Attraction

between two houses, a bottle-o.
mapping like syrup or gravel
I’ve snuck between these two
houses fistfighting; plotting cats
in neighbourhoods of potential

I’ve had so many non-Euclidean
thoughts about you, noting the
corruption of cricket (6s are renamed
hi-maxis), the ways birds index the
pitch in corners exceeding one-eighty

in traffic, cars sublimate
stop and start like alchemy
white cockatoos skirt and pop,
lemonpip-y. neighbourhood
cats as the smallest data

sex is topography (sketching
altitudes and affects of climate)
Neopavlovian whatever – a Truffaut
version – mapping like syrup or
gravel into hankie-pleats of time-sense

quilting is a tribute to angles,
a worse idea than poetry. a woman
next to me sucks the room’s air
through her teeth, asks, ‘what do
you know about smoke signals?’

–

this digital version of English
mustard, pumpkinbread, sweetmeat:
sown pastures of barley wash into
gullies by yolk-cracking rain, losing
the raw materials of lunch

we came right up to our throats
with a fingernail’s amount of rattly
atoms buzzing, pointing to clouds
and charging them each with new
cloud-types, eg, ‘total fucking gas’

hologrammatic America, hi-def and
projected across the surface of
México. feral fennel/parsley seeding
on the median strip, angles flush.
lean-cut mince-meat; leathery chaps

O, to fall in love! the first time
you see two magnets drag clean
a fishtank and deposit folds of
algae onto the fingertip: a lesson
on bloodflow, digestion, dejecta

archaeologies stack up and fast-
food together; pigeons squabble
for soy proteins. imagining that
everything can be translated as
‘sex,’ I wait for some utterance

–

imagine the centre of a circle is
that moment of first collision.
we’re in a Lucretian poem
tied up in the smallest data of
lambwool woodchop and milkskin

composition by field – noting
where one cat appears and one
disappears. eccentric analogy
about a wasp and indeterminate
probability, e.g. the pokies

ataraxia: pleasure of ingestion
ejaculation resistance tension
equilibrium. the rat-a-tat of energy
discharge. spreading is not just
difference but electronics, sonics

Dutch family sweating uphill
crosshatching a steep headland south
of Cronulla. from the sky waves are
constellations; sheep are modular units
bog silt chaff rainwater and milk

inside every grass-blade is a fat
lamb, suckled on milk and heat-
stroke – the sun’s history jotted
onto post-its, ie, the burn-out as
both beginning and ending

–

we are crosswording and feeling
that sex is just synonyms, a play
of equivalent others. pleasures in
difference are pleasures of emphasis
the way an accent sits on a letter

peaty-as-fuck scotch like blood
transfusion I’m walking waist-
high in a thistle farm glomming
needle-thin encounters. percolate
in this case is rain up through shoe

losing an apostrophe on a
Czech keyboard, I can no
longer contract or possess
so I begin to stretch out my
discourse, give it all away

pleasure is emphasis, the one
reiterated against or through
the other. the difference between
malting (a milkshake) and moulting
(a dog) the difference of smoke/mouth

a play of equivalence; difference
is emphasis, Eros and errata, typo.
sediments of punchy stout or a rock-face
all five were talking at once, one
couldn’t see the irony re Freddy Mercury

–

this is an event particle: site-specific
willy-willy, caravan relocated to
lagoon. a woman next to me sucks
the room’s air through her teeth, says,
‘Oh look.’

mapping a banjo solo: a turkey
vulture flies in patterns of
forgetful desire, first here then
here then here (etc.) strings towards
each other like Muybridge’s horse

American typologies: only
ever in Ohio or an mp3 Nashville,
the Atlantic ocean is dredged and
relocated for five bucks. A woman
sucks the air through her patois

O kat, O puss kat, guard me
against moth against my own
obsession with greeting cards,
against Pennsylvanian brown/reds,
complexes of smallest spidersilks

things are being relocated, weathers
are cracking us open, tealeaf/genesis
narratives: sex and harvest, toffee plates,
fish scales cold sweats. when wool stinks
of Greek mutton Greek oil Greek nicotine

Lovetypes

I speak of love in one pan; love for potatoes

love in a tablet, love and debts or sermons.

