LYN McCREDDEN

'untranscended / life itself: The Poetry of Pam Brown

There are many ways to peel an onion: sharp knife and tears; under waterlike your mother taught you; surreptitiously, creeping in, layer by layer;or with sunglasses on. And cunning poet Pam Brown knows them all.There they are, those devastatingly onion-like little poems, with furled skins andlayers, offering up biting streetscapes and cafes, half-remembered far-awayplaces, distant friends, 'rock & roll', and lost, ordinary cities; that deceptive,seemingly autobiographical voice cruising between wit, boredom, disillusion,nostalgia, paranoia, irony. Always irony. Always the slippery poetics ofknowledges warping, even as the poet obsessively scans the texts for narrative: aseeking of 'untranscended / life itself ('Patti Smith Was Right', Cordite 9).

Brown is one of Australia's lesser known great poets, if great equates withbeing revered by her peers; appreciated by a growing number of academics; readby a coterie of fans; producing prolifically in her own minimalist way; beingsteeped in Australian and intemational poetics; producing work which isphilosophically and technically rich; and being someone who contributes to thewider literary world through her editing, her mentoring of younger poets, herembracing and discerning of literary culture embedded in an always bigger,baggier world. Brown's works, produced over thirty years, are not widelyavailable. They include volumes such as New and Selected Poems (1990), ThisWorld/This Place (1994), Little Droppings (1994), 50-50 (1997), Dear Deliria:New and Selected Poems (2002), Text Thing (2002) and 2005's Let's Get Lost.The latter is a collaboration between poets and friends Pam Brovra, Ken Boltonand Laurie Duggan. At last count there were eighteen poetry collections, withseveral of these overlapping in a number of selected works (1984, 1993, 2003).

However, critical attention has not been extensive, and despite being highlyregarded within a small group of poets and peers Brown has typically publishedin a scattered, small-press way. While this small-press, small-readershipapproach is something most Australian poets know intimately. Brown bas madeit into an art form, and one which seems in keeping with her own ironic and attimes cynical approach to tbe world of appearance, celebrity and media hype.Brown's career is very far away from such scenes, not it seems through self-effacement or a shy-poet-in-the-garret attitude. There is just a residualtoughness, a pervasive, questioning cynicism, and a stubborn faithfulness tolanguage's plasticity which Brown's poems embody, attitudes which seem tocome from the deeper registers of this poet's intellectual and artistic life as it isled in contemporary Australia.

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Reviewers describe Brown as a satirist, as improvisational, wittily paranoidand world-weary, ironic' She is, and does, all these things in her poem'Flickering Gaudi' from the 1994 volume This World/This Place:

Whatto drink in remembrance of friends, of ideas,of projects, of eight millimetre films,of sketchbooks, screenprints, letters alleliding somehow in the depths of the pile?The extemporary verve of designs for a lifewhich never evolve into actual manufacture.And now, in a kind of inner-suburbanisolation, brilliant - bright - paintingsare attentively wrapped & stackedat the back of a wardrobe. Mild domesticitywhere reasonable evenings become numinous nightsof reading difficult books patiently fiaton your back & raging,privately, laughing, noting the clues,improving your vocabulary, never your method, (100-01)

There is indeed improvisation - of a careful, knowing kind - in the eclectictumble of things and moods, moments of brief existential measuring: 'a kind ofinner-suburban / isolation', 'Mild domesticity', 'reasonable evenings', 'on yourback & raging'. The wonderful swing of 'The extemporary verve of designs fora life' threatens to quite undo the aim of this essay, for the poem's continualriffing on ephemerality - the life never evolving 'into actual manufacture', orrealised method - offers a challenge to this reader. That challenge is to go withthe quizzical, self-deprecating wit of the surface, and at the same time to stake aclaim about depth in this wonderfully extemporising poetry.

