Dear Eileen,
Gareth Morgan
(Slow Loris, Series 3, Newcastle, 2020)

Reviewed by Pam Brown for Southerly, 79.3 July 2022

---

  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.

  The letter has been a literary mode since the seventeenth century when James Howell published Familiar Letters and Aphra Behn published her novel Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister. In current times the literary form of the letter and, alas, the postcard have become anachronistic, and handwritten material is uncommon and quaint.

  A quarter of a century ago poets began using electronic mail as an art form. Susan M. Schultz and John Kinsella published voice-overs - a chapbook of their exchange of email poems. Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark continued their relationship, borne of a brief sexual encounter in Sydney in 1995, via emails to each other. In 2015 their correspondence became the book I'm very into you. Thus, their once-possible letters became emails. At the same time in the 90s Chris Kraus published an epistolary feminist novel called I Love Dick. The obsessive, infatuated, yet ultimately table-turning author, writes to Dick, "Dear Dick..." Dick never replies in spite of her stubborn persistence. The second part of the book is titled, paradoxically, Every Letter is a Love Letter. Today in Australia 'the post' continues as a historical trope in the conceptual work of Dave Drayton whose poetry interplays with Australian postcodes and delivery routes.

   Gareth Morgan's chapbook Dear Eileen, is an illuminating and kinetic discourse on social, political and aesthetic connections between employment and a life in poetry. It engages with the aforementioned writers Chris Kraus, Kathy Acker, Ken Wark as well as others. The addressee of his letters, 'Eileen', is, of course, the self-described 'most famous poet in the East Village', Eileen Myles.

   Gareth, a young Melbourne poet, works as a postie. Eileen Myles' father was a postie (or 'mailman' as they're called in the USA). In their recent memoir Afterglow (a dog memoir) Eileen's father reincarnates thirty years after his death as the dog Rosie. I'm pretty sure that most posties don't relate to dogs with the finessed anthropomorphism that Eileen Myles poured into their love for Rosie, but the memoir so captivated Gareth Morgan that he wrote a series of letters, or as he says, 'google docs' to Eileen -

      dear eileen
      you noted in the foreword to chris kraus' i love dick that the novel    
      interestingly took place at the birthtime of email. i.e. the death of mail.  
      1997. i was 4. i can't remember your point about email but today i am 
      thinking about the death of mail. it has become clear that our days are
      numbered. which feels poignant and odd to be typing here. because
      naturally these are not letters but... google docs.

   Gareth is a 'delivery only postal delivery officer'. In a slang acronym that's a 'dodo' and so, he says, 'a cute dead bird'. As he rides around the mail run on an electric pushbike listening via iPhone to Spotify recordings and podcasts of Eileen and other poets, there's the glaring irony of using internet content on the job when it is a main cause of the demise of the material his work depends on. In the first letter Gareth, in the context of his generation, writes 'life was so much posturing. i hated the internet, for example, yet i lived there. by which i mean: social media'.

   Letters have a colloquial tone, as if the correspondents are talking to each other. Gareth's letters meander easily through various referential topics. For instance, here he quotes Bertolt Brecht -

      each morning, to earn my bread, i go to the market where lies are sold and,
      hopefully, i get in line with the other sellers ... so i am writing you these
      letters, and going to work... i was all right. i didn't have any dependents. i 
      had my poems, a rental home, a beautiful girlfriend and a steady job. time
      and space, time and space. like a dog, i did my rounds.
      love,
      gareth

later in a longer letter he declares the influence of reading Afterglow -

     
      i wonder if i am just doing so much copying or echoing - of you. is that still
      art? 

and he continues with a brief appreciation of Kathy Acker and Ken Wark's email messages, and then -

      but so, now i remember what i am up to: i am reporting from the ground, 
      that is my difference. i am a dog and sniffing. i'm gauging the field. is
      that right?

  Gareth's imagined identity as a dog makes the working life more problematic than that of an actual dog -

      dear eileen
      there were times i felt i couldn't piss while on my rounds and was indeed
      made to feel my pissing should be rationed against the streets i'd passed
      thru so it was that i was like a dog. i measured my route in relation to the
      bladder which was a mean and dominating organ and tho you'd think to
      be outside and yes to be a dog one would be free to pee wheresoever,
      which is why i am telling you now: according to our bosses, whom we
      naturally obeyed, and some of us even adored, we pissed like clocks.
      love, and solidarity
      g

  Weather is a continual menace for posties. Gareth gives clear-cut context to the task of working in dire climatic situations in a letter that embraces the rant -

      ... the post is an important, powerful aesthetic, or: importantly aesthetic. it
      is part of what holds a nation together both literally (in THINGS (waste))
      but also symbolically. the post is colonial! it's capitalist it's evil. it's an
      advertisement for the happy country, and well, like, we WORKED thru
      the BUSHFIRE SEASON, chugging poison smog. what better heroes for
      capital can you get? the postal service is a poetics of capitalism.

