“originals of revisable originals”
TRANSCRIPT
This article was downloaded by: [University of Kent]On: 19 November 2014, At: 15:18Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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“Originals of Revisable Originals”Kate Fagan aa Writing and Society Research Group, College of Arts (Bankstown1.1.163), University of Western Sydney , Locked Bag 1797, PenrithSouth DC, NSW 1797, AustraliaPublished online: 27 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Kate Fagan (2009) “Originals of Revisable Originals”, Angelaki: Journal of theTheoretical Humanities, 14:2, 67-75
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ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 14 number 2 august 2009
What is this narrative of origins? . . . Without
marking, all ancestors become abstractions,
losing their proper names; all family trips
become the same trip – the formal garden, the
waterfall, the picnic site, and the undiffer-
entiated sea become attributes of every
country.
Susan Stewart, On Longing1
_ _ ‘‘the’’ _ _ _
‘‘a’’ ‘‘the’’ ‘‘to’’ _ ‘‘the’’ ‘‘of’’
_ _ _ ‘‘of’’ _ _
‘‘the’’ ‘‘the’’ _ ‘‘and’’ _ _
Michael Farrell, ‘‘,emily bronte –’’, a
raiders guide2
This essay began as a response to Jed Rasula’s
anthological miscellany This Compost.3 Or
rather, it found one of several beginnings in
Rasula’s evocative trope of literary composting –
not a new conceit, but one that Rasula applies in
new ways when setting out to divest several
hundred North American poets of their
‘‘familiar’’ literary groupings and hierarchical
trappings, in order to reposition them within a
deliberately eccentric ‘‘intersection of commu-
nities’’ (xiii) and material commonalities. This
Compost piles together poets and their works to
create a regenerative ferment in which origins are
prolific and source materials resist classification
along ‘‘stable’’ lines of heredity. Rasula chooses
‘‘the trope’’ (9) as the organisational rule of his
nouveau anthology in a bid to avoid what he
describes as ‘‘a hideous proprietary vocabulary
[that] anatomizes ‘modernist’ from ‘postmoder-
nist’ tendencies’’ (4–5). He thereby sets sail under
the twin stars of rhetoric and poiesis, making
much of a turn away from the literary-historical
burden of canon building. ‘‘Poetry is biodegrad-
able thought’’ (28), argues Rasula. He offers ‘‘the
compost library’’ (16) as a leading figure for an
‘‘open-ended’’ approach to writing and reading,
and adopts for his book a formal structure that
declares itself ‘‘an exercise in ecological solidarity
with the materials it conveys’’ (xii). Those
materials are drawn chiefly from the writings of
twentieth-century American poets who share, in
Rasula’s view, a ‘‘willingness to work outside
prevailing literary sensibility’’ (xi) and who ‘‘tend
to fall outside customary genealogies’’ (9). As
part of its essayistic, editorial technique, This
Compost dissociates ‘‘the name[s] of the poets
from many of the citations’’ (9) in favour of
exploring what Rasula calls ‘‘the organizational
role of randomness’’ (4).
kate fagan
‘‘ORIGINALS OFREVISABLEORIGINALS’’sampling and compostingin the poetry of peterminter, paul hardacreand kate lilley
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/09/020067^9� 2009 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of AngelakiDOI:10.1080/09697250903281889
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Rasula’s necropoetical romance has been
almost three decades in the making. His project
stands one foot on either side of a cybernetic
revolution that has brought, for a rarefied
cross-section of the world’s population, a lasting
change in available writing forms and reading
methods. ‘‘Origin is not engaged by originality
but by reiteration,’’ writes Rasula. ‘‘The origin
is immediate, not remote’’ (169). From one
angle, the agglomerative libraries and anarchic
reading styles of This Compost sound uncannily
like the prolific databanks and digital route-
maps of the Internet. Online ecologies permit
beginnings and newness to repeat in endless
series. In a kind of information paradox, sources
and origins become hyper-available to net users,
even as concepts of ‘‘original matter’’ become
ever more complex. Rasula steers clear of net
technologies and reading experiences in This
Compost – a different heap of worms, perhaps,
but one from which sympathetic abstractions
might be drawn.
