You have to unclip the world to think it
from cloyed screen or scream words haste

…

Time moves further away from you
Memory stifled the jonquils
and you’re in a tube of dreams, swimming

 — Gig Ryan, “Southern Aurora”

 

The act of doomscrolling a teeming amount of virtual content is widely familiar in the actual internet tube of dreams of 2025, yet poems have always been literature’s doomscrolls. The act of reading some poems (usually longer ones), like when doomscrolling, requires constant readjustment in switching back and forth through different aesthetics, techniques and forms, and in processing a vast selection of content — text, imagery, narratives, ideas, themes, politics, critique and etc. — all etched on to the palimpsest of the human brain as we read and re-read. The sublime/subliminal, pleasurable/displeasurable state one might be drawn into when reading a poem or doomscrolling can also resemble a fugue state, with its loss of awareness of one’s identity, often occupied with a flight from one’s usual environment, subjectivity or situation. Online, as in some poems, we feel we could scroll on and on and access one more vision, one more thought, image, perspective, meme or truth that might arrest our senses, our affective state, or make the pseudo-fugue state in which we find ourselves at least bearable, even as the binds of the virtual and the real, technology and the body, work and life, Covid and wellbeing, climate change and the future, as well as aesthetic binds, such as language and representation, remain irresolvable.

As is inevitable, poets in so-called Australia are finding ways to represent the doomscroll sublime in their poems. In their attempts at representation, some of these poems hint at fugue-like or fugue-adjacent form and techniques, the fugue being a flexible, contrapuntal composition in which a melody (or subject or theme) is introduced and then revoiced or developed through interweaving, creating a friction between centripetal and centrifugal motion that, I like to think, has the capacity to speak to the complex tension between representation and the tube of dreams of the now. This friction in the poem- -as-fugue might be described by a physicist as “effective potential” — which is the sum of opposing centrifugal potential energy (ie. motion, style, syntax, technique) and the potential energy of its dynamic system (ie form). What follows is some analysis of what I’ll call “doom-fugues”, by poets Niko Chlopicki, Michael Farrell, Astrid Lorange, Anupama Pilbrow, Dan Hogan, Holly Isemonger, Alex Gallagher, Jazz Money, Gig Ryan and Pam Brown.

In poet and activist Niko Chlopicki’s “auto mate me” (2023), a triptych of meme-driven bricolage, moments in the poem operate centrifugally and centripetally — there is movement simultaneously outwards and inwards in the rhythms, ideas and lines. The poem jokes about belittlement at work under capitalist precarity, but also communicates the binds of this. Here’s the opening of part I:

don’t worry kid, i used to want
to be like shane warne too. bit left
out now i’m off spin and on the bottle
hunt. one night my boss caught me searching
his yellow bin for return-and-earns. the next
day at work he’d bought me a headlamp to make it
easier to look through his garbage. my Human R.
colleagues passed along pamphlets all day
about how it isn’t too late for me
to book a spot in the next office well
being seminar on how to delete my
mental health to focus on my productivity
performance. the only productive thing ive done
today is be a troll posting poop on pig’s
balls to bring down free speech
sites in retaliation for my school bullies
knowing i was queer before i did.

The use of enjambment both propels readers through the poem, ie back into the poem from the end of each line and down the page, but also out, off the page, through double entendres. Just focusing on the end words, at the end of the second line, “bit left” leaves us hanging on to the idea that the speaker might lean left politically, while on the next line the speaker is “bit left / out now i’m off spin”, which perhaps confirms their socio-political position: they no longer bowl leg-spin like Shane Warne and feel left out; in fact, they bowl off-spin now, or rather, they’ve gone off “spin”, they’re over bullshit. They’re also “on the bottle” at the end of line 3 — we’re to presume they’re prone to drinking, however the next line quickly reveals a more socio-economic “hunt” for small change, or an implied desire for change in their socio-economic conditions. In line 6, which ends “he bought me a headlight to make it”, the enjambment leaves us hanging on the thought that their boss might’ve done something nice, offering the speaker a source of light to help them “make it”, ie. to make it in life or work, but the next line feeds us back into the refuse of the poem’s reality: the headlight is only gifted “to make it/easier to look through [the boss’s] garbage”. Similar high expectations are raised at the end of line 9 due to enjambment  — “about how it isn’t too late for me”, that it isn’t too late for them to succeed — only for the next line to scupper those expectations: “to book a spot in the next office well”. The enjambment on “well”, here, creates another double entendre — the speaker seems to be having to book their own office time, and the office is a well, as in dark and dank — while the next line finishes the phrase: “in the next office well/being seminar”, and it becomes clearer as the poem spirals that the speaker is spiralling too, in response to hollow management-speak and the vicissitudes of workplaces.