  This letter goes on to quote from the late radical anarchist poet Sean Bonney and then returns to lament the dog-life of a worker - '...we are not free dogs'.

  Gareth conveys anxiety and an angry awareness of the effects of class, the precarity of his job, actual job losses resulting from 'profit squeeze' and a weariness that has him quoting Newman, the mailman in the Seinfeld comedy series, saying "the mail never stops". He rails against everyday difficulties like 'SHIT letterboxes' and the huge number of parcels and inane ephemera ordered online by wealthier people. The volume of these packages sometimes causes his left shoulder to ache from the delivery work load. An 8-hour day is really 10-12 hours.

  Eileen Myles has written often about their own background as working class Boston. Towards the end of the series of letters, after a particularly hard day's work and feeling peeved, Gareth addresses Eileen about the money problems that are analogous to a poet's life -

      ... you said when you were broke you could go knock on john ashbery's door
      and ask him to help you get a grant! i could meet michael farrell for coffee
      at the nova cafe, and sometimes i do. and then there's 'working in a totally
      unrelated field', which i, like melinda,(1) do. how nice, or i know i 
      enjoy it. it sucks to be an insider i believe, at least for today. let me ask, did
      you get paid to run St Mark's?(2)
            today.... today i have been delivering SO many parcels of crap to the 
      wealthier houses on my route and have been wondering over the virtue of
      being poor, which i feel you and others are proud proponents of, or were, in
      the 70s say, when things were allowed to flourish a little... stinkily... but you
      are no longer poor, and are in fact the most famous and probably richest 
      poet in the east village, or marfa - and probably america! which is like the
      world... and it is time i think to return the rent controlled apartment to the 
      people, as if such a thing were still recognised, the people, or rent controlled
      apartments in new york city.(3)  

  This small turn where a fan, or in this instance, an acolyte challenges aspects of the life of the subject of their admiration is unexpected and touching. It is also fundamental to Gareth Morgan's candour in writing in the moment. Letter writing releases a spontaneity that's mostly antithetical to the work of devising the structure of a poem.

  Dear Eileen, is teeming with daily fragments that are sometimes vivid, sometimes casual, often referential, sometimes disagreeable, though not altogether only constituting acts of thinking aloud. Some parts are also simply observational.

  Publishing letters to a living idol is a vulnerable move. Here though, the revelations of instantaneous thoughts and reactions work to reach not only the recipient but also the readers. Gareth Morgan's good nature takes us right in to his particularly readable, never humdrum, everyday world -

      dear eileen
      i have told myself - and now you: the reason i am a postie is the potential in
      it for pleasure. the great outdoors, suburbia's unruly sheen, the sublime pain
      of the elements. the mythic, loner's journey into the blue. to be the cutest
      kind of hero. and each day like any other, at one with the footpath... 

---

NOTES
1. Melinda Bufton is another Melbourne poet with a non-literary day job.                            
2. St Mark's Poetry Project in the Bowery, NY NY  is a venue for new and experimental poetry readings, 
memorials, workshops and a quarterly newsletter. Eileen Myles was the Director from 1984 until 1986.
3.  Eileen Myles recently received an eviction notice after 42 years of living in a rent controlled 
apartment in East Village, NY NY. They wrote about it in For Now (Why I Write) published by Yale University Press, September 2020.
They also own a house in Marfa, Texas, where their current dog Honey, rescued from an animal shelter, resides.