It is beyond the scope of this short essay to give
a detailed reading of This Compost, or to address
its machineries of anti-canonisation in the fields of
American poetry. Rather, I want to pick up
Rasula’s trope of ‘‘compost’’ as a marker of
skewed literary lines in order to think about
genealogies, sources and heredities in contempor-
ary Australian poetry. Unstable origins have
special resonance in Australia – a colonised
country yet to make treaty, whose non-
Indigenous inhabitants all share emigre
histories of endemic rootlessness and who, by
one reading, have been welcomed collectively as
guests into the country only as recently as 13
February 2008.4
This paper comments on the work of three
Australian poets who share, in Rasula’s words as
cited above, a willingness to work outside
prevailing literary sensibilities: Peter Minter,
Paul Hardacre and Kate Lilley. All three have
published largely in the past decade, and all have
adopted some kind of composting or compositing
as a key poetical method. In one sense, the
following discussion gives a partial answer to an
earlier essay of mine called ‘‘Relational Acts’’
where I concluded by suggesting that ‘‘at their
most effective, certain innovative poetries leave
room for exactly the kinds of movements and
shifts that enable explorations of rootlessness as a
primary characteristic of authenticity, and that
acknowledge the compound drama of narratives
about ‘origin.’’’5 I am not especially interested
here in codifying Minter, Hardacre and Lilley as
‘‘innovative’’ poets. Rather, I am compelled by
the different yet parallel attention given within
their work to historical swerves and unstable
borders, and by the ways these poets generate, in
Minter’s words, ‘‘originals of revisable origi-
nals.’’6 In the work of all three writers, playful
manipulations of poetic form and commotions of
genre signal a deep interest in issues of disloca-
tion, origin, cultural fabrication and anxious
belonging.
I want to introduce several more concepts as a
bridge to considering the poets. The first
concerns the seductive, ancestral world of
etymologies. The online Oxford English
Dictionary reveals that ‘‘compost’’ comes to the
English language from the Latin composit-us,
meaning a compound or composite. An earlier
and obscure corruption of the same root compos
led to usage of the word ‘‘compost’’ in a
differently-spelt form, compot, referring to a
collection of some kind. ‘‘Compost’’ also assumed
the meaning computus and was used in the early
modern period to denote a calendar or computa-
tion of astronomical and ecclesiastical data. This
more obsolete form of compost – a computer – is
especially generative when applied to contempor-
ary poetics. In the business of printing, compo-
sitors are those who compile pages by setting text
into type. Within the business of poiesis, or the
literal making of poems, the evolution of digital
print technologies has enabled a new kind of
typesetter: poets who make use of Internet and
computer technologies as a primary method for
the capture or harvest of data, flocks of roaming
ciphers that are compiled or collected – computed
– within the dialogical artefact of a poem. Kate
Lilley makes a deft play on these ideas in her first
book: her title Versary carries the dual promise of
neological compilation and archaic historicism,
while the book’s sequence ‘‘Black Letter’’ is
named for various styles of Gothic script or
typeface used widely in Western European
bookmaking during early modern times.7
‘‘originals of revisable originals’’
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Taken from that poem, her line ‘‘Ingression of
antique Forms’’ (61) asks readers to be alert to a
congress between aesthetic contemporaneity and
schooled antiquity, and suggests a poetics con-
cerned explicitly with the process of revisiting
and reconstituting origins.
