisher Vagabond Press.
<p>
So now we have this book called <i>Subtraction</i>. Of course, in arithmetic, 'subtraction' is the operation of removing objects from a number of them or, simply, taking something away. Given the title, the book's fascinating cover is apt - it's a detail from Helen Johnson's painting called 'Things People Say They Should Give Up'. A woman leans back with one arm extended upwards in a feline stretch as she's engrossed in reading Karl Marx's <i>Das Kapital</i>. The other woman is using a laptop - we can speculate on what she's doing - there's a bunch of 50 and 100 dollar notes and what I take to be hunks of tuna under a trailing vine and, in the corner, just slipping off the cover, there's a very canny product placement - a bottle of Penfold's Gr... 'Gr' - it has to be 'Grange'. One question is - Who would have a bottle of Grange in the first place? Probably not a poet. The only person I can think of who 'gave one up', so to speak, was Barry O'Farrell (that's a New South Wales joke). Perhaps the poet, the painter, or the publisher might send an invoice to Penfolds for the product display? What would Karl Marx say?
<p>
Anyway - to the poems! (I should preface what I'm going to say with 'I could be totally wrong'.) A phrase 'the alembic of her line' was once used to talk about the poems in Fiona's first book <i>Novelties</i> and in this new collection she continues to transform and refine language through image and even to amplify that technique as she delves into an examination of an age-old, complex conundrum. I'll quote from the online flyer notes for this launch because they're more succinct than I might be - 'Taking its cues from Rimbaud’s call for the reinvention of love, <i>Subtraction</i> tours the hologrammatic labyrinths of the English language to ask again: What is love? And what does the other want?' <p>
'Hologrammatic labyrinth' is a great term for Fiona's poetry. The intensity of these poems' persistent and kind of heady rush of imagery might cause a minimalist poet (like me) to lose sleep. The rush can sometimes seem like you're streaming glossolalia but happily Fiona's poems, although forceful, aren't actually charismatic, so they're not trying to persuade or sway anyone - they're investigative - of both poetry and their topic, 'love'. There is a sense of method in the clusters of images and scenes, or vignettes. The idea and the main question is foregrounded, so once you tune in to the theme you can surrender to the totally impressive offbeat and unpredictable connections and abutments.
<p>
Fiona gestures to philosophy in these poems. Though we know that philosophers and poets haven't really got along very well since at least the 4th century b.c. when Plato banished poets from the republic. Nonetheless, Fiona does <u>read</u> philosophy. Plato's academy had an inscription engraved above the door - 'Let no one ignorant of geometry enter'. The still-living French philosopher Alain Badiou might have had an influence on Fiona's writing. In his book on twentieth century writing, <i>The Age of The Poets</i>, he revisits the Platonic antagonism between poetry and maths. Fiona's book's title alludes to a connection with mathematics. She also selected the poems for a recent issue of 'Cordite Poetry Review', her chosen theme was 'Mathematics' - though Fiona <u>has</u> <u>said</u> that she's not really into maths.
<p>
In <i>Subtraction</i> an occasional guest is the precursor to existentialism, early 19th century philosopher Georg Hegel. Along with his theories of the spirit or the 'geist', Hegel had things to say about the connection or function of desire in the everyday world. And these poems consider exactly that.
<p>
In Fiona's poem 'Recollections of the Mortal Body' - set in the local swimming pool - some lines go - 'your silicone shadow glimmering against the hurricane,/ like love as the fiction of a sublime pragmatics,/ the aluminium waters sinew and repeat: <i>shame enters/ only through the recollection of the body</i>.' That last line, direct from Hegel.
<p>
And in that poem, from Greek mythology, Leander, the young lover of the priestess Hero, is introduced. He drowned swimming across the Hellespont* to visit her. From the poem -'So let the wisdom of folly unfold in lettered wings/ and tell me again how Leander crossed the hellespont/in a flurry of greased-up limbs.'
<p>
In a subsequent poem, 'Swimming to Leander', using tercets Fiona imagines young Leander - '...If stung by jellyfish,/ carry on. The last time I saw you, unbuttoned to the whale,/ caressing like a chook on heat./ To whose banquet were you hurrying?' //'Keep your eyes underwater when next you swim'// 'As for love, stop worrying, I am potential/ biological immortality in at least one species" - the poem ends with an oxymoron -'Grow me a science of emptied hieroglyphics/and I will pinpoint your location with stochastic accuracy'
<p>
'Stochastic' - a term used in statistical analysis. It's about having a probability distribution, usually with finite variance - so it's imprecise.
<p>
In a recent conversation Fiona mentioned a part of the Greek myth in Homer's classical epic poem 'The Odyssey' that's perhaps an analogy or at least a suggestion of what function writing these poems might have proffered. While Odysseus's consort Penelope waits <u>for</u> <u>a</u> <u>decade</u> for him to return home from Troy to the island of Ithaca, she uses weaving as a device to turn away over 100 advances. Penelope tells these many suitors that she will marry one of them when she finishes weaving a burial shroud for Laertes, Odysseus's father. It's a fib. She weaves the shroud during the day, at night, away from the attention of the suitors, Penelope undoes the weaving that she'd done that day - it's an artful yet labour-intensive defence - the weaving and unweaving perhaps similar to the process of making poems. In <i>Subtraction</i> the conundrum of encounters with the possibilities or absence of love is unravelled, but here the threads or lines haven't all been discarded.
