Jacket 1 - Pam Brown - New Maxim(u)s

From beneath the arses of ducks,
deploying consumables and calling it
art   and the sheep gurgling hysterically.
We keep it in buckets.

Love leaping onto the tired pile
of my flesh,   hot air
concentrating in sewers. Vroom!

Like corporate suicide across
the polished screens   surface molten,
stripped of its cage   and we celebrate
the past, suppressing the throats, furrowing
nutrition and filling cavities and udders
performing ridiculous labours : supreme-O.

Santayana might have been ugly,
organisation saves none of them
collecting apogean multiples of disorder
headlines might claim — bad guests
from a party.

Pam Brown compiled this poem from the last lines in sequence from the first 16 poems in Syzygy, a collection of poems by Australian poet John Kinsella published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Pam Brown’s twelfth book of poetry, ‘50-50’, was published by Little Esther Books (Adelaide, South Australia) in September 1997.

Photo, left to right — Nigel Roberts, Pam Brown, Dîpti Saravanamuttu, 12 March 1983, Courthouse Hotel, Newtown, Sydney, at the launch of John Forbes’ Surfer’s Paradise magazine No. 3, photo by John Tranter, catalog m1.

Pam Brown’s author notes page here on the Jacket site offers a recent biographical note, and also links to a dozen or so Jacket pages that feature her work or reviews of her books, or where she is interviewed.