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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                    #1/thyla1k-la
AUSTRALIAN POETS SERIES 1
The Poetry of Louis Armand
Selected by Coral Hull

[Above] Photo of Louis Armand by Giovannide Caro, 1994.

I LAND PARTITION: 8 SECTIONS: 1. the landscape marks.... I 2. _the island...is.... I 3. it murmurs, from... I 4. _ fearing a storm.... I 5. surreptitiously it re-.... I 6. quoted from elsewhere,.... I 7. cross to: dusk.... I 8. the gesture doesn't.... I

LAND PARTITION: 8 SECTIONS

_in regard to nature ... philosophy ought to know her as she is, that if
the philosopher's stone is hidden anywhere, it must at any rate be
within nature herself, that she contains her own reason within her_
--Hegel

1. the landscape marks only the incessance
           of procedure--
                                              the narrow band
of a depthless field
running out of contexts--shot-reverse-
shot in relentless pursuit
hunted by the lens
a remote & fugitive line frozen in two-
dimensional space--
                                   sanitised
for mass viewing, the failed escape
reduced to forensic banality
a cross-hatching of bodies, "live flesh"
simulated, almost
                                 in vitrinal tableaux mortes

2. _the island ... is generally barren, being dry, as i said;
& the best of it is but very indifferent soil_

not nostalgia that brought him here, then what?
where the map indicates water it has been dry
since before living memory (naming the delusion,
however, will take him longer than diagnosis--

causality becoming more & more difficult to de-
termine as the remoteness between signifier & land-
scape increases--words under
"mineral sedation" ... regarding their virtue,

that which they assume the capacity for, as a power
he alone now possesses)

3. it murmurs, from an abandoned (it seems to them)
location--the
                 light goes out: bodies
                                         ground
                                                      vault--inertial
square / squat walls, set on wooden piles rising
white pale out of earth vertically /
                                         ground
                            sheer--planes arbitrarily
                                                                  inter-
secting / or the architecture, crouching, vulnerable
is a hieroglyph of im-
                                        permanence / the
pre-
carious
             statement of (universal) truth--
                                                              "possession" being [a fraction]
                                                                       of "the law"

4. _fearing a storm ... in a place where there was no shelter,
& desiring at least to have sea-room: for the clouds
began to grow thick on the eastern-board, & the wind
was already there_

more often than not we cut our losses
& move on--knowing
that from elsewhere
things appear differently

an eye narrowing through the headlands
cataracted
                       synapse muscle & nerve

depth-soundings charting the sub-
aqueous humour--
paradox of inner perception
not yet brought to consciousness

foundering somewhere just off the point--
the shoals barely navigable
& danger
written in the undertow

5. surreptitiously it re-
emerges, in blue
veinless light--
crepuscular as un-

structured stimulus
& the cold
remembering its way
back in to the body

at this latitude
before the sun rises up
to sear flesh, ghost
walking at mid-day--

a shadow, barely re-
semblant, of this place also

6. quoted from elsewhere, the place-names read
like an inventory of
absentees--& there are too many
unexplained phenomena, static figures
looming up from the plain
like genital malformations & sabattier
effect framing negativity
in the sudden exposure--air resinous
& heat waves shimmering upwards
visible & tactile
in lines of distorted transparency--synthesising
space as projection of assumed
attributes, the too-fertile screen concealing
substrata leached by saline waters--
the distant shores
beyond the sign, graphemic
in red sacrificial ochre, salient--& monumental,
dominating the horizon

7. cross to: dusk [-broken
hill-] the abandoned
mineshafts,
concrete slabs like

monoliths in a desert--
silhouettes of headframes &
wracked stretch of earth--ore-crushers
& conveyor belts spilling out

of processing mills in
sibilant ventriloquy
or haemostasis
miming declinations of

surface structure, ground
indicating subsidence
the foundations "undermined" & condition
terminal

8. the gesture doesn't require translation but remains un-
equivocally apart,
aberrant--a "landmark" transgressing an
(otherwise) undifferentiated space, denial
of underlying order--
                                          erosion, the inescapable decline
into desert regions, salt flats, entropy--
l'acte gratuit
                              in accordance / with a universal
law of averages--
at each point, the eerie continuation
eyes empty as a vast plain / in the distance
like celluloid / in the middle of
(nowhere) & the self
anathematised, like something pestilent
on the fringe
                                of inoculated memory--
totem figures, ossature
half-buried in the scorched earth--a mute
                                                                      prostration (?)

About the Poet Louis Armand

Louis Armand was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1972. Some of his publications include; Seances (Twisted Spoon Press, 1998), The Viconian Paramour (x-poezie, 1998), Anatomy Lessons (x-poezie, 1999), Erosions (Vagabond Press, 2000), Synopticon (with John Kinsella: Vagabond Press, 2000) and Inexorable Weather (Arc Publications, 2000). In 1997 he was awarded the Penola Festival's Max Harris Award for Poetry (Adelaide). Since 1994 he has lived and worked in Prague, in the Czech Republic, where he currently teaches in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University. Louis Armand is the editor of a literary broadsheet, PLATIC (SEMTEXT), a member of the editorial board of Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge and Strange Attractions, and poetry editor of The Prague Revue.
   [Above] Photo of Louis Armand by Giovannide Caro, 1994.

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Thylazine No.1 (March, 2000)

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