<p>
The poem 'Muster' is about this process, this 'unravelling' - I'll quote the final section of it - 'I stand at the rim of a system of infringements, codes/ and punishments to rival the ancient Greeks. Talking down/ from a position to differential, the coxcomb coral of six/ fingered bounties makes love to the idea of the voice/ making love to itself, establishes an iconic, incurable/ distance. Now I dream during the day and write all night,/sewing a template for the region of your delirious.//While you spiral freely in the conundrum of lost territories,/ harbourless wanderings distill my ingrown love.'
<p>
To change tack now and briefly reveal Fiona's breadth of interests - Situationism gets a look-in here too. In the 1950s the Situationists wanted to disturb the categorization of art and culture as separate activities and to transform them into part of everyday life. A poem called 'The Inevitable Beauty of the Viewer When Faced with the Partitionist Tactics of the Situationist Lover' is astonishingly deductive. Again, to quote : 'Nothing to see in the spectacle of your lips/ but the insistence of the letter in the mire of situationist abandonment./ Keep telling yourself that/ the poem is a container for the formless horror of your eyes as emotion/ skinning you to the scrutiny of the automaton as inadequate/ representation of the poem as a container for the formless/ horror of the delimited passion of the never stops not being written'
<p>
But myths, maths and philosophy are just three components in a myriad. There's much experiment with language - there's dada, metonymy, proper nouns as verbs and so on - plus, the poems offer plenty of humour. Popular characters appear - Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, Emily Bronte, Lady Chatterly, Steven Spielberg, Kate Winslet - whose last name becomes a verb - Chrissy Amphlett - 'now that Chrissy Amphlett's gone/ what more is there to say?'
<p>
Given the exigency of my alloted 10 minutes that I've probably gone over, here are a few favourite lines, without comment -
<p>
'If the syntax won't admit us we will have to break it.'
<p>
'The slum landlord in your bed massaged you to tenancy...'
<p>
'Micro-chipped <i>nature is a beautiful thing;</i>/beauty of art is a beautiful representation'
<p>
'Handing you the jumper leads inevitably proposes connections...'
<p>
'A handful of wax and a fathom of chain means/love is close, desire is far away.'
<p>
'The appeal to nature confines us within the limits of natural numbers./There is something mundane about the way we love./ And yet, in the hedged bets of our narrow beds we are alive to thrill.'
<p>
These poems are doing a lot of <u>thinking</u> around both the renunciation and the pursuit of love and/or desire. That's a <u>big</u> topic. Some say poetry resists the concept of use value - its function is to make culture - poetry is thinking about thinking. It's something that I'd say Fiona Hile does round the clock.
<p>
These are wonderfully difficult poems - I can't say that I've figured out everything about them and I've presented only a smidgen of their references and concepts - I didn't even mention Heloise and Abelard, John Keats, Edmund Spenser's Calidore, the knight of courtesy, (adlib : not even maybe o I dunno - Michel Foucault?!). Which is exactly why I'd suggest that this book will be read, reread, and read again. There's plenty to impute, to love, to think about, to laugh with, to be both perplexed and charmed by and, overall, to take pleasure in appreciating the superlative artistry of a poet whose presence in Australian poetry signals a unique rejuvenation of the genre. It's a complex, fabulous set of poems - congratulations Fiona!
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NOTES:<br>
*Hellespont - the ancient name for the Dardanelles, named after the legendary Helle, who fell into the strait and was drowned while escaping with her brother Phrixus from their stepmother, Ino, on a golden-fleeced ram.
<p>
FH in an email to me: <i>And maybe the whole book could be said to perform writing as a way of calling love into being and also keeping it at bay. Or writing installed as a more bearable fake obstacle to the absence of love. </i>
<p>
<u>more fave quotes - no time to say them :</u>
<p>
'Raise high your melancholy and frigate, Tinnitus soundscape/your experimental chin cinders appetise when fenugreek soliloquoys/the aforementioned.'
<p>
'How can you say you don't believe in Spring/ when our trajectories collide with calamitous outbreaks/of Physics?'
<p>
'When the actuaries invent a diagnostic/ category for love, we'll Creon/ ourselves senseless, community <i>sans</i>/ jurisdiction, free. Enough about me-/Here comes the booze bus.'
<p>
'<i>Caritas</i> carved deep into shallow stone/ filters lime-wash through purple hashtag tunnels./ Am I a woman or a man?'
<p>
p.s - 'Stochastic'- incidentally there's a tea room in King Street Newtown called 'Stochastic' - I'm not sure what the service would be like.
