Liam Ferney:

click here for what we do by Pam Brown

Vagabond Press, 2018

In 1915, H G Wells published Boon, a satirical novel that featured long passages
pastiching the literary style of his erstwhile friend, Henry James. It kicked off an
epistolary barney over what art should be about. ‘It is art that makes life, makes
interest, makes importance,’ James wrote in one of the letters. I’m no Jamesian (and
it’s not in my stars) but what he seems to be saying is that one of art’s functions is to
give structure and meaning to existence by elevating moments, objects and
sentiments, however vague or fleeting, out of the formless flux of stimuli that is our
world. This curation process is how art helps shape our sense both of ourselves, our
communities and cultures and our past.

I came across James’s letter chasing down the epigraph of the third section of Kate
Lilley’s Tilt. (1) It seems an apt way to consider, at least partially, Lilley’s latest work
as well as Pam Brown’s new collection, click here for what we do. The epigraph
begins: ‘I hold that interest may be, must be, exquisitely made and created, and that
if we don’t make it, we who undertake to, nobody and nothing will make it for us.’
Brown and Lilley are both poets invested in making interest and exploring how it is
made. This is particularly explicit in a number of Lilley’s poems that function
through the accretion of unadorned detail and, in doing so, interrogate that act of
depiction itself. This Jamesian notion of art is also a useful way to read the
confessional vignettes that powerfully level serious allegations against Dorothy
Hewett, her mother, and rape allegations at several countercultural figures, as well as
the alternative history of Oxford Street the title poem recounts.

It’s also a helpful framework for understanding Brown’s work, which continues to
mine the quotidian. This is a mode she has described, in 2002’s Text Thing, as:

this
shambling
contingency,
(writing a poem) -

work’s
for me,

(‘The ing thing’) (2)

In determining which moments from life’s shambling contingency make the cut,
Brown is, in James’s terms, making importance. It is a democratising poetics,
privileging the mundane and the minor. The poems are a kind of poetic mindfulness
enacting the benefits and pleasures of living in the present.

(ensuing 3.5 page review of Kate's Tilt ... then :

Turning to Brown’s click here for what we do, this diversity of poetics is obvious,
even if the subject matter occasionally overlaps. (Brown not only name-checks Lilley,
she also refers to the 70s Sydney video game arcade at the heart of Lilley’s ‘Tilt’.)
Where Lilley is continually trying out new forms, Brown is content with her signature
rambling mode, weaving long poems out of smaller fragments of short lines and
hanging indents. Form is an efficient treillage for her shambling contingency. The
smaller fragments give her the freedom to pick up ideas and study them like a
browser in a cavernous antiques store. They are assembled into longer poems that
seem to cohere even as they disassemble, zigging and zagging before looping back to
the comfort of familiar routines and rituals. For example, Brown has a ‘love affair /
with weather’ both as a spectator sport –

every day
I check the temperature
in taormina

on World Weather

– and in the seasons’s rituals:

refining the skill of peeling

small oval stickers
off the mangoes
without damaging the skins

These details are the bass drum of a work that begins in October 2014 (‘october
already’) and concludes in February 2017 (‘almost February again / (I’m not ready)’).
(3) Other details, like meals in Asian restaurants and news headlines, help keep time

in between. One way of thinking about the book is as an annual riff on Bernadette
Mayer’s diurnal Midwinter Day, which makes an epic of a single day of domestic life.
Like Mayer’s poem, click here for what we do toggles back and forth between the
mental and the external world. It often appears to proceed chronologically before
careening off on various tangents then returning, several pages later, to the point of
departure.

These returns are one of the book’s minor pleasures. For instance, a scene is
established (‘high on cleanskin / & cynar’), the poet tacks on an idea’s breeze, in this
case a reflection on Giorgio Agamben, turns again, musing, coincidentally, on Lilley
(‘burglary / looks like a good idea / if I read Kate Lilley’) and philosophical pondering
(‘happiness / seems / to happen accidentally’) before eventually declaring, ‘we
finished / the wine’.

