wet smells

there are two things next to my bed: one, a half-full cup of steeped ginger chunks in a tea cup; and two, a sprig of the season’s first jasmine bloom, picked five days ago. both these things are stinky in the finest sense – their smell is deep and pungent, sweet and acrid, filling my sleep with memories of the body.

the ginger is a familiar bodily feeling, that of sickness and tight throats, the heavy sideways dozing that happens when half your head is drained of mucous and the other half is holding it all at capacity. this mucous is solid, shifting with the squeaking pressure of tectonic plates. the ginger is a heat felt right down at the back of the throat, a wet and pleasant heat.

the jasmine is the smell of warmth too, warm evening spent tucked into the roots of lantana, hidden, eating the meat from cold chicken bones and swatting the large, blood-dumb mosquitoes of early spring. these were nights that were long and unknowable, nights that started with mustard coloured skies, nights that brought a new colony of foetal guinea pigs, birthed in small wet beans in a cage, mostly dead by morning. (it may be a dramatised memory, but the jasmine in this image is wild and all-encompassing, covering the weatherboard and growing deep into the kitchen cupboards and the bathroom tiles. the smell was too wonderful and it elicited such a quick breath that the bloom month was spent in a dizzying state of hyperventilation).

slug courtship

there must have been a time when we would have found it nervous-making to see a pair of slugs wrapped together in copulation (scientific discourse refers to the getting-to-know-you stages as a ‘courtship’, but to me it looks like one slug eating another slug out) and producing what looks like a string of decorative bluebottles. in fact, these slugs hang from the bluebottles (which remind me of plasticy windchimes bought from market stalls and taken down because of atonal, clinky sounds) as they wrap together in slugfuck. here, upside down, they exchage their genetic information and make more slugs. yes, there was a time, the time before these slugs, that we were dry-throated, and we liked to avoid such ideas, because they were bad ideas and we were nervous people. we had never sat down and really talked over the potential benefits of two slugs in ecstasy sharing their codes of differentiation: the way that these things bring together any mating couple as a sign of camaraderie, a nod of knowingness. the way that knowing how slugs love each other brings us closer together, links our desires with the bluebottle strings.

indignity

the shame was misplaced but i felt
it anyway, the indignity of my insides
and the thought of those things being
made real to someone, not just to my
imagination or to the warm, not-really-there
awareness of the body and its habits

i had time to kill so i went to a record shop
and idly fingered a woody guthrie boxset
with cheeks wet and flushed-feeling like pastry.
and then i left, unable to concentrate, and
sat in a cafe that was playing the kind of music
you hear in documentaries about stripclubs in estonia,
shrill techno stuff with trilling sexed-up bird calls of
oooooh oooooh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

on the train, i sat next to a half-full styrofoam
container of discarded chips. they were sweating a
dull, cold grease and a smell of starch and lard.
i held the oversized envelope between my knees
and watched as people dropped like dumb bullets
into the carriage and across the seats

pig fat & water bodies

walking home late last night along paramatta road, i watched as the seagulls lined up along the roof of a warehouse next to stanmore mcdonalds, waiting for an opportune moment to swoop down for a stray chip, or crumbs of mayo-soaked bread. this mcdonalds has recently undergone a renovation, with the aim of looking more like the kind of modern, dimly-lit café that the discerning diner might like to visit. the gaudy, plasticy reds and yellows of the eighties fast food aesthetic has been replaced with square lines, wooden beams and chrome signage. i guess the hope is that any reservations that people may have about mcdonalds are soothed by the gentle, sophisticated, hip model of the future. for me, though, who only ever walks past the carpark and exhaust fans from the kitchen, the overwhelming sensory experience of the place is the sound of gulls and the smell of pig fat.

