Pam Brown’s poetry has been described as both conversational and deeply layered, its historical consciousness seemingly belied by a fragmentary, diaristic style. An easy comparison might be drawn with the work of her long-time friend Ken Bolton, which often achieves a sense of over-arching unity of vision expressed in monologue form. Bolton’s work can appear exhaustive — long prose-like stanzas — where Brown’s seems to flicker down the page like dawn through the mangroves on the drive to Cronulla. This misconception is quickly rectified in the opening poem of Guess the Experience (2025), entitled “It’s a Problem”, a fifteen-page ghosting of Bolton’s poetico-autobiographical mode, which contains lines like,

in here         words stuck
               in a yawn
                       between misquotes

poetry’s geographies become
              coaching children in sport
someone else gets
                              sex in the bible

the status quo     is the catastrophe

you wanted to be
                       part of the big picture
but they demoted you
                to car pooling

In Text Thing (2002), published by Bolton’s Little Esther Books, Brown writes,

this is the same
project isn’t it?
you just get
older on the job (“The ing thing”)

While in “Day and Night, Your Poems”, dedicated to Bolton (Authentic Local, 2010), Brown jokingly avers,

‘I don’t have a Cruel Theory
                       in my body’
    has become an in-joke between me and myself

In “Antipodean Default Mode” (in the same collection), this enlarges into a general satirico-political-poetics:

they were living in Australia
two heads were better than one

Brown often dismantles illusions of cultural authority via the mundane and the contingent. There’s a reluctant lyricism, often undercut by bathos or irony. Like her enigmatic forebear, JS Harry (generationally speaking), she’s suspicious of “dominant narratives” and her style constantly draws attention to the constructed nature of perception and language, without being trenchant or obvious about it. Harry, perhaps unfortunately, has come to be best known for her Peter Henry Lepus poems — featuring a philosophical rabbit, possibly a nod to Arthur Boyd, possibly to Monty Python. Her work is often considered a strange if brilliant fusion of fable, wit and moral seriousness. She employs apparent whimsy to confront global politics, ethics, war and human destructiveness. Her playful surfaces conceal sharp political edges. Language is questioned, refracted through the poet’s gaze and “restored” to its alien, uncanny animality. In this she shares something in common with Brown, yet to my mind it’s Harry’s capacity to abruptly shift registers, from the meditative and reflective to the jarringly vulgar, that communicates most directly w/ Brown’s mode of poetic incision (language being “shit on schist rock’s mineral aeons” [“It’s a Problem”]).

This is a conclusion unlikely to be drawn from Harry’s posthumous New and Selected Poems (ed. Nicolette Stasko, 2021), which omits some of her best work. One example is “Poodle Diplomacy”, originally published in 1983 and recently reprinted in Overland 257 (2024):

innocently entering
malcolm fraser’s
temporary garden
through the back
wrought-iron
security gate
that is opened
to let in
to ‘his’ lodge
an immaculately-groomed
shampoo-scented
visiting rolls-royce car,
the
small
white
french
(republican’s)
poodle
curtsies deep
to the (australian)
(royalist’s)
ground
it is peeing upon

While Harry (born 1939) was not one of the three women permitted to grace the pages of Hall and Shapcott’s supposedly groundbreaking New Impulses in Australian Poetry (1968), she is represented in most recent major anthologies, though none succeeds in capturing those qualities of her work mentioned above with the exception of The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, eds Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn (1986) and John Tranter and Philip Mead’s Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991), both of which reprint her 1986 piece “The Poem Films Itself” (likewise absent from the New and Selected):

Down the slimy rope    into the impossible!

[…]

The poem as a historical drama or epic

[…]

will be filmed in prose our new technique

Pam Brown’s opening contribution to the same Hampton-Llewellyn anthology, “One for Patti Smith”, begins:

one of my friends lost her mind in nineteenth
century novels. i tried to have her take a cure.
i offered your books. i said here are wild dog hotel
poems. cocaine and cooked dog. i said. wild street.
totally present words. here take them they’re for
you. read them now please.

