We are sitting in Pat’s backyard, tapping away on three laptops, Nick is fielding calls. Pat has just made some excellent gnocchi, and now empty bowls with stains of red sauce are on the table with the computers. We are splicing sound, cropping images, shaping code, writing; trying to work out how to show this work best. We have tossed back and forth words like this – ‘showing’. ‘arranging’, ‘curating’ ‘exhibiting’ - trying to find out what it is we are doing.

We began gathering work for this collection simply by asking people whose work we admired. Issues grow in this way.

After a tragically predictable six months of namelessness ended, Pat and Nick quickly knocked up the ‘puzzle piece’ When Pressed icon by taking out the shape formed from the space between the E and the S in PRESSED and turning it on its side. This shape seemed to work as a talisman for the approach this collection has since taken. We all wordlessly agreed to allow design and language to talk to each other, an approach that was only natural given our different backgrounds and interests. I think: turning scribbled words into the cool invincibility of pixels, like walking with your mouth open…

This collection is both an exploration of the diverse practices being used by poets today, as well as a special feature on the work of Amanda Stewart. The selections chosen here look particularly at the correspondences between visual and aural inscription in her work. As anyone who has seen Amanda perform knows, her work pushes at the limits of what the voice can do, exploring voice as the fabric of speech, utterance and life-force.

Jason Nelson is one of the most adept artists at bringing language poetry and cultural geography, always playfully, into the digital context, and his collaboration here with Christine Hume continues to ply its wonderful messiness in an age of inviolable pixels. Dan Disney’s three poems function like meditative documentaries on three northern cities and the experience of travel, while Keri Glastonbury’s short sharp lines return to your mind like lines in an askew pop gem. Prague-based poet and artist Louis Armand has three pieces in this issue, including the exquisite long poem Circus Days. In Derek Motion’s essay, he looks openly at his own writing and the inventive processes that keep it awake and moving; while Tom Lee’s series of poems create hypnogogic spaces within the domestic. Michael Farrell’s poems continue an interest in exploring and remixing and thinking again about colonialist poetry. Patrick Jones work says: Stand on a city street at an odd angle, and this – of course, why not? - is poetry.

The first issue, like the first pancake, can look a little strange (but no less delicious, uncovered from the bottom of the stack). Be patient. Give it time. It’s a test, a stretch to see what can be done. The website will go on to be different things that we, always anterior, couldn’t have thought of.

You can download an MP3 of Amanda Stewart’s full reading here.

for Hugh Clarence Ultan

1.

It’s morning and we’re on our way—the park
and leaves hanging in autumn sunlight like analgesic.
Hands travel in all directions at once—
astride the giant green shoulders, juggled up into
another day’s sinewy disjuncts. Hello, are you happy?
Funnelled through the mysterious ordination of events:
Kleomenes at Thermopylae, mantis-eyed, staring into
darkest comedy. Sat in the cold under the Big Top—
the elephant at the door, the monkey running around
in circles doing tricks. Scenes of hope and despair.
But we are becoming the future, not knowing
when to stop. Backwardly, navigating insipient
weather—butterflies, stamps, old shoes, those
little painted lips that send us, kneeling, into sleep.

2.

At the bottom of the box my mother is there
who is not in her right mind. The moon with its
puppet strings showing, frictionless knots
slipping and unslipping. Nor is this the light at the end.
Dear, it is always late, you will lose count thinking
of it. Also, one of its themes is time. Collecting the
left-overs in soup tureens—remits of La Place Blanche,
staring Pépé le Moko-like at the departing logos.
What will we do tomorrow if it doesn’t return?
A constant activity would be a surface without grips,
unsizing us. Night grows ugly, all nerves and sex,
looking and not looking. A violet-blue window seems
to be inside the room and at the same time outside it.
Or a stranger is mounting the stairs, pointing towards us.

3.

Why not describe everything backwards? Scenes of
scotch-taped celluloid, navigating the gross weather.
Headlines stand out in bas relief, thrusts of form
between interludes of grisaille. Improvise something
on this theme. Sifting the left-overs, Pasternak’s
“territory of conscience.” Humanity finds the myth of
personal freedom intolerable, unlike a work of fiction.
Waiting for that girl with the eyes of a trapeze artist
on the corner of West 57th street. Thoughts travel in
many directions at once, electronics, science fiction,
footprints on the moon. What I’ve been painting is
a life’s work index of first lines, whoever reads them?
Standing outside the École des Beaux-Arts like a
character in a novel hopelessly excluded from its plot.

4.

