Stasis Shuffle
it's insane it's fast / it's fun:
the poetic chronophotography of Pam Brown
A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).
—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (27)
Recalling Barthes's concept of the punctum as the entanglement of emotional subjectivity and imagery, Pam Brown, in the opening stanzas of Stasis Shuffle, notes that “my own private / punctum / (best before) / closes” (10). This early referential gasp, combined with Brown's proclivity to capture snapshot-like movements, provides me with a starting point for figuring Brown as a poetic chronophotographer whose poems present themselves as a film roll—sporadic activity shuffled into an analogue animation that plays no favourites between the human and non-human, the rural and the metropolitan.
I choose to read Brown as a photographer not out of desperation for a slantways method of reading this work, but because Brown is no stranger to referencing photographic practice throughout her oeuvre (see the emboldened quotations throughout this review), and because her penchant for dropping in and out of throughlines possesses a type of off-beat rhythm that ensures she cannot be purely read in a collagic or narrative manner. For me, the text presents moments of extended sequence and large sections of bitsy observation, tell-tale signs of a film roll that has been dragged out around town by a body who alternates between states of hyperfocus, boredom, and attraction. A focus on chronophotography (the pre-cinematic practice of detecting time and movement through photographs) when reading her work speaks to the nature of the title, where ‘Stasis’ denotes being in either a state of static balance, slow blood flow, or lack of evolution, while ‘Shuffle’ evokes a dance, a dragging of one’s feet, a reorganisation of people and items across time and space. Brown’s reference to her punctum’s closure also suggests the subjective state of the poet as one who remains insistently observational—perhaps even against her own volition—but whose position and reaction to the world’s images is changing.
in this poem i am asking / for your trust. / the photograph my medium
(Selected Poems, 63)
Slimly preceding moving image technology, the major interest of chronophotography was the capturing of movement in a series of successive photographs. If you were to collect chronophotographer Eadweard Muybridge’s images of the racing horse Sallie Gardner (1878) and assemble them as a flipbook, suddenly, the horse is running; the same principle applies for his Plate Number 121. Descending an incline with a bucket of water in each hand (1887). Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No.2 (1912), recognised as being closely linked to these chronophotographic experiments, is a static instance of compressed and functional movement. When Philip Mead examines poetic cinematism, he proclaims Gertrude Stein as the most “intuitively brilliant” poetic translator of these Modernist compressions (McCredden and Trigg 204).
In 1892, closely following chronophotography, brothers Cherry and Richard Kearton produced the first photograph of a bird’s nest filled with eggs. Considered the first nature photographers, a Kearton brothers’ image of particular note is robin’s nest in a nosebag (Kearton and Kearton n.d.)—an image predominantly of a brick wall. In the centre, a horse’s nosebag, to its right, a large chain tacked to the brick. On the lower right of the bag, peeping from a hole, a tiny, barely perceptible muddle of sticks announces the robin’s nest.
Keeping that Kearton image in mind, these lines from Brown’s long-time poetry friend Ken Bolton, whose ‘Untimely Meditations’ fights over a poetic sandwich layered with the complexities of representing the 'urban' and 'rural' in mid-late 20th century settler Australian poetry:
Les told us
37
“Where’s
the beef?”
as if poems were a sandwich
and his
had dinkum verities
and content, while ours were that relativistic nonsense
you learn at unis,
not very sustaining.
This was “The City and the Country” theme.
Les assured us the Country was
“more Australian”.
Disregarding Murray’s distinctions, and Bolton’s gag reactions, Brown’s observations of landscape possess an undichotomised egalitarianism—her great talent is her ability to see (like the Keartons) glimmers of the non-human in the most apparently ‘human’ of places, the city. She documents and compresses worlds without fuss, the “dinkum verities” of “the Country” making themselves known on a Sydney street—even better, she refuses a view that would even acknowledge their difference. Stasis Shuffle contains multiple, often humorous, examples of unexceptional, organic interactions that foreground the built environments’ impact on the ‘natural’ world, as well as engagements with rurality as a resident of a city (it is assumed Murray would still disapprove of her form):
that time
you licked a saltbush
out in the scrub— (17)—
it’s an extinct finch
pecking
a four’n’twenty pie (48)—
slippery heaps of sediment,
earthmovers that never said
‘sorry, rhizome’ (14)—
with ‘indeed’
says the currawong
through a beak full
of pecorino (92)—
they say
bush capital
but but
everyone’s seen the wind farms
churning out power
on the other lake’s shore
across the federal highway (21)—
a connecting thread
in my barely-thinking thoughts
today
my feeling is
the planet is losing its real (10-11)
Like the Keartons documenting undomesticated non-humans in built environments in the name of nature photography, Brown’s ecological documentation focuses on flattening the visual plane between human and non-human bodies and environments (“caterpillar poo / looks like / pepper corns / breezes neglect / arrival / breasts sweat” [71], “is it cicadas /or tinnitus” [36]), “in australia / it’s all profit & bigotry / & weevils” [15]). Brown is adept at removing dichotomies, and thus the question of what is natural, human-made, concrete, immaterial, metropolitan, or rural becomes unimportant in its classification. Via her camera lens everything is eco, boundaries are dissolving, ecopoetics is all poetics, nothing (everything) matters.
Stasis Shuffle, when thumbed quickly enough, takes on an almost film-like quality. Running repetitive sequences of bedrooms, poetry readings, construction sites, and animals (to eat and watch) fall into one another, their relationship defined by how Brown seeks to arrange them; stills of once moving objects reanimated with smartness and wit. These images have been shuffled from the stasis of their own existence, a move by Brown that oscillates between the word’s varying definitions—for this animation, even when relentlessly speeding through imagery (“it’s insane it’s fast / it’s fun” [105]), retains the listless truculence of a gluey shuffle (“anything ‘new normal’ / you’re screaming” [89]), a sharp recount of the “imagination / pictures / the real” of the past two years (33).
being a poet in these late capitalist times is like using an hour glass rather than a digital watch
(This World/This Place 1994, 13)
The time-based interests of chronophotography allow us to study Brown's collections of static and moving imagery, and their alternate compressions and enlargements of the tunnel of time. Before even opening the text, time (the queen of moving and static) makes itself known on the cover: emblazoned with a Wes Anderson-adjacent Futura title card, we are given a wraparound vista view of the Euston/Campbell Road intersection that provides the option of turning stage left into the WestConnex M8. Apparently rejecting this idea of the sliced and diced experience of expressway travel, Brown seems content to remain on the verdant green verge, capturing a moment in which there is but one car on the road, and a puffer jacketed, masked (an Easter egg of temporality) pedestrian schlepping a shopping bag. It is these sorts of moments that crop up again and again within the text—pockets of momentary stabilisation in places of great movement (the city, a bar, the tiny busyness of insects in a garden)—as well as the suggested backdoor image of Brown, paused and still for a second as she produces the snapshot and then moves on.
Time makes itself known again in the tri-sectioning of the text, which begins with the first section, titled ‘(one idea on each dragée)’. A quick internet search reveals a dragée as a sugar-coated almond, and a perusal of Brown’s ‘Samplings & other effects’ at the rear of the text reveals she has found the same Wikipedia entry (there is a contextual speediness to her definition sourcing which feels amusing). One idea on each candy: an image of dipping a hand into a bag and munching, picking teeth, repeating. In ‘(dear a dear a)’ she instructs us to:
quick
(54)
unwrap
the chewy dragées
‘one idea on each dragée’
A glib idea that becomes literal with the accompanying snapshots of Mentos sweets imprinted with tasks (“add as friend” [54], “read palms” [55], “tell a joke” [57]). With time as the idea, we now think of how long it takes us to get to the bottom of a bag of sweets (how long it takes us to read these poems). Brown tells us to unwrap them quickly, and the shortness of the stanzas within each poem encourage this. Orienting us temporally by the eleventh line of the first poem, “my body will know / what to do / with the vaccine / in two weeks’ time” (3), these short stanzas and miniscule lines betray a documentation of a tract of time known primarily for its sluggishness, sickness, and woeful ennui (“running / a temperature / delirium wheeze / floats up & sticks / mouldy ceiling” [27]; “you could / get off the internet / you could use / some goodwill” [38]). No wonder we are speeding through these sugar-coated ovals, gulping them down quickly; we remember how slow it was. The irony of this section being the longest means that even gulping takes time.
The midsection, ‘(pressure’s on)’, is announced as ‘six mini double sonnets’, the naming of which is already a meddling with time. ‘Mini’ in line width, maxi in poem length, all sonnets begin with the line “memory seafoam”, a synthetic oceanic conjuring of impressionable material pockmarked with observations and instructions (“lose balance / rug burn / mirror crash” [71], “tremendous pain / take your time” [72], “never forget / english spinach” [73]). There is a feeling of Brown spitting cherry stones, olive pips, grape seeds at a canvas, a hazy documentation enhanced by her ‘Samplings’ footnote, “memory seafoam—was that a song?”. These sonnets feel mushy, afternoon fever-like, their compression of time operating differently to the crunchier ‘dragées’.
The final section—‘(stasis shuffle)’—continues the sonnets’ soft sensations (“curled up / sort of spongily / little bit sleepy /… not a problem / you’re lying down / in / a state / art institution” [79]) as well as the pithy sidestepping through the time tunnel of ‘dragée’, with the disrupted time/place warp and weft of:
I’ve never even been to michigan
(8)
I’ve been
to 1981
Which is then shifted and reflected in the past/future breath of:
she is invited to participate
(94)
in a poetry reading
in the future
we saw her do it
last week
Included in the final section, the work’s namesake poem, by definition the source of so much movement rumination, becomes a point of linear chronology in the text:
I shuffle
in my room’s stasis...
needing a beginning
(95)
for a poem
I could
re-use some lines
from some fake double sonnets,
free-associated
a while ago –
Is this what I think it is? A fleeting moment of continuity, a tiny ribbon of cohesive negatives held against the light.
now I’ve had them / processed / & I realise / it is not always / the photograph / which / interests me— / it’s the memory / of taking the photograph / of standing in the damp leaves
(This World/This Place 1994, 39)
The funny thing about photography is you don’t always end up capturing something you find interesting. Reflecting upon a roll of developed film, we can occasionally be stumped by stills that, at some point, engaged us enough to require a snapshot. Other times, plates are occupied by accidents, blurred captures of diagonal fences and awkward faces. Brown plays with the presence of these in between moments (“not every / mundanity / makes it / into a poem” [85]), but her attitudinal stance on them is strong enough that even they become interesting in her capable hands. She may be ironic when discussing these ‘dud’ moments between the blazing portraits or landscapes, but her documentation of minutiae denotes an active observation of the tiny-tiny, and there are few things that bring me greater pleasure than finding another who could look at ants all day (“I’m / idling around / staying outdoors / until the final ray / it’s awesome” [47], “by late morning / you’re lying in a park / staring” [14]). The beauty of reading this text as an analogue animation means that we also have the power to stop the ‘film’ whenever we so choose and linger with Brown in these extended slow moments.
We have been told that Brown’s “own private / punctum” (10) has closed, and I started this angle of reading because of how swiftly I came across this line. Whether it be a tear duct or a pinprick of subjectivity, Brown is quick to announce that, nowadays, images and the world are having a changed effect on her. Her subjectivity may be less intensely emotive than in her earlier works (i.e. the drama of “asking you / to wire my heart / to your electric dream” [Selected Poems 24]), but if Stasis Shuffle demonstrates anything, it is that Brown has not lost her capacity for tiny revelations, weekday epiphanies, and an inherent interest in all bodies’ movement through time, her pockets of observation organised as fragmentary stanzas sequenced by happenstance hand.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Hill and Wang, 1981.
Bolton, Ken. Untimely Meditations. Wakefield Press, 1997.
Brown, Pam. Selected Poems 1971-1982. Wild & Woolley Pty Ltd, 1984.
Brown, Pam. This World / This Place. University of Queensland Press, 1994.
Duchamp, Marcel. Nude Descending a Staircase No.2. 1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Kearton, Cherry and Richard Kearton. “Robin’s nest in a nosebag.” No date. The Guardian, 14 July 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2016/jul/14/the-keartons-inventing-nature-photography-in-pictures. Web Image.
McCredden, Lyn, and Stephanie Trigg, editors. The Space of Poetry: Australian Essays on Contemporary Poetics. Melbourne University Literary and Cultural Studies, 1996.
Muybridge, Eadweard. The Horse in Motion. “Sallie Gardner,” owned by Leland Stanford; running at a 1.40 gait over the Palo Alto track, 19th June, 1878). 1878, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Muybridge, Eadweard. Plate Number 145. Descending stairs and turning with a bucket of water in right hand. 1887, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