In the poem 'Scenes', from the 2002 volume Text Thing, Brown is stillconcertedly at these meditations on detritus.

that white plastic baghas been driftingfrom the gutterto the roadfor three days,when the rainwater

I Interviews and reviews of Pam Brown's work include: 'Bev Braune Reviews Pam Brown,'rev, of Text Thing, Cordite ; Kerry Leves,rev, of Text Thing, Southerly 63,2 (2003): 190-93; Brian Henry, rev, of Dear Deliria: New andSelected Poems, Jacket 24 (Aug, 2003): ;Susan M, Schultz, rev, of Eleven 747 Poems, Jacket 22 (May 2003): ; 'Pam Brown in Conversation with John Kinsella, July 5, 2003,'Jacket 22 (May 2003): ; Kate Lilley, 'TruthIs, the Bright Young Thing Doesn't Get the Drift,' rev, of Drifting Topoi, Sydney MorningHerald 23 September 2000: 7; Susan Schulz, rev, of 50-50,- Selected Poetry, Heat 8 (1998):198-200; Kevin Brophy, 'A Long Way, No?' rev, of This World/This Place, Australian BookReview 159 (April 1994): 44-45,

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carries it offto the Tasman SeaI think I'll miss it, (130-32)

One of the intriguing things about this scene from 'Scene' is its careful noting;of place, colour, time, destination and feeling. Such care is at odds, hauntingly,with the observation of transience. But there is also a poignant realisation, in theunderstatedness of the poem, that the things of the world are intimatelyconnected to emotions - or at least the observer continues to make theconnection, albeit tentatively: 'I think I'll miss it.' The scene is reminiscent ofone in the film American Beauty, in which the young drug user standsmesmerised by the plastic bag lifting and falling in gusts of wind. Just why thatscene was so moving is hard to explain - did it present an image of transience?A glimpse of nature in a ferociously human world? Of forces outside humanpower? The scenes from the film and the poem are linked by their fascinationwith something faintly glimpsed, distant and understated, that is my clue inturning to an interpretive reading of Pam Brown's work.

However admiring I am of the spare, sharp, witty and ironic poetry of Brown,turning on its recurrent tropes of ephemerality, memory, place and postmodernsubjectivity, this essay will move beyond admiration. It will read against thegrain of Brown's own urbane secularity, with its emphases on transience,distance, its critique of lack of depth in the modem world, arguing for a readingof Brown's works within a category of sacredness. This is indeed an uphillargument, one by which I imagine Brown, the poet of 'untranscended / lifeitself, would be bemused. In this climb I will call on the work of earlytwentieth-century sociologist, novelist and secular theologian Georges Bataille,and his anti-institutional and transgressive concepts of the sacred. Further, theessay will confront ideas about the sacred in Brown's familiar haunt, the city, sooften the icon of godlessness, whether it be in the guise of disenchanted, secularmodernity, the technological, commercial, chartered place; or differently, as theplace of decadence, Sodom and Gomorrah.

Within this context, here is the opening of Brown's poem 'Pique', from her1997 volume 50-50,-

no oneon the comer

here

silent,not spiritual,

the city is empty

antispectacular&as

deodorisedas heaven

no sleeping boysno density

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no belchingpissing bodies

no spittingin the street

utilitarian -make one step

another stepfollows

the pace setby the tedium

ofthe blessed (67-68)There is so much going on in these seemingly laconic and wittily spare littlelines, though 'sacredness' is not what the poem appears to be focused upon;quite the opposite, it seems. Brown's poetry could be described as jauntilyprofane, captured in the little dance of 'Pique', with its stepped out rhythms andsharp observational city-scapes.

In bis essay 'Savage Metropolis', Andrew McCann argues, through a readingof Australian colonial aesthetics, and of Marcus Clarke in particular, 'thatmodernity brings witb it a degree of regret related to its disenchantment' (325).He argues of Clarke's view:

In a world where cultural authority resided increasingly with the agents oftechnological and scientific progress ... pre-modem 'belief in sacred incarnations,in heavenly interpositions, in personal relations with the awful Spirit of theUniverse, is dead' [Clarke's words] the 'creed of the nineteenth century' isunambiguously secular. (325)

Despite this claim to secularity, in McCann's argument Modernity's regret aboutits own disenchantment in Australia informs a larger repressed colonial sense ofthe uncanny which arose, again and again seeking pleasure in the animistic, intbe very things it was meant to be so far beyond. Further, be argues that 'tberituals of a "dead and forgotten creed"' - and here he's referring specifically tocolonial responses to Indigenous beliefs and practices - are located 'inside tbeWestern Imagination' (330).