This salvaging of necessarily decayed ele-
ments from past libraries, and their availability
for re-use, is integral to the ‘‘poetics of the
archaic’’ (14) that drives Jed Rasula’s notion of
‘‘this compost’’ – a title Rasula himself borrows
from Walt Whitman’s foundational epic Leaves
of Grass.8 Rasula makes the distinction that
while an archive might be employed to preserve
and delimit documents toward static ends, such
as ‘‘authenticating the history of a dynasty,’’ a
library offers the promise of eternal future
proliferation, since it ‘‘proposes in its very
arrangement a field of material yet to come, for
purposes unknown’’ (16). In Rasula’s new-
modern compost heap, found originals are
revised as fresh matter that might, in turn,
sustain a projected ‘‘future.’’ Peter Minter gives
us a clue to a similar field of inquiry in his
latest work blue grass by calling the book’s first
section ‘‘History of the Present,’’ a nod toward
the historical methodologies of Michel
Foucault.9 Composting implies a certain spatia-
lisation of time, one that we might align with a
compositional technique of ‘‘sampling’’: portions
of past narratives are re-assembled in such a way
that sources or parent materials can become
confused, or at least partially overwhelmed by
the subsequent invention. While they may bear
traces of their ancestors, they are re-localised
and made new in a new context. This descrip-
tion of method provides one way of approaching
the title sequence of Minter’s second full-length
collection.10 The first poem of the series
‘‘Empty Texas’’ begins with the provocation:
‘‘Content is a slippery glimpse’’ (‘‘Linguige’’
34), while the last concludes with a knowing
meditation on organicism and intertextuality:
‘‘days appear & / we describe ourselves, again /
here at last, / trying to forgive what we
have made / beneath the other vines’’
(‘‘Unperturbed’’ 53). To ‘‘describe ourselves
again’’ is to situate ourselves in a new present
– or, as the American poet Lyn Hejinian writes,
within a new context: ‘‘Context is a past with a
future. That is the sense of the phrase this is
happening.’’11
Perhaps a poetics of compost is close to a
poetics of context. The phenomenon of poetical
sampling that occurs with high frequency in
the work of Minter, Hardacre and Lilley – and
also, I might add, in the work of Australian
poets Michael Farrell and Patrick Jones – can
be read as a marker for a contextual poetics,
or one that is switched on to the active
relations between things, between elements that
co-habit in what Minter describes as ‘‘living
systems’’ (Empty Texas 14). To return to
Hejinian:
. . . if one sees history as, at the very least, a set
of relations – or, to be more precise, of active
correlations (co-relations) – then that seems
not too far from a workable characterization of
the context of something. And it not only
allows one to situate that something within
history as a descriptive or explanatory
account of what has happened, but it also
gives something a history with a future.
(‘‘Reason’’ 347)
For Minter and Hardacre, in particular, a poetics
of ‘‘active co-relation’’ carries an overt invest-
ment in both history and ethics. Hardacre
suggests as much via the title of his most recent
book, Love in the place of rats, which riffs on
Gabriel Garcıa Marquez’s consummate narrative
of colonial and familial suffering and obsessive
classification.12 Hardacre discloses in his
acknowledgements that ‘‘the place of rats’’ is
Kurilpa or West End in Brisbane, named by its
original Indigenous custodians for the water rats
that frequented the river banks. Love in the place
of rats unfolds an intricate story of exile and
displacement whose key geographical coordinates
jump between Brisbane and Chiang Mai in
Thailand (where Hardacre has lived for several
years). Its poems skip rapidly among locations,
languages and phrases poached from a dizzying
array of poetical, cultural and seemingly over-
heard conversational and media sources. Every
shift in tone or voice demands a renewed
attention to context – as in the following poem,
‘‘the man who danced as a bird,’’ which is the
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third part of a long poem called ‘‘last of the
timber & worms’’:
‘‘pockets apple pie &
stories of horror’’
last of the timber & worms/colourful flags
& eyes so far
& ocean south
all this stone & meat/
dancing cleavers
birds (always)
fancy ug boots
‘‘big happiness’’
(or something)
chopping up cake or altitude
(32–33)
Hardacre’s poem carries an epigraph from Tenzin
Choegyal’s Buddhist tract Call of the Land:
‘‘Being a stranger in this land, / it seems the day
is longer than a year.’’ Indeed, ‘‘strangeness’’ is a
principal site of inquiry for Hardacre in Love in
the place of rats. His use of compound citation
and dysprosody suggests a state of self-estrange-
ment, as the poet encounters his own literal
foreignness as neither a tourist nor a local in
Chiang Mai. Hardacre adopts techniques of
defamiliarisation and enjambment and pushes
them to extremes via a host of vertical slashes
that break lines in middles, rather than signifying
beginnings or ends. These lines don’t just turn in
a tropic sense – they collect, cut and re-assemble.
