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LYN McCREDDEN
'untranscended / life itself: The Poetry of Pam Brown
There are many ways to peel an onion: sharp knife and tears;
under waterlike your mother taught you; surreptitiously, creeping
in, layer by layer;or with sunglasses on. And cunning poet Pam
Brown knows them all.There they are, those devastatingly onion-like
little poems, with furled skins andlayers, offering up biting
streetscapes and cafes, half-remembered far-awayplaces, distant
friends, 'rock & roll', and lost, ordinary cities; that
deceptive,seemingly autobiographical voice cruising between wit,
boredom, disillusion,nostalgia, paranoia, irony. Always irony.
Always the slippery poetics ofknowledges warping, even as the poet
obsessively scans the texts for narrative: aseeking of
'untranscended / life itself ('Patti Smith Was Right', Cordite
9).
Brown is one of Australia's lesser known great poets, if great
equates withbeing revered by her peers; appreciated by a growing
number of academics; readby a coterie of fans; producing
prolifically in her own minimalist way; beingsteeped in Australian
and intemational poetics; producing work which isphilosophically
and technically rich; and being someone who contributes to thewider
literary world through her editing, her mentoring of younger poets,
herembracing and discerning of literary culture embedded in an
always bigger,baggier world. Brown's works, produced over thirty
years, are not widelyavailable. They include volumes such as New
and Selected Poems (1990), ThisWorld/This Place (1994), Little
Droppings (1994), 50-50 (1997), Dear Deliria:New and Selected Poems
(2002), Text Thing (2002) and 2005's Let's Get Lost.The latter is a
collaboration between poets and friends Pam Brovra, Ken Boltonand
Laurie Duggan. At last count there were eighteen poetry
collections, withseveral of these overlapping in a number of
selected works (1984, 1993, 2003).
However, critical attention has not been extensive, and despite
being highlyregarded within a small group of poets and peers Brown
has typically publishedin a scattered, small-press way. While this
small-press, small-readershipapproach is something most Australian
poets know intimately. Brown bas madeit into an art form, and one
which seems in keeping with her own ironic and attimes cynical
approach to tbe world of appearance, celebrity and media
hype.Brown's career is very far away from such scenes, not it seems
through self-effacement or a shy-poet-in-the-garret attitude. There
is just a residualtoughness, a pervasive, questioning cynicism, and
a stubborn faithfulness tolanguage's plasticity which Brown's poems
embody, attitudes which seem tocome from the deeper registers of
this poet's intellectual and artistic life as it isled in
contemporary Australia.
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LYN McCREDDEN
Reviewers describe Brown as a satirist, as improvisational,
wittily paranoidand world-weary, ironic' She is, and does, all
these things in her poem'Flickering Gaudi' from the 1994 volume
This World/This Place:
Whatto drink in remembrance of friends, of ideas,of projects, of
eight millimetre films,of sketchbooks, screenprints, letters
alleliding somehow in the depths of the pile?The extemporary verve
of designs for a lifewhich never evolve into actual manufacture.And
now, in a kind of inner-suburbanisolation, brilliant - bright -
paintingsare attentively wrapped & stackedat the back of a
wardrobe. Mild domesticitywhere reasonable evenings become numinous
nightsof reading difficult books patiently fiaton your back &
raging,privately, laughing, noting the clues,improving your
vocabulary, never your method, (100-01)
There is indeed improvisation - of a careful, knowing kind - in
the eclectictumble of things and moods, moments of brief
existential measuring: 'a kind ofinner-suburban / isolation', 'Mild
domesticity', 'reasonable evenings', 'on yourback & raging'.
The wonderful swing of 'The extemporary verve of designs fora life'
threatens to quite undo the aim of this essay, for the poem's
continualriffing on ephemerality - the life never evolving 'into
actual manufacture', orrealised method - offers a challenge to this
reader. That challenge is to go withthe quizzical, self-deprecating
wit of the surface, and at the same time to stake aclaim about
depth in this wonderfully extemporising poetry.
In the poem 'Scenes