Later in the poem, to end part II, the speaker needs a break from their latest Grindr date, their communist friends, their previous crush, and their own neurodivergence:

                                                                … my
neurodivergence melted down with the
change of plans so i left early and cleaned my room even
tho nobody was coming over for sex. i’d liked
my previous crush a lot but they had dreams of
being a Land Lord. time for a break, time for a
seroquel induced dopamine rush from switching
between three apps to stop the bad thoughts.

And so here’s our therapeutic moment of doomscrolling, that “darkly soothing compulsion”, as the BBC once put it. What is presented is a double bind (that of escaping the bad thoughts and feels for more bad thoughts and feels) and it is depicted here in the anaphoric allusion to advertising: “time for a break /time for a …”, alluding to “Have a break, have a KitKat”. The enjambment after “time for a …” swaps the expected Nestlé treat for the self-induced dopamine rush of dissociating among burning hellsites. The not-so-subtle-though-perhaps-apt implication is that these inescapable, teasing corporate apps and their social structures, whether on your phone or work computer, and compounded by patronising corporate wellness programs, exacerbate one’s neurodivergence. We need-want/hate-want a break from ourselves, but of course that’s impossible. This is fine. We can fugue out across three timelines, in multiplicity, in uncertainty, in “negative vapability” (to steal someone’s Twitter/X handle). The doom-fugue, such as this one by Chlopicki, if read with a focus on the poem’s centrifugal and centripetal rhythms and ideation, can represent panic attacks and anxiety at the same time as suspending one’s panic and anxiety — readers can come to learn through studying such poems how to identify the complexity of the ill-feelings induced by capitalism.

While Chlopicki’s poem doesn’t use repetition the way a more traditional fugue might, Michael Farrell’s “Enterprise”, from his collection Googlecholia (2023), uses anaphora and torsional rhythms to explore a construction of a literary self amid late-capital consumerism and entrepreneurialism. It begins in a virtual sort of pastoral mode:

 Bought a sick poddy, nursed it till well to sell
     then bought Don Quixote
Bought a torn, buttonless jacket. Mended, sold
     bought The Tree of Man
Bought a rungless ladder and repaired and sold
     it, bought A Room of One’s Own
Bought a pinecone, harvested seeds, sold plan-
     tation for Poet in New York
Bought a comb to rent to longhairs, made some
    wigs to sell and bought Walden
Bought a boat, propped it up and sold it as
    house; bought The Pillow Book, The Rainbow
Bought an acre of clay and sold to potter fam-
    ily; bought a typewriter …

The anaphora of “Bought” devolves into a queer fantasia of various verbed actions, in which the speaker:

Collected eagle feathers from cliffs wearing pa-
    rachute and spats
Began to look around for husband on streets
    and secluded beaches
Made kelp salad, grew rye from seedlings in
    window boxes
Rode to China on bicycle made from matches
    towing a cocoon
Eventually married very tall man with many
    attributes I lack …

 Eventually, the poem makes explicit its virtual world and culminates on another planet: 

 Turned up years later in Silicon Valley, posing
    as a neck masseur
Accepted tips in form of cyberspace chunks
    code strings, Google crumble
Opened a virtual Italian restaurant, lost mon-
    ey till crucified by creditors
Returned from dead wearing Google crumble
    dress salvaged from secret hiding place
Gave anyone who asked a virtual good time
    became known as a virtual Mother Theresa