At every point in a Hardacre poem, horizontal
and vertical linkages are moving simultaneously.
While poems like ‘‘‘anona’: kurilpa death cycle’’
shadow a Dransfieldian language of the imagina-
tion that is analogous in part to a drug
experience, it is perhaps more accurate to read
such works as digitalogues: they exist beyond
analogue or one-to-one correspondences, in a
place of metonymic shifts and contextual associa-
tions. Following Hardacre, we could call this a
‘‘pan-tropic’’ mode of writing (Love in the place
of rats 57).13 A form of cultural translation is
occurring in which the poem, as one localised
moment of encounter, allows the poet’s sense of
subjectivity to be continually destabilised and re-
oriented.
The American writer Pierre Joris might read
such trans-iterative texts as symptomatic of
a nomad poetics, which he views as a
necessary response to the twentieth century in
which Western innovative poetries were domi-
nated by modernist techniques of collage. Joris
argues:
A nomadic poetics will cross languages, not
just translate, but write in any or all of them.
If Pound, H.D., Joyce, Stein, Olson, & others
have shown the way, it is essential now to
push this matter further, again, not so much
as ‘‘collage’’ (though we will keep those
gains) but as a material flux of language
matter.14
This same material flux is critical to
‘‘Australiana,’’ a section of Peter Minter’s blue
grass that undertakes a project of decolonisation
driven by an ethics of positive, non-consumerist
materialism. Minter writes:
This is the new nature –
snow peas, english spinach & bright
pak choy synthesise foreign matter,
newsprint compost & old hay
break down the suspect plot.
I stand planted in this mix of attributes.
What lies beneath: transplantation . . .
(‘‘A Nation of Trees’’ 69)
Note the small ‘‘e’’ of ‘‘english,’’ which strips that
adjective of its propriety. Minter is addressing
ways in which cultures and ecologies are ‘‘broken
down’’ and grafted during colonising processes,
resulting in ‘‘new natures’’ that bear traces of
their suspect histories, their synthetic ‘‘mix of
attributes.’’ As Minter has explained in another
context: ‘‘I lean toward a mobile poetics of
locality in which both material and political
history can be encountered and expressed.’’15
The subtitle of the poem cited above is an ironic
sample of A.D. Hope’s ‘‘a nation of trees, drab
green and desolate grey,’’ a phrase that conjures
both the persistent ghost of colonial, Anglophilic
readings of Australian nativity and an anxious
moment of settler-culture dislocation. In Joris’
post-collage poetic ‘‘there is no at-home-
ness . . . but only an ever more displaced drift-
ing,’’ which exceeds the state machineries of
‘‘originals of revisable originals’’
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nation-building, and in which language itself is
always ‘‘on the way,’’ as Paul Celan writes.16 This
wayward drift is a leading dynamic for blue grass
– whose very title enacts both a kind of cultural
dystopia and a drama of family groupings, by
shifting objects out of their ‘‘correct’’ taxonomies
(i.e., why is the grass blue? and isn’t that a kind
of North American post-settlement hillbilly
music?). From Empty Texas, Minter’s
‘‘Palimpsestina, Kurnell’’ is similarly acute in
employing crises of genre and naming to fathom
ongoing Australian stories of colonial territorial-
ism. The poem begins:
Capable of distortion,
Typography on hard stone
Or blue steel work against faultlines,
Finger held to the space
Between letters, accents thrown
To shadow the skin
Where you finish, just one
Remnant of deposit
Speaking out a mime say,
Parody of Europe & Latinate
Serif on the border
Where mobility, apostrophes, strokes
Condense sleep and the tablature
Of chloric evening skies.
One can no longer say
Solid form adds to collection
And suburbia, either city
Or dash, ethics or memorial raised
Over endings is finished . . . (60)
This poem is a troubled urban pastoral or, as
Minter writes, a ‘‘parody of Europe & Latinate /
serif on the border.’’ It confronts the politics of
erasure at work in Australian descriptions of
‘‘landscape’’ – which are always subject to
‘‘distortion’’ in ‘‘the space / Between letters.’’