when i first moved to stanmore and noticed the seagulls – which apart from on friday nights when the carpark is an ad hoc nightclub and pick-up joint, are the most regular presence – i was disoriented, wondering where they come from. stanmore seems so neatly knitted into the inner west that you can easily forget that there is water close by. the annandale canals, which run off from glebe point, are just to the north, and the harbour curves around almost half of an imagined three-sixty degree circle around the suburb. thinking of the other suburbs i’ve lived in, there is more or less the same sense that there is water everywhere: the central network of port jackson, botany bay to the south, and, of course, the ocean to the east. each network is so complex that it is often difficult to locate yourself when at the edge of the water. i remember one night a couple of years ago, nick and i drove down to balmain late at night in heavy fog and walked around the foreshore. after about fifteen minutes, we realised that we had lost our point of reference – the harbour bridge – and we no longer knew which direction the small scalloped inlet we were following was facing.

as i passed mcdonalds last night, i realised that most of the cars parked in the lot had people in them, mostly on their own, silently eating their food. as though the design of the space, with the tacked-on drive thru, was not alienating enough, people choose to eat their food from inside their cars, lights out and windows up. i imagined that this sort of practice would displease the gulls greatly, who were still lined up on the warehouse, ready to brawl for flotsam. further down bridge road, a woman in jogging gear got out of her car and ran to the wheelie bins of an apartment block to throw her bag of rubbish away. the bag was sizable, no doubt filled with the cheap mess of plastic and waxy paper. she jogged back to her car and drove off. i could still smell the pig fat as i turned into albany road.

* a note on the map

after thinking about this, i wanted to see if i could draw a map of the waters that surround each of the houses i’ve lived in. the map is obviously not conclusive, nor particularly accurate, but was done mainly from memory and include any part of water that i have a connection to, or experiential knowledge of. i referred to a sydway street directory to clarify names in some cases.

moving left & right

we are in the moment between ash and pink
there’s a blue in there too, somewhere,
although the distinctions are difficult to make,
and we have an appreciation for the role that
pollution plays in all of it; the strange light
reflecting onto plates of glass and frames,
moving the whites into more fantastic colours.

side by side our arms are the wetly folded bones
of chickens, the stretch of skin across a corner;
an armpit, a hole, somewhere to put things
or to stay until it aches like sleep, and the stillness
smells like milk and dandruff, the sound of people
outside calling out and scraping car tyres,
the fall of daylight, the way the cool makes our
kidneys dull with ache, and aeroplanes buzzing.

there is a place here between light and dark,
where the air is thin and everything is wet
with cold, the body is new again, softened,
and we will stay until we fuse, our joints
the movable parts of a wing, not being together
but going together.

the material poem ; non-generic ; objecthood

the material poem, a collection of experimental poetics and inter-media art works, has just been published online (for free download) by james stuart at non-generic productions. the twenty-eight artists have submitted work which engages with ‘the poem’ in terms of its objecthood and materiality (including new babylon sydney by the very hunky nick keys). there’s a meaty file here of material goodness, so download it and check it out.

beefsteak & sex

‘What I call “feminine” and “masculine” is the relationship to pleasure, the relationship to spending, because we are born into language, and I cannot do otherwise than to find myself before words: we cannot get rid of them, they are there. We could change them, we could put signs in their place, but they would become just as closed, just as immobile and petrifying as the words “masculine” and “feminine” and would lay down the law to us. So there is nothing to be done, except to shake them like apple trees, all the time.’ Hélène Cixous

when i was researching my thesis last year, i came across a lot of writing about gertrude stein in terms of her sex. a typical analysis of stein’s work is that it is in opposition to the patriarchal conventions of narrative and poetic language: that is, it is does not follow the structures of a meaning-full*, rational, psychological language. it is not penetrative. instead, it is unknowable, disjointed, paratactic, mysterious, demanding. people who have written about stein, particularly her contemporaries (and mostly men), are dismissive of stein’s work and proclaim it unskilled and nonsensical. often, criticisms of her work are carried with a suspicion of her sexuality and her state of woman-ness. her work is understood to codify the sexual revelations of her relationship with her partner, alice b. toklas. this sensuality, a bodily joy drawn out in an oblique, discrete writtenness, can be ‘translated’ to represent a clitoris, a lip, an orgasm, or the opened-out sex of a woman’s body, but the translation is entirely interpretive. her work does not suggest a single interpretation, it offers the possibility of countless interpretations.

