Waratah, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2025, 69pp.
Readers of this site will know that I’m always interested in the possibilities of a more minimalist Australian lyric poetry. But it is, as John Forbes said about an entirely different poetics, “hard and stony ground”. One of the reasons for this is that most minimalist poetries require a lot of commitment, not to say complicity, on the part of the societies they are written within, commitment that takes the form of shared ideals, shared cultural educations and, above all, a certain respect for, and patience with, poetry. It’s not the sort of soil that Australia offers and this may well be the reason that Australian poems are inclined to look like mere text, to expand – and, even, to shout – as though in desperation that they will not be understood or listened to. If we think of what minimalism means to most readers we probably arrive at Tang Chinese or Heian Japanese but the conditions of contemporary Australian culture mean that these kind of luminous poems aren’t really available to us. There is, for a start, the fact that these poems are often exercises on a set topic and are collected in approved anthologies. They require an agreed upon cultural background and often need prose explanations to set the poems in context. They are also a courtly activity – something common to a great many poetries – and thus restricted to a socially narrow band of practitioners. But there are alternative minimalisms. Postwar American poetry (or, perhaps, post-William Carlos Williams poetry) has room for minimalist pieces not necessarily all about wheelbarrows and plums. I think one of the enabling features there is an abandonment of the possibility of a broad audience and the hope that an adherence to a poetics will render the poems meaningful to those who understand the theory behind them: think of the fine early poems of Robert Creeley, coming out of an engagement with Olson (no minimalist he!).
Cameron Lowe’s poetry has, since his first small book, Throwing Stones at the Sun, published in 2005, worked away at investigating and realising in practice his own version of minimalism. It starts, in a sense, with his productivity. Fewer than two hundred poems in a twenty-year period is a lean output in a country where poets usually produce a book every couple of years and, in the case of some poets, several in a single year. The poems seem, also, to have become “smaller” in many senses of the word. The poems of BliNk and the book that precedes it, Circle Work, are inclined to make a virtue out of the various kinds of smallness on offer. At the thematic level there is an attractive emphasis on the limited and everyday as opposed to the grand. And over these couple of hundred poems we get used to the porch (the first full-length book was called Porch Music – an engaging phrase for a poetry focussing on what you see from a homely domestic setting), to the flowers that can be seen from it and to the ever-present white picket fence, as well as to the seaside walk at Geelong. Although the function of the poems is sometimes registration it is more likely that they will concern themselves with what a poetry is doing – or what it can do – with an immediate world such as this. This is done most overtly in a set of poems from Circle Work called “The Skin of It”. I don’t think it’s an entirely successful piece – perhaps because it runs to six poems and Lowe is uncomfortable with what looks like an approach to a major statement. It also has a slightly breathless, slightly ecstatic tone that recalls certain American poets. But it does have a lot to say about what this poetry might try to do. It opens,
At the moment of waking, or just after, light sharpening,
the day a plaything
for possibility, sun-showers, the sudden brilliance
of bitumen, the I-as-sensitive-register
noted in passing, dismissed as diary of emotion –
so a piece of sky might be chipped, wrought anew, delivered
to the door, consumed as simile
or fast food –
at best a sampling, tilted towards now, of what a day,
a merging of days,
might permit –
familiar things, white pickets, rooflines and aerials, pale petals
climbing rough palings –
It’s a clear statement of the kind of things that are going to be a worry for this poetry. Is the self a mere “sensitive register” – with its implication of superiority – and will the result be an assemblage of samplings of the environment? “The Skin of It” is balanced at the end of the book – as though to stress the importance of what it is worrying about – by a companion piece, “Skin Response”, which eschews both a comfortable high style and a tendency to abstract the registered objects by creating a frame of significance in which, metaphorically, they act as symbols of something wider in significance than, say, a picket fence.
Impelled to begin again, to respond –
neither that slick, knowing eloquence, nor skin fashioned
into abstraction, slippery yet emphatic
with intention . . .
As I have said, these poems don’t really work, partly because they have a semi-rhapsodic tone about them – as though to say, “here I am confronted again, but I must push on with my affirmations” – but they are an invaluable guide to what Lowe sees as the problems in what he does and wants to do. And they are a perfect introduction to the poems of BliNk.
One of the problem features of minimalist poems is the way they seem to aim for a “high-art” experience, something that is designed to leave us quivering and prostrate with aesthetic bliss. The idea, I think, is that this is not appropriate in contemporary Australia (or, for that matter, post-war America) where life is complex if not decidedly fraught. I don’t hold this view myself – I have no problem with Yeats’s embroidered cloths of Graves’s woman who tells her love while half asleep – but I can see the argument behind it: poetry should explore reality rather than making attractive and pleasing poems out of it. One of the problems of the poems I’ve referred to, not to mention endless contemporary haikus and tankas, is a certain tendency toward the high-flown, the slick eloquence. The first poem of BliNk gets us out of this kind of minimalism by a healthy dose of vulgarity:
Thought that it was Josey Wales who said it in The Outlaw Josey Wales but he didn’t – Wales said: “To hell with them fellas. Buzzards gotta eat same as worms.” He said: “Dying ain’t much of a livin, boy” – It was John Vernon, said: “Don’t piss down my back & tell me it’s raining” –
In the manner of faux-oriental poems (James Wright’s “As I Step over a Puddle at the End of Winter, I Think of an Ancient Chinese Governor” is an example) there is a long title to direct the reader: in this case: “Late-morning Western Reverie as Raindrops Turn Rivulets Trickling Visions of Trickle-down Economics on the Pane”. This turns a poem about a fifty-year old Western into a comment on the myth that extreme wealth can be justified because it produces economic activity (work in luxury yacht-building yards, Lamborghini factories etc). In a sense the pleasure of the poem – not untypically in minimalist poetics – derives from neither language nor form but from the interplay of contexts. Another way of puncturing any incipient pretensions of high style is to introduce a jarring metaphorical object as in “Summer Fancy for Idle times”:
Thought, rest sweetly in the shallows of night like a floating thong, while the eye falls asleep & and the ear, well the ear gets busy on a bender!