What kinds of meanings do imported forms
continue to carry as they move along the complex
routes and imperial ‘‘faultlines’’ of colonisation?
As Minter reminds us: ‘‘[o]ne can no longer say /
Solid form adds to collection.’’ ‘‘Palimpsestina,
Kurnell’’ performs a fracture of the sestina form
and closes with a three-line Tornado rather than
the conventional tornada: ‘‘Un amico dell’acqua,
or so you saw him, / trapped in reeds and,
naturally excited, / moulding, steaming speech-
lessness’’ (64).
In ‘‘The Poethical Wager,’’ an essay that
precedes Pierre Joris’ nomadics by several years,
Joan Retallack argues for an ethically informed
poetics of unhomeliness that breaks language and
form in similar ways. ‘‘The model is no longer
one of city or nation states of knowledge each
with separate allegiances and consequences,
testy about property rights and ownership,’’ she
writes,
but instead the more global patterns of
ecology, environmentalism, bio-realism, the
complex modelings of the non-linear sciences,
chaos theory. You can see this now with more
and more poets using multiple languages in
their work – not as quotation, but as lively
intersection, conversation . . . What better
thing for poets to do right now than to begin
in one language and end up in others.17
Retallack’s thinking here returns us to practices
of sampling in at least two senses. Firstly,
sampling is a form of ventriloquy, a ‘‘beginning
in one language’’ that moves to another, and then
another. Secondly, as Susan Stewart reminds us
in her pioneering work on souvenirs and
collections, a ‘‘sample’’ is a one-off piece, some-
thing ‘‘not available as [a] general consumer
good’’ (On Longing 138) in the mass chains of
ownership and property that Retallack is resisting
via her poethical wager. Stewart reads the
souvenir as a site for the fabrication of fretful
genealogies, writing: ‘‘[t]he souvenir displaces
the point of authenticity as it itself becomes the
point of origin for narrative’’ (136). Like the
sample, the souvenir is by definition an incom-
plete thing:
whether the souvenir is a material sample or
not, it will still exist as a sample of the now-
distanced experience, an experience which the
object can only invoke and resonate to, and
can never entirely recoup . . . The place of
origin must remain unavailable in order for
desire to be generated. (136, 151)
Poetical sampling, then, can be read as a form of
souveniring that allows its keeper – or writer – to
fabricate a local, personalised relation to
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historical context while involving her or him in a
drama of contested origins. By this reading, the
sample-as-souvenir guarantees its user a place in a
genealogical trajectory or family tree of their own
making, beyond the constraints of parentally
supervised or ‘‘legitimate’’ lineage.18
Kate Lilley’s Versary is an exemplary study of
unstable origins and skewed lineages. It recovers
souveniring and sampling as explicitly gendered
labours, in part by calling to mind the ‘‘sampler’’
as an aphoristic, embroidered miniature that
salvages material cast-offs while restoring its
maker to a domestic moral order. A ‘‘versary’’
suggests a body at work in the service of verse, in
the sense that an ‘‘apothecary’’ might labour in
an apotheque or store-house of some kind. More
literally, a versary is a collection of lines that
turn, a thing of and about poems. Lilley arranges
her treasury under the sign of the circulating
library, inviting the rub of many female hands
across the same sequestered pages. The book cuts
pieces from an extensive back-catalogue of
feminised genres including 1940s and 1950s
American film culture, country music song
lyrics, contemporary domestic and kitsch adver-
tising lingo, and arcane finds from texts by early
modern women. Versary assembles an all-star cast
of female leads while laying claim to a host of
literary ancestors: Lilley’s poetic parallels that of
Emily Dickinson, who stitched memorial samples
into coded fascicles, while her ‘‘Sapphics’’ invoke
a much older lineage. The poem ‘‘Lady in the
Dark’’ conjures the cross-dressing figure of
Ginger Rogers, who acts the part of a fashion
editor undergoing psychoanalysis in a film
version of Weil and Bacharach’s original musical.