perelman says of stein, ‘her words displace all others’. her language is without an anchor, a vanishing point or a blueprint, it is radically geometric, radically decentred and radically spatialised. if public discourse idealises a static notion of a woman, then stein disputes this ideal radically. her work is not ‘feminine’, it is not emotionally revealing, psychologically self-reflexive, confessional, passionate or domestic**. i can imagine that it would have been an uncomfortable experience for the conservative male critic of the twenties to read stein, her language would have come up against the very limits of his linguistic understanding of a woman. his ideas of a woman’s softness, maternalism, emotionality and desire would have been challenged in an uncomfortable way. in this instance, the impossible nature of a woman’s sex as compared to a man’s ideal brings about a discussion of a woman’s art work and the failing of her femininity. by which i mean, when someone doesn’t ‘get’ stein, and they feel alienated by her poetics, they are likely to make a connection between her work and her person, her work and her sexuality.

any description of stein’s physical self is similar: she was broad, short-haired, stern-faced and wore dowdy smocks with strange indian sandals. her appearance apparently terrified many men, who saw her as a large, demanding, shrewd and loud woman whose ‘femininity’ came in a scary brand that borrowed from the certain traits of ‘masculinity’ that men felt empowered by. anne carson writes that her voice was ‘like beefsteak’, and that hemingway was scared of the sound of her laugh. her femininity, most likely fetishised by men in terms of her sexuality and her relationship with alice, was just as scary because it was unknowable, untouchable; it didn’t need a man. (no doubt a lot of her critics were flummoxed by the idea of what women actually did together, too).

though i am interested in the sex of stein’s work (as i am interested in the sex of all poetics), my own reading of stein is concentrated on the language’s surfaces, rather than its perceived inside-spaces and underneaths. whether or not there are clitorises and open thighs patchworked througout her language is not of particular concern to me. if i find, in the small poem-sentences of her work, a phrase which elicits a sensual response, then i enjoy the moment and move to the next. it is being present in her language that makes the experience of reading stein an experience of bodily and poetic pleasure.

* i use the word meaning-full here rather than meaningful to avoid the qualitative associations of the word ‘meaningful’. instead, in this instance, i mean quite literally, ‘filled with meaning’. this distinction was used by lyn hejinian, and i take it on with much appreciation.

** here i mean that her work does not conform to the historically gendered notions of femininity, it does not ‘express’ a desire for passion and an emotional interest in domesticity in the ways in which women are expected to. i am not implying here that stein is disinterested in desire, passion and the domestic space (tender buttons, for example, is a meditation on the poetics of domesticity), but that her interests are beyond the normalised understandings of women’s role in language (and in life).

sport’s the real winner

spread out broken on a rug i felt the grass go wet with cold, the feeling in my legs a heavy and purpled mottle. a swimming carnival when the sun goes down, or being in damp clothes after rain, or the feeling of falling asleep in the car and waking with dull kidneys. there was wind were there wasn’t wind before, and i wanted to tear the clover out and make a small scarf for my jugular. you had two pincers for ankle bones, and i could see them cutting across the grass as you sweated chunks of sand.

unturned mill quid

below is a sound translation of dylan thomas’s under milkwood. the text was generated by deconstructing the language phonetically and replacing each sound with a linguistically similar one. in general, i tried to keep the cadence as close to the original as possible, so the rhythm of the poetry was not syncopated in an entirely schizophrenic way.

i first became interested in various forms of poetic translation through a conversation connecting tim, nick, charles bernstein’s blog and bp nichols’ translations of apollinaire a few months ago. my own ignorance of a second language means that any discussion of translation in strictly linguistic terms (that is, the transfer of meaning across the delicate membranes of different languages) is fixed on the limits of language and the impossibilities of smooth transfers. i am seduced by the strange hiccups and false impressions that translated poetics collects, and yet my seduction is one fraught with the semantic dilemmas of edges and deadends; i am not privy to the joke of translation.