If we accept McCann's argument that colonial writers and readers such asMarcus Clarke are caught in the gap between modem disbelief in the old creedsand superstitions, and nineteentb-century readerly and writerly predilections forthe gothic, the barbaric ritual, the eroticised, indigenous sacred, surely tbe post-colonial, poststructurally-informed writer such as Pam Brown is several stepsbeyond this: aware of these colonial, racial and cultural blindnesses, but self-reflexive too about language as tbe site most complicit in constructing suchblindnesses. Looking back at modernity's ambivalent attempts to dispel thesacredness of tbe word, looking around at the poststructural word which knowsit will betray itself, and at tbe post-colonial word which tries but cannot openitself up enough to alterity, what can a poet do? I want to suggest several ways inwhich Brown's poetry of the city is a poetry readable within the context of tbe

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sacred, a category which gives full play to such questions. Tbe first indication ofthis is when we look at Brown's uses of irony.

Jean Michel Heimonet writes that tbe function of irony 'is to "torture"discourse, to empty it of positive content by pressing it up against a blind spot, asymbolic no-man's-land that simultaneously reveals to the discourse its ownfinitude and its beyond' (63). This is partly what Brown's ironic lines areengaged in: confronting of tbe finitude of discourse that is at tbe same time adesire for tbe 'beyond' of discourse. The city of 'Pique' is empty, unspectacular- there is even tbe asserted absence of abjection.^ In Brown's city there is 'nobelching / pissing bodies / no spitting' - although of course her words arenecessarily 'bodying' the very thing tbey seek to negate. Sbe plays here witb thelimits of her own discourse - its lack of spectacle, density; its repeated rhythms,just like tbe tedium of tbe blessed. All tbe poet can do is mimic and ironise suchtedium and emptiness, her little step down lines making a mockery ofthe rituals,but also of tbe artist looking for her narrative.

In part two of the poem another strategy is tried, as the poem constructs itscomically blasphemous vignettes. After tbe hiatus of 'the pace set / by thetedium / of tbe blessed' we have constructed for us - in a seeming reaction - analmost impersonal, visceral desire for

demolishinghalf the house

to make roomfor the truck

bashing the brickswith

a blunt tang

aimingthe air rifle

anywhere

blasting dovesfrom

telegraph poles

shouting and struttingdown

BBQ lanesetting fire

to lakes. (68-69)

2 Abjection is another major site of contemporary investigations ofthe sacred, particularly in thework of Julie Kristeva, notably The Powers of Horror, and in Catherine Clement's TheFeminine Sacred.

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What else can you do in the empty, unspectacular city, but run amok, disrupt thesilence, bash, aim, blast, shout and strut? In such a vacuum, how to find a role,how to write, how to live? One thing you can do is tum the irony back onyourself, the poet:

& here am I,nibbling

my jejune nourishmentwith the laxity

of a cultivated& singular minority

languidlyerasing

all legend

fiick fiick fiick, (70)Nothing sacred here - all legend (text and belief) casually self-erasing. Or is it?One effect of the irony is to mock the languidness of poet and audience, the'cultivated / & singular minority', the eradication of all legend simultaneouslyhailing its own laxity, the very thing it claims to mock. So narrative excitementis mocked as 'the tedium of the blessed', and comically whipped up in theviolent acts of nameless larrikins (and poets). The poet or the poem recognises, ala Bataille, that she is confronted by 'the finitude of discourse, and its beyond'.Language refuses such silence, but is constantly submitting to it. In fact, I amarguing that this is Brown's recurrent theme: the impossibility of the sacred, andthe impossibility of resting with that impossibility.

