'Out of the Box'With Here, as ever, the general question of whether a poet's identity should

infuence the interpretation of their work rears its head. Depersonalised

poetry has its place-in docupoetry and other forms that draw on found

fueer,-{uftralian ?oe material, to give just one example-and it is always valuable to remember
to separate the actual person writing Poems from the putative self in the
poem, which can be as much of a fiction as any other character. Beyond
Solly Evbns this, though, there is great political and personal power to be derived from
situating the writing self within the written worh especially for people
whose identities are so often left to the margins or overlooked entirely. The
visible and acknowledged presence of LGBTQIA+ people is important' not
just within 'queef spaces but evcrywhere else as well.
,i$', Michael Farrell's introduction to Out of the Box suggests that the
lLove Poetry labelling of poetry as gay and lesbian need not be ueated as a'reductiort',
Michoel Forrell and that:
Giromondo Publishing, 2017
rsBN 978-t-92533655-9, RRP $24.00
tT]he conscious idea that the poems were written by a gay man
or a lesbian adds something to many of the poems land that]
Up
Missing :.,il idea isnt meant to terminate the extent of their meaning.
Pom Brown t L

Vogobond Press, lOtS
tsBN 978-t-922181-5O3, RRp $25.00 ,t
It has been dmost a decade since the release of Oat ofthe Bac:
Ausnalian Gay and Lesbian Poets, selected and edited by Michael Farr
and Jill Jones, and it is still rare to see an anthology or special edition
focuses so squarely on LGBTQIA+ writing. This does a huge disse
to poets whose gender and sexual identity is central to their writing hl
also to the idea that'queer poetry' exists with as much variery and nunnn
as 'straight poetry' and, moreover, gains further nuance when
and read as queer. unless a poet explicidy positions themselves butsidc fli
box,' as it were, their gender and sexuality can be glossed over both withM
anthology collections and their own individually published work, whilo
an LGBTQIA+ collection foregrounds this aspecr of the poet's experience,
u
Poetry is tied to identity, but not bound up and limited by it. And even
poerry that see}s to remain outside of the (identity) political in its form
or content can become part of a larger project of identity formation,
through this tonscious idea.'A poet might explore real and speculative
positionalities in their poems, playing amongst multiple voices, sources,
forms and frames. And the poett identity can also figure in the ways in
which their work is picked up, read and spread-a way for establishing
kinship bemreen poers and readers and a frame of reference for individual
readings of a given poem or collection.
Of course, there are plenty of LGBTQTA+ foll<s who resist identity
formation in its more rigid, label-driven sense: 'Bay' ,'lesbian', 'queer',
'trans'can be means for self-determination and community building, but
they can also limit your identity to the 'box' in which you've been put.
And, particularly when these labels are applied to you by someone else,
they can be ill-fitting, openly stigmatising, and both conceptually ancl
concretely dangerous. This becomes a problem, I think, when an identity
category is used to terminate any further analysis-queerness, again, is not
a terminal reduction, one that stops the reader from looking any closcr,
but an addition, an extra facet to how we can imagine the poet looking
at the world.
*
{+
Michael Farrell's latest collection, I Loae Poetr!, displays his usual
hopscotching approach to ideas, images and sentences-his lines are
playfully put together, sometimes transmuting well-known idioms into
new forms or otherwise occupying familiar language in unexpected wap.
For example, 'Pope Pinocchio's Angels' reads partially like a pastiche of'
weeklywomen's magazines and advertorid platitudes: 'It is not / Advisablc
to stand under an / Angel in the rain. If / You have the makings of / Arr
angel in / A country shed they may I Be quite valuable. \7hen / I fly wirlr
angels I I Always book rwo extra seats.' Pope Pinocchio is the holy leadcr
of a church of liars, but there's nevertheless a kind of aphoristic wisdom in