 Wrote more memoirs, went sailing in space
    found new planet, new husband
Taught Proust and Carpentaria to residents of
    new planet, learned their classics
Played football on weekends with the wives
    Got my vet licence
Began a fashion line based on Don Quixote
    enacted narratives I’d read: that is
The eight or so books, as if plays; had affairs
    with all the actors
Learned about their body parts, some detach-
    able all marketable

As is clear from its shape on the page, the form is torsional — the syntactical anaphora and lineation, with inbuilt enjambments in every line (the lines are long but deliberately split across two lines), create centripetal rhythms, while the enjambments that split individual words create centrifugal ideation. Two notable enjambments in this final section of the poem are a case in point, as both contribute to augmenting themes in the poem while splitting meaning inward and outward from the poem. The first, “mon- / ey”, spotlights a central concern of the poem — money — but cuts it in half; “mon” itself, with its potential for misreading, ie “mom”, which sets up the self-parodic queer Mother Theresa flex a few lines later. It could also refer to Monday, that most ominous day of the working week. The second notable enjambment, “detach- / able” in the final line, binds the concatenation of themes developed in the poem. Throughout, the speaker is simultaneously buying and discarding, entrepreneuring and escaping, marrying and divorcing, donning avatars and ditching them. The poem both describes and parodies one of Farrell’s focal poetic modes, that of donning literary forebears and ditching them — how he might just pick up the detachable limb of Lorca, play with it for a bit and put it down for a hand or foot of Proust or Patrick White. The poem both describes and parodies the economic climate for writers, how our limbs, our written works, become detachable and marketable. The poem also both describes and parodies the virtual experience of doomscrolling, and the cutting-off of one’s nose to save one’s face that could be argued is happening with each shift in the poem (like those lateral shifts in argument on social media, or by figures in public life, when skirting around the point). It also performs and sends up fluidity of self in the digital. It’s an affective take on all this, though even more so when we consider the etymology of “fugue” — from Italian fuga (“flight, ardor”), from Latin fuga (“act of fleeing”), from fugere (“to flee”). I read Farrell’s “Enterprise” as a doomscroll fugue that can pick up an idea in ardor in one line and flee from it just as quickly in the next, while laterally repeating, developing and queering its main subjects and themes across the composition in contrapuntal patterns.

A poem that doesn’t flee, and rather homes in on its subject, and yet one that can just as readily be read as a doom-fugue, is the essay-poem “Homestead Aesthetic” (2022) by Astrid Lorange. The poem opens with the speaker, a pregnant woman, “soliciting information from my phone in a putative act of solitary study which nonetheless involves proprietary algorithms and targeted advertising shortly thereafter”. The poem depicts the algorithms haunting the speaker while scrutinising how they track “my age my weight the degradation of my eggs over time” via “unsettling and grating” videos offering targeted “advice” in the form of “judgmental loops” on how to bear a child and how to be a mother. As the essay-poem expands its critique, it unveils what the online woman of unexamined privilege who schools the speaker through the phone is really doing:

she is doing something specific yet almost imperceptible … it is now ubiquitous … she is selling something that is indirectly bought and sold and she is working to game a platform trained to privilege certain content — what she creates she might call “homestead aesthetic” or “nutrition mama” …

These videos are a political project where “the disciplining of gender occurs”, and a “primary site for the radicalisation of TERFs”. The elongated syntax and essay form are vital to how the poem represents the spiral deeper and deeper into “redundant video loops” as a kind of “destiny”. Written as one long hyper-complex sentence, it feeds us back into the loops of the “dominant medium of exchange” (the videos), the loops of thought of the speaker, the loops of information generated by her participation in them, and, reading along, we experience the destiny, the inescapability, of the broader loops (the algorithms and economies) of vector capitalism as they manifest online.