Indeed, tropes of self-sampling and self-fashion-
ing via modes of literary-psychological analysis
appear regularly across Versary, such as in the
poem ‘‘Affect Ensemble,’’ which quips: ‘‘You can
scan my glowing interior / and write down what
you see there / thou hast curiously embroidered
me’’ (73). In a play of robing and disrobing,
Lilley flirts with and short-circuits a potential
figure of the reader-as-watcher or reader-as-
analyst, anticipating that relationship and con-
signing it to history before it arrives. Versary is
alert to the limitations of writing poetry as a
cipher for self-revelation, and that relationship is
never allowed to stabilise. The book trades
instead in distance, removal and fantastical
doublings. ‘‘Talk as long as you like,’’ Lilley
warns, ‘‘the x-ray believes my story / is an
anagram of yours’’ (‘‘In The Sun’’ 25).
As implied by the title ‘‘Mint In Box,’’ Versary
is a studied experiment in collecting – a fabula
rasa in which Lilley remakes her own story of
origin by souveniring from countless excursions
into a specialised pantheon of female cultural-
historical figures, in order, perhaps, to take an
ironic place alongside: ‘‘Precision-timed explo-
sions create / acres of visual illusion // Light up
your album of beautiful sights’’ (‘‘Sapphics’’ 95).
Lilley’s poems twin neatly with Susan Stewart’s
claim that ‘‘the collection replaces origin with
classification’’ (On Longing 153). Like Stewart,
Lilley is highly attentive to collections as scenes
of self-fabrication, while acknowledging an over-
saturation of signification that is carried by the
objects in a collection and that can ‘‘overwhelm’’
the host or collector. A collection will always
exhibit the seams of its making – a maxim that
holds for all forms of sampling handiwork,
including poetry. However, each stitch suggests
a volatile border, as Stewart argues: ‘‘The
boundary between collection and fetishism is
mediated by classification and display in tension
with accumulation and secrecy’’ (163). Lilley is
keenly aware of this dual burden. Her poem
‘‘Live at the Opry’’ (Versary 17) alludes to the
inimitable figure of Nashville icon Skeeter Davis
recording duets with herself, following the
accidental death of her previous singing partner.
In Davis, Lilley has chosen a powerfully invested
trope for a poetics that moves shrewdly between
concepts of the self reassembled through fantas-
tical collections, and the subject infinitely
displaced via a calculated queering of origins,
genealogies and genres: ‘‘Discipline has the
pleasant voice / of virtue in distress // Can
modernism get any later? / Is it my turn to paddle
foregone Niagara / barrelling into nowhere?’’
(‘‘Post’’ 79)
The poetical task of destabilising origins is a
task of differentiation. The point is not to obscure
origins but to make them a problem in the
present, and, as Stewart writes, to mark their
specificities. To return to the epigraph with
‘‘originals of revisable originals’’
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which this essay began: ‘‘What is this narrative of
origins? . . . Without marking, all ancestors
become abstractions, losing their proper names;
all family trips become the same trip – the formal
garden, the waterfall, the picnic site, and the
undifferentiated sea become attributes of every
country’’ (On Longing 136, 138). Poetries that
make lively use of sampling practices can be read
as a signal for this kind of cultural marking.
Aesthetic and formal choices in the work of
Minter, Hardacre and Lilley are local instances of
‘‘fronting up’’ to dramas of belonging that
continue to unfold in Australia. Poems such as
theirs remind us of an ongoing necessity to
revisit, differentiate and name our ancestors – a
material work of imagination – rather than
relegating them to mere abstraction, ‘‘as if a
European sensibility hadn’t just / landed here / &
held Reason up / shiny as a glas bayonet.’’19
present-script: ‘‘this work iscompost ready’’20
In her formidable text ‘‘How Writing is
Written,’’ Gertrude Stein instructs that it is the
job of every writer to discover their own
contemporaneity:
The whole crowd of you are contemporary to
each other, and the whole business of writing
is the question of living in that contemporari-
ness. Each generation has to live in
that . . . The thing you have to remember is
that everybody lives a contemporary daily life.
