World Poetry Portfolio, edited by Sudeep Sen in association with ATLAS Magazine
Louis Armand was born in Sydney in 1972; since 1994 has lived in Prague, Czech Republic, where he directs the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University. In 2013 he was a Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Monash University, in the Postcolonial Writing Centre, Melbourne. He is a writer, publisher, visual artist and former subtitles technician at Karlovy Vary Film Festival. In 2004 he founded the Prague International Poetry Festival which has continued, since 2009 as the Prague Microfestival. His books, of which there are more than thirty, include a translation of Véronique Vassiliou’s N.O.: Le Détournement; he has also translated work by Maghrebi writers Dorra Chammam, Mehdi Mahfoudh, Emmanuelle Pireyre, Leïla Sebbar, Moncef Ghachem and Raymond Farina. He has published critical writings on fellow writers Pierre Joris, Joshua Cohen, Karen Mac Cormack, Vincent Farnsworth, John Kinsella, and on the artists Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others. He is the editor of Contemporary Poetics (Northwestern UP, 2007) and in 2010 he edited The Return of Král Majales: Prague’s International Literary Renaissance, 1990-2010. In 2009 his screenplay Clair Obscur received honourable mention at the Alpe Adria Trieste International Film Festival. He is the author of five novels, including the neo-noir Breakfast at Midnight (2012), recently published in Czech translation by Argo, and Canicule (2013; both from Equus). His most recent collections of poetry are Letters from Ausland (Vagabond, 2011) and Synopticon (with John Kinsella; LPB, 2012). He is presently an editor of the international magazine VLAK: Contemporary Poetics and the Arts.
All poems published with the permission of the poet | Author photo © David Vichnar
Patrick White as a Headland
Something vast is being suggested,
shapes barely visible in the
pre-dawn – a faint line of smoke
from a chimney – or a headland
bearing down at the sea
like an ego, jutting into it,
describes the laborious theosis
of a body at the end of a
grappling hook – to bleed if necessary
to ascend – and the seasurge beating at the shore,
yellow water – and the dark crab-eyes
looking into it, long after
there’s anything left to see.
Hugh Tolhurst, with Lines for a Poem
Scenery emerges from the picture like a train
just emerged Jolimont-way from the
tunnel system, Melbourne, 1966 – in time
for jewels and binoculars hung from the head
of a mule – all roads to Port Phillip Bay.
Young mother pegging diapers on a line –
a black crow in its pulpit yawning the day’s
sermon to conscripts ganging the platforms –
flashing backyard suburban jingoisms.
We look back through the poem and see
only the wisteria creeping under the windows,
a trellis, a flyscreen door and dead lawn
a million miles from Saigon. The train rattles on
from station to station, parsing the signals,
numbing the arses of generations to come
without ever upsetting the status quo.
Arriving one day at the end of the road
like a detail conscientiously ignored until it
punches you in the eye – imagining some
real estate genius struggling to find metaphors
that fit the marketplace: southerly prospects,
ocean views, all modcons. Grey ships ply
the dun-coloured textbook waters and turn
into History. It’s cold and you shiver a little.
Out beyond the big picture the refinery lights
are coming on – the tide heaves towards its
Bethlehem. A hundred years and nothing
remotely imaginable, thinking why here and
not some other place, far away under monsoon –
agent orange sunsets making hell a scenery.
But the poem is only a way to dream without
having to suffer – and it dreams us too,
on the other side where time is forever
advancing like a threat. Night stabs a thorn
into the mind’s eye – we end where we began,
riding the line until the words stop. The
silent machines take us back out of the picture.
A train’s windows flash past like cinema:
Something groans. Something else gets born.
Domes at Houmt Souq
Because the sea, anomalous, white –
flanged walls beneath a headpiece:
a stone idol, megaphone-eared,
listening to the bewildered landscape.
In the square asleep under eucalypts,
a hummocked mosque, sky like phenobarbital –
dusk and voices, the wailing god on its
pediment, chatter in doorways, the risen dead.
From the beach, you looked out onto a war.
Lightbulbs, shoes, cigarettes, clocks…
A garbage tin in conversation with a dog.
And the minarets like a Philip Guston cartoon.
Morning is a sheet out on a line, the eros
between pages of a book left behind,
a cenacle of black ants enacting scenes
of departure among the flagstones.
Crossing the sandbar, late blue echoes of night
heron, unreal, the mangrove island, the estuary
stilled in the lull of the tide. Mooring lights
in the sky. There’s a point where the river
turns back on itself like the crook of an arm.
We stand out watching the prawn fishermen dangle
their mock moons, the black swelling vein
of water cutting us slowly off from the other side.
