I think I would have more fun if I'd read a computer printout on the daily balance sheet for the National Australia Bank. Talk about creatively sharing the energy of other people's ideas (or incomes) ...
When Paul Davies won a huge prize from the Queen for writing about science, religion and the selling of the arts, some people took him seriously. Mike Ladd from ABC Radio's Poetica even produced a show on poetry which fused science with poetic thinking to cultivate the blossoming trade in contrived tech-speak that poetry was admirably positioned to adopt, given the mediocrity that has prevailed in this country for so long. Shame on you, Mike. But, given that Frankenstein's Bathtub is Tricia Dearborn's first collection of poetry, should we feel such pity? I think the blame lies heavily on the over-expectations of the mentorship system, the awarding of Varuna Fellowships to mediocre poets in the hope that they might rise like the phoenix above the ashes of their intentions.
The first poem, 'e-mail', is a fine example of the esoteric and dissociative poetry which follows. Obviously, Dearborn is someone who has grown bored with life and has decided to vent her frustration on the poetry community:
in compensation, I
parenthesise
invent improbable
endearments
exploit our various
private jokes
adorn the form, to
undisguise myself
If we're to re-invent ourselves then at least we should try to do it well. The second poem ('Mango Lust') which, I'm told, came second in the The Erotic Muse national poetry competition, 1999, is a sickly sweet dip into a bath of fruit - after reading Neil Rollinson (UK), Sharon Olds (USA), or even Meredith Wattison's poetry, I can't see how a poem that is written with competition in mind, written with metaphor that is not original (nor even Romantic, ie, it doesn't have a human object of love, it has a food fetish), written with repetitive word usage (the words 'sweet', 'flesh' and 'seed' are unnecessarily repeated), could even be considered for such a prize.
The third poem, 'my possibly pregnant friend', is a selfish poem. It lends to a kind of jealousy which sits at the core of Dearborn's writing. It refuses to see that marriage (and everything that bond includes) can be the ultimate friendship and that her lesser friendship might have to take a backseat. The poem even attacks the unborn, possibly unconceived child:
... Another friend's child
who, fresh from the womb, turned as I spoke,
in later years hung up the line
that linked our voices. Over and over
severing the curly cord.
No wonder s/he hung up. Friendships should not complement a form of s/mothering. Then, in 'horror movie' we discover Dearborn comparing a menstrual shedding of the 'vermilion' with the shower scene from Hitchcock's Psycho. Obviously Norman Bates wouldn't have understood, but, if Norman is synonymous in Dearborn's poetry to 'men', then she is a million miles off the mark.
There are several prose pieces in this short 68 page collection which are not poetic, nor even clever. 'A story I like about my mother', 'this book will change your life', and 'consider the cockroach' (a truly unauthentic Sydneysider joke) are a waste of time. 'bookmarks' is another waste of time and, again obsessed with putting things in the poets mouth that have very little to add to the intelligence of the poetry community nor its wider readers. 'the pouch of Douglas' is exemplary of the anatomical unease, the difficult word structure of the 'scientific' poems which do not speak freely, are disjointed and cramped, are buried in their lack of syntactical exercise and excursiveness into the realm of meter. In fact, when I read this last poem out loud it sounded as if I were reading a sketch from the "Laughter Is The Best Medicine" column of the Readers' Digest.
Are we going to take a poem titled 'the biosynthesis of 3-nitropropanoic acid in penicillium atrovenetum' seriously? The prose style, the telling nature, the Romantic plot, do not entice consideration but refuse any kind of relation with its reader. Then, I thought this poem was more a badly written CV or misplaced diary entry than a poem:
At home, when I should have been writing up, I lay in
the sun by my desk and read. Handed my thesis in two
weeks late.
The title of the next poem, 'intimacy, long-range and second-hand', sounds like a breakthrough. Yet, there exists some difficulty with interpretation, a lack of information created through Dearborn's conceit and indulgence, a jargonistic mind-speech which refuses touch, is repulsed by intimacy, which reflects a lack of empathy for her subject and, always this feeling that there is someone whom the poem wants to bait:
the meanings you read into what I've written
exist within you as chemical impulse, the precise
vacillations
of minute concentrations
creating potentials across nerve membrane
sparks that leap synaptic gaps
I had no idea that Dearborn was interested in semantics. How little bits of information are processed has nothing to do with what is being processed by the body's sympathetic nervous system. And Dearborn is consciously processing the how-it's-done vocabulary of science in a demonstration that clearly refuses the why, the intrigue of science. But the why is the subject of Dearborn's next poem, 'touch' - an untouching, dispassionate explanation, of why. And here I realise Dearborn's absolute pessimism:
a hand that probably can't change
our situation, nor reach in
and wrench fear from our hearts
Perhaps this is a reason for the poetry's defensiveness. Yet, I'm not here to analyse the poet. I've read this book from cover to cover and there is only one redeeming line in the entire enterprise: 'we carry our shadows with us'. If 'Frankenstein's bathtub' is about the invention of an unsociable doppelganger, a shadow that always sits on the periphery of our vision, then the book has done its job. But, I'd argue that this shadow has always been known: to make this silent untouchable other the desired dominant monster of our invention is a pursuit I find wasteful, possibly dangerous or, at least, self-indulgent.
(Reviewed by Richard Hillman, September 2004)
