Australian poet Pam Brown made her first trip to New Zealand 12-16 September 2005 to read and talk at the University of Auckland. She spoke about the poetry scene in Australia, and later wrote up the talk for ka mate ka ora. She also recorded seven poems for nzepc archives (video and texts below) and was presented with a Tapa Notebook. Pam Brown is associate editor of Jacket and Australian co-editor for Poetry International.
A benign compulsion nudges my writing practice. The process is to track lines of thought, to collect and record glimpses, to use snatches of language and try to place them at a slant to a linear norm. I write poetry in the shadows of the twentieth-century post-Modernist idea that after the A-bomb, linearity is anachronistic. Generally though, my continuing aim is intelligibility.
The eruption of innovation in poetry (& every other art-form) in the 1960s, in tandem with a new wave of global politicisation, influenced my generation irrevocably.
For poetry to exist in corporatised western societies, whose undeniable context is power, it has to be sceptical of the status quo, questioning, probably experimental, or at least apply an unanticipated use of language and form – that is, be interesting to be poetic.
Poetry might bring me into nuanced engagement (with a reader). It’s a risky means of making an encounter accompanied as it is by all the doubtful artifice, murmurings and disruptive stuttering of that desire.
My topic is local. The poems rarely leave whatever street I’m on. They are as mobile and as mutable as my daily life.
My attitude, anti-Wordsworthian in a way, can be summed up by a stanza from Joachim du Bellay’s sixteenth-century ballad The Regrets:
Funk descending
for Eileen Myles
celebrating
a wobbly
new world declaration,
I’ve ordered fireworks
& méthode champenoise,
but
my soubrette’s
been crossed out !
(the mini-series’s set
in an insurance agency)
like grumpy
Jurgen Habermas,
I feel a funk
descending,
&
I miss whisky too,
Eileen.
on Ritalin,
banished by
Ma Po’s tofu’s
flatulence,
in the museum
I stand before
an activity station
& make a wish -
hexed by
an unexpected
power surge
we were all
brought up on
“I Love Lucy”
wherever we lived,
new worldlies.
every gym buddy
produces a steroid rage
when the strategic plan
becomes the mission statement -
Our values
Our vision
Our mission
in a parallel universe
I’ve ordered a thought-burger.
20th century
When the couch became a sofa
we sat down in front of pay-TV
& replaced our ‘hmmm’ with ‘wow’ -
It’s all just clothes, makeup and hair.
And as we were the tootlers,
we tootled along to the popular
anytime anyplace big brown & orange
inflatable bouncy castle to contest
the awards for untrammelled enthusiasm.
In The New Berlin
it was sad & not so beautiful
between two worlds when jazz
& soul & funk & the Marshall
Plan were going strong
elsewhere & what we had
was communism here
& capitalism there
*
a sudden storm
turns the street
Gerhard Richter fuzzy,
passengers in yellow trams
stare at us, huddling in a doorway,
the Kantstrasse sign
wobbling in the wind
*
it seems so complex & so
terrific through the smoky air
in the wine-glossed movie-looped
writers’ cabaret at the Podewil
on Klosterstrasse just opposite
the corner of Parochialstrasse,
where dotcom beauties lounge
*
with the advent
of re-invention,
Nina Hagen, like
Wilhelm Reich,
the orgone box man
( but was he
German ?
as German as Walter Abish
[ a literary joke]
no, he was Austrian.)
these days believes in UFOs
*
Jane & Ulrich, enjoying
diet Coke & discourse
at the spicy Merhaba,
consider the semiotics
of Kreuzberg’s satellite dishes,
like po-mo decorations
on plain apartment blocks,
each pointing
in a different direction
Vapours
little delirium the first
a woozy clarity
adorns
all liars -
sucking
a nettle lozenge
in peril
of being
found out
(the lowest fear)
& so intensely
self-enclosed
maybe you'll
implode,
your
diction's
eccentricities
increase
with each fresh glass
of vile verdelho
& you make
a dark confession
I'd prefer
not knowing
little delirium the second
is nearly
as bad as
a eurovision song contest -
an awful something
grips the crowd
which, turning ugly,
boos
a feathery-minded
politician
announcing
his proleptic vision
to a world
of shrunken
bandwidths
where
everyone's called
'andrew'
& you have to
bring a plate
little delirium the third
a Tibetan jalopy
rolls across
the silvery sky,
the Sea of Tranquillity
fibrillates
& those
algae-coloured
hormones
make you sick,
your stability
collapses
like a stinking
puffy fungus
Another think coming
on time,
speeding into the cold shade
in the mica-blue daihatsu,
hailstone dings patched
with felt-tipped pens
and nail polish,
towards York Street,
the only street
left standing
after two centuries
of demolition –
its sandstone Victoriana
like a row
of determined invalids
suddenly brought into daylight,
stunned in a gone world.