Then wade up onto the squat island, a shot-up
sign warns of dog traps in the undergrowth.
Locals sometimes talked of a black dog, grown
to man-size hunting bullsharks, though
never seen – only mauled shark fins washed-up
along the shore, marking its territory.
After Donald Friend’s The Outrigger (1974)
Windjamming between the reefs – a boy in a canoe
you lie beside in your mind, knotted blue hair,
loincloth undone as he turns about and rides you,
white shemale posed on all-fours, a four-posted
thatch hut and postcard figures cut out to form
a watching backdrop, static as Balinese theatre.
The ribbed canoe flexes against the breakers’
coercive uniformity; a snapshot makes the outfall
aesthetic. His mother, he says, was an orphan
of Dutch colonists. Brownskinned. For another
five bucks he’ll let you suck him off afterwards.
Through a chink in the wall you see the dogs
stalking the periphery – remedial demons, rust-
pelted, scavenging for morsels of proof that things
are indeed as they seem. The ceaseless grovel
of the waves. On the wall, a gaudily illustrated map
shows the route to paradise – but who can say
if what lies there isn’t cursed? The outrigger
turning back to shore, sun low in its arc, flash
of an oar. Each stroke, down-thrust, a purification.
But to stand in the light and not in the shadow
is no guarantee against the infinite evasions of glib
post-coital sentimentality. Was anything stolen?
Can you provide a description? The outrigger,
dragged up onto the beach among crab burrowings,
seaweed, brine – all the surrounding amorous
real estate pegged with for sale signs. Or you alone
are the island on which you walk, compass-eyed,
seeing only the X that marks the lost co-ordinate.
Roland Robinson’s Grendel & Death in Custody
An unseen hand at work among the evidence. Grendel re-
shuffling the pages, strata, bone-shards and whatever else
remains, as indictment or disqualification. Our deletions
are accumulating, like Royal Commissions or radio talk-back.
Grendel and John Laws exchanging product placement
between early morning traffic reports. To start again
bending the square outline of a place in which nothing
escapes formulation, hanging cheap tinsel on everything.
Or a landscape with empty refrigerators, detention cells,
uselessly speaks the way of refuse or refusal.
Grendel in Redfern, breaking off TV aerials and clothesline
to make a bed. Grendel beckoning at the window,
all dark hints and bodily purpose. Knowing as well as you do
there’s no such thing as accidental death in custody.
L’arbre en fleur dans le jardin au printemps
The scene was what it was, full of sweat and frustration.
First the mountain then the river, the flaccid distance
one begins to overcome by preparing a canvas
of eventualities: the concluded journey, the spent
arousal of an object made to describe the inverted
form of itself. Ivy leaves and ferns in barbotine.
The process is a body in disarray beneath an attic window,
late afternoon, sky sectioned by vapour trails
converging but equidistant. A point the eye intercepts
and distorts: the incomplete motion of a line descending
or a figure describing, like a repeated note
in a child’s exercise book, a Spanish guitar, a sheet
of smeared newsprint. From the outset the piecemeal
is a technique committed to the evasive obvious:
the Mexican amulet, the drooping petunia in its glazed
pot, the brown thumb hooked under a celluloid strap
as prelude to blank long siestas of contentment.
But in all concluded things there’s an insolence art
can only accustom itself to, since art also is a kind of envy.
Like the mirroring pond beneath the almond tree
once the blossoms have withered and green husks
have peeled back from their shells, the parrots noisily
scattering the remains everywhere.
(for David Malouf)
The conception is everything – grown
from a hostile mind like a city state
in a hot wilderness. Its curve and arc.
Two men in the beginning performed
a simple act – welding two girders
together, then a third: a whole complex
of space, Uffizi-garish – little
Medicis volumising over it…
The procession of rooms – the glopping
monitors’ hum and buzz. Some primitive
Giotto’s Last Supper – jungle-eyed,
a caged figure mewling at its captors,
hook, tail, breast-mound and rude totemic line
(“tantôt libre, tantôt rechercher”) –
the miraculous Daughter of Fishes,
fleshlipped, nightblue, shriving the horse-mackerel.
“Still glides the stream and shall forever glide.”
Five thousand miles of platitude and not
one pale god to be seen. Nolan’s Burke, dead-
eyed like some homicidal idiot,
stands sentry at the tomb of the unknown
artist – bark and red ochre, yellow,
white, a pair of sticks tied with possum gut
to steer through subterranean weather.
Whoever said that art doesn’t conform
to fact? A polaroid nude, the eye’s un-
bridled rut blacking-out a big money
sunset, navy yards and warm chardonnay.