these readymade, re-contextualised lines: 'Angels have no insides, which
makes them unselfish.'The lies seem true, sornehow; not least becausc
they draw on the kind of truisms that we overhear as children and thcrr
carry as echoes into our adult lives. This approach-part found poetry pert
malaphor-is all the more unsetding due to its slighdy skewed familiarity,
For LGBTQIA+ people, nostalgia can be a tricky business. Itt not that
we dont get that same golden longing for the past, but rather that our pa.st
can so often feel as though it doesnt quite belong to us. Farrellt prose pocnl
'Put Your Helmet Ort' gives this same sense of alienation, of estrangem€nt
from moments that are both formative and entirely quotidian. The helnrct
is a bike helmet, a combat helmet, a cricket helmet: something to protcct
the head from damage through this imagined road trip, this kaleidoscopc
of the familiar and the weird:
... I remembered
Michael stipe eating beer-soaked Donuts offa Bus
floor with nvo Drag qu€ens on his Back.'We posed as
Couriers.'We drove the whole \(aywith our Eyes on the
Road. W'e failed to see the hitching Skeleton.'We saw no
\7ind farms of chivalric Beauty.
Here we have the iconic Australian landscape, peopled with a constantly
shifting set of characters and references: the bus trip in Priscilla: Queen of
the Desert, the thivalric' windmi\Ls of Don Quixote made local by our own
government's ambivalent embrace of renewable energy sources. The use of
idiosyncratic capitali5adsn-rnost but not all of the nouns, most but not
all of the proper namss-lsnds weight to certain objects, giving them a
kind of personal sacredness, but also serves to add a jarring thy,h* to the
long lines. Nothing is quite what it seems in this Poem, and nothing is
entirely comfortable, eit-her.
This sense of unease is everywhere in Farrell's Poetry and his inclusions
in the Out of the Box anthology are no excePtion; 'Bagboy,' in particular,
shares this kind of skewed familiarity, combined here with an undercurrent
of violence that is, tragically and unfairly, Part of so many young gay men's
lives: 'only a building sensation 6C blood coming out of him I in ecstasy
or as close as hell get symPathetic homicide they call it.' Farrell's approach
to punctuation here (or, rather, his complete avoidance of it) is another
technique of estrangement: the reader is forced to take their time in the
reading and to confront multiple possible ways to Parse any given line, even
as the rhythm of the comma-less lines rushes them forward.
{&
Pam Brown's poetry is more understated and sParse than Farrell's, but
one thing the rwo poers share is the current of strangeness that takes the
ordinary and familiar and makes it unsettling. In Brownt poems, the
161
unsettling details come from a more domestic position, with a tendency
towards short, spaced out stanzas, and direct references to quotidian an<l
personal matters.
If Brown, like Farrell, is a 'nostalgic' poet, then her nostalgia is of n
more personal kind-and, read as a queer poet, there is an underlying
interest in inheritance, family and legacy that goes beyond an immediart:
family unit. The poem 'A Second Ago' acknowledges the relationshilr
between the poet and her mother and earlier predecessors, and the things
that we inherit from those who come before us. Brown writes of taking
'a few ofJames Schuyler's I peonies' while ar rhe same time trying nor t(r
'imitate' her predecessors who 'were in main-world, / europe, japan, nortlr
america.' This question of poetic lineage has particular resonance when rcatl
with the'conscious idea' both of Brown as a lesbian poet and Schuyler as l
gay male poet-to take a few... peonies' in homage is in this case a markcr
of both a poetic and a queer history.
The challenge of treading the fine line benveen borrowing, paying
homage or ouright imitating another poet is echoed here by the links
Brown draws between herself and her mother; two consecutive stanziur
begin with 'my mother likes to know / the wind's direction / 6c to siry
it' and 'I would like / a speculative set / of laws / that are friendly ro
life,' drawing an association through the parallel constructions of whlt
she and her mother [ike.'W'e can read the southerlies and nor'wesrers :ui