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p.p.s. - Everyone knows Lou Reed & John Cale's song for Andy Warhol - 'Trouble with Classicists' - yes?</p> </font face></font size>
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<font face=Arial><font size=1><p>Return to<a href="http://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/extras-selected-reviews-and-other.html"> Extras</a> or <a href="http://pambrownbooks.blogspot.com.au/">Pam Brown site</a></font size></font face></span></span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-67823352408047438072018-04-15T18:05:00.000-07:002018-04-16T03:34:49.230-07:00<p><font face=Avenir Next Medium><font size=3>
A Reading</font size=3>
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Ali Alizadeh Pam Brown<br>
Ella O'Keefe Ann Vickery </font face=Avenir Next Medium></font size=6>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBLxK2a6wLn9CoNtfAkWx7YjtiWZIUFsxYkys8ygLe55OveFGmkGZaDkTKDwQImuhOfkCldKX0rlRn9WV_xRH4Tjfe5vW1accM9zsseSyKlQVyCVXMU6X9Y4VUPaCwTHU4w5XtXYd1NEaH/s1600/Books.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBLxK2a6wLn9CoNtfAkWx7YjtiWZIUFsxYkys8ygLe55OveFGmkGZaDkTKDwQImuhOfkCldKX0rlRn9WV_xRH4Tjfe5vW1accM9zsseSyKlQVyCVXMU6X9Y4VUPaCwTHU4w5XtXYd1NEaH/s320/Books.png" width="320" height="140" data-original-width="494" data-original-height="216" /></a>
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4pm<br>
Sunday 13th May<br>
<p>
at<br>
<a href= https://www.broadsheet.com.au/melbourne/bars/alderman>The Alderman</a><br>
134 Lygon Street<br>
Brunswick Melbourne
<p>
everyone welcome
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<b>Ali Alizadeh</b> was born in Tehran, the then-capital of the Kingdom of Iran, two years before the Iranian Revolution transformed the country into an Islamic Republic. His family immigrated from Iran when he was 13. He has published a number of books including <i>Eyes in Times of War </i> (Salt Publishing, 2006); with Kenneth Avery, translations of mystical poems of a Sufi master,<i>Fifty Poems of Attar </i>(re.press, 2007),<i>The New Angel</i> (Transit Lounge, 2008),<i>Iran: My Grandfather</i> (Transit Lounge, 2010), <i>Ashes in the Air</i> (UQP, 2011), a fast poeticisation of Jacques Lacan called <i>Acts</i> (Black Rider, 2013), <i>Transactions</i> (UQP, 2013) and, most recently <i>The Last Days of Jeanne D'Arc</i> (Giramondo, 2017). Having decided to leave Australia in search of creative freedom and inspiration, he lived in China for two years until 2007, then in Turkey for another year, before moving to Dubai where he taught writing and literature for three years. He eventually returned to Melbourne, where he lectures at Monash University.
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<b>Pam Brown's</b> many books of poetry include <i>Text thing, Authentic Local, Dear Deliria, Home by Dark </i>and <i>Missing up</i>. Pam, a dedicated amateur, has earned a living in a range of occupations. She has been writing, collaborating, editing and publishing in diverse modes both locally and internationally for over four decades. She has come to Melbourne to read a selection from her newest collection from Vagabond Press, <i>Click here for what we do</i>. Over the years she has moved around - living at various times in several towns and cities - but has always returned to live in the perpetually reconstructing city of Sydney.
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<b>Ella O'Keefe</b> is a poet and researcher living in Melbourne. Her poems have been published in <i>Cordite, Steamer, Overland Blog, Text Journal</i> and <i>Best Australian Poems</i>. She is a former director of the Critical Animals research symposium. Ella's chapbook <i>Rhinestone</i> was published by Stale Objects dePress in 2015.Her work on radio has been broadcast by 'The Night Air' on Radio National, 'All the Best' on FBI Radio and 'Final Draft' on 2SER FM. She is Audio Producer for <i>Cordite Poetry Review</i>.
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<b>Ann Vickery</b> is the author of <i>Devious Intimacy</i> (Hunter, 2015) and <i>The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon</i> (Vagabond Press, 2014). She is also the author of <i>Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing</i> (Wesleyan University Press, 2000) and <i>Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry</i> (Salt, 2007). She is co-editor with John Hawke of <i>Poetry and the Trace</i> (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013) and co-editor with Margaret Henderson of <i>Manifesting Australian Literary Feminisms: Nexus and Faultlines</i> (Australian Literary Studies, 2009). Ann was editor-in-chief of HOW2 and is poetry editor of Puncher & Wattmann. She is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Deakin University and lives in Melbourne
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pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-58870250015040390772018-03-13T14:58:00.000-07:002018-03-25T22:46:59.011-07:00<p>
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You are invited to celebrate<br>
two new poetry collections <br>
from Vagabond Press
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KEN BOLTON &   PAM BROWN</font face=Avenir Next Medium></font size=3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdXyawHa-LKu1DvRGZoqi-OYVa6fRzwr5DoTwwCmrb8AT9MvWbj7qcYaZuGb-sCE8GRNBN4KwBaVtQlZ-_g18c0BDoRrMiu_CxmYq3u0yF1ge_TFZVjdlwAauqQa_xapXQ5WCPyISufEaK/s1600/KB-PB-covers.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdXyawHa-LKu1DvRGZoqi-OYVa6fRzwr5DoTwwCmrb8AT9MvWbj7qcYaZuGb-sCE8GRNBN4KwBaVtQlZ-_g18c0BDoRrMiu_CxmYq3u0yF1ge_TFZVjdlwAauqQa_xapXQ5WCPyISufEaK/s400/KB-PB-covers.jpg" width="400" height="291" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1165" /></a>
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with readings from <br>
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Astrid Lorange<br>
Toby Fitch<br>
Ken Bolton<br>
Pam Brown<br></font face=Avenir Next Medium></font size=3>
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Ms of Ceremonies - Melissa Swann</font face=Avenir Next Medium></font size=2>
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3pm<br>
Saturday 14th April<br>
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at<br>
<a href=http://www.parkviewhotel.net.au/home.html>Parkview Hotel</a><br>
corner Mitchell Road & Harley Street<br>
Alexandria
<p>
everyone welcome
<p>
Click <a href=https://vagabondpress.net/collections/frontpage>here</a> for Vagabond Press<br></font face=Avenir Next Medium></font size=3>
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How to get to Parkview Hotel<br>
Mitchell & Harley, Alexandria<br>
transport & map click <a href=http://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/blog-post.html>here</a></font face=Avenir Next Medium></font size=2>
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About <i>Starting At Basheer's</i> :
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<i> Starting At Basheer’s</i> shows a determined ‘tightening up’ of the language and sentiment brought to writing and thinking: the book responds to growing tensions and growing animosities felt in Australian society: bleakly reductivist withdrawals of sympathy, and of automatic goodwill, are tested, examined and worked around. Still, the poems remain open to playfulness & aesthetic opportunism, which is good—so, jokes, rapid shifts of direction and attention, allusions to popular culture and to literature and the visual arts. Characteristically the poems think through experiences, issues, social, ethical and aesthetic problems, using the lens of the everyday. And, here's a plus, at the same time they refuse to preclude any one register—high, low, or middling, the casual or the seriously proposed, the specialist or the amateur. At all times the ‘Self’, the ‘citizen, is weighed and judged in the light of the imagined Other.