I mistook pleasure-giving for an indiscriminate

seedtext — two cowboys and a pickaxe — a

moving principle, an attempted deduction. She

is in love, in love with Russia, with minerals and

rivers. The way we love borders. The way we

learned to love physics, the way we used to

love globalisation. THE WAY WE LOVE TECH-

NOLOGY! Loving difference or Buddhist

perspectives. The love in a Freudian analysis.

Pornographic or scatological loves “at odds” with

chance. Love so slovenly, so clumsy. Good usage.

I love it and I tell it. I abandoned illiteracy as untrust-

worthy. I said love love, Haitian French, Scottish stigma

Harlem renaissance. Handful of non-standard, academic

Thomases. A very complicated person. Almost a

decoy. My language draws love as a grid. Stuff about

formations. Set of concerns floating about, sandwiched

with an occasion for thinking. Somewhere between the two.

Someone’s gonna read this, this love like police presence

For A Parasite

O the whitenoise and language buffets,
the body-memorial the love and diagonal

roastmeats. The deaths of food, to feast
and to die, somewhere between solids

and gas. Pay for it. Interfere. Static fuzzes
like television and newness. A parasite

plays Button Button Who’s Got the button?
A parasite gives you what you want. A

lover tucked into the clam of your neck
gland. A tapeworm or countryrat. What

complicates your logic. Flowcharts melt;
waters push against winds, cityrats bleat

for the death of their transmissions. Famine
and bondage. Cube/bone. Bread and love’s

a chimera. Your greatest asset is ‘your’
specificity, what joins you to your arrangement

Not a position, not even puzzling, not a
dinnertable’s polite fictions. Not analysis.

I name something and so I love it. Inter-
subjective and fabulous, head-first, face-on

Of a Certain Science. I divvy up economics.
I feed between relations. Guest-hosting. You

are an old orbit. A referent. You are strenuously
current, like a wrestling match. I gave up

metaphors for you. I spoke theology. I hogged
the ball, weaved the function, was a Copernican

subject. Idiott! Idiott! But o, white-space, white-
noise, table/cube: Eating and speaking just ‘work’.

A coat for Michael. A bluecoat; a Steincoat; a sealfurcoat

Here is a genesis of Buttons:
A phonometrician covered metal with F minor
made an anti-Wagnerian opera/hoax
reduced the highlights to nouns
moved time in loud acts
retired to a Lakeside shiatsu-school
riffed a precursor to repetitive musics
left himself ajar like Stevens, like a mood, like Agon

+ made it pointillist style in the deskwhiskey’s wake, a coat
across a chair ‘as’ a hammock ; sealfurcoat one layer of Harlequin’s

STRIPTEASE!

–

an a coat a b coat a bluecoat in a mirrorplate. a coat an occasion of
‘Cambridge blue’ a crude clot any use.

Erik Erik Erik where’s your coat
mingling with motor analogies and Emersonian anarchism

A duke is pistol’d!

what son ever went North to a wartime coatless

–

divide the seamless coat into ex-wrinkles of a hankie
say ‘what I mean by creativity is …’

in California: bald mountain, deadcat, weekday grammars, winefooling

a blueness a coatness a ness-ness!

I sketched across a butcher paper tablecloth everything I knew
an etymology traceable to Joyce, porridge, snailstepping

–

self-enjoyment: a coat is a hook a coat and a pear and a pear

–

I had an athlete’s coat, a mirrorimage thereof
I’m moving as a verb oughta, a spanking trot a tropical blowfly armswat

“chiefly” (adverb) + “overcoat” noun

you’ve a hankering for a coat of silk/wool
glance zest:
coats behave ‘just like’ commas
an impulse re compoundwords
an auto-affection like an accordion lovesong

–

an mp3 whyayeman

–

spotted-like-an-ocelot reading Stein on a trainjourney

–

Alice’s first real fur torn by a madman

–

Wittgenstein and a bagpipe ringtone clanging in a newyear or decade. he was a guest who may’ve snubbed a pudding at biscuittime

it makes birds, it just makes birds. wartime griefnotes not poetry but the distribution, the most tender act of all, of a coat in wintry impossibilities, for sons both lost and longdead.