Or an artefact shaped from the stolen
inner lives of appearances. These things
like maps of impending extinction, that
procure such insurance against themselves.
(i.m. robert andrew ostle)
figures in the landscape appear to burn. a fringe
of cinders: yellow dust, funerary ash covering
the ground – varanasi, dasaswamedh. saddhu
in a burning ghat. And the canticle: place of
dead reckoning. signs written in concrete, a blind
one-eyed skull and the half-god half-corpse
that fits it, fucking down into the underside of a
guilty conscience, to measure degrees of con-
tamination. an underground reservoir, dug out
by the old whitebellied diviner pumping brine
from limestone sinkholes, resists the applied
method. saddhu perched on a heap of rubbish
exhaling long plumes of smoke. the camera’s
analogue eye like a mind passing and
observing – atoms, nomenclature, intellect –
how can it be removed? if the earth were as
flat as it seems, a photograph
dragging down at the edges – belongs to another
history: a mathematical error addressed in
manufactured desert-language, like a too-
rational and precise stupidity, uncorrectable
as a dog or man who refuses labour. saddhu
in a contortionist’s box: television vistas,
satellites, remote emanations telling of contracted
future memory in solitary confinement. a band
of night shows red above the judas-hole – they are
counting down, digit by available digit.
smoke settles on the eye’s inner rim; attendant
fingers brush ash from ashtrays into a plastic bag.
at the other end of the demarcation line
one more salvage operation is about to begin.
Something like the Weather
(to John Forbes, et al.)
it begins and in spite of everything (sleeplessness,
fear of attack) is almost serene. Shooting speed
in a room behind the GPO, each letter
one more step in the direction of universal literacy.
Nobody needs poetry for this. Or do they?
Witness our little ceremonies, the nightwatchman’s
redemptive vision, the hairdresser’s assistant
like some hapless Venus of Urbino draped in her
sleek reclining chair. Tomorrow we may slip out
past the wire-conducting trees into the languages
of the news stands. Or sit alone, white serviette
folded into smaller and ever smaller epigrams.
You check the dials, the registers, the glass eyes.
Could anything have happened in the meantime?
“the visible in materialisation is not the material.”
Old Quiros waiting to cross the road – then
the coffee arrives. You notice, how he stood there
deliberately, like a ruined observation post, framed
by the corner window at the station kiosk. all those
elapsed times, cut-out faces in green commuter busses.
First light. Floating through billboard retail scenes.
Quiros in his drunken boat paddling towards
Elizabeth Street. 8.00 A.M. and progressively the air
becomes rubberised and limp. Piecing together
an itinerary of what’s left to come: this hour
meant for nothing more, having struck root in us,
stroked and shaped and misintended by it.
the same repeated hour, the same deliberation.
one of the ten plagues of Egypt made its way even
here. Slouching under the harbour on hollow legs,
to re-emerge, strangely intact, propped against
a bar in Harold Park holding forth on Michelet’s
Historical Monuments. And this, as good or bad
as any other place to live and die in. television
made the outside world invisible; poetry made it a
wreck. in each particular a ritual has been arranged –
the metrical progress of footfall up the stairs,
a closing door, a too insistent respiration. Things
there are hardly notions to impress upon. Asleep again
under the moon-broadening night, the sound of
police helicopters, the broken-bottled serenades and
street hustlers bidding dreams of wordless fornication.
Something to be filed away on the internal memex.
Nights of bondage fed on the wholly unreal, a city
dredged-up from barbarous pre-history, crime or
wanderlust. You know the score, tapping out rhymes
on the shoulder of adversity, for the sake of a look
or as little as an admonition. The truth was never
believable, in any case. We have invented the worst
as best we can, always reflecting the contrary of intention.
underfoot the banging becomes more and more hellish
and idiotic. (Why won’t the dead finally shut up and
sleep?) The distance traveled is still not far enough.
The migraine purrs. Morning shouts in its familiar drawl.
a dry meniscus rings the eye, thickening over it, caul-
like. And how the dumb horrors laugh.
From the Reznikoff Variations
(for C. Bernstein)
It begins in the relation. Walking in the Bronx,
over the bridge, eight hours down Broadway –
the migrated tribes, tyre repairs, the elevated
line balking from wide skies – husks of a land-
scape once a low mountain now dry arroyos
north of 182nd street. Menudo and Spinoza
and Karl Marx. I want to tell you a story of
where I’m from, but it’s not here – stuck in mid-
afternoon traffic, a Puerto Rican, fingers stiff
with rings, selling insurance from the trunk
of a jacked-up Lincoln – all the second-nature
curb-talk, four o’clock, in a neighbourhood of
working men and women, where night comes
on fast, the stockings and low lights over bars,
and another on the rocks ’til it’s time again
to arise with street lights still aglow in the East
River washed out to sea, rock and pedestal –
and the rain, the silver streak of subway cars,
the straightman with hand out for change –
and Nat Finkelstein, dead too? Who else?
