In his review of Lucy Van’s The Open, Gareth Morgan writes that Van writes ‘against the impulse to ponder dutifully about the sins of the past and present.’ This fucked me up for some time. What is it to ponder dutifully? But perhaps more importantly, how do we ponder in a way that’s more … metal? Gareth’s first full-length collection, When A Punk Becomes a Spunk, illustrates this anti-impulse vividly, as a refusal to think too seriously, or perhaps too appropriately. Not because we don’t need to think carefully about our complicity in the big ‘-isms’ like neo-colonialism or climate change. Rather, under present politics, these ubiquitous problems demand a constant, weary moral attention which blunts critical thought and meaningful change beyond meagre representation. This book suggests we should be suspicious of western imperialism, of cringe, of the Australian refusal to accept complicity, and of bad art. It views apprehensively anyone who ponders too dutifully, too loudly, who doth protest too much–though thankfully, these poems are gloriously and critically unsuspicious.

What Morgan does in this book is maximally and frustratingly good. As Ursula Robinson-Shaw said at the book launch, ‘trying to describe Gareth’s poetry is like a map-territory relation problem; like all good art, the only thing that can adequately describe it is itself.’ Though summarising the work is surely an affront, When a Punk Becomes a Spunk gently investigates the hard problems of our crispy-edged temporality to gently present us with the brittle and badly-woven lattice of white settler nationalism and the paradox of Commonwealth morality. Ultimately though, like all good art, what is most striking about these poems is the artist’s legitimate style. Is that too basic for a lit review? I don’t care. Besides, following Morgan’s joyously uncringing riffing, worrying about whether our passions and afflictions are cliché is pre-pandemic passé. Take, for example, ‘keep things moving’:

look at you, in your yellow hair
up on a big wave
riding that cowabunga machine
life’s forever arms

The poet paints lurid and distinct images throughout, and considering his background in art history, Gareth’s talent slowly unravels: the artist is literally painting his surroundings. Reading these poems, you can’t help but notice the poet’s eye for curio, his ear for conversation. The poet kneads these sensitivities juicily with the hard problems to kick-start trauma integration, in the hope we might get up instead of sitting in the room on fire telling ourselves, ‘this is fine’. He has a knack for the cadence of everyday speech and uses it to shift colloquialisms beyond simple expression in service of a much deeper critical reflection. This is apparent in one of my favourite poems in When a Punk Becomes a Spunk, ‘secret secret history of the 1960s’:

yes! it’s the 1960s …
they never ended, mate
it’s the sixties
doing that thing with its mouth
it’s the six toes
of the apocalypse
watch your back
you are a splotch, you talk a walk
and the future is like a
shootout or: ‘quelling’ the future
which is naturally the 1960s too.

Setting aside the strange metaphysics of transmuting the present into a flower-powered period drama, we should read this poem in the voice of dads and uncles. I can’t tell if the subject matter is masculinity, temporality, Melbourne or New York, but Gareth’s particular mastery lies in his delicate yet critical treatment of aging imperial attitudes. ‘Secret secret history’ holds in tender tension the soft beer-gut underbelly of the familiar with an almost Nietzschean larrikinism, cloaking stick-in-the-mud neo-colonial defiances inherited from war, migration, and capitalism. This poem asks us to accept our fates and shake loose their tragedy in order to transform. It’s fond and oddly profound, not only because it consists of seven straight pages of mashed-up concepts, centred in lower-case Times New Roman without a single line break. It sounds boring and insane, and it should be. But this is part of Gareth’s genius (yes, I said it). He curates delight in the mundane. Or perhaps we’re just delighting in the vividness of his perspective?

The authenticity of this delight lies in the poet’s reach, which exceeds mimesis. In his rigorously absurd poetics, Morgan both critiques and reclaims a radical larrikinism to challenge current trends in Australian political marketing, particularly ‘the politics of recognition’. This is a broad concept theorised by Glen Coulthard and Charles Taylor—the latter in a famous essay by the same name—involving the assimilation and transformation of resistance into the pure signification of a moral stance. This is a common feature of neo-colonial liberal multiculturalisms across the Commonwealth. It’s the perpetual ‘renewal’ of white nationalism, the skinheads in high-vis, and the brain-draining sensationalism of the Murdoch monopoly. It’s the distraction of Abbott eating onions and ScoMo tackling children on footy fields while white supremacists march down Elizabeth Street every Saturday. Ultimately, the effect of the politics of recognition is a constant re-fashioning of protest into a passionate ‘best intention’, a spectator sport rather than a radical tool for changing our material conditions.

Gareth captures the sentiment succinctly, in ‘morning after visiting the rock n roll nightclub’:

do what you love
(in the australian armed forces)
the bus stop says

Then, a stanza later:

it’s the little things
it’s stopping the telos
come to big iran, ryan!