In the poem 'Relic' we read: 'what faith! / flailing & thrashing / beating drybones / on rust-flaked drums / practising ritual / as if it were possible to swallow/ an arrow' {50-50 71-72), In 'Pique' the gap between the patterned tedium ofthe silent city and the random violence of bashing bricks, blasting doves,shouting and strutting down BBQ lane sets up an ironic interplay between whatwill not shine - the city as not spiritual, deodorised, one step placed dutifully orploddingly after another - and the bizarre violence of language, or poets, seekingto force event or response. Like Walter Benjamin's flaneur, the characters inBrown's poetry go about declaring the decay of aura, the loss of sacredpossibility or depth in the modem urban world, with its commercialisation andprofane surfaces. But for Brown's city dwellers, again as for Benjamin's flaneur,the city taunts or seduces with its flickering aura, and is simultaneously, I amarguing, the site of 'displacement of the religious into new forms of the sacred'(Hegarty 114). Here is 'City', also from 50-50:

CityA yeamed-for somewhere

adverb-physicallyas lost as now

gazing acrossthe chunky valley

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to a hillof quivering lights -

There is nodestination -

just a placeno site

not Olympicvillage site

not harboursidecasino site

nor sectionof expressway

just eastof where

coincidencehas determined

your residencein a city

you returned toto rememberwhy you left -

Inventingnostalgiafor elsewhere -

you'll live therein the future - (28-29)

The fmal dash - recalling another biting minimalist of tbe sacred, EmilyDickinson - is wonderful. Is it a linguistic lurch into tbe future, a beyond? Oranother ironising stroke of the computer key, signifying a no-place, no show? IsIt a signifier ofthe 'languaged' nature of tbat future? Here, place is emptied ofits definitive meaning, emptied of sacredness, it might be argued, for hereeverything is negated; and it is randomly circular, a place that 'you returned to /to remember / wby you left'; wbere 'coincidence' rhymes with 'residence'. Buttbe city is also yearned for, a place that, because it is an invention, can be seen asenabling invention. And there is tbe flickering postmodern aura of meaning(possibility, substance): the quivering lights, the cbunky valley, the shared storyof vulnerability - yearning, gazing, memory - told only between tbe lines, and inrelation to the city.

One of tbe main projects of Georges Bataille, in 1930s and 40s France, as aleading member of the Parisian College of Sociology, was to invent SacredSociology (Hegarty 101). He sougbt 'the profanation of tbe sacred' (109). Hisapproach was 'to sites tbat predate modernity but persist within it ... tbat couldbe characterized as (im)properly modem' (109). As Bataille scholar PaulHegarty writes, Bataille revealed

... the transvaluation of sites valorized by Christianity in terms of holiness (thechurch, arguably the home ... ) or in terms of sin (the brothel, the bar, the woods)such that they are part of an economy of transgression, or of an ever-mobile

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sacrifice [my italics]. Only after such a shift in value, which is the removal ofvalue (insofar as this fixes a phenomenon) can the move be made to bring back thereligious sacred, this time as part of a Bataillean sacred, such that 'a brothel is mytrue church,' (109, qtg Bataille 12)

The premise here is that only in the removal of value can the sacred be openedtowards. And it is a question of experience rather than fixed space, category,value or definition. As Hegarty describes it, sacred acts or places

cannot permanently exist as sacred, but they can be brought ,,, and this bringingrequires time - a time not of progress, or even process, but of waiting, of non-occurrence because unrealizable - unliveable except in hindsight, except perhapsin anticipation of its not being liveable. But this space is far from abstract,,, (105)

This is not the sacred of the cathedral or mosque, bush or city. Nor is it thesacred of moral codes, nor of the legalism which often attends such codes. It isthe experience of the individual and of a community (readership? peers?): whatis yearned for. awaited, dreamed of, leaned towards, recognised asunpurchaseable in a linguistic or geographical or legal or material economy. It isthe coming to realise that there is no destination (as Brown's metaphor writes it),even as you arrive at your latest port of call. But as Hegarty argues, it is also farfrom abstract, this sacred. In Brown's 'City' the sacred and political areimbricated, in the comic refusal of all those alluring national and commercialand class-transcending promises - 'no site / not Olympic / village site / notharbourside / casino site / nor section / of expressway / just east,' This sacredundermines fatuities and glittering prizes, just as Bataille's sacred understood thebringing of sacred experience away from institutional or codified versions of thereligious, including, most particularly for Bataille, European fascism.