One more photograph and then the job’s done –
the last intersection, last fragment of a crowd,
life by facets. Perhaps we don’t know what art is
or does, but the point’s to go on as if we will.
Acid Comedown & John Olsen’s Five Bells
Call it topographic, eyeball to eyeball with invisible
fidget wheels, the whole blueprint in acid-dissolve.
Intelligence reports arrive from remote space colonies
dot-dash-dot on tree-branch telegraph wires,
meteorites and pool hall metaphysics. Calculating
backspin with celluloid tape-measure, ancient shark-
brain x-ray machine, whistles and bells –
the whole synaptic opera drowned in ice-cream vendor
jingle-ology. The count’s too close to call. Crossing
the upturned bridge on grinning Luna Park
commuter shuttle: a cast of salaried extras –
white teeth on cobalt blue – laughter in the fallout.
A lost method of the infinite shell game: circles,
triangles, reels of night-constellation tickertape.
We wait out under the giant fig trees with tin can
and twine, relaying messages received long after
the transmission died. Slow-motion videos of a city
in mid-construct – Wandjina Man drunk under a wall,
dreaming of blond missionary ancestor spirits
turned to coruscated glass and steel. Rain spirals darkly,
each grey drop like a map of endless underground
parking lots, waiting for the cold to set in.
Out there, the harbour lies on its side like a broken
all-mod-cons kitchen sink – dawn is a revolving light
in a pawnshop window, a blues saxophone,
the mute reflection of a mannequin in a five dollar suit.
Even the Most Concluded Journey
(for Robert Adamson)
In winter a heavy fog used to hang over the cesspools
along the abattoir road – the run-off
still warm from each mornings kill – a thick scent
filling the valley. More than observance of routine
we knew the seasonal transactions. Lent. Passover.
The mythical beast with two books… Parables
of implication or blamelessness, raised on the fat
of the land, like the dogma of a well-fed public body
and the mind in the body. Blood mingling
with an approximation of lost kinship –
all the received grace of an unsentimental
bureaucratic God, whose love is a meatworks’ gross
efficiency. A whited hulk, an idol carved by
withering force. When they shut it down we mourned.
Wind jangling the rusted hooks – gutters
run cold – the dragged chains of ghostly hatchetmen.
Our ritual comes full-circle. But even the most
concluded journey remains a fragment. Years pass,
entering by a gap in the perimeter fence
to pay obeisance, dispel childish superstition,
admonish the austere architectural vision.
An alter-piece with junk and weeds.
What could it have known that we mustn’t?
The task at hand, the irreconcilable opposites, some
vastly tendentious joke born of a moment’s irritation –
or nothing more than a desire to be elsewhere?
Melbourne, Night (Albert Tucker, 1974)
An almost silent car crash at the street intersection. Afternoon
rain drifts-in, westerly, and curtained apartment windows
between trees, telephone wires. Imagine the air full of radiostatic.
There are factors we don’t understand, voices strung across poles
directing the alien traffic. And is home any different from
where we are? Climbing the stairs two at a time, a note
on the door, the key under the mat. Open the text-mirror and
enter a room. Someone has vomited a mess of symbols on the floor.
Tomorrow is Friday, cleaning day. Scanning the newsreels
from outer-space. Oh, there’re things we know awake, too.
We won’t ever learn what they’re about. Dreaming of that first false
air conditioned spring, lying between happiness and the promised
sex. On the eve of our farewell, the message is all that matters –
the secret rendezvous, the undecipherable text.
Kneeling Figure with Canvas & Black Can (Arthur Boyd, 1973)
all games are hostile: education in perpetual evol-
utionary struggle. The artist’s territory of conscience,
bringing forth untenable species in the service of his
vision. To conceal, present, prevent, contain.
Or force a shape out of nothingness, blacking-out
the unmeaning weather: more things are invisible
than you know. Lodged in its own background,
the sketched scene is not the one that interests you.
Testing the collective mind’s power with a hunger
for whatever we’ve felt deprived of. What would it cost
to see clearly? Committed to ultimate things.
Or dragging at the end of a long chain, to maintain
an open account with history. Like a ghost that
clumsily disappears into the night, trailing its tin can.