WORKS CITED
Howell, James. Familiar Letters or  Epistolae Ho-Elianae, 1645-50 4th Edition, London, Thomas Guy, 1678.
Amazon online docs, 2011
Behn, Aphra. Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, 1684. https://biblioteca.org.ar/libros/167063.pdf ,2008
Myles, Eileen. Afterglow (a dog memoir). London, Grove Press, 2017
Kinsella, John and Schultz, Susan M. voice-overs. Honolulu, Tinfish Press, 1997 
Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark. I'm very into you  Correspondence 1995- 1996. Cambridge, MA, Semiotext(e)/Native Agents, 2015
Kraus, Chris. I Love Dick,. Cambridge, MA, Semiotext(e)/Native Agents,1995
Drayton, Dave. '3 Poems'. Minarets, #11, (June, 2020) 

---

Return to Extras or Pam Brown site

Christopher Brown reviews Pam Brown’s Stasis Shuffle
for Cordite Poetry Review 10.10.2023

---

The last poem of Pam Brown’s Stasis Shuffle, ‘(fundamentals)’ begins with the lines: “make a distinction / between imagery / & reality” (103). As much as the distinction in question evokes the verisimilitude of the fake, a need to separate unreliable image from truth, Stasis Shuffle’s interest in reality and authenticity goes deeper. The lines above resonate with the book’s cover, a photo of an urban landscape so carefully constructed that the photo (especially its forward half) might be taken for a planner’s sketch or impression. Myth’s claim to truth has been an important part of Brown’s work, though a focus here is the way the real world comes to relate as something less than authentic.
In ‘(best before)’, Brown writes:

my feeling is
           the planet is losing its real
(like 
       everyone knows)
(11)

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)’:

r.i.p

icon 
of blankness
       embracing 
inauthenticity

you will be 
         missed
(99) )

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)’:

how many eyes 
        go to the gym
its wall mirrors 
                       colliding 
         with lust
(34) )

And this critique might be considered with the following on ecology, “earthmovers that never said, ‘sorry rhizome’,” if we think of self-sameness as monoculture (14). Together such examples suggest totalising political structures, according to which “the systemic management / of culture” occurs as much from a self-regulatory within, as from a governmental without (20).

Consumerism and digitalisation are presented as cultural forms toward the degraded experience of the real, which in ‘(next time)’ is mediated, literally diluted, juxtaposed to the sensory real of the poem:

        you licked a saltbush
        out in the scrub –
that’s the photo

that the taste
         wasn’t that good
isn’t ‘revealed’
(17) 

As with the decontextualising image/photo, the passage

it beggars
           belief
that
ipad streaming
was all they did
beneath the campanile

(‘(I can hear your aargh from here)’, 44) 

ironically engages the diminished status of high culture yet points to the relocation of experience to digital contexts, with the effect that “there’s no history / there’s (only) allegory” (‘(best before)’, 8). It’s here in part, in a context of experiential inauthenticity, that the title Stasis Shuffle gathers meaning, suggesting a recombination of existing elements, perpetual sameness attended by superficial change, production and reproduction, “old […] faking new,” the kind of change implied by the streetscape on the cover (65). Stasis Shuffle’s 2021 publication coincided with COVID-19 shutdowns in Australia and internationally, with their impact on world production, and as much as the title calls to mind an unchanging political reality, it also hints at a welcome stasis, one “liberated / from the drudgery / of usefulness,” as ‘(best before),’ quoting Walter Benjamin, puts it (3). In this perspective

everyone
                   should just
                   leave
                   everything
&
  I do mean
  every thing
                   alone

(‘(I can hear your aargh from here)’, 46)

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:

life’s more fun
                  when you
                  don’t know
what the hell
 you’re doing
(29) 

Brown begins the poem ‘Might as well’ from her 2015 collection Missing up with the lines: “born in parenthesis / raised in an interstice” (42); she writes in click here for what we do of “interstitial thinking” (‘Susceptibility song’, 86). As if to consolidate an early conceptualisation of process, Brown parenthesises each of Stasis Shuffle’s poems’ titles – locating the poem at the gaps and apertures of systemic culture, while implying clarification, revision, an imposition of terms and conditions on the otherwise culturally acceptable or legitimate. In this revisionist space Brown can assert a value for poetry. If the phrase “daydreaming […] good for you” in (39) ‘(mme nhu)’ tends to the political, values for poetry are further communicated in ‘(the real)’ (39; 32). The images of Jack Spicer and experimentalism

    evil boy genius
             jack spicer
desired
    a peculiar derangement
            of experiment
(32) 

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:

jack was right
            when he said
the imagination
pictures
the real
(33) 

The underline highlights a concession, but a conditional, an ironic one, something like a backhanded compliment (he was right, for once). Poetry diminishes myth, as well as poetry’s myth-making (“not every / mundanity makes into a poem”) (‘(looks like)’, 85). But in ‘(the real),’ the rewriting of myth progresses to a truth or ontology (the nexus of imagination and reality) yet caveated by “the imagination” and “pictures,” whose connotations of the dream-like, and cinematic, shadow any transparent idea of the real.