There’s a potent synergy here, which recurs, by a kind of atavistic progression, in Brown’s poem-within-a-poem, “I remember dexedrine”, included in the later Tranter-Mead volume:

A scrap of paper
where I have written
‘the blank bullet
in the firing squad
is one image
i am sick of’
i tear it up

Brown’s, like Harry’s, is an ironic, destabilising intelligence that interrogates language and (gendered) power through strategies that are often oblique to the mainstream of Australian poetry:

a fortnight’s lassitude and more to come
a man who peels his peeled broad beans

(“Beyond the Right Occasion”, Text Thing)

Far from being the measure of some kind of elitism, these strategies bespeak the “authentic local” temper of the guerilla fighter — in Brown’s case, predominantly urban, in Harry’s, increasingly rural, or somewhere on the cusp. In each, the lyric, as embodied cadence, is as far from literary affectation as the physical movement of a language can be. There is no either/or, no binary into which the writing resolves itself, by way of a too-easy hedge, between “poetics” and a self-righteous mode of “social commentary”. Brown:

that night
we shouted our rendition
                              of yoko ono
then we collaborated
              on deadpanning

later
       a car drove through
               the front garden

(“It’s a Problem”)

Narrow separations of an overtly “political” kind (the competing jingoisms of the righteously indignant and the indignantly righteous) belong to a callow Platonism of mimetic binaries, which (for example, in “The Poem Film’s Itself”) Harry unapologetically ridicules. For neither writer is there such a thing as a permitted poetry. In order to be what it is, poetry has to cross the line and keep on crossing it. In this, both writers find something in common with Gig Ryan, a generation (if measured in decades chronologically) further removed, whose poetry is frequently defined by critics as overtly feminist and combative in tone (as if the former aren’t that, too). Ryan shares with Harry and Brown a drive to dismantle the smooth surfaces of official discourse — the kind of smoothness that has increasingly characterised the kinds of editorial decisions made about their poetry. Ryan uses fractured syntax, jagged enjambment and disjunctive vocab to deny the solace of societal contradictions redeemed by poetic sublimation. Consider “In the Purple Bar”, the first of Ryan’s six inclusions in the Tranter-Mead anthology:

She spreads her pale legs
out across the table
and the beer
while he, the last car accident
red and tight across his eyes,
sucks her off, ungracefully.
But is she happy?

There is, in fact, a profound anti-dialectic at work here. Gender and other mechanisms of alienation (the implied culture industry no less than any other: “He’s playing Billie Holiday / unshaven”) never resolve into the poignancy of institutional power structures critiqued in verse. Ryan (“Ode to My Car):

At least the mechanics are honest.
My poor car, baby, you should be in England,
not here, withering. Though in the sun you can still,
not quite shine, but glow from within like a higher state.

Neither Harry, nor Brown, nor Ryan offer any type of substitute “clarification” — alternative poetic worlds or escape routes. Rather, they pressurise these structures in the language in which they occur, the language through which power imagines and articulates itself. They each advance the poetics within this same language — to drive beyond any stable rhetorical formulation that may be said to belong to it — in order, not merely to expose or oppose, but to exacerbate the false comfort of surface meanings. This might sound a little too theoretically clever, but it’s really about taking socalled “everyday” discourse, the “unpretentious” vernacular of common sense, of populist media, with all its hidden ideological baggage, and thrusting it back down the poor-mouth of Antipodean “poetry”. As if to say, before anything else, in order to know what it is, the language, in its “base common denominator”, has to become foreign to itself. To grasp the basics as if from scratch, learning to re-see what’s so familiar it’s turned into a parlour trick that PR execs and politicians and every other type of con artist uses against precisely those who think they’ve got it all down pat. This is how Guess the Experience Ends:

should you see less of yourself
                                                 how?

this is ipseity in the second person

you carry the machines in your backpack

and           you do know
          that it’s no use replicating your life

it’s already artificial

never the same person twice

 

a pale imitation

                                            your former —

As if to say, in order to come to itself at all — in order, indeed, to be what it “is” (and not some parodic confection of meaning) — poetry, that proverbial foreigner, can never afford to be “the same person twice”.

Image: a detail from the cover of Guess the Experience