From Mexico and Mónica de la Torre we're taking a grand leap across the Pacific for our next poet, Australia's Pam Brown.
Pam has not only enjoyed a long lifetime as a published poet — releasing her first book in 1971 — but has also played an important role in promoting the work of her fellow Australians through her editorial work with Jacket Magazine (and now Jacket2), as well as Overland, VLAK, and Fulcrum. Most notably — as I've mentioned in class — Pam edited both the Jacket2 feature "Fifty-One Contemporary Poets from Australia," (which rolled out over the better part of a year), and a complementary anthology of recordings from Australian poets for PennSound, both of which are tremendous resources if you'd like to do further reading. That having been said, I'm glad that we're putting the focus on her, and specifically her latest book, Home by Dark (2013).
What you'll find here is poetry that I think sits very well beside our previous readings. Brown shifts gears between subjective expression and more fictional modes, weaves poetry out of pop language and official rhetorics, and writes in a mode that's both energized by and suffused with the traces of music, film, and literature. As Philip Mead observes of her "distinctive poetics," Brown is "a material girl [placing] emphasis on everyday lives inflected via a hyperalert formal and linguistic imagination."
I asked Pam if she'd like to provide an introduction to the book, and she generously replied with something truly stunning:
I asked Pam if she'd like to provide an introduction to the book, and she generously replied with something truly stunning:
Home by Dark is a collection of poems assembled from notes, thoughts, images, reactions and feelings over a period of around three years. (2010-13) A poem builds up, in a steady accretion, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis says, 'like plaque on teeth'. My process is to track lines of thought, to collect and record glimpses, to use snatches of language etc and try to place them at a slant to a linear norm. I am conscious of writing poetry in the shadows of the previous century's post-Modernist idea that after the A-bomb, linearity is anachronistic.
The poems are notational. I sometimes use a montage technique of placing stanzas in short sequences and sometimes I use lines from others' poems or songs or newspapers, or tv commentary and so on, to make an encounter with the world in general. My attitude is skeptical and anti-romantic though not blindly dismissive of lyricism. I think I use a kind of philosophical “I” to examine my place (as a poet) in the culture at large.
For poetry to exist in corporatised western societies, whose undeniable context is power, it has to be skeptical of the status quo. It has to be questioning, probably experimental, or at least apply an unanticipated use of language and form – that is, be interesting to be poetic. I would hope that the poems in Home by Dark foreground this intention.
I think irony comes in to play at times as a tool that can cheerfully undermine self-importance or grand statement. I do think that the 'difficulties' of addressing complex political/philosophical or questions like 'how to live?' (& how to live in a wrecked world) are similar in most art or writing forms -
same problems
in poems, newspapers,
plays, sciences, films -
& I’m fuming like dry ice,
poetry can do it though,
specifically, address problems
from the sofa.
from 'Dry Ice' - p81
My topic is local. The poems rarely leave 'whatever street' I’m on. They are as mobile and as mutable as my daily life.
I used to say that in general, my continuing aim was intelligibility. But I released my poems from that stricture at the end of the C20th. So, although not especially abstract or conceptual, I think the poems in Home by Dark can stray off track and wander elsewhere like the way you might find yourself watching a film in a multiplex picture theatre adjacent to the one that's screening the film you actually meant to watch.
Pam was also kind enough to provide the following advice for you as you make your way through Home by Dark:
There are a few technical points that I didn't include — don't know if anyone needs to know — but here they are:
- I don't always punctuate where punctuation "should" be.
- I don't like colons, I really dislike semi-colons and tend to use dashes instead
- I don't like Italics for title or emphasis in poems - I prefer to underline (sometimes I use Italics, but rarely)
- I don't always use full stops where they might be used conventionally
Armed with that knowledge, here's our reading schedule:
- Thurs., September 25: parts I and II
- Tues., Sept. 30: part III
- Thurs., Oct. 2: parts IV and V, plus "At the End of the World as We Know It Retreat" and "Placeville"
And here are some supplementary links for your enjoyment:
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