Many of the poems in Stasis Shuffle use the divided shapes and forms for which Brown is well-recognised; there are also some key variations. The stepped lines of ‘(next time)’ and ‘(drinks)’ share a visual likeness with the poems around them. Their enjambment, line-by-line grammar, and reflective parenthesis build, however, to a more firmly cumulative impact. ‘(drinks)’ seems most notable in this sense. Picking up about halfway through, it reads:

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) 

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:

memory seafoam
hidden expectations
keen accomplice
no provocation
exercise yard
ecco runners
pressure’s on
(72) 

There’s the feeling of speed, at odds with or in response to the stasis of the title. Brown writes in ‘(fundamentals),’ “it’s insane it’s fast / it’s fun,” which perhaps sums up the spirit of ‘(pressure’s on)’ (105).

It’s fun but there’s also a keen discipline at work here. In their unstinting documentation of the moment, Brown’s poems read like maps of exemplary (sustained) concentration, both individually, and then together, as a rich and extraordinary oeuvre.

------------

A comparison - Each published by Hunter Publishers, Nicholas Powell and Pam Brown write in two very different modes. Brown’s poems chart shifting thought in appropriately notational form. Open to the moment, they come to suggest the possibility of the poem, beyond thematic, to picture the scope of experience. Powell’s poems in Trap Landscape are allusive, metaphorical, shifting in their signification, a moving and fluid landscape.


Chris Brown is from Newcastle, and lives in Bega where he works as a high school teacher. His collection of poems hotel universo was published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2021. He edits the slow loris chapbook series.

---

Return to Reviews, or Pam Brown site

Sydney Spleen
Toby Fitch
(Giramondo, Sydney, 2021)

Reviewed by Pam Brown for Australian Book Review, September 2021

---

'A creepy little walk' : Toby Fitch's lyricism and versatility

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 Sydney Spleen, he has made a sophisticated fresh move that enhances his signature playfulness and tongue-in-cheek poetic antics.

Under the influence of Charles Baudelaire, Fitch has swerved into a mood that is disgruntled, politically disenchanted, derisive and, consequently, outraged. Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en Prose (which Fitch declares a favourite book) and Les Fleurs du Mal are two sources of animation that fuel the poems in Sydney Spleen, as do Guillaume Apollinaire's Calligrammes.

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:

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.

< That final pronouncement immediately corresponds with Charles Baudelaire's fiercely provocative piece Assommons les pauvres!('Let's Beat Up the Poor!'), written in an attempt to materialise class struggle.

Sydney Spleen 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.'

Though contemporary Sydney is hardly mid-nineteenth century Paris, Fitch - like the most prominent flâneur, 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 ... '

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.

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.

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.'

'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.

---

Return to Extras or Pam Brown site

   

W h a t   i s   t h i s   


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       
             

'A love supreme' cover

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa's capsule review of Pam Brown’s Endings & Spacings
for The Argotist Online 2021

Endings & Spacings by Pam Brown
Never-Never Books, Sydney 2021

---

The very prolific Pam Brown has a signature style that she continues in her latest, Endings & Spacings, 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:

   '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

 - - -
 

Every page of Endings and Spacings is a captivating and fun journey into Brown's observations about the world around her and us.

Return to Reviews, or Pam Brown site

Chris Arnold reviews Pam Brown’s Stasis Shuffle
for Australian Book Review 3rd May 2022

Stasis Shuffle by Pam Brown
Hunter Contemporary Australian Poets, $24.95 pb, 107 pp, 9780648848110

---

What colour is bitcoin?

The reader of Stasis Shuffle is immediately confronted with the collection’s naming convention. Titles of poems and sections are parenthesised, for example, ‘(best before)’, ‘(weevils)’, ‘(& then). More than simple stylisation, this convention suggests that every poem is a fragment, a meander through consciousness. "e first poem, ‘(best before)’, begins ‘liberated / from the drudgery / of usefulness’, a quote from Walter Benjamin. From there, Stasis Shuffle wanders flâneur-style through language, politics, and many different kinds of plant life. The central arc of Stasis Shuffle, however, is its self-consciousness about subjectivity and process. ‘(best before)’ asks ‘is your slowly accreting poem / morphing into a larger cloud yet’? As the collection unfolds, poems begin to comment on themselves and the writing process.