Another doom-fugue that uses a single sentence is Anupama Pilbrow’s “Watching a Simulation of the Birth of the Universe Poem” (2021). In this one, however, the speaker isn’t initially immersed online and rather immersed in the garden, getting their hands dirty potting some plants. In Pilbrow’s signature style of delving into the gross or abject, via visceral descriptions of the body and its functions, the poem becomes an exploration of hypochondria:

… inhaling a lot of soil and I am having a shower and cleaning all the
soil under my fingers and scrubbing them and scraping out the
mucus from my nose and inspecting it looking for soil particles
and coughing and hacking into my hands so I can spread out the
expectorate on my palms and hunt through for any specks of
brown and I am feeling in my chest every breath thinking if I can
feel a tightness or any evidence of the dust that has gone in them
and then I am looking up Legionnaires Disease and I am thinking
about legionella and aspergillosis and and feeling afraid for my life
and thinking do I need to make an appointment with my doctor and
telling her that I inhaled quite a lot of soil and I am feeling my
throat and sinuses drying out and I am  noticing every ache and
pain and gently panicking that I might die from gardening and how
everything carries some hidden risk of death even gardening …

The inhalation of soil becomes too much so she turns to the internet to look up worst-case scenarios (Legionnaire’s Disease, a severe form of pneumonia), but in her satirical existentialism she simultaneously feels awe at the immeasurability of life on planet Earth:

… am also feeling awe and thinking fondly of how many living things
are everywhere at all and how delicate is my hold on life even the
bacteria on my own skin can kill me and I am thinking how even
when our species is gone (which will be soon) there will still be living
things everywhere and how comforting and how quickly life formed
on our planet and how enormous our universe is and how ordinary
my own life is where are the aliens are they living ordinary lives are
they afraid of death and then I am watching a simulation of the birth
of the universe and I am seeing the unmistakable evidence that
actually we are entirely alone in this giant expanse one single blip …

 After noting in a pointed aside the end of our species — “(which will be soon)” — the only use of parentheses in the poem (and an aside that is like its own mini spiral of doom), and then wondering about alien life elsewhere in space, the speaker turns again to the internet to watch a simulation of the birth of the universe. This oscillating between the physical world and a reliance on the digital world to inform the “real” evokes the “meta” in “metamodernism”, as Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker define it in their 2017 “Notes of Metamodernism”, whereby the prefix “meta” refers not to some reflective stance or repeated rumination, but to Plato’s metaxy, which intends a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond. Accentuating this is the poem’s oscillation between wide-eyed sincerity and irony, which become inseparable tonally, as they are in the following poem.

In “No Alarms”, from Secret Third Thing (2023, and previously a winner of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2019), Dan Hogan’s use of the imperative address presents a series of commands, or rather a list of insipid demands inflected with management-speak which become, metaphorically, the digital demands one encounters when doomscrolling: click this, click that, be consumed by “tfw” (that feeling when) you’re consuming and being consumed at the same time, ie, and as the poem puts it most succinctly, “Submission without the act of submission”, with “No time to grieve for lost futures”. The sense of this mode of living and working in the doomed present reveals the speaker of the poem as in a fugue state, and this state of being is compounded by acutely observational lines such as:

                                                  Not tired.                                                                                                  
Just playing with my eight-ball eyes. Misery during the work shirt
donning process.

 In the representation of entrapment by capital in “No Alarms”, Hogan’s use of post-irony, and their post-digital self-awareness, allows them to say it like it is at the same time as sticking their tongue so far into their cheek it comes through to touch the air-conditioned air, ie a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond:

                         The best part of being
   stuck in traffic
on your way home from work is being late to the work you have to do
for work after work.

While “No Alarms” represents this centripetal entrapment, “because dreams / were movies that kept rewinding”, the poem twists the automated language of capital to extremes, and in doing so turns the poem’s momentum outwards, till “The sky is about to happen”. Rhetorical questions in particular mock the pervasiveness of corporate rhetoric:

                                Are you revolted
the right way?

       …                                                                                            

                                              Would you
say your depression has a purpose? The air might be air-conditioned
but who is ringing the bell?