                                               

to beg in the begging ninny.

it is prim, moonly slight, in this mauled down, styleless and bubbling-black, the coddled treats eye lent and the humped, courtesan rabbi swab limping in visible down to this lobe act, slow, black, crow be lack, fish-in-boat-bob-in-sea. the houses are blinders’ moles (though moles sea fan to night in these mounting, velveted ingles) orbit lined as cap tan cat therein the muff-led mid-dell by the plum pan the tao ink lock, this chops in mornay, the well fare whore in widows’ wee. and all the peep hole of the lull dance dumb floundered town arse leaking now.

hush, the bay bees arse leaking, theft armours, theft ishtars, theft raids man and penchant honours, cob blah, skew latina, post-man and pleb lick hand, the under take her and the fanned sea woman, drunk art, dress may cur, pre-churl, polly eats men, the webfoot cock-or-woman and the tidal waves. yum girls lie bedhead oft or gliding dreams, with rims of truffaut, brides made it by glow-worms down the island of the orgasm-splaying pud. the boys are adream in wick kid or of the buck in ranches of the knight and the jolly podgy dizzy. and the anne forthright stat chews of the whores leap in the feels, and the cows in the baiza, and the dogged welt-nosed yards; and the cat snap in the slant corns, or, lopes lie, streak in and need ling, on the wonky loud of thoreau.

it isn’t item, in the child squad chapped all, hemingway, in bonhomie and roach and bombastic lactic, butters fly choking her and boob place bone, coffee in like nanny gloats, suck in mine toes, forty-wind-king have a lewd jar; ninth in foreplay, quiet as a donkey vote. it is tonight in donkey’s treat, trotting side-bent, with seaweed honest spoofs, a long the cock-led cobblers, past curt tanned firm pot, sex and trinidad, harmed moan on him, holy dress code, water! cull her!, dumb by ham, china dog and rosy thin tea cladded. it isn’t right, readying a nun babeless.

only you can near the howlers leaping in the streams in the slowed ear-salt and silage stack, band-aid genocide. only yucatán sea, in the bland dead bedabble, the tomes and petty soaps over the tableaux over the cherished, the lugs and bearskins, the grasses of tee-hee, vow shout snot onto war, and the yell ‘oh!’, indicative bird-watching pick sores of the dead. from where you are, you candy their drear.

cap tan cat, the refined by tea cap tan, arse leak in his spunk in the she-spelled, shit-in-bottomed, shit-shake, beast cabaret of scooped nervous dreams of never succeed as a knee that swan-necked the dicks of his s.s. glib-belly smelling over the bed-hogs and german-fish slipstream sump king him down sultan speak into the gravy duck where fiscal blighting out and needle him down to his whisper, and the lawn drones narcissists factotum.

now be kind, the eye-strain secretions of the dramas in these treats pocked to sleet by the sea, see the tit clits and topshelf scurvy, bogs and mutton chops, rags and boners, gash and rhinos and can stuff and male pairings, sore liver and snuffle aches and molten fair thighs of drains, the recast prats and she-males and fistbones, wail spruce and munchausen and some more salt fried isis pup by the hip propensity.

the principle alley of this guy ripens now, oh! her grin ill! into sprig mauling locked and croaked and bawling. hoop pulls the downfall bellhop but bland cap tan cat? won by one, the sleekest are wrung out of sleet this young mauling a severe mauling. and spoon usual spree the chimpanzee’s low upflung snow as cap tan cat, in say lord scrap and sebums, anoints us to day with his loud ghetto-bed bell.

now fry in pains pit, cuddle sand cats per inch kit chains. the down-smells of spreed weed and bread clasp all the weighed-down from pay-for-view, where missus sprogmore pilchard, in smog and turbine, brig-bosomed to enrage the dusk, pricks at her parched kiss head and slips lemming-brine tea.

all overdone, babe fleas and old hen arc leaned and put into their brokendown rams and weened onto the sun-split cock-led cop-bled or out into the black shards under the dance in udder-coughs, and deft. a babel chrysler. no says are swiped, head spic, heck owned, poor scrub dead, ear spocked, and the chilled wrench reeled oftens cool. stirrupy old in the posed offers. a card writhes demarcate, fool of owls and anathema. milked yearns tanned at cordon nation caw nerve like shawls ill bird pole eat man. andes, eating at theo penny widow obscure house, bligh cap tan catheters easel the mourning of that own.