In the anti-institutional and anti-colonising aspects of Bataille's sacred thereare obviously synchronicities for artists working in contemporary, post-colonialAustralia. But of course the context of the necessarily political and spiritualstruggles against entrenched hierarchies and dogmas in early twentieth-centuryEurope is not the same context in which postmodern poets in the West are nowworking. What was at stake for Bataille and other anti-fascist artists was theneed to disarm the mighty push towards political and religious centres,programmes which were yet again establishing themselves. For Brown and herpeers, poets such as John Forbes, Ken Bolton and Laurie Duggan, there is adifferent, Australian starting point in relation to the making of meaning, and itseems almost a converse one in relation to any idea of the experience of meaningor sacredness: Brown's cynicism, satire, attractions and repulsions seem builtaround an absent centre, something always already (in the poetry) lost in thetedious non-occurrences of contemporary (Australian) life. At times this absentcentre seems to be what needs attacking, eradicating, repulsing. At other times itcontinues its function of holding out the possibility of meaning. In this lattercontext. Brown's poems are perpetually beginning:

setting out,a scarlet flower

behind an ear.

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into the wideworld intobanner-adorned cities

fakingpermanent festivity

('Anyworld', Cordite 20)or,

leaving nature'sbarbarism (spiderin a glove) behindme I enter mypaved city -pocked concrete& traffic carbonsky's allcoppery night'scoming up

I followthe man-in-the-dressalong a lanelitteredwith litterwhereCarlo and Zanzihave signedthe sub-stationroll-a-door -more than a tag -a declaration -white strokeswide brush('In Ultimo', 50-50 93-94)

Momentarily adorned as Romantic poet, 'a scarlet flower / behind an ear', thenarrators of Brown's poems have to leam again and again that there is no return,that nature is barbaric, just as the city is, 'faking / permanent festivity', 'pockedconcrete / & traffic carbon'. But her repulsions constantly, momentarily pivotinto hope, a leaning towards, observing intimately 'my / paved city'. This is notBlake's blasted London full of marked and desecrated citizens, nor theArmageddon of Eliot's Wasteland. Brown's poetry is less dramatic, moredemocratic, accepting, following without judgement 'the man-in-the-dress',observing the verve and particularity of Carlo and Zanzi's 'declaration',experiencing in the marks of 'her' city what she sees in herself- not the need forredemption arising out of some extraordinary fiat or mighty pronouncement, andpossibly foreshadowing no redemption at all, but still a continuing need - in thecitizens, in the poet - to declare, to sign, to transgress. Postmodern theologianMark Taylor writes:

For Bataille, [the sacred is] the soiled, it's the dirty, it's the polluted, it's that whichis ordinarily regarded as negative ,,, Because he sees in that kind of hierarchical

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Structure of high and low, extraordinary repression. And he's trying to release that- to cultivate, indeed solicit, the return of the repressed.

At the end of the poem 'Anyworld' Brown declares:

re mem ber Ba,Are-e Bam

ancient city of sandand mud

collapsing in an earthquake,the cultural heritage building

slipping subsiding,consigning

any recordof the archaic ruin

to dust*

the memoryis

ruined*

who can accepta given world,

who canlive in it? {Cordite 20)

This essay has been reading in Brown's work an openness towards thelittered, un-Romantic, pocked and transvestite city, 'my paved city'; to thetransgressive, unaffiliated, anti-hierarchical; to defilements, blankness and little-ness. Brown's poetry places a finger on the pulse of small, everyday defilements,registering the mystery of abjection, of loss, and the unlocatableness of meaning.In 'Anyworld' all cities, including the human body, are sand and mud,collapsing. The final question of 'Anyworld' - 'who can accept / a given world,/ who can / live in it' - is almost imponderable. The question strains with irony,the word 'accept' pulling in opposite directions: not to accept is to judge,condemn, repudiate, dismiss. But to judge what? In the context of this poem, toaccept seems an act of complacency, a simple, total forgetting. But if the worldis 'given', there is no direct mention here of a giver, divine or otherwise. Unless,in approaching that liminal place between acceptance and rage, living andrefusing to live, the experience of the sacred emerges: a waiting, a non-occurrence, a mobility. Of course this poem's question is potentially moral andpolitical, for one answer is - I will not accept, I will change the given world, asin Brown's poem 'At the Wall' (77;/.!? World/This Place 93-95) and its outrageover 'Sarajevo Srebrenica palestine / rwanda kabul'. But a parallel response is toacknowledge the sacred dimension of the question, a sacredness experienced inthis active play of possibility and impossibility, Taylor writes:

,,, at the heart of the experience of the sacred is the conflict between attraction andrepulsion. The sacred is never simply one or the other, it is at one and the sametime attractive and repulsive. That's what lends it its power and horror. Whathappens in a lot of Christianity is that the positive and the negative get split and

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posited on two different realities - God and the Devil, whatever framework we'rein.

The rigour of Pam Brown's poetry lies in its very refusal to merely collapseinto one or the other reality. There are no gods or devils, no unironic negativesand positives. Rather, I have been arguing that in Brown's poetry there aremetaphorically rich experiences of a yearning, one which recognises language asthe chief ally and enemy, the poetic site being not one of celebration orrepulsion, but of both. The aura glimpsed fieetingly may well be only thoseflickering lights across the valley, but the poet makes them props in anexperience ' , . , of waiting, of non-occurrence .,. unrealizable - unliveable exceptin hindsight, except perhaps in anticipation of its (possibly) not being liveable'(Hegarty 105), This is 'an ever mobile', languaged experience of sacrednessencountered in the ordinary, faking, littered and flickering city.

WORKS CITED

Bataille, Georges, Inner Experience. Trans, Leslie Anne Boldt, Albany: State U of NewYork, 1988,

Brown, Pam, Sweblock. Glebe, NSW: The Author, 1972,, Cocabola's Funny Picture Book. Sydney: Tomato Press, 1973. An anthology of

prose, poetry and graphics,-, Automatic Sad. Sydney: Tomato Press, 1974,, Cafe Sport. Sydney: Sea Cruise Books, 1979., Correspondences. Sydney: Red Press, 1979, With Joanne Burns,, Country and Eastern. Sydney: Never-Never Books, 1980,, Small Blue View. Adelaide: E,A,F,/Magic Sam, 1982,, Selected Poems 1971-1982. Sydney: Redress/Wild&Woolley, 1984,, Keep It Quiet. Sydney: Sea Cruise Books, 1987, A prose collection,, New and Selected Poems. Sydney: Wild&Woolley, 1990,, This World/This Place. St Lucia, Qld: U of Queensland P, 1994,, Little Droppings. Sydney: Never-Never Books, 1994,, 50-50. Adelaide: Little Esther Books, 1997,, My Lightweight Intentions. Cambridge/Perth: Salt/Folio, 1998,, Drifting Topoi. Sydney: Vagabond P, 2000., Text Thing. Adelaide: Little Esther Books, 2002,, Eleven 747 Poems. Ireland: Wild Honey P, 2002,, Dear Deliria: New and Selected Poems. Applecross, WA: Salt, 2003,

Brown, Pam, Ken Bolton, and Laurie Duggan, Let's Get Lost. Sydney: Vagabond P,Stray Dog Editions, 2005,

Clement, Catherine, and Julia Kristeva, The Feminine and the Sacred. Trans, Jane MarieTodd, New York: Columbia UP, 2001,

Cordite. . Accessed 7 Dec. 2004.Hegarty, Paul, 'Undelivered: The Space/Time of the Sacred in Bataille and Benjamin,'

Economy and Society ll.\ (February 2003): 101-18,Heimonet, Jean Michel. 'Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of Mysticism,' Diacritics

Id.l (Summer 1996): 59-73,Henry, Brian, Rev, of Dear Deliria: New and Selected Poems. Jacket 23 (2003):

.

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Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans, Leon S, Roudiez, NewYork: Columbia UP, 1982,

McCann, Andrew, 'The Ethics of Abjection: Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot.'Australian Literary Studies 18,2 (1997): 145-55,, 'Savage Metropolis: Animism, Aesthetics and the Pleasures of a Vanished Race,'Textual Practice 17,2 (Summer 2003): 317- 33,

Taylor, Mark, 'Georges Bataille,', ABC Radio National, Encounter: 22 April 2001,.

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