Philadelphia

being here is Robert Fripp-y spaces cracked open and whistle-whistling
“of happening, a mouth”

small-leaf thicket runs north-south, mirroring the Appalachians.
from a plane they buzz orange for fall — music-as-weather,
ie its ON-TO-LOGY

I lovepoem into a bar with the Frenchman and the only-in-a-clinic-context man:

the one in the horn-rimmed glasses with the story re
a tombstone, a Pound at large, a list of notable Austrians,
or some Schwitters, tinny on Pine and Colonial
Pizza: “fümms bö wö tää zää uu, pögiff, kwii ee.”

macho like magnetic fields

Once there was a doctor in love with an addressee — tortoise stamps gumtaste envelopes and traintravel

a shelf of chess strategies

carboncopy typewriter forensics reveal the purple ink of quince-fruits, coughsyrup and basketball; the painful grammar of Bill

Seems So Long Ago, Nancy, so long
since we made pointillist sweet-love on the
vineyard gallery walls, our fists jellyfishing
with brain surgery blues

so long since the Twombly room; Achilles the scribbles the heartattack

I had you open and squirrelling as a bean burger;

O dearest, Philadelphia, O Kat
O those gifted fudge in an asylum downstate

this is an economy of hangovers, of mistranslations, of snowfall
in widgets, of names flattened by the prairies

I sopped like a pillowcase like the Delaware

But O Philadelphia — your poems your snackplatters
I had a jukeboxy dream of a tissue in a beerbottle
the scotch a buck the Eritrean CD-DJ in a digital lag
you a dilemma
fanciful schtick
soulfood lunchtruck

did you tag intuitively?
did you draw up schizopolitics?

More than that,
Philadelphia: that two river city

I was in the Shop ‘N’ Bag, yelling a letter home:

“Watch me as they watch this”

Paronymous Attraction

(This essay was written for Critical Animals, a research symposium held during This Is Not Art, Newcastle Australia, October 2009. The title comes from a poem by Aleksandr Skidan. Photograph of fireflies by Akihiro.)

Everything we need is here, nothing is missing. No omission, no repetition. It is rare, it is miraculous, that we may read openly, in a syntax as transparent as the work of mathematics, the coherent semantics of a universe already constructed. Yet nonetheless this is true.
– (Michel Serres)

Events are produced in chaos.
– (Gilles Deleuze)

Susan Howe says, “The selection of particular examples from a large group is always a social act.” This paper is a social act. I am interested in constellations beyond the usefulness of a rhetorical trope. If we can look to the stars and find a goat’s head, we can enact a similarly creative poesis when looking to the material of our experience. I am in Philadelphia, falling into an opposite weather pattern to Newcastle. In the northeast of America, the sky is pale and silvery, like the flanks of herring. Weather gets caught between the Appalachians – a curious ribcage – and the Atlantic. Three nights ago there was a thunderstorm that cracked through the air and woke me from a fever. You will find connections here in my language, you will sketch your own goat’s head.

Marrickville Sunset

In the beginning there was the fall

two or more Lucretian dustmites

ones and zeros, wheatstuffs and yeast

the paint-wrinkle of air across milks

I heard the birdwhistles of late summer,

oiltankers beaded across horizons &

broken into oceanbath projectors. I

heard the Saturday traffic of freeway

sandstones, petrol bowsers lit & drum ‘n’

bassy in Cherrybrook. Sounds like

topology – an easy analogy is a rubber

band – folding over and into each other

as the cityglow murked over to the left.

I had a thousand things for you, mostly

binary, some knotted together or glommed;

others burnt out & sumpy like motoroil,

tobacco lint bedding into potplants. I saw

the cinema of showering neighbours, planes

heading straight for the sexshop buzz of the

church’s cross – cinema for me, for you

Living is a thing we’re doing

The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing. Nothing else is different, of that almost any one is can be certain. The time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of that composition and of that perhaps every one can be certain. (Stein, Composition as Explanation)

In July 2008, over slick croissants and pats of butter on Lygon Street, Stein 09 was brainstormed. Two thousand and nine will be a year-long festival of Gertrude Stein. All acts, encounters, products of dumb banalities and intimacies; every word written and word effaced; all the grammars of consciousness and imagination; every plump chook roasted and omelette fried and sock darned and poodle groomed … all perceptive, cognitive and creative events of experience will contribute to a prolonged duration of engaged Steinian thinking-and-writing, writing-and-playing, playing-and-thinking.