one such set of speculative laws, or at the very least a refection of wi<lcr
moods and experiences than simply the weather; 'the rain comes witlr a
southerly' implies a causal relationship between the two as well as evoking
the possibiliry of emotional 'bad weather', just as other, more ephenrerll
changes might be heralded with seemingly unremarkable phenonrcnir.
Mother and daughter both put stock in these speculations-both wanting
to believe that both real and ephemeral changes can be recognised frorrr
the unremarkable phenomena that precede them.
Schuyler reappears in a number of the poems in this collectiorr*-
the poem'Marctt' for example, invokes'James Schuyler's /'February', /
an inimitable poem / I revere' in its first stanza. The Schuyler original ls
a glorious observational piece, focusing on the images and colours of a
late February day in New York; Brown's homage is Australian-summer
in place 6f wln1s1-and moves more into personal introspection rather
than pure outward awareness. Brownt use of line breaks and short stanzas
serves as a kind of manifestation of the jt*py, distractable behaviour of a
curious mind, starting from the metatextual, to the docupoetic'East River
/ in deep freezr / worst ice in a decade' and then her own Schuyler-esque
observational stanza:
humid slate grey
beyond my ding,, panes
the greying fence
conceds
a snake-eyed skink's
miniature throbs
nerves pulsing
in the intermittent sunlight
its skinlcy skin
close to mauve
The conceit of the poem is the question of whether the 'deep freeze' of
climate change will push Schuyler's observations of a late winter's day-its
colour and feel-into the rarefied territory of myth. The original poem may
indeed be inimitable, not because of its craft but because the conditions
that it describes no longer exist in the same way.
But'March' also rests on the division berween the hemispheres, the
'main-world' and the 'rest-of-world' of A Second Ago,' which juxtaposes
'glass facades frost' and 'body odour / dank / 6c sweet / like rainforest
ground.'This poem offers the unsettling prospefi that our observations
are all entirely positional and entirely contingent on the self doing the
observing-and that that self may be the centre of one's own exPerience
while being located beyond certain cultural, literary or geograPhical
margins.
 Many of Brown's poems occupy this space between permanence :ltttl
impermanence, and the indelible traces of actions that remain even wltcn
the cause itself has passed. Tsunami debris and receding tides, photograplrt
and arrworks in reproduction, and'the teaspoons / smeared / even aftcr' /
their time in the sink' all make appea,rances in this collection, ghosting irr
and out of the continuous present. Between these shifting images and tlr,'
short, spaced-out and semi-complete lines that characterise Brown's writinli,
there is a sense that even the most solid objects are subject to uncertairr $ +**r-i
, #':'l r-- "i
boundaries, nebulousness and'smear.' ",,tS

{* "$

Of course, many of these interpretations would still be possible with.rrt

knowing the sexual identiry of the poets. However, it should be clear tlr;rt
sexual identity, as it is termed, is in fact not only about sexuality lrrtt i'
instead part of a complex nework of identities that work together to slutpt'
a persont experiences, both internal and interpersonal. As such, rcadinli
Michael Farrell as a gay poet or Pam Brown as a lesbian poet helps to rtrLl
depth and nuance to the poems-notions of family, domesticiry nostrrll',i.r
and influence are all impacted when one considers the poems within tlr,
broader context of an LGBTQIA+ poet's work. Beyond this, though, ir'r'
s
worrh being reminded that, although it's tempting to treat the heteroscxrr.,l
experience of family, or of history or of one's literary predecessors, as tlr,
default, there are elements of those experiences that are equally contittplt'rrt
and non-universal. The kinds of estrangement that Farrell and Browrl cn,r( r

in their poems are guideposts towards ways in which poetry, as a forttr, ,.,"
destabilise and question the ideas and perceptions that our society (r'('.tr.'
as self-evident.

m,

Opposite: Piercing 2, mixed medio, irregulor dimensions,20l2.

Photogroph: Andrew Atchison