<p>
A loony tune, something of a zany, a yo-yo with money, <b>Ken Bolton</b> has been variously described. In truth, he is a curious figure— irascible, intemperate, vituperative, yet devoted, apparently, to an idea of 'the Beautiful', as somehow defined. Lord David Cecil held him to be 'the Hulk Hogan <i>des nos jours</i>' — and found in him 'a Pol Pot, perhaps the very Pol Pot, of the aesthetic.' Bolton has published many books, the most recent published in 2017 - <i>Lonnie's Lament</i> (Wakefield Press) and <i>Species of Spaces</i> (Shearsman Books).
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About <i>Click here for what we do</i> :
<br>
<i>Click here for what we do</i> is a cluster of four loosely connected poems that are not only sceptical of the status quo's serial mendacities and hype but, in a way, they also attempt a coming to terms with the erosion of the idealistic conditions that once made non-mainstream culture, including poetry, so viable and, even, necessary. For Pam writing poetry is a habit, a disorganised ritual. Her poetic inventories begin in everyday bricolage. Real things interrupt the poems the same way thoughts and phrases do. She dismantles monumental intent and then, by mixing (rather than layering), splices the remains into a melange of imagery and thoughtful lyric. Hers is a friendly intelligence that clues in connections to the 'social' as the poems make political and personal associative links. Spurning any lofty design these poems debug the absurdities of contemporary materialism with surreptitious humour. Though disquiet is present it's usually temporary. Here, thinking about the future can be 'trickgensteinian' and yet the poems also offer a circumspect optimism.
<p>
<b>Pam Brown's</b> many books of poetry include <i>Text thing, Authentic Local, Dear Deliria, Home by Dark </i>and <i>Missing up</i> (the latter published by Vagabond Press in 2015). Pam, a dedicated amateur, has earned a living in a range of occupations. She has been writing, collaborating, editing and publishing in diverse modes both locally and internationally for over four decades. Over the years she has moved around - living at various times in several towns and cities - but has always returned to live in the perpetually reconstructing city of Sydney.
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About the friends reading at the launch party -
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<b>Astrid Lorange</b> is a poet, writer and teacher from Sydney. She is the author of <i>Eating and Speaking</i> (Tea Party Republicans Press, 2011), 'How Reading Is Written - A Brief Index To Gertrude Stein' (Wesleyan Univ Press, 2014) and <i>Ex</i> (SOdpress, 2016). Download or read <i>Ex</i> <a href=http://staleobjectsdepress.tumblr.com/post/140410149160/astrid-lorange-ex>here</a>. Astrid also writes critical articles and essays and lectures in art theory at UNSW Art & Design.
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<b>Toby Fitch</b> is the author of <i>Rawshock</i> (Puncher & Wattmann 2012), which won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, <i>Jerilderies </i> (Vagabond 2014), <i>The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau</i> (Vagabond 2016), <i>Undulating Cloud Sonnet</i> (SOdpress, 2017) and <i> The Or Tree</i>, a fictitious recreation of the fictitious poem, ‘The Oak Tree’, by Virginia Woolf’s character Orlando. See the first two chapters <a href=https://redroomcompany.org/poems/?search=the+or+tree+toby>here</a>. Based in Sydney, he teaches creative writing, directs the Australian Poets Festival, runs the Sappho Books poetry reading series, and is poetry editor for <i>Overland</i>.