                                                                            What is
the warmest document type? What is the reverse of a chandelier? Is it
fernspores?”

The poem’s use of repetition gives it a twisted fugue-like arc. The rhetorical questions come in three bursts: one question toward the beginning, then two in the middle, then three toward the end. The recurring imagery of sky warps throughout the poem. And this is all kept in check by the refrain “Please clap”, which has five iterations, the final one concluding the poem with empty applause that resounds through the speaker-cum-worker-cum-doomscroller’s empty echo chamber.

Two poems which create their own echo chambers using meme-like forms — and perhaps we could already consider these as exemplars of the genre and form — are “OK Cupid” by Holly Isemonger and “surf’s up” by Alex Gallagher. The former, from Isemonger’s Greatist Hit (2023, and previously a co-winner of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2016), explores desire and the search for love via online dating platform OkCupid. The poem asks, “At what point do you decide to love someone?” and as the poem progresses the speaker comes to terms with leaving, or when to leave, an affair. It takes the form of a prose poem with nine paragraphs, yet there are ostensibly only three paragraphs rearranged three times, like loose anagrams — but rather than reordering the letters, it’s the words that are reordered, give or take a few. The first paragraph is rearranged in the second and fourth paragraphs. The third paragraph is rearranged in the fifth and seventh paragraphs. And the sixth is rearranged in the eighth and ninth paragraphs. The paragraph patterning is mathematical in its symmetry, which suggests an attempt to find order in emotion, or structure in the search for love. Paragraphs 1, 2 and 4 depict the online stages of hooking up: “Cupid messages the other man who gets a window of hope that authors me”. Paragraphs 3, 5 and 7 depict meeting up in person and a period of time dating: “Still here at a low point. Love momentarily assembles on bodies, arrange some head. Today you decide on what to do-over: the grass, ‘be the one’, the plane that flies”. And paragraphs 6, 8 and 9 depict the ending of the affair in a somewhat cinematic way, which increases the affect, through imagery of flowers, and cars reversing out driveways: “Our end lines paradise. I walk to the asphodels. Desire drives the real scene reversing a car out of shot. My eyes water, a way to tribute the last piece”. The rearranging of paragraphs suggests the internet meme as a strategic poetic device. Each reordered paragraph imitates a previous paragraph, self-replicating and mutating ideas, symbols and actions or practices. What lifts this practice above the everyday meme, which can be an artform in its own right, is how language is manipulated, shifting meanings to make readers see love and desire anew. “My eyes water lines of asphodels”, for instance, makes strange of the breaking up and grieving process. It’s comical, almost farcical, in the way tears could water the garden patch, given there’d need to be a huge volume of them, but it also delays the reader’s understanding of grief, what with humour coming first and then later the realisation that to cry this much has happened for good reason. And while this sentence comes in the first iteration of its trio of paragraphs (6, 8 and 9), before other mutations occur to it, it actually reads like a latter mutation in the language, because of its strangeness, which makes me consider reading the trio of paragraphs in reverse, which in turn only augments the reversing imagery of the final paragraphs, the end of the relationship and the doing over, the going over of pain and grief being represented in the poem.

A similar mutating effect happens in Alex Gallagher’s “surf’s up”, from their book Parenthetical Bodies (2017), in which the speaker embodies their trans identity as well as the pain and disappointment at the reactions and discriminations toward trans bodies more broadly, and especially online. What heightens the affective qualities of this poem and its use of the meme as strategic poetic device is the fact the speaker embodies an animated-like character (perhaps a version of Poochie from The Itchy & Scratchy Show) who would be at home in any meme, and who proceeds to mutate themselves, partly as a representation of transition, partly as a representation of the many attempts to change one’s self to please a disappointed lover (in this case an ex), and partly as a representation of futility:

i am a dog wearing sunglasses
on a surfboard, wearing a leather jacket
riding a wave of disappointment

After a few mutations and an interluding scene depicting the sincerity with which the speaker regards the time spent with their ex, they morph even further:

i am a surfboard riding a wave of leather jackets
to be eaten by sharks who have no idea
how cool they might look
wearing a leather disappointment
i am a dog wearing a leather shark

Through these mutations, and fugue-like repetitions of the main theme, we can see and feel the desire to be loved and accepted, but also the futility, the sense of doom, experienced when one is not loved or accepted, and, worse, discriminated against.