Grew up in a time of last ideas and normalisation,
thick-necked, under cuntish weather. Street preacher
shouting if God’s self-sufficient what are we doing
here? Sitting opposite a table for company, one litre
of red wine after another. Signals writ large all through
the air—a last minute blunt cutting out of sky, its
variations, before the venom sets in. Parts of a face,
a man’s or a woman’s, perfume. But already it’s late.
Anatomised an hour, moving straight ahead sideways
out the door. Outside the window a green sky cuts out
giant writing in hard autumn schist. Oh, my nerves
are bad tonight. Why blame the sins of a permissive
mother? History is what happened at other times
among strange people, unashamed of letting us watch.

5.

All through the air signals flash out of margins,
saturating it. It even gains a type of solidity. It sits there
in the world like a brain, naked and useless.
Spreading out from North American winters—dead
leaves mulching into excrement. Dollars stir the rain
into an autism, a giant lozenge pressing through
windows and ventilation ducts. We stood there
watching it, designed to self-destruct into dreariness
and forbearance. A whole year of mouths ending only
in paraphrase, rumours, plagiarisms of nature.
The scapegoat artist hangs in sunlight, complicating
our grey brown scenery. In it for the dollars? You must be
crazy. Kleomenes at Thermopylae. A private joke in a
parallel room. The windows unaccountably fogging up.

6.

Something about the weather. Figures against a black
ground moving in all directions at once. Pigeons
flocking under the circus tent of Manhattan skyline.
Momentary, headlong, physical insurrections that end
underground riding the subway to afternoon teas,
sex and privacy. Evenings of paraphrase turn emaciated
or womanly—out-waiting the rain, it is perhaps
a symptom after all. A barbershop quartet stands out
in bas relief on the opposite side, hurrying you
to self-doubt and secrecy—coupled to a surmise that
it, the day, ought to be seized and usually wasn’t.
But did we promise ourselves happiness? Looking and
not looking for the key under the door, to get to wherever
time comes from, or to relent, or to be taken “all in all.”

7.

Am I talking to myself again? Waiting for catharsis
to unfold, the way things happen in restored old
subtitled films. Hello, are you happy? Those little
painted lips behind store windows among the window-
dressing. The story begins with intimacy and evolves
into a threat. A zone of silence where we stand and
scrutinise the naked body, in vague penance. It is
difficult not to run out of the room, stupidly looking
for the departed years. And still the light in the trees.
The lowering sky and waning light—a sky you want to
get out from under. The danger is in conclusions.
Again words point an abstract finger to exert will, put
things in order—names, images, objects cancelled out.
The kid says “You die!” But already it’s too late.

8.

Things seek attachment: behind the door, a room
on the second floor, light through the trees.
In sleep you stretch forward to touch the scenery.
Soon enough time to perform the last act—
counting down these dry years, looking under the table
for the joke that got away. Our cruelty makes us
stupid—pratfalls and false hilarity. We’re still
getting there, the long road out to the deserted lot
and ruined chimney stacks teetering. When it comes,
I’ll go on bargaining to the last breath, Kleomenes
at Thermopylae, under the Big Top, arraigned
before the horses and sequined women, the strong
man, the dancing bears. What was our reason for
coming here? What false assurance did we accept?

Listen to a recording of this piece being performed:

sound and sense has previously appeared in Amanda Stewart’s I/T Selected Poems 1980 – 1996 (book and CD), Here and There Books/Split Records, Sydney, 1998; and James Stuart’s excellent 2007 e-book anthology, The Material Poem, available free as a PDF here.

Look! An empire of morning with fleamarket bicycles wobbling under bony arses. The cranes, stork-legged, wandering construction sites where day, a map read backwards, unfolds at the horizon. Footsteps echo on the broken-window boulevards, apes lounging at the foot of Babel in their postcards. Sunrise has been pasted into the halcyon. A banner trails a plane: kultur macht reich! above bronze Marx and Engels in an unmown park, in long beards, visitors from an old world. A bohemian pack is beginning to snarl. Light stills, where books once burned. ‘Beauty is a history lesson we have failed’ they bark, dog-headed, without even fallen angels for company.

In the graffiti-hung galleries, bombs and ideologies have all been dropped.

The first issue explores some of the non-traditional media, processes, and interventions that have been used to make poetry - code, sound, installation - along with those themes that have been explored throughout poetry’s many literary traditions. It is a special feature on (and takes its name from) the work of Sydney poet and vocal artist, Amanda Stewart, presenting a selection of her work from the last twenty years.