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Pam Brorvn, 50-50

Little Esther, 1997,ISBN 0 646 32225 7
Pam Brown's new book of poems ends in Paris, or rather her mental
image of Paris, appropriate for a poet so obsessed with American
modernism and postmodernism. Paris seems preferable to Sydney (or
the Blue Mountains, where Brown is reading Alice Notley, an American
who lives in Paris) as a site for poetry:
&, unlike
the sealed

rtirgy tunnels
of Sydney,
Paris is

anatural
as a location
the

Me[o

the catacombs

& the sewers

just, always,
almost surfacing.

what was I to make of the fact that last August, as I finished reading
Brown reading Nodey and imagining Paris, I turned on my television only
to get the first reports that Lady Di had been in an automobile accident in
a Paris tunnel? Surely nothing more than coincidence rules the reading of

'real' that sometimes emulate poetry's

fictions. ("what's this stuff/ for anyway-/ this whacky genie,/ tiris
poefry?/ In a fiction,/ laxn/ & shamble off": "seven Days)."yet Brown's
book is full of the providence that comes of coincidence, and especially
out of the odd conjunctions of random events and the meditations that
accrue because---or in spite of-them. Her school of poetry, if one can
call it that, might be described as'narrative imagismi an amalgam of the
books amid intrusions of the

modernists' accentuation of the image and a postnodern talkiness that is

itself the basis for a curriculum. The headnote to the book's first poem,
"Twitching," comes from the Language poet, Charles Bernstein: "I/
learned to read by watching / Wheet oJ hrtune when I was/ a baby." The
punning word "fortune" (and its opposite number, "misfortune) is the
basis for Brown's poetics, as it is, in a different way, for Bernstein's. The
title, 50-50, is a reference to chance, or a chance reference. My reading of
the book in the context of Lady Di's accident thus seems, if not *r198

VIEWS & REVIEWS

determined, then at least part of Brown's program-the world of the

book becomes a book that describes the worldt randomness.

If Brown writes about Paris from the perspective of the

Blue

Mountains, it may be because she is very much a ciry poet, not a countsT
one; she prefers the city's grubbiness to what she terms 'nature's/

barbarism" ("k Ultimo"). Among the Moderns, then, she sides more
with Mina Loy, the last years of whose life were spent among the poor in
New York City, than with the organizing manias of Pound, Williams and
Cornell. So, in "Not Myrna, Minai she writes:
in dream you mumble
Mina,
modernism's a wasm
Ezra' s cantankerous scrapbooks

William Williams' stamina

Joe Cornell's boxes

my true
environment
is a dust bin

new maps for Mina

Elsewhere, in "Abstract Happinessf Brown, who is a librarian, asks how

a reader can concentrate on the New Formalists "with the case-moths/
a-chomping/ through the ground covers?" [n "First Things Firsti she
addresses a friend in a letter: "Dear K. I'm reading/ dense U.S. poetry/

still beside/ the sea which has/ no influence// the worst,/ in this
instance,/ is merely a congestion/ of pleasure-parachutists/ falling
through/ that colourful sky/ over a contaminated tide." And, in
"Prospectsi she considers her ambitions in the light of R. Mutt, namely
the signature found on the famous urinal of Marcel Duchamps. These,
and other, examples reveal a poet who opposes the statement she
includes in "Twitching": "Art is mostly/ showing offl the cleverest/
decoration." Brown's poetry is decorative only in the sense that it
catalogues the images that make up the poet's world; to call it antidecorative, at least in an aesthetic sense, might be more appropriate.
Some readers may find fault with the fact that Brown's urban landscapes
are more interior than actual, but I do not number myself among them.
This is not to say there are no politics in Brown's work. As an
American

I am perhaps predisposed to notice the American content of

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Brown's poems; as a resident of America's 50th state, and more

specifically of oahu, a tiny island some five hours fly-S time for the U.S.
continent and best known there as a tourist destination, I am also drawn
to Brown's treatrnent of postcolonial postmodernity."Mwa vee" is, to my
mind, one of the strongest poems in this collection. Brown's collage
method works well with the political content of the poem, about a pacific
island where American and French imperialism meet the tourist 63dsand where the indigenous people can be altogether overlooked,
forgotten. Here Brown may have learned from her friend, Adam Aitken,
an especially acute observer of the postcolonial Pacific; like him, she
writes with irony and with lyricism, a difficult combination. A closereading of one passage reveals the many levels of critique Brown is
leveling:
across

in sydney

armchair agitators
continue
.

slinging
the

off

against

french ignoring

american revelations

of secret pacific tests

as late as 1991
& "radiation experimenls'furtively feeding
selected citizens

plutonium

The passage further explores the historical backdrop of world War II,
which inspired good feeling between citizens of the island and American
soldiers, especially black Americans (and here what is sometimes termed
the "postcolonial" experience of blacks in America becomes evident).
The irony of historical good feeling as a backdrop for recent secret
nuclear testing is further embittered by descriptions of "the sea/ in which
poodles swim/ with madames who don't/ but float with kickboards/
flippers goggles bathing caps/ like children" and of the lushness of the

vegetation. This perverse combination of political and cultural

imperialisms (where "the kanake/ don't perform/ commercially,"
doubtless in self-defense) is the marker of "a successfully/ colonisld
island." One of Brown's major accomplishments in this book is to think
through the images of the world without colonizing or in any way
appopriating them. This is no small feat.

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