Most of the ‘poems’ so far raise the question of whether these works are a product of the internet and online culture — “Are the poets writing this way because they are digital natives?” a so-called boomer might ask. And the answer is, of course, yes. Any poetry is a product of the technologies to hand, whether pen and paper or smartphone and laptop, whether written now or centuries ago. This question is subverted, however, by Wiradjuri poet Jazz Money in her poem “digital native” (2020), in which she reclaims the term “native” for an Indigenous subjectivity: “babe we’ve always been in the network — we are the network —/ of course it’s black the whole way down”. The poem alludes to Australia’s history of interventions into Aboriginal communities, and comments on the census as a (now) digital construct, and how the census surveils First Nations Australians:

– all these deliberate interventions 
– all this data – big census numbers –
little pixels long strings – how they count up the natives
– and yeh but who’s counting –
101010111111100000001

 Mocking settler Australia’s fear of its native peoples and practices, the poem has spears and rain dances (perhaps an echo of Adam Goodes celebrating in front of AFL crowds) rattling the servers and bursting the Cloud, before skewering online businesses for appropriating Indigenous culture without recompense, and for their empty acknowledgements of country:

and the RAP banner image is always stock hands
dot in the sand cos no one wants to pay
but they’ll take some cultural credit paypal afterpay donate here –>

 The spoken-word, or oral, storytelling voice, repeatedly addressing the reader as “babe”, lends it a fugue-like patterning. In its online publication, the poem also plays out like a gif or video, with the words unfolding as if the disembodied author is typing it in front of us, communicating as a ghost or spirit directly to whoever’s watching the screen. What we’re presented with is just one page of the poem, like a screen capture, not the potentially endless scroll of an online webpage — and yet the last line of the poem, made up of binary zeroes and ones, flows on beyond what we can read in the screen capture, suggesting that this doomscroll spirit and their native voice, their Indigeneity, cannot be contained, are beyond the colonial gaze, the census surveillance, even beyond internet time and space, are all-time.  

These twenty-first century poetic mutations, spirals and scrolls aren’t necessarily new, just newly inflected. In the last two decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Gig Ryan has sculpted a fragmentary, feminist poetics of involution and aporia whose taut and twisting syntax simultaneously reflects and refracts aspects of contemporary existence, most notably intimate relationships and the overturning of power dynamics. Anxiety and doubt are central conditions of her poetry, and, as Corey Wakeling writes in Westerly, “[its] paradoxical mobility is at once inevitable but necessary to turn unbearable political immobility into emancipation”. Technically speaking, there are enjambments within enjambments — the enjambment acting as a kind of inversion as I’ve described above in Chlopicki’s poem — and in Ryan’s poetry these are enhanced by a lack of full-stops that torque her fragmentary syntax into something akin to a scrolling feed. The last “new” poem in Ryan’s New and Selected Poems (2011), “Southern Aurora”, casts an electric blue light on this:

You have to unclip the world to think it
from cloyed screen or scream words haste
their loot and return to her/his sleep-out
sucking troth’s lozenge
as the film waves magnolia
on brushed sky childhood seams
       …
night mutes
while you watch another country’s “lap of pain” win,
his face bevelled in the anthem
here cars sopped and rain was out of kilter
Time moves further away from you
Memory stifled the jonquils
and you’re in a tube of dreams, swimming

The slippages between sentences (where there are no full-stops to delineate an end to a sentence), perspectives (beginning here in second-person, moving to third, back to second, into third again and finally back to second person) and cultural references (moving from the conscious mind of the addressed to depictions of screens and online culture, from an affective reaction in an intimate setting to the double meaning of “troth” as both faithfulness and an ancient Egyptian deity, from the film Magnolia to the sky imagery and childhood) sees the poem move in waves back and forth between what’s on screen and what’s swimming in the mind.