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pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-76799919923637063092017-09-21T17:37:00.001-07:002017-09-21T17:44:41.427-07:00<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVByWdwgHctXfhTdyHU0420LTNpz-fzdasq-dCt1jusah3AsZSSTZ1O3D7dGi5JQKgfMuX9FAPmVGBkQWrV0FoD27GOmoh4v18CaXrdAp8s1TAoMPa6_WxLq63CvyqxqRl06GCTeWE_YL2/s1600/9781922181411_Nguyen_FC_medium.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVByWdwgHctXfhTdyHU0420LTNpz-fzdasq-dCt1jusah3AsZSSTZ1O3D7dGi5JQKgfMuX9FAPmVGBkQWrV0FoD27GOmoh4v18CaXrdAp8s1TAoMPa6_WxLq63CvyqxqRl06GCTeWE_YL2/s320/9781922181411_Nguyen_FC_medium.jpg" width="227" height="320" data-original-width="170" data-original-height="240" /></a></div>
<p><font face=Arial><font size=3>Captive and Temporal
<br> Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng </font face></font size><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> (Vagabond
Press, Sydney, 2017)<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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Bài giới thiệu của Pam Brown, đọc nhân buổi ra mắt sách tại Trường Đại học Sydney, 8 tháng 9, 2017
<p><font face=Arial><font size=2>Translated into Vietnamese by Quang Hominh</font face=Arial></font size=2></span></div>
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Sinh năm 1956 ở Đà Nẵng, Việt Nam, Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng nhận học bổng Colombo Plan, qua Úc du học năm 1974. Hoàng từng làm việc với đài phát thanh Radio Australia và sau đó trong ngành kỹ thuật tin học. Trong hơn 30 năm, Hoàng viết dưới bút hiệu Thường Quán, cộng tác rộng rãi với nhiều tạp chí văn học lớn ở Việt nam, Hoa kỳ và Úc. Hoàng vẫn giữ liên hệ chặt chẽ với văn giới trong nước Việt Nam và đã dịch nhiều thơ sang tiếng Việt. Gần đây, anh mới hoàn tất biên soạn một tập thơ từ ba nhà thơ Việt, ấn hành với Vagabond Press Asia Pacific Poetry Series, vừa ra mắt giữa tháng 8, 2017 tại Sydney.
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Năm 2012, Vagabond Press xuất bản tập thơ khổ nhỏ (chapbook) Years, Elegy của Hoàng trong Loạt Thơ Rare Object. Vài năm trước, năm 2014, sáu bài thơ trong tập Captive and Temporal được chọn vào tuyển tập Những Nhà Thơ Á Úc Đương Đại (Contemporary Asian Australian Poets), do Adam Aitken, Kim Boey và Michelle Cahill đồng biên tập.
<p>
Thơ Hoàng nhuộm đầy những hình ảnh, đôi khi 'siêu thực' hay dường như đến từ trong mơ. Và mơ với những ngôn ngữ khác nhau. Michael Brennan, với Vagabond Press, nhận xét: "Thơ Hoàng triển khai từ những mảnh vỡ ngôn từ, qua những ảnh hình, đưa đến một cảnh quan dùng một ngôn ngữ đã được 'lựa chọn' cho thích ứng với những giằng co và trải nghiệm."
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Hoàng giải thích: 'Cảnh quan nơi tôi 'vào' thường quyết định thứ ngôn ngữ được chọn. Rất có thể nó là một tổng hợp những cảnh quan nhìn thấy và cảnh quan khơi dậy từ nhà kho tâm tưởng và/hay tưởng tượng ra trên tâm trí. Những tâm ảnh này tạo ra những căng thẳng, giục giã ngôn từ với một đà đẩy, được duy trì nhờ một thứ âm nhạc tư duy có từ ngay chính sự chuyển động này.
<p>
Nhiều bài thơ trong tập Captive and Temporal được đặt trong thành phố 'sống được' nhất trên thế giới lần thứ 7, Melbourne. Tập thơ mở với bài 'November, end of a street, Melbourne' ('Tháng Mười Một, cuối một phố, Melbourne') -
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"Những đảo từ mây góm ghém và gió nhẹ vỗ bờ, ngợp trong nắng sớm, một đường cây, đầy và xanh mướt
một kẻ bước trái phép, giữa những dung lượng và khối hình"
<p>
Chẳng bao lâu sau đó, thi điệu và bút pháp tập thơ biến đổi với một bài 'thơ liệt kê' (list poem) ẩn mật, chỉ trích giới quyền thế, nói đích danh là 'nhà cầm quyền cao nhất trong vùng' - một thế lực tòa án mải-chìm-trong tơ-tưởng, sẵn sàng buộc tội bị cáo của nó. Và, những thủ pháp biến thể này đã gieo hạt nẩy nầm nội dung tập thơ.
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Suốt tập thơ, Hoàng bày biện một tổ hợp những hình ảnh, đa phần là tư riêng (dẫu vài bài trong đó không-phức-tạp). Một trong những thi pháp của anh là trộn lẫn và diễn đạt một cách ấn tượng, rồi ngưng bỏ, cắt một lằn ngang rồi bỏ lửng. Gig Ryan, một nhà thơ/phê-bình ở Melbourne, nhận định rằng với thơ Hoàng, 'nhiều bài hầu như là những bí ẩn về tương tác và triệt thối, trong đó sự giằng co giữa chiêm nghiệm và trải nghiệm đời sống không bao giờ có thể được giải minh'.
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Có những lúc, qua thơ-về-thơ ('meta-poetry'), anh cho chúng ta thấy cách anh ta nghĩ về chuyện viết. Một thí dụ: bài 'Autumn Writing' ('Viết Mùa Thu'), một bài thơ lạ, đầy kịch tính, bắt đầu với một câu hỏi khá thông thường -
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"Có thể nào mình chỉ đơn giản viết về một đám lửa để làm ấm một buổi sáng,..."
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rồi chuyển qua một hình ảnh bất ngờ của một cái đầu lớn -
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"Giản dị, chắc nịch, một đầu
của một người, một thú
di chuyển trong đám cỏ cao-ngang-cổ.
Một đầu khác nhắm đích. Mắt căng, tập trung, thở chầm... chậm. Lúc này, trái tim chữ thập (+)
Một tiếng, gọn, kim loại."
