Poems by Louis Armand and John Kinsella
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30.
Remaindered in the quarry where’d they’d returned to check before time the quality of purple stone, the grand building’s shutter’s fluting requiring that quality finish; once danced in the froufrou moment, and another choked on the dust of rhythm and murmur, taking it to heart; what makes memorable: the Cordilleras’ imperial stone, the god-like caul of clouds that have beheld everything laid out for the monument, embracing anguish and ecstatics with equal measure, shouting hubris to the hidden demagogues and senators deploring the people, their chromosphere self-declarations, last survivors on the ship to a distant star, or even a close star-turn like Venus, to cast a long-slanting gaze at the blue planet, with all that breeding making flesh in the chairs, strapped down with gravity where seraglios are blended into the main room, the vaulted capsule. 31. Restraint of the spun axis, to create new orthodoxies, goes nowhere, cutting the things that grow back. Pulmonary, lymphatic – virtues of ‘disorder’-in-System resurrecting the ‘old style’ of work & affect, torpid & as cynical as canned ennui product placement: waving TV genitals as global hunger-strikers rule out ‘conditions’ for trade talks, the planchet evidence enough to warrant a counterfeiter. Call it avant-garde, narrowing the front line. The stamp of an ideal merchandise, plugged straight down into the grandiose sequel – all cant and subversive muscle-flexing, the pocket war machine of kulcha moguls scheming junkets & relative atomic mass. If it bombs, we’ll go down singing! – resplendent in purple and, from a baboon’s POV, charming. Already on the heritage list, the tree they swing from. |
Louis Armand is the author of ten novels, including The Combinations (2016), Cairo (2014; longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award), & Abacus (2015; a Sydney Morning Herald Pick of the Week). His collections of poetry include East Broadway Rundown (2015), The Rube Goldberg Variations (2015), & Synopticon (with John Kinsella, 2012). He is also the author of Videology (2015) & The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey: Culture after the Avantgarde (2013). He lives in Prague. www.louis-armand.com
Vegan, anarchist, pacifist poet, John Kinsella has published over thirty books and has been awarded many prizes. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University. In 2007 he received the Fellowship of Australian Writers Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry. Recent titles include Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (Picador, 2016), Graphology Poems 1995-2015 (Five Islands Press, 2016) and On the Outskirts (UQP, 2017). More recently he has collaborated with Charmaine Papertalk Green in writing False Claims of Colonial Thieves (Magabala, 2018).
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