Of course there have been plenty of poets who have been waving at the screen since before the twenty-first century — John Tranter, for one, before it was common to write poems with translation generators (such as Google Translate) or even AI generators (such as ChatGPT), used dictation computer programs in the 1990s and 2000s to compose poems, and developed that approach as part of his broader conceptual twenty-first century poetics that was often intertextual and formal in its reproductive processes (see his poems in Starlight, 2010, and “The Anaglyph” in particular, for what could be read as a doom-fugue for its use of the “terminals” form, taking the end words from each line of John Ashbery’s poem “Clepsydra” and writing into the middle of the lines). But what I’d like to finish this essay with is the poetry of Pam Brown, who is a contemporary of Tranter’s (Tranter passed away in early 2023).

The four long fragmentary poems in Pam Brown’s click here for what we do (2018) can be read as doom-fugues, but on a larger scale. As Tim Wright puts it in Australian Book Review:

The form of swaying, concatenated fragments is continuous with Brown’s previous collections; the difference is in the dimensions. Each of the four poems … are interconnected to the degree that the work could be read as one long poem in four movements … they keep going, past the point that close readers of Brown’s work might expect them to begin shaping towards an endpoint, creating an effect palpably reminiscent of the infinite scroll feature of web design.

Michael Brennan’s characterisation of a typical Pam Brown poem in Poetry International could also be describing the thought patterns of someone doomscrolling: “… like a particle map, a range of trajectories arcing off into open space, determining that space through movement, velocity and the inertia created, at times shocking associated bodies (poetic, politic, cultural, critical) into action and reaction”.

In click here for what we do, subjects and themes are most often presented as counterpoints to the previous, and move centrifugally and centripetally across the fours poems, creating a broad depiction of the virtual now, or the “here” of click here for what we do.

In the fourth poem, “A mockery”, after a series of anecdotal fragments that explore a gripe with a partner or friend, the banalities of language, incommunicability, Australianness, “how to live”, love, work and the humdrum, set in a dumpling restaurant in Newtown where “sheet lightning/streaks/ across the corner/missenden & king//wide open doors/leach[ing] humidity”, the proceeding series of fragments act as a kind of contrapuntal culmination of a key subject of the book — poetry and its purpose in the post-digital under climate change and colonial capitalism:   

huh

it isn’t love
it isn’t art
it’s shit    
                    pretty much

              anyone?

                    *

(

   personally of course I regret everything

not a word not a deed not a thought
not a need not a grief not a joy
not a girl not a boy not a doubt
not a trust not a scorn not a lust
not a hope not a fear not a smile
not a tear not a name not a face
no time no place that I do not regret
                                      exceedingly

an ordure      from beginning to end
                                                         )
                                         *
then    it seems
      that
           the gesture
           determines
       the document
            every time

(it’s a worry)

if,
as the internet poet says,
the first thing
a poem
communicates
is communicability

then
                           what?

                    *

            some poetry
                            is
              very good
                at futility

                    *

it is mostly futile
but
it’s also
“something to do”

echo  echo  echo

The “echo echo echo” at once alludes to online echo chambers, whether in the poetry ecosphere or beyond, the prevalence or culture of imitation online, and to the echoing thoughts in the speaker, oscillating between pleasure and displeasure. After “personally of course I regret everything” (not least the griping in the dumpling restaurant), Brown offers her own imitation, an appropriation of Samuel Beckett, creating her own echo chamber, poetry’s echo chamber. The casual, detached parentheses around the Beckett quote situate that centrifugal moment as an aside among other asides — thoughts about thinking — and which branch out (the poem works itself out as it unfolds its rhythmic overlapping thinking). In this way, hers are poems made for thought, poems as made thought (poiesis = to make). Meanwhile the use of imitation re: Beckett is a culmination of Brown’s centripetally deployed subject of poetry’s futility (she constantly reminds us of her minor poetics — here, it’s “an ordure from beginning to end”, the word “ordure” alluding to “ordeal” but literally meaning excrement, and later, she says to herself, inwardly, “you’re making a/mockery”, centralising the theme).