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Vậy đây là cuộc chiến - những người này ẩn núp trong lùm cỏ cao, rình nhau? Hay là một kẻ săn rình thú?
<p>
Nó tiếp tục - và đây là mặc khải về quá trình bài viết -
"Bài thơ nằm ngoài cái đầu, một khoảng xa. Như cường độ tổn thương đến sọ, máu huyết được bảo dung, những tế bào mềm, những màng óc - những dữ kiện bệnh lý này chưa bao giờ được xem là một phần của ngôn từ mùa thu."
Một số bài, như 'Memory Flash' ('Chớp Trí Nhớ'), trực tiếp nói về chiến tranh.
<p>
Thơ Hoàng biểu hiện nhiều hình ảnh siêu thực - thí dụ, qua nhiều yếu tố linh hoạt trong 'Quagmire' ('Vũng Lầy') -
<p>
"tiếp tục đào xới
không tìm khoai tím, ếch cát, mạch nước ma, vết cắn
người cổ sử, chỉ là cừu cái [& xương thú chết] và quạ rao ngày mới.
<p>
Đôi khi một bò sát đổi hình, đôi khi một cợt đùa hương hoa, một tiếng sấm đập im, những chớp
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sáng hừng lên sau những đám mây dầy (Apollinaire có thể nhầm với tình nhân)."
<p>
Nhiều nhà thơ Pháp có mặt trong thơ anh - Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Valery, Charles Baudelaire và, trong những khoảnh khắc siêu thực, có tiếng dội của Andre Breton. Chắc bạn cũng biết, Việt nam dưới quyền đô hộ của Pháp và được biết là Đông Dương từ 1887 đến 1954, khi Việt nam đánh bại Pháp và lấy lại độc lập. Dấu tích từ thời đó hình như có ảnh hưởng. Hoàng cũng có dịch rộng rãi thơ Pháp.
<p>
Một số bài trong tập tìm lại - cả với nghĩa đen và trong trí nhớ - Hà nội, bạn cũ, đồng nghiệp, thân mẫu Hoàng, nhớ lại những lần vào rạp chiếu bóng thời mới lớn ở Đà nẵng xem phim hài, cao bồi viễn tây, và một phóng sự lạnh người về Auschwitz.
<p>
Có những bài tưởng niệm cảm động về những nhà thơ như Joseph Brodsky, Garcia Lorca, kịch gia Úc Bruce Keller. Và có bốn bài tưởng niệm rất đẹp, đầy tình cảm nhớ về những nhà văn/thơ Việt nam: Thanh Tâm Tuyền, Lê Đạt, Nguyễn Chí Thiện và Phùng Nguyễ̃n.
<p>
Trong phần cuối tập thơ, bài 'By accident' phân tích cuốn phim 'Heaven's Gate' của Michael Cimino. Hoàng bảo đúng ra nên đổi tựa là 'Thất Bại Lớn Nhất', nhưng anh tiếp tục viết, về thực dân Mỹ và ảnh hưởng của sự khuếch trương kinh tế từ những nhà tư bản khai thác đất đai đến người di dân và công nhân. Anh nhắc đến một sách của Alexis de Tocqueville (nhà khoa học chính trị và ngoại giao thế kỷ 19), về nền dân chủ Hoa kỳ và chấm dứt bài thơ với một quả quyết -
<p>
"Tôi viết đây trong quán cà phê cạnh Thư viện Baillieu, nghĩ đến một sưu tập gia đình kế bên về nghệ thuật Úc, và cảnh nghệ thuật quốc gia này
đã chẳng ngang đâu so với Wyoming, hay Naples
trên bình diện bạo lực hay xung đột
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để rồi tôi nhận nhanh rằng: Không, đó là một phân tích dễ dãi. Tôi phải cố gắng tìm học
<p>
một thổ ngữ, chưa chết vì bị quên lãng
trên đất này, đúng, một ngôn ngữ, vẫn dùng dù ngược với vận may lịch sử."
<p>
Những bài thơ của Hoàng đi khắp hoàn cầu, từ Instanbul đến Chợ Lớn, qua Paris, Moscow đến Việt nam, Canberra, Nam Sydney, rồi trở về phố St Kilda ở Melbourne và đến một đại học trong thành phố đó với 'A dedication poem to my alma mater, Monash' ('Một bài thơ tặng trường cũ của tôi, Monash') -
<p>
"Ngôi trường cũ của tôi, tôi nhớ trường khi tôi rớt, chữ 'Rớt' tôi bắt đầu nếm được với trường Môn nào đòi hỏi dùng thước đo, hay cái bàn tính thô sơ thuở đầu.
Bởi vì điều may từ những cú sốc khổ nhọc là: Kant, Wittgenstein, Mill và Marx,
Peter Singer và Dr C. L. Ten
<p>
Chắc hẳn rằng, chỉ với tình yêu, cạnh bên ý nghĩ, đơn thuần, sẽ có được
<p>
Những tản bộ đêm, dặm dài, từ nhà ga Clayton về lại sảnh cư xá, từng mảnh bùng lên, niềm hân hoan tuyệt vời."
<p>
Sau khi bảo rằng anh sẽ trở lại, khi tuổi già, để được đọc sách dưới cây khuyên diệp trong khuôn viên trường, mấy câu cuối trong bài này nghĩ lại -
<p>
"Ta được phép sai và dị, kỳ. Mọi hiền nhân đã qui Đông
(sau những vùng núi non)
Mọi triết gia tôi từng biết dưới mái trường đã thành giáo sư danh dự."