Stasis Shuffle is divided into three sections. The first, ‘(one idea on each dragée)’, roughly does what it says on the tin. The notes explain that a dragée is a hard-shelled confectionery that often has a second purpose. Each poem dwells on a relatively contained locale or time, and thinks through a cluster of connections. ‘(the real)’ considers linguistic connection itself. Its speaker wakes ‘in my / kind of golden / kind of biscuity / actually kind of / bitcoin-coloured pyjamas’ and works toward a Jack Spicer quote from After Lorca, ‘the imagination pictures the real’. The quote comes from Spicer’s letter on the separation and correspondence between poetic images and their referents. As Brown puts it, one ‘can’t / make poems / out of real objects / that’d be sculpture’. This reasoning throws the representation of the pyjamas into question: what colour is bitcoin? It’s a fascinating question about the nature of phenomenal experience in a world saturated by digital media – what colour is “bitcoin”, a currency that only exists in 3D render?

Nouns are unstable in Brown’s poetry. The correspondence between a thing and its name is always under pressure, and punning is a serious game. John Kinsella interviewed Brown in 2003 for Jacket 22, when she spoke about enjoying spelling as a child. Nouns carry an ‘undercurrent of meaning because whatever you spelled, it had a significance for you’. To tinker with spelling and syntax – to produce ambiguity – aligns with deeper questioning of her subject matter. In ‘(canberra drains)’, a ‘blood red & blue / [super] moon’ dates the action to 31 January 2018. The poet takes refuge from barking dogs and humidity in a room with too many clocks. Time and place coalesce as political reds and blues are absent: ‘it’s still / holidays here / progress / is a phantasm’. Progress, here, refers coincidentally to a ferry on the lake, but also to the fact that ‘nobody’s governing / no barking dog / eat barking dog’. This tension is characteristic of Brown’s poetry: the tranquil scene contrasts with a turbulent period of government (or lack thereof ) around Australia’s same-sex marriage plebiscite.

Another tension in Brown’s poetry concerns the lyric. Brown spoke to Kinsella about her practice of ‘undermining the notion of this “important figure”, the author’. Despite an unwillingness to privilege her subjectivity, Brown’s poetry is rooted there. As such, associative thinking speaks to personal questions of value:

acupressure chia seed 
        equals 
the closest you’ve come 
              to gentrification 
in australia
     it’s all profit & bigotry 
               & weevils

Associations are personal, but they are also connections to bigger, transpersonal issues. Another way that Brown undermines ‘the Author’ is with humour; not taking the self seriously. Stasis Shuffle doesn’t disappoint in this respect: ‘duchess / pops her muesli / on instagram / (we are not / a muesli)’.

For a volume that, according to its back cover, ‘plays with style and form’, much of Stasis Shuffle is recognisably Pam Brown: uniformly short lines, shifting indentation and alignment. The second section, ‘(pressure’s on)’, is different: a series of six double sonnets. Each begins with the same line, ‘memory seafoam’, and spears off in a different direction. The poems are, if the collection’s title poem is to be believed, ‘fake double sonnets, / free-associated / a while ago’. These poems don’t make the thematic or tonal turns one might expect from sonnets. Rather, it’s as if they’re entirely made of turn. They are relatively light, and much of their appeal is their refusal to distinguish between linguistic and political connection.

The eponymous poem ‘(stasis shuffle)’ also lends its name to the final section, and it’s here that the collection comes together. Brown’s rhizome spreads wide, and these final poems explore tensions in relationality and process. Correspondences and relationships generate energy: a long passage is dedicated to Amelia Dale, ‘whose strategy is to retire / from poetry’. Dale’s performances are hilarious, but they are also thoughtful reflections on authorship and performance – a good fit for Brown’s poetics. Community has its disappointing side, too, as ‘at the reading / everyone / seemed to be under pressure / to be experimental [...] I realised / there’s nothing funny / about comedy / that misery can’t cure’.

‘(stasis shuffle)’s melancholy tone simmers through the collection. Stasis Shuffle works with fatigue: the poet persistently wakes groggy, feels alone, suffers mondayitis. It’s a tribute to the sheer torque of Brown’s language that fatigue is never boring. If Pam Brown is suffering Covid fatigue, Stasis Shuffle doesn’t show it. This is a lively, sharp, and entertaining collection from a veteran poet who has mastered her craft.

Return to Reviews, or Pam Brown site