2: I'll Show You Mine: Writing about Writing

Pam Brown has a long publishing pedigree, and in this collection, much of the work is
introspective and makes her artistic process explicit.
For instance, Spirulina to go:
You're embarrassed
by my slurp
when I'm
guzzling spirulina
but
I've been to my personal best
and back
I'm not worried
and later in this same poem,
...
I want to reach the inhumans
find the kind of poetry
that appeals to them
...
At times Brown turns to address her reader directly, as in Wordless, a diary-like
stream of consciousness in which the minutiae of life, bus journeys, the people
observed, and new undies, become a compelling read:
...going home
to make a poem
(this one)
to give my problems
to you, reader
(contagion)
Her approach to language, subject and form has an authoritative anarchy. In
Queensland looks at first glance like a simple descriptive poem, but isn't, despite its
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stonkered cattle lying in the road/ to carnarvon gorge." This is a poet who can stud
her work with glac cherries like polysemy, gewgaws, cladistic and hyperaubade
and make them stick. She had me at stonkered.
In More than a Feuilleton, a longer poem that she originally published as a chapbook,
Brown reveals more about her poetic practice, hardwired as it is into her life. And in
doing so, as in much of this collection, ruminates on those things that can also perplex
and destabilise many of us.
my week
is my weekend
my task
reinvigorate ossified poetries
by adulteration
and, later:
who says 'penned'
instead of
'wrote' or 'written'?
always say
I data entered
that poem!
As Munro lets us know in Proof of a Day, her poems don't slip out without permission
either. A catalogue of the scatter of objects on her desk becomes a piece about not
writing poetry:
...poems by Jim Morrison
and an ashtray full of apricot pits and butts
coffee table proof that January 26 really existed;
that, and 5 bad poems dated 26/1.

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