<p>
Nhà lý thuyết gia về truyền thông người Ý Franco 'Bifo' Berardi có nói "Thơ ca là sự mở lại của bất định, một cử chỉ châm biếm của sự vượt quá ý nghĩa vốn đã thiết lập của chữ" và trong tập thơ bao quát và phức tạp này, tôi nghĩ rằng đó là điều Hoàng đang làm. Một ngôn ngữ đặc trưng và đầy sáng tạo trong Captive and Temporal sẽ giúp bạn chú tâm một khoảng thời gian dài.
,p>
-------
vi lãng dịch từ bản nguyên tác tiếng Anh
<p>
http://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com.au/2017/09/captive-and-temporal-nguyen-tien-hoang.html
<p>
Pam Brown là một nhà thơ Úc. Từ 1971, bà đã ra mắt nhiều tập thơ & văn xuôi. Bà cũng có viết nhiều phê bình sách, tiểu luận, văn bản kịch, làm video & phim ảnh. Bà đã từng biên tập cho tạp chí Overland, Jacket, Jacket2, Fulcrum và VLAK Magazine. Thêm vào đó, bà cũng là biên tập khách cho nhiều tạp chí khác như Ekleksographia, Cordite Poetry Review
<p>
và Vagabond Press. (http://pambrownbooks.blogspot.com.au/)</pre></font face></font size>
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<font face=Arial><font size=1><p>Return to <a href="http://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/extras-selected-reviews-and-other.html">Extras</a> or <a href="http://pambrownbooks.blogspot.com.au/">Pam Brown site</a></font size></font face></span></span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-711780309769780202.post-2683808933372127142017-09-17T17:16:00.001-07:002019-11-16T21:28:44.552-08:00<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglqf7BiG22criQtlBXRyOaRGX7kwEO8Av-lC5BozD7odagExg9xXxsSc3od2GDSxLCclutVakFlFcL7M2HXUcXoIRbXRyRUeAgvwzFCU0PTBowq94pbgAxFGjxCbuCEfl3vRU0DcKlPuo5/s1600/Adam.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglqf7BiG22criQtlBXRyOaRGX7kwEO8Av-lC5BozD7odagExg9xXxsSc3od2GDSxLCclutVakFlFcL7M2HXUcXoIRbXRyRUeAgvwzFCU0PTBowq94pbgAxFGjxCbuCEfl3vRU0DcKlPuo5/s320/Adam.jpg" width="225" height="320" data-original-width="169" data-original-height="240" /></a></div>
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<font face=Arial><font size=3>Archipelago
<br>Adam Aitken</font face></font size><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> (Vagabond
Press, Sydney, 2017)<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Launch talk at University of Sydney,
8th September 2017</span></div>
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Adam Aitken has been writing and publishing for a long time now. In the early 1980s he was involved in editing <i>P76</i> poetry magazine with Mark Roberts. They named the magazine after the P76 - a big car with a rushed assembly - the poor build meant that the car was a lemon - it's only remembered because it was a dud - so Mark & Adam memorialised it. (Briefly)
In 2013 Adam co-edited, with Kim Cheng Boey and Michelle Cahill, the important <i>Contemporary Asian Australian Poets</i> anthology. He's also currently a part-time teacher of creative writing at this university. Last year Vagabond Press published Adam's memoir <i>One Hundred Letters Home</i>. <i>Archipelago</i> is his fifth book of poetry.
<p>
As you know France has been in the news - unfortunately, for terrorist attacks - just over a year ago in Nice in the south and also in the capital Paris, and more recently in the news for a change in political direction when a youngish neoliberal banker Emmanuel Macron beat off the nationalist right wing led by Marine Le Pen and, as we know, France will be contributing to the Australian war machine by building the submarines that kept Christopher Pyne elected.
<p>
A curious traveller, Adam Aitken is an annual visitor to France - usually to a small village in the south, actually just north of Nimes, where some of his partner Neela Griffith's English family are permanent expatriate residents. But during the period of the compilation of these poems Adam was lucky enough to also spend some time in Paris on an Australia Council residency at the Cité des Arts. Adam, as a continuous student of the French language has attended <i>Alliance Française</i> language classes for some time now.
<p>
So that's a sketchy background to this collection. There are a couple of quotes that introduce the collection - one from Roland Barthes '<i>Comment vivre ensemble...?</i>' translates as 'Like living together...?' - an ellipsis and a question mark - hmmm - what augurs here? I'm not sure. I guess it's interculturalism ?<p>
The other opening quote is a nice French graffiti joke -'<i>Egalité Fraternité Beyoncé</i>'
<p>
The book begins with the poet exposed to extremely cold weather and becoming obsessed with thermometers. The movement of the mercury along a red scale leads to a trail of images that conjure a watercourse, the tributaries of the river Seine, and slides from there to some boys growing up along rivers in the south of France - the lusty sons of big drinking farmers whose histories are lent dramatic monologues.
<p>
Cold weather persists in these poems. The Mistral, the famous strong, cold, northwesterly wind that blows from southern France all the way to the northern Mediterranean appears a couple of times. Farmhouses traditionally face south with their backs to the Mistral which has a mythical reputation for causing 'madness'. One line in a touching poem about a hoarder reads - "If you could buy the wind and store it forever/you would.'
<p.