But healthy vulgarity is a minor technique; more important is the density of contextual references which make superficially simple poems resonate with wider significances. And these references abound in Lowe’s work. Many of them are references or quotations from poets. Most of these are American but Lee Harwood and Roy Fisher are English presences and Laurie Duggan is an Australian one. A poem about a plant seen in the Geelong Botanical Gardens describes itself in the title as “A Nod to Doctor Williams . . .”
At the edge of a gravel path winding amongst camellias I found it purely by chance - & knew it only by its sign SAXIFRAGA – & not a rock to split in sight!
I read somewhere a description of classical oriental lyrics as being analogous to light bulbs. The poems illuminate and glow in the imaginative parts of our minds and seem very simple but behind that glow is the full complexity of the contexts they are built on, contexts which were understood, at least partly, by every informed reader. In a similar way, a light bulb, simple and illuminating as it is, is the visible endpoint of an enormously large, complicated and largely invisible power-grid. So it’s intriguing to see one of the poems in BliNk take up a similar idea:
There is a certain way of talking
about light globes.
I will write
a big poem some day.
Reflection
encounters reflection:
the window, dusk
bats flying out of
the mirror.
The desire
to make it more
than it is.
There are prizes
for this –
Of course it’s a polemical poem attacking those poets who abstract, metaphorise and inflate the simple experience of reality – they win prizes – but it also has a number of other issues. It uses a quote from Roy Fisher as an epigraph, stressing that it is entering the world of how poetry can “deal with” reality. It raises the issue of reflection (something that occurs in a number of Lowe’s poems) and it also raises the issue of how brief poems about reality – such as the ones I’ve quoted – might be fitted into something larger: “I will write / a big poem some day”. The poetry of Laurie Duggan is significant here. The basis of Duggan’s poetry is often small observations where the world, or the processes that generate the world, reveal themselves. But Duggan always seems to want to make these into larger wholes, so that there are the “Blue Hills” and “Allotments” sequences, which are really anthologies of short observations, and then larger constructions such as The Ash Range or Crab & Winkle, the latter built as a kind of diary or, as the book says, a warped Shepherd’s Calendar. Interestingly Lowe quotes from Crab & Winkle in “The Skin of It” but it’s a comment about dissolution rather than accretion working towards a long poem: “the grand projects become miscellanies”.
Readers’ sensitivity to allusions can sometimes create the problem of finding allusions that may never have been intended. I don’t think that is likely to happen in BliNk. The title “Leaving the Corio Station” recalls Ashbery’s “Leaving the Atocha Station” as “Time’s Shit Sandwiches Hurrying Beer” is a comic take on Marvell’s lines. And the passage in “Everyday” which specifically refers to what I think is the core of Lowe’s poetry – “How sing it straight / in all this fiddle” – recalls in that wonderful phrase Marianne Moore’s poem on poetry and also, perhaps, Alvarez’s collection of essays which takes it as its title. In poetry such as this, where the resonance of allusion is so powerful a technique, it’s probably best to assume that all such suspicions are justified and that they all are known to the poet and part of the apparatus slid into position to make a satisfying poetics.
I realise in this review that I have been so much concerned with the issue of a contemporary minimalist poetry that I have come close to committing the critical crime of seeing an individual author’s work as exemplifying something rather than being a coherent free-standing whole in its own right. Throughout BliNk and the earlier two books there is a consistent balance between registering the ordinary domestic world that life presents us with and at the same time considering ways in which this can best be done. The first poem of Circle Work, “In Memory of Flowers”, shows that the former can be done without the latter but this isn’t typical. One feels, behind the poetry, a nervousness about producing something shapely and attractive out of observing the immediate environment. There are other elements in BliNk as well which I haven’t dwelt on in describing the book: a surrealist wash in some of the poems, for example, as well as some deliberately cryptic brief pieces. The last poem of the book, “Days”, chooses to leave us with the issue of the poetics of the everyday as a final topic. It engages the “objectivists” of the thirties, Rakosi and Oppen, quoting the former’s comment that the latter “upheld the integrity of nouns” – object words rather than their interpretive servants, adjectives and adverbs. The last words are a request from Rakosi “Cellist, / easy on that bow”: don’t strive for stagey false effects but write a poetry that has a tone that respects reality for what it is.