The writer lives it, too, and expresses it
imperceptibly . . . That is what I mean when
I say that each generation has its own
literature.21
Jed Rasula in This Compost compares Stein’s
poetics of a continuous present, as detailed in her
essay ‘‘Composition as Explanation’’ (1926),22 to
the technique of composition by field advanced
by Charles Olson in ‘‘PROJECTIVE VERSE’’
(1950).23 ‘‘The work,’’ writes Rasula, ‘‘being a
species of autopoiesis, corresponds to no prior
plan, scheme, blueprint, paradigm, authorizing
sanction. It is its own preview and afterthought’’
(168). While a post-script implies a miniaturised
addendum to a closed page, a present-script is
both an afterthought and an invitation to material
futurity. I hope here to seed a new compost by
undertaking a short exercise in what Kate Lilley
calls ‘‘rhizome collateral’’ (‘‘Mid-Century
Eclogues’’ 48). I am also following the advice of
Michel Foucault, whose genealogical methods
seem particularly apposite to studies of poetry:
[Genealogy] must record the singularity of
events outside of any monotonous finality; it
must seek them in the most unpromising
places, in what we tend to feel is without
history . . . it must be sensitive to their recur-
rence, not in order to trace the gradual curve
of their evolution, but to isolate the different
scenes where they engaged in different
roles . . . Genealogy, consequently, requires
patience and a knowledge of details and it
depends upon a vast accumulation of source
material.24
The following particles were sampled from a
series of cultural, poetical and social texts that
occurred during a forty-eight-hour period
between Wednesday 9 July and Friday 11 July
2008 in the immediate preamble to a Melbourne
conference at which a first draft of this essay was
presented.25
1. In an email exchange on July 9th, 2008
with the American poet Forrest Gander,
Peter Minter cited this extract from Jean-
Luc Nancy’s essay ‘‘The Deleuzian Fold of
Thought’’: ‘‘A contemporary is not always
someone who lives at the same time, nor
someone who speaks of overtly ‘current’
questions. But it is someone in whom we
recognize a voice or gesture which reaches
us from a hitherto unknown but immedi-
ately familiar place, something which we
discover we have been waiting for, or rather
which has been waiting for us, something
which was there, imminent.’’
2. During the interval from midday to
midday July 9th and 10th, 2008 I took part
as a singer in a 24-hour production for the
Biennale of Sydney by the French artist
Pierre Huyghe entitled ‘‘A Forest of Lines’’.
Huyghe installed one thousand rainforest
trees inside the concert hall of the Sydney
Opera House, removing several hundred
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seats in order to do so, and unavoidably
littering the floor of the auditorium with
soil, broken twigs and fallen leaves.
Movement through the darkened space was
random and aided solely by small head-
lamps worn by each person who entered the
forest. Access to the installation was free.
3. On the evening of July 11th, 2008 a new
website called WhenPressed had its
Victorian launch at Collected Works
Bookshop in Melbourne. Among the first
texts published on the site is a sequence of
poems by Michael Farrell entitled ‘‘Edit
Suite’’ in which poems by the late nine-
teenth- and early twentieth-century
Australian poets John Shaw Nielson, Mary
Fullerton and Bernard O’Dowd are cut-up,
sampled and remade as originals of revis-
able originals. Farrell has described the
poems as ‘‘colonial edits’’.26
4. Also at the Melbourne launch of
WhenPressed, a new book by Patrick Jones
and Peter O’Mara entitled [HOW TO DO
WORDS WITH THINGS] made its first
public appearance. The work explores active
co-relations among innovative art practices, a
poetics of locality, ecological annihilation,
and what Jones calls ‘‘small communities’’
([HOW . . .] 60). Jones’ part of this double
act concludes with ‘‘A Free-Dragging
Manifesto’’ whose final pages declare:
This work is compost ready. (61, 65)
notes1 Susan Stewart,On Longing (Durham,NC andLondon:Duke UP,1993) 136,138.