Under the politics of recognition, questions of responsibility and complicity are simmered by the country’s top marketers and political elite (is there a difference?) into an impotent paste of crocodile tears and regret. The basic idea is that if we constantly declare our intentions rather than legitimately finding new tools, no one will notice the maintenance of the status quo or the ghosts of colonies past. The master’s tools are sanitised by an empty neo-liberal poetics, which flattens everything and promises nothing. And in Australia, as may well be the case in other colonies, questioning what we’re obliged to actually do is absolved into national days of mourning for dead fascists and nonsensical displays at sport matches. Capturing bus stop ads and other late-capitalist detritus so succinctly and juxtaposing them with concepts like ‘the little things’ and the ‘telos’, Morgan both demonstrates and subverts the banality of evil through play, asking us to take a second look at normative western culture.

Though the work is deeply rooted in the contemporary present of suburban Melbourne, Gareth follows John Forbes in his admiration for the New American poets as well as their present cultural resonances. Forbes addresses them directly in ‘To the Bobbydazzlers’:

American poets!
you have saved
America from
its reputation
if not its fate

Given the state of American decay, it seems unlikely that the sparsely-united nation’s poets will have saved her from fate, though the resulting poetry remains tragically beautiful. This is a lesson in itself for Australia and her colonisers, by whom much is owed for many of the same reasons. As with Australia, America was ‘settled’ when an expansive land mass occupied by numerous First Nations was invaded by the British. Since the beginning of the colonial era, the white majority has advanced western expansion through the building of mass infrastructure, the extraction of First Nations land, the exploitation of non-white labour, and the continual attempt at trans-national domination. The status quo plays the role of bondsman in this false dialectic through nationalist poetry and propaganda, maximally construed. Accordingly, Morgan is wise to read and proceed cautiously from the warnings of American poets like John Ashbery and Eileen Myles. His first chapbook Dear Eileen presents a series of poems staged as letters to Myles, who writes in ‘Rotting Symbols’ (from their collection School of Fish):

all I see is rotting ideas
the epics I imagined
the unified cast of everyone
eating turkey together
on a stage

Like Myles, Morgan asks us to look around and view this strange paradise-for-some with a little more suspicion–not least because the neo-colonial politics of recognition has utterly cooked both aesthetics and political action. Stemming from the illegitimacy of white sovereignty in Australia and America, this politics disseminates and incentivizes representation without action, aggregating the historical symbols and languages of protest and dissent into an absurd and aimless spectacle of arcadian impotence. Towards the end of ‘morning after visiting the rock n roll nightclub’, written in type suggestive of a sign on a front gate or a letterbox, we read that ‘A Spoilt Rotten Cavoodle Lives Here’. Myles is Gareth’s Goethe, and he pays homage to their work by taking with a hammer to western cultural artefacts, producing a tongue-in-cheek iconoclasm with a specifically Melbournian funk. When a Punk Becomes a Spunk draws on Ashbery and Myles’ ennui with hypercapitalist decay to contrast juicy concepts, snatches of conversation, and everyday banalities which generate critical re-examinations of the commonplace.

With a characteristically light touch, Morgan rounds off this poem with a relatable sentiment: ‘in the morning go to work, carrying the feelie bag from the night before’. And truly, the entire book is something of a ‘feelie bag’. When a Punk Becomes a Spunk gathers a number of strange cultural curio, arranges an imperial smorgasbord, then asks us to put our hands in and draw our own conclusions. This book tugs at the inertia of the increasingly apolitical and detached tone adopted by white autofiction, as Ursula Robinson-Shaw demonstrates in her review of Ella Baxter’s New Animal. Refusing this aesthetic, Morgan stages the affect of present-day Australia without endorsing its closures to produce an honest, open work which reminds us that we exist, fundamentally, prior to any given essence. To distil the logic of formal play into an existential implication, this marks the radical duty to exercise critical freedoms wisely, and to refuse this received interpretation of politics as a meaningless reptilian custard.

The poet further critiques the absurd vacuity of Australian political language directly in ‘guitars’ after Aby Altson ‘The Golden Age’ c. 1883’. ‘The Golden Age’ is a painting commissioned for the 1890 National Gallery of Victoria Travelling Scholarship. Aby Altson took up the scholarship and travelled to France to paint nudes in the open air, and the founding galleries of Victoria were purposefully populated with art in the style of the European Masters. Romantic elitism, qua Heidegger, is a dangerous game— ‘guitars’ nods to the consuming ontology of western fascism through a series of accessible and seemingly innocuous rock and roll motifs. While Heidegger took hundreds of pages to establish continental European Being as a supremacy worth not only defending, but dying for, Gareth conjures an existential suspension tank in a few swift sentences. Within these pages, carried by these poems, we can and should be suspicious of the romantic Australian bucolic:

it’s hot, it’s sunday so i go to see those horrible
paintings of pink nudes in the bush
ladies in chairs and dresses on the beach
nodding off to the sound of guitar, him in fins
playing the conch like a surfboard
there are two types of apocalypse
the government and guitars