cement-dusted street corners
draped with orange vinyl netting -
framing the unannounced return
of Bert Flugelman’s
silver shish-kebab.
an un-hoped-for cityscape -
two clocks
on the same building
displaying different times
having, so far,
dodged all civics conferences -
now, punctually, I attend
stressed-finished
seminar rooms -
a beautifully literal
painted-on patinae
of grime and cracks.
buoyed by
off-to-the-second-
day-of-a-conference-
eagerness,
this flâneur
drives everywhere,
imaginary ram-raider
skittling that bricoleur
clutching a fascinating
collection of spoils
in a palm organiser.
attention, attention ,
may I have your
attention
sorry no -
I’m reviewing a few
windows of opportunity
from my workstation desktop,
on the actual desk –
the pale golden colour
of white ginseng
steaming in a china cup
perched on a silvery
compact-disc coaster,
screwed-up pages, red ball-point,
small black radio emitting news -
political party supporters’ dreams
weakened by boom time fluctuations
like comets in a spin
were ‘we’
not to apply
serious scholarship
to metro profit margins’
most pressing questions -
‘we’ might find ‘we’
have
another think coming.
money now
determines class,
focus, promise, function
& an era
of boredom
tolerated by
the middle classes
ends
mistaking the ruins
for decoration
the dig reveals
bits of polyvinyl chloride,
ribbons of audio tape,
the usual aluminia –
the site becomes a museum,
the souvenir shop’s
elegant glass counters
house miniature replications
of christianity’s clean spires
carefully erected by
gigantic Russian helicopters
in time for the international
sports event
some time back
in the year 2000
In europe
I’m leaning
on a pillar
under a high
squinch arch,
breezy
brown leaves
swirl along
the colonnade,
dust my sandals.
dear palermo,
bella palermo,
dear trastevere,
I’m covered
in commas,
I’m wasting water
roman-style,
cool chalky water
I’m letting it flow,
I’m in science road
by the sandstone
devil fountain
that spouts a trickle,
imagining
I’m walking up
viale di trastevere,
I point
to my ‘wound’
my shoulder
my ‘sin’ like
an early christian
martyred
for a living,
bones bound
with fraying rags.
my one year
in a thousand years,
dear chrono,
your iron cross
upright atop
a potshard hillock,
I’m there
on the summit,
it’s flat like a mesa,
there I imagine
my balm,
my beauties –
in a kitchen
in europe,
licking
the harissa
in europe
anywhere,
white tiles
to the ceiling,
a sprinkling
of soap suds
glistening
in a dark
autumn sink.
dear cerveteri,
I’m standing, quiet
and still,
inside a tumulus
covered in grasses
and wild flowers.
the bus
has broken down,
I’m walking back
to ladispoli,
in the distance
a bird flock swarms
in folds & turns,
in geometric patterns
like a screen saver.
swift evening rain
coming across
from the coast.
Darkenings
born in a de-mountable, there you are now,
fifty-something years gone by not a disaster,
in the centre of the car-lined road,
a paper bag
tucked in the crook of your arm
with two paperbacks
and a poetry pamphlet.
no longer having much idea
of earlier versions of yourself
today bewildered
by some invented crisis
apparently necessary
for a cowardly killjoy
(whom you wish, of course,
to soon forget)
to end an already-fraying friendship,
but not so sentimental
as to crank the handle
once the rust has dusted the debts.
*
you go on vacation
to an unmodified landscape,
towards a blackout, the cause impossible to source,
to candle and fire,
to night’s proper darkness,
you go to the bay
where sooty grey shearwaters
come down from Siberia
to bob stiff on the waves,
dead from exhaustion,
a flight from zero to infinity.
taking the news
from a smart eco liftout -
(international features
delivering ‘all you need to know’)
of war dunes and sand dunes
in deserts far away -
camels superseded
by four wheel drives,
date palms blown into blue yonder
and uranium-flecked scrapheaps
mapped as oases
*
there you are, back again,
at the printer as covert,
reading the back of the recycled paper,
cipher and sign,
vigilant under fluoro
scrutinising discarded files of dissent -
a single fist raised to the world
expressionist texta
‘greetings from the resistance’
but nobody’s watching, just shadow,
nobody’s thinking
that you’re here reading reports
on indiscriminate transmissions -
avian flu, Hendra virus, lyssa virus –
insensible species’ leaps,
no-bargains-pandemics,
no clues in the notes from darkening science
*
no further treatment nothing to lose,
man with cancer carries his son
to lay him down in the contaminated ground.
nowhere left now,
moon ripple on the tailings dam
where he used to skip stones.
