A tragic television star, the brain of a genius, and a prize-winning pig – 3 new books are brilliant examples of contemporary Australian poetry

All art comes from some abstraction of reality. What is written on the page or painted on the canvas is the artist’s representation of something real. Through that representation, the real becomes abstracted and is transformed into art.

There are different degrees of abstraction. There is the real of reportage, the quasi-real of television, the semi-real of thought. We take journalism to be based on real events. We know television pretends to display the real, but has no need to base itself in reality. And our thoughts are certainly subjective abstractions of reality.

This is not a new concept, of course, but it is a useful frame to consider these three books of poetry. Television^[1] by Kate Middleton, Einstein’s Brain^[2] by Mark O’Flynn and Fat Chance^[3] by Kent MacCarter all perform some degree of abstraction. They take something real and transform it to draw some greater meaning.

We might classify these three collections, in broad terms, as examples of “non-fiction poetry” – that is, poetry with elements of non-fiction, centred somewhere in a sense of reality. This too is not a new phenomenon, but it is one that seems to be gaining traction in Australian poetry.

Middleton’s subject is television; she writes her biography anchored in her experience with it. O’Flynn lets his rich trains of thought run wild as he dissects the mundane. And MacCarter shows us the varied possibilities of reinterpreting and reimagining non-fiction.

These books are brilliant examples of contemporary Australian poetry. If they are anything to go by, we’re in a good spot.

Review: Television – Kate Middleton (Giramondo); Einstein’s Brain – Mark O'Flynn (Puncher and Wattmann); Fat Chance – Kent MacCarter (Upswell)

Television

It is refreshing to find a collection of poetry that draws on the mythology of television, rather than some other more high-minded mythos. I sometimes get annoyed when a poem is so dense with secondary references that I spend more time on Wikipedia than with the work itself. This might speak to my subconscious anti-intellectualism, or maybe my lack of intellect, and is likely a symptom of the academy’s capture of contemporary poetry. But I think most people would prefer to read poetry without needing to go to secondary sources. This is not to imply that Middleton’s work is lowbrow or simple, rather that it speaks to a common reference point and in doing so opens up the form. Television is so much a part of culture that it seems natural to refer to it while writing autobiographically. The book’s first poem begins, you might say television proliferates inside my bodylike so much gut bacteria: its good flora, its bad Gut bacteria is an interesting simile here. We know that has an unseen influence on many parts of our health. It is infused in our being and influences us in unknown ways, whether we like it or not. It looms larger in our lives than other media, whether we like to admit it or not. The first poem begins to draw the links between Middleton’s experiences growing up and the effect television has had on her life. She learned adolescence here, learned what would be expected, the all-out rageof emotional extremes – though I’d like to claim it was Emily Bronte’s wuthering inferiority that taught me, too,to brood, at least as absolutely as Dylan McKay For those unfamiliar with the mythos of television, Dylan McKay was the character played by Luke Perry on Beverly Hills 90210^[4]. Middleton hints at a secret we perhaps all share to some extent. I, for one, frequently tell people that the early poetry of Leonard Cohen taught me empathy, when in reality it was more likely Captain Janeway’s caring and thoughtful approach to her crew in Star Trek: Voyager^[5], which I contrasted with Picard’s hierarchical management style in Star Trek: The Next Generation^[6]. Luke Perry died in 2019 from an ischemic stroke, his brain hypoxic,a second stroke, life support, then life support removed — Middleton, like many members of Generation X (she places herself in this generation), was affected by his death. For her, it prompted a meditation on fame and the ways in which Perry became his character: dark, brooding, unstable. He suffered from the alcoholism, among other afflictions, perhaps due to the unique pressures of his job. This first poem gives readers a concise and affecting account of Middleton’s thesis: television is all-consuming and, although it is an abstraction of reality, it affects reality. The real-world influence of television appears throughout the book. The sexual assaults on the set of Hey Dad! are mentioned: the stories broke, a long parade of faces: reassuringas childhood: broken as childhood: looking up the history Bill Cosby’s attacks on his co-stars (and others) are also mentioned: I never liked the Cosby Show – at least,I never liked Bill Cosby: not prescience, just a preference This breaking the fourth wall, where television reaches beyond what we see on our screens, is incredibly successful. These are not simply characters in a series or even actors portraying characters on the screen, but real people whose wholesome images acted as smoke screens behind which they could commit their crimes. Middleton says as much: – hey, ‘dad’, there’s a real evil in these studio lots: hey,‘dad’ is a mask too, worthy of Twin Peaks Reflections of reflections and twistings of reality draw a complex picture of the nature of television and our relation to it. Middleton complicates her thinking when she wishes the reality of television news had a more satisfying narrative structure, as in other forms of television: like when CNN rolled full-time Desert Storm:and me at home, watching tanks sweep out, wanting instead to watch a start, middle, end and not just the tanks entering,spectacle: wanting a story I could retell myself at a later date returning it to what I needed: war brings little comfort viewing:no end to binging, doomscroll rhetoric: no end to dust and hardware Middleton points here to the unreality of television: in real life, there are no beginnings, middles or ends. There is simply the ongoing procession of events with little resolution. No matter how hard they try, news anchors can’t make a satisfying story from reality. The poems in Television are numbered, with the first line of each used as their titles in the contents. The collection is also set almost entirely in couplets, save for a few single final lines. These features give the poetry and the book itself a television-like quality. Couplets have a way of driving a narrative forward, like beats in a scene or even frames in a film – there is almost a frame-by-frame quality in this technique that is appropriate for the book’s subject. While Middleton’s book does have a familiar reference point in television, she is thoughtful enough to provide a few brief pages of notes for each poem to draw out the specifics of the references, and she includes some longer explanations of why she has included them and how they relate to her biography. Einstein’s Brian Albert Einstein’s brain is a strange object: an organ, the same as the organ we all have in our heads, but this one came up with scientific theories so advanced its owner’s last name became a stand-in for genius.