From this improvised working bee, ideas about what kind of contemporary Australian poetic might emerge from strategic saturation of neo-Steinian activity were imagined. How might Stein intervene the lineages and chronologies of national poetic narratives? In re-imagining Australian experimentalism in terms of a Steinian poetic, could we somehow mobilise ideas about our own local circumstances that were not tied up with discourses of historical and cultural character? The very fact of our coming together over Stein in a fracas of mid-conference, post-booze, croissant-and-jam skill-share was meaningful. Yet Stein has always done well to elude the logics of her own biography, so her presence in wintry Carlton on this morning was no surprise. She is our contemporary in the sense that her ideas about language and experience, writing and thinking, composition, grammar and time are utterly relevant to our own various praxes. More than that, Stein’s oeuvre is, in so many ways, anticipatory of contemporary preoccupations. She seems to gesture towards key moments of late-twentieth century cultural, critical and philosophical thought.

In a literal sense, this paper is a Stein 09 event, a piece of writing with the project in mind. But more importantly, this paper suggests that the very living and thinking of my being-in-time, my sensing time and living with my own time-sense, as well as the living and thinking of my own sense of a poetics, is a Stein 09 event. To say that this paper is a composition, I must also say that there are other compositions at play, that to compose is to take note, to be aware, to keep moving, to find a way — as Stein would say, to make living a thing that I am doing.

There is a certain sense of playfulness, an admission of silliness in framing these conceptual-creative preoccupations, collective or singular, within a year and naming it a festival. Yes, I admit to being silly about this gestural act. But it is not a silliness that recourses to coolish irony or cynicism. It’s a serious silliness; there are serious concerns at play for me here. Whatever claims I make about the processual or durational events of Stein-induced attentiveness to poetics are claims that actively contribute to my sense of being-in-the-world, claims that demand the ongoing interrogation of my intellectual and creative practices.

fred’s farm

yes this is a field of gunmetal glinting like weather
an entire ecology of dead thistles mapping a drought
barbs pain dull remembering poisons of beestings &
the skull-eye fits perfectly a climbing stick found hill-
side. let’s take a photo here of the air’s texture looking
down into damwater figure out some key property of
atomic nature the push of things against another. let
no one say that sheep can’t really move if encouraged
when it’s a distance issue the soundlessness is affecting
as a cinematic device. this dog resembles more closely a
seal than say a different dog & really the same is else-
where too. owls pocket into roofy line-drawings I’m
imagining that everything is a sketch or a story told
hundreds of times at the dinner table. (months ago
on saying I was interested in oral histories I was made
to feel oversexed and dead-keen on performing fellatio.)
rhubarb is a barometer of the times, heirloom parsleys
grow into mad reunions, tomatoes hang on tho pecked
into pumice. predictably all the wool smells of dinner
farmdogs bray fig trees are irrelevant bowsers like delta

collaborationism

opening out some office-tones hushy-grey
hard/soft metaphors & back-to-ham radios
, thwarting military commands glitching
some new masculine intimacies or love-talks
I’d order less milk for more tea and insist on
‘or’ as a consequential joining word suspending
two things in lateral flow attuning and framed

your code metaphor is very late-nineties
we’re yoking an idea of the body with one of
not-the-body, as if we ever got rid of ourselves
as if we ever felt that the body’s betrayal
was other than us. knitting circles aside newness
clots and curds, nouns set up suggestively as some-
thing more interesting, less servile

meta-sex talk tsk-tsk-ing, the chills / pink frost:
to collaborate is always already evident crumbing
against an Auckland dusk-light. it’s girlfriend in
a coma but without the irony. across the street cats
lope into themselves, into liquid ambers, as though
their limbs were patterning an ominous index
the easy analogy is this – there are bones in a

battlefield, settled into the seams of the soil &
all the conscientious post-bloodshed grasscover
– and the bones tell us a list of things about the
battle or any number of potential battles. brownian
motion (the path of a drunken bird; measured in
units of exquisite likeliness) and ordering peking
duck (quantities jotted on the underside of a napkin)

come to mind. our love, to put it crassly, is indexical.