2 Michael Farrell, a raiders guide (Sydney:Giramondo, 2008) n. pag.
3 Jed Rasula,This Compost: Ecological Imperatives inAmerican Poetry (Athens, GA: U of Georgia P,2002).
4 The formal celebrations accompanyingNational‘‘Sorry’’ Day on 13 February 2008 began with aWelcome to Country in Canberra’s ParliamentHouse, for the first time signalling an invitation byIndigenous legal custodians for parliament toproceed.
5 Kate Fagan, ‘‘Relational Acts,’’ 3rd SydneyPoetry Seminar, 17 May 2005; subsequently pub-lished in Five Bells, the magazine of the SydneyPoets’ Union.
6 Peter Minter, ‘‘Valentinea’’ in blue grass(Cambridge: Salt, 2006) 86.
7 Kate Lilley,Versary (Cambridge: Salt, 2002).
8 Walt Whitman, ‘‘This Compost’’ in Leaves ofGrass, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991) 285:‘‘Behold this compost! Behold it well!’’
9 See, for example, Michel Foucault, Discipline &Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan,2nd ed. (NewYork:Vintage/Random,1979) 31.
10 Peter Minter, EmptyTexas (Sydney: Paper Bark,1999).
11 Lyn Hejinian,‘‘Reason’’ inThe Language of Inquiry(Berkeley: U of California P, 2000) 347.
12 Paul Hardacre, Love in the place of rats(Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2007); GabrielGarci¤ a Ma¤ rquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, pub-lished first in Spanish in1985.
13 Note that Hardacre’s poem ‘‘love in the pan-tropics’’ begins with an epigraph from Australianpoet Laurie Duggan, from The minutes: ‘‘The ageof graffiti is over.’’ This implies a dialogical textualregime in which no citation, scrawl or tagline isout of place.
14 Pierre Joris, ANomadPoetics:Essays (Middleton,CT:Wesleyan UP, 2003).
15 Peter Minter, unpublished email to ForrestGander,9 July 2008.
16 Pierre Joris,‘‘Notes toward a Nomadic PoeticsVersion 1.02b,’’ available 5http://www.albany.edu/�joris/nomad.html4 (accessed Feb. 2009); Joriscites Celan in his first paragraph.
17 Joan Retallack, ‘‘The Poethical Wager’’ inOnward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics, ed. PeterBaker (NewYork: Lang,1996) 295.
18 One instance of this sample-play might bethe poetical epigraph, which often works
‘‘originals of revisable originals’’
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‘‘originals of revisable originals’’
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to ‘‘stake a claim’’ to a disruptive allegianceor new family grouping ^ an approachemployed by Paul Hardacre throughout Love in theplace ofrats.
19 Peter Minter, ‘‘Political Economy & Raphael’s‘Madonna of the Pinks,’’’ bluegrass 49.
20 Patrick Jones, ‘‘A Free-Dragging Manifesto’’ in[HOW TO DOWORDSWITH THINGS] (Daylesford,Vic.:Tree-Elbow, 2008) 65.
21 Gertrude Stein, ‘‘How Writing is Written’’ inHow Writing is Written: Volume Two of the PreviouslyUncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. RobertHaas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow,1974) 151,154.
22 Gertrude Stein,‘‘Composition as Explanation’’inWhat Are Masterpieces, ed. Robert Haas (NewYork: Pitman,1970) 31^34.
23 Charles Olson, ‘‘PROJECTIVE VERSE’’ inPostmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, ed.Paul Hoover (NewYork: Norton,1994) 613^21.
24 Michel Foucault, ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy,History’’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and trans. D.F.Bouchard (Ithaca,NY: Cornell UP,1977) 139^40.
25 ‘‘Poetry and the Trace: An InternationalConference’’ was hosted by the University ofMonash between 13 and 16 July 2008 at the StateLibrary of Victoria in Melbourne.
26 Michael Farrell in conversation with theauthor, 12 July 2008. The website WhenPressed(http://whenpressed.net) was founded byAustralian poets Nick Keys and TimWright, anddesigned by Pat Armstrong.
Kate Fagan
Writing and Society Research Group
College of Arts (Bankstown 1.1.163)
University of Western Sydney
Locked Bag 1797
Penrith South DC
NSW 1797
Australia
E-mail: [email protected]
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