“A mockery” starts: “like a confession // * // as usual it begins/as description”. This poem eventually peters out, appropriately, with description — of small useful living things; in this case, the plants and herbs in her garden are what is real, useful, important, not futile in the context of a human world obsessed with its technology while causing climate collapse. These plants and herbs are also grown things, made things, suggesting a minor, organic poetics. The final fragment of the poem (“almost February again/(I’m not ready)”), after all the gentle counterpoints and culminations, echoes Beckett’s “I must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on”, or his “fail again, fail better”, ie poetry is regrettable, futile, but as Brown has it, “it’s also/ something to do” (with one’s time on this planet).

The variety of poems I’ve analysed speaks to the variety of approaches to reading and experiencing the internet and existing in the contemporary moment under indelible structures of capitalism. I’m not aiming to lump the agencies of these poems together — they each deal differently with contemporary culture, politics and poetics, and each author has their own agency and subjectivities in doing so. One way I can justify bringing these poems together is their use of fugue-like forms to depict and critique the doomscrolling consciousness, and other states of mind imposed on us by economic and social structures. The fugue offers a counterpoint in a traditional form that is loose and open, imitative yet contrapuntal, and that can, through its friction with nontraditional subject matter, explore the complex binds we find ourselves in with technology, corporations, work, social media, ongoing crises such as the Covid pandemic and climate change, as well as aesthetic binds like affect, the lyric and representation itself. As poet Alina Stefanescu writes, the fugue has “a capacity to stir and jar the reader by overlaying sounds, musical effects, and impressions. There is the shadow of a whispered chorus, the power of subtle moves, the undertow of implications”. And like an infinite scroll, such poems continue to get made while making themselves before the eyes of any reader willing to activate their effective potential in the scrolling: “the world’s physical stuff/remains physical”, as Brown writes, despite the virtual and real doom.

Works referenced

Brennan, M, “Pam Brown”, Poetry International, not dated.
Brown, P, 2018, click here for what we do, Vagabond Press. “A mockery” first published in otoliths 45, May 2017.
Chlopicki, N, 2023, “auto mate me”, Cordite Poetry Review 108: Dedication, viewed 30 June 2025.
“Effective Potential”, Wikipedia, viewed 30 June 2025.
Farrell, M, 2023, Googlecholia, Giramondo, Sydney.
Gallagher, A, 2017, Parenthetical Bodies, Subbed In, Sydney.
Hogan, D, 2023, Secret Third Thing, Cordite Books, Melbourne. “No Alarms” first published in Overland 238, Autumn 2020.
Isemonger, H, 2023, Greatest Hit, Vagabond Press, Sydney. “OK Cupid” first published in Overland 226, Autumn 2017. 
Klein, J, 2011, “The darkly soothing compulsion of ‘doomscrolling’”, BBC, viewed 30 June 2025.
Lorange, A, 2022, “Homestead Aesthetic”, A Perfect Vacuum, viewed 30 June 2025.
Jazz, M, 2020, “digital native”, Liminal Magazine.
Pilbrow, A, 2021, “Watching a Simulation of the Birth of the Universe Poem”, Liminal Magazine.Ryan, G, 2011, New and Selected Poems, Giramondo, Sydney.
Stefanescu, A, 2019, “Fugues as form in poetry”, author website, viewed 30 June 2025.
Tranter, J, 2010, Starlight: Poems, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane.
Vermeulen, T and R van den Akker, 2017, “Notes on Metamodernism”, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture.
Wakeling, C, 2015, “Anxiety and Antigone: an introduction to Gig Ryan’s New and Selected Poems (2011)”, Westerly 60.2. 
Wright, T, 2018, “click here for what we do by Pam Brown”, Australian Book Review.