Poets generally have some kind of quandary that they investigate in the process of making poems. Poet John Kinsella says about <i>Archipelago</i> "One key question is what France (and Europe generally) mean to an Australian writer, which leads the poet to consider the ‘French inspired’ work of other Australian writers." So, in poems like 'Reading Menus in Paris
(After Ouyang Yu's ‘Reading Magazines’)' Adam adopts aspects of Ouyang Yu's directness and vulgarity as he (Adam or, the poet) suffers a kind of linguistic alienation from the place he's visiting -
<p>"Not coming here to become what they see in you/you window shop till you’re broke or just pissed off – /(shit you really meant to write that)/reading phrasebooks over and over again/to a non-appreciative dog.
<p>
It is wonderful/‘cos you make yourself into a Frenchman/scanning the menus in the windows"
<p>
the poem ends comically with -
<p>
"To keep on doing this and never actually sit down to eat/or talk to anyone in French. But still,/Bengali’s more useful, or Swahili./You are about to starve, sweat-shops beckon."
<p>
Another instance of the question of Australian poets and France is in 'Letter from Paris' where "Slessor imagines Heine's Paris full of spires" - Adam jokes quoting Kenneth Slessor "'Ten thousand chimneys spume'-/a metaphor for the libidinous, maybe," and he wonders in his own 'spireless' version of Paris "Why in Slessor's poem all the women are gone from their 'miserable' lives?"
<p>
Adam tells us, and it's a relief, "I do not promise to make sense of predecessors/ who can't make Paris theirs" and, with that he lets it go and instead reports on yesterday's Alliance Française lesson's popular culture interview with Carla Bruni.
<p>
He ends the poem recounting that the 19th century poet Heinrich Heine, who spent nearly half his life living in Paris, "kept writing in German" and his partner couldn't read his poems - "Translating them into French/didn’t help her, but didn’t hurt./She was German, and only ever spoke in German./ The way the 10th is African, the way the 4th is poodles."
<p>
'Old Europe(2)' is a pacy poem about tourist Paris - filled with travel cliches - it's cynical and it's funny - "The Romanies sell puppies to lovesick tourists" and "The Eiffel Tower a blingy earring/on the ear of Europa." There's a drama being filmed beneath a "millionaire terrace" - - "the road a crime scene below, a day-for-night/with Citroen and cafe shoot-out./You might have to step over the body./I only come here for a summer,/for language, macaroons,/delicious cod. Good thing Cheryl/got the handbag she wanted she's/so persistent we filmed it."
<p>
Adam's personal poems here are clear and heartfelt and avoid the devices of artifice. 'Avignon-Paris TGV, Winter 2012' is a thoughtful, graceful poem for Adam's partner Neela -
<p>
"...that I am passing you by/and leaving you/in your deeply orange sunset/over the Auvergne //in some high-speed/French railway after-effect/that radiates the idea of you //that compensates for all that is too/distant and dark as matter//But we can see it, barely –/the way it brings us to ourselves/into the one thing,//our selves/all within the skin of the thing/I think about."
<p>
And the following poem 'Maruejols' memorialising the death of a hoarder who, although the poem doesn't spell it out directly, I happen to know it's Neela's mother for whom he's writing -"Some days we would farm our way/through your legacy/dipping into your library/brushing off a kingdom of silver fish,/working through the junk,/ in some sort of rhythm/and catch the intermittent bandwidth/ bouncing off the local mountain – an ecology.// Later, coming to empty your home, we felt/ the dark matter of your brain/and what came through it:" and there I'll leave it for you to read the things Adam records that made an important part of this woman's life.
<p>
There are poems dedicated to other poets - to Vietnamese poet Nhã Thuyên, for Aotearoans Jen Bornholdt and Greg O'Brien and a romantic poem or, rather a poem about Romantic French poets, for Sydneysider Toby Fitch - "where a homesick chauffeur wept/ for Verlaine's verse,/for the friend with the gas blue eyes" who can only be Arthur Rimbaud -
<p>
The final poem is called 'Rimbaud's spider - Lake Toba, Sumatra'. Some time in 1875-76, just after he abandoned poetry and a few years before he became a trader in Ethiopia, Arthur Rimbaud traveled to England, Germany, Italy and Holland where he enlisted in the Dutch army - but he deserted from it in Sumatra. This is an imaginative poem using a classic male/female metaphor, while gesturing (possibly?) to the Dutch takeover of Indonesia a couple of years earlier -"With all of Java’s crimes/(that history none must speak of)/hanging there like tear drops,/suspended in her web ..."
<p>
Arthur and his Sumatran spider -
<p>
"she carried on, the web/made perfect and complete./he her guest who overstayed/who never left, the one she chose to lay her brood within// that eats him from inside/infused with an acid to keep him fresh./For he would survive/on a spider’s sliding scale,/paralytic with affect/for each hour of night/sucking nothing else but violets..."
<p>
<i>Archipelago</i> offers an abundance of fascinating imagery and observation evoking many aspects of contemporary and historical life in France. I've mentioned only a mere modicum of the references and ideas in these poems. I encourage you to get a copy of the book and discover its breadth.<br>
I congratulate Adam Aitken and wish his book a smooth trip onto the bookshelves of many readers. </font face></font size>
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<font face=Arial><font size=1><p>Return to<a href="http://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/extras-selected-reviews-and-other.html"> Extras</a> or <a href="http://pambrownbooks.blogspot.com.au/">Pam Brown site</a></font size></font face></span></span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
pbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488501096578637033noreply@blogger.com