Though for all her talk of Agamben and philosophy, click here for what we do isn’t
highfalutin. Some of the books best moments are its jokes:

‘thanks very mush’

begins my email
to the proofs editor

Or the thumbs Brown gleefully pokes in pretension’s eyes when commenting on

some essays she is reading:

I’d say ‘second last’

rather than ‘penultimate’
maybe ‘brokered’ or, even, ‘supervised’
for ‘proctored’

(context depending)

(when did ‘proctoring’ begin?)

Brown sifts out odds and sods from life’s swarm of krill. Extracting these pieces,
weighing them for inclusion, making decisions on their preservation. This is interest
and importance being made. The lunches, letters, quips, ideas, headlines,
correspondence with friends are, as she says in a section of ‘Left wondering’, ‘my
attention’s / creaky scatterings assemble.’

But this isn’t just a book about life amongst a certain inner-Western Sydney caste. It
probes questions of poetry’s place in the world and its utility. We are accustomed to
the idea that poetry is the least popular, the most marginal, of art forms. Shrinking
funding buckets, publishing lists and bookshop shelf space attest to this, but, in the
age of social media, where the written word remains omnipresent, clever wordplay
and memorable coinages are as central to the culture as they have ever been. At its
best, this opens up an immense new playground for poets to goof around in and is a
potential gateway for new readers. At its worst, it trivialises and reduces.
Mememakers stripmine Frank O’Hara’s beguiling love poem for Vincent Warren in
search of likes, retweets and upvotes. The end result:

having a coke with you

goes round & round
 the internet
until
the very end

(‘A mockery’)

The fragments we are left with quickly lose their varnish, becoming as prosaic as a
bestselling guide to corporate management. Poets like Rupi Kaur co-opt social
media’s brevity, assemble pat inspo (‘you / are your own / soul mate’ to quote a poem
in its entirety) and shift upwards of a million units. But B-grade self-help with line
breaks does not poetry make. Brown asks:

if,
as the internet poet says,
the first thing
a poem
communicates
is communicability

then
what?

Then what indeed? The reason we are drawn back to poetry is, in part, because of its
complexity. Its resistance to communicability. The way it rewards re-readings,
continually offering new interpretations, resisting the idea of a final definitive
reading.

The question remains, though, is this enough when ‘seventy percent of the coral / is
dead’? Anxiety about a warming world has been part of the tapestry of Brown’s
recent books. In this collection, tension emerges in the face of terrorism. A gruesome
hit parade of recent terrorist atrocities that includes Westminster Bridge, Bangkok,
Stockholm, Manchester, Idlib(4) and Cairo concludes ‘mosul / baghdad / kabul /‘,
reminding us how successful Western policies have been at inflaming fundamentalist
violence. The fragment immediately following the list asks:

does
a list
like that
do any work?
The question has two meanings. Firstly, do the poetics work and secondly does the
poem have any kind of political utility? The direct answer, at least to the second
question, is no; but then poetry is hardly alone in its political impotence. All most
think-pieces do is boost metrics to sell ads, yet their authors and readers consider
them a valuable contribution to a public discourse. Poetically, though, the list’s
structure foregrounds our complicity as well as highlighting the way in which these
atrocities have come to wallpaper our lives, as omnipresent as the weather or
consumerism.

So here we have two of Australia’s best poets [Kate Lilley & Pam Brown-ed.] (to be
fair I don’t think its hyperbolic to say the world’s finest) making interest and
importance in different ways and to different ends.

Brown’s devotion to the making of interest is much more tactile, improvisational, an

attempt to use poetry to track a mind’s wandering; while her pursuit of importance,
the bits and pieces of an inner-Sydney life, should serve to remind us all that the
world around us, as prosaic as it may seem, is gloriously rich in detail and in
meaning. The end result is, for both books, poetry that makes it easier to live in this
world.

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1. Tilt by Kate Lilley Vagabond Press, 2018

2. For the poet's intended context of the line 'work's/for me, ' see the stanza from 'The ing thing' :
work’s,
for me, a sanctuary
from building sites
from something else
from evil duco-scratching
truants
if-not-already, soon-to-be
excluded
from its realm -
work’s

3. The poems in click here for what we do were written from October 2015 to early January 2018
4.'Idlib' is not mentioned in the book - it's an imputation by the reviewer
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