Here’s some magic from Lionel Fogerty’s latest collection Harvest Lingo (Giramondo, 2022) which won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry at the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards. Fogarty must be among the most unique voices writing in English language poetry today—his use of syntax and the way he disorders established lexical categories (“No hidden child backward growing up / gains my learned on the road sky”) compels us to concentrate on each line so thoroughly that they seem to exist in isolation of each other, like islands in an atoll which are only connected in the mind of the cartographer or reader of maps. Fogarty's syntax creates new compositions in English language, with previously unheard combinations of sounds and rhythms—a new music.
John Kinsella, writing in Overland magazine, suggests there are at least three ways to a Fogarty poem: “One way is via lines of list-words in which words undo each other through juxtaposition and add up to an immensity. Another way through the staccato interrupting of English’s flow to make us concentrate on the impact of each word as colonial toxin. And yet another, and maybe most vitally, is reading with a flow, taking these other factors into consideration, and letting them sing their ghost tracks, samizdat, and cultural communiques that are not for all ears (to hear what you don’t hear and possibly can’t hear).”
“Intruder Wants the Writer”, which opens Harvest Lingo, lends itself particularly well to all three of Kinsella’s suggested approaches. I will hopefully have more on Lionel Fogarty soon, so stay tuned.
Intruder Wants the Writer
To write as a child to be a man
No boxes of childhood voice
my present, writing details.
No hidden child backward growing up
gains my learned on the road sky.
Future’s song dance lit pen friends for me in evenings
Not one sort of personal fireworks voice,
gave rise to the now existence dared.
Reluctance response by these ages,
Spare me not remorseful teenage pandemonium.
Pare her tempest defiant with red yellow brown ochre.
Breathe well inside the walls of rooms helplessly undecided.
No baby’s cries touch my raiment saddest crutch lost of mum’s death.
Those life survivals by childhood happenings are snapped
by swine trample readership.
Embellishing more than needed.
Note: All posts by Thomas Moody are copyright (c) 2024 by Thomas Moody. All rights reserved
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