Speaking of guitars, the book does not shy away from remembered song lyrics, or popular music in general. Under the American influence again, there’s even a poem called ‘jesus of suburbia’, complete with explicit references to Green Day. This poem navigates the Niagaran border-edges of new sincerity, plunging into the depths of messy imperialism and spangling nostalgia. When you surface for air, your surroundings are so jarringly familiar you can’t be sure which western fascist wormhole you’ve timeslipped into. Again, these poems have a strangely self-aware candour, a transcended larrikin poetic which refuses the demands of literature proper, instead somehow eclipsing them in the style of a bat—no, a hunky punk out of hell. The poem, ‘robert harvey’, for one, does something few literary works have done, which is to take AFL seriously. Robert Harvey, who played number 35 for St Kilda from 1989 to 2008, is the subject of this poem, where Gareth writes an ode so sincere —or so ‘rudely beautiful’, as Lucy Van puts it—you can’t help but wonder whether your own aesthetic sensibilities are screwed on correctly.

in the highlights package
dennis cometti’s thick cultured goop

‘hunched over, handfuls of his shorts clenched in fists
but a man of action’

And the poet too, is a man of action, writing almost exclusively in the present tense to create a strange sense of nostalgia for the present, or perhaps demarcating what is increasingly becoming the post-pandemic. It is difficult to see what surrounds us, and anyone who has managed to recover from depression knows this. One of the true fortés of this book is thus its ability to construct the present as past, or to make the familiar strange again, in order to make the normative white present object to us though we remain steeped in western imperial hyper-reality. Ultimately, Gareth’s work stands testament to poetry’s uncanny knack for compelling argument by doing the fingers at academic rigour and propositional logic.

The critique formed by When a Punk Becomes a Spunk is anything but straightforward, and calls to mind Astrid Lorange’s argument in her essay on Diana Hamilton’s God Was Right and Trisha Low’s Socialist Realism. Lorange writes:

poems are not essays, except poems that are also essays; if the claim is correct that poems cannot make arguments, then the poem that makes this claim in the form of an argument must either be false (and the proposition remains true) or true (and the proposition is revealed to be false).

Both despite and due to its superficially aesthetic reputation as an art form, poetry always contains the possibility for double movement, leaving the medium ripe for capturing paradox. The complexity of the West’s decaying imperialism is precisely why we need poems like Gareth’s. A good poem can expose to us the limitations of our vision by showing us an ‘and’ where an essay provides a conclusion. This is the case with ‘metals’. In this poem, we might take ‘metal’ to have a multitude of meanings: metal as in money, as in sovereign, as in ‘cool’, or metal remoulded yet again to mean passé, for instance. The poem begins as one long ‘and’: as a list, ‘my carrot cake is metal like a city’, transforming through train of thought, or a conversation the poet is having with themselves while performing some menial task.

kings and queens are not metal
unlike the entrepreneur. the entrepreneur is wild and freely metal
micro-dosing metals on various coasts of the un-metal globe

Of course, kings and queens aren’t metal; logically speaking, you cannot mint an original; it’s the metal which makes a copy of the sovereign. ‘Metals’ casts us into the dangerous territory of philosophy to think through the capitalist death cult we live in, worshipping no gods, neither kings nor queens, but money itself. Gareth lends us his metal-tinted sunnies to reconsider start-ups, highway art, therapy, and the possibility of everlasting culture in the context of the present-in-rear-view. Returning to Lorange’s argument, ‘metals’ demonstrates that poetry is not only an ideal tool for critical thinking, but also that it’s dangerous to see poetry as incapable of thought beyond surface romanticism.

raw ores are being harvested by slaves right now
the beginnings of everyday metal
metal’s cost like everything is about bodies
metal doesn’t care

Paradoxically, this book serves also as a reminder that by taking things too seriously, we risk overlooking imaginative resistances, responses, and the kind of playfulness which leads to art. Through the kind of fair-game free association necessary to art, this book reminds you of the moral risk of taking things too seriously. Gareth has not been wasting his time with the things he’s chosen to take seriously. He’s been busy riding around the streets of Williamstown and Footscray, holding up a large mirror like a real suburban prophet (or maybe a postie?), transubstantiating local tragedy into something we can really sink our teeth into. Or, in his words: ‘i wanted to draw a line, like a wish on a stray eyelash’. This particular line is drawn from ‘the mystic english face’, the book’s opening poem, which goes some way towards summarizing the title of When a Punk Becomes a Spunk.

a hunky punk reminded the english of evil once
an idea lost to wind on its stone

A hunky punk is essentially an ornamental gargoyle without the function of draining water. Hunky punks were commonly used to decorate the roofs of Gothic churches in England. The title’s meaning is thus at least two-fold. Bracketing the Punk as a signifier for hunky punks (already a Jungian wet dream), the purely decorative monster unfolds as a hunk of spunk as the book goes on in a coming-of-age poetics. In this story, the poet moves beyond sheer representation to enter a much deeper aesthetic realm which begins to bite at the fray of our little ontologies. The title also hints, at least for me, at this problem of a cosmetic politics which recognises, but does not function. The poem could refer to all of these things, or none of them. The possibility generated by this book is what legitimates When a Punk Becomes a Spunk as a truly contemporary work of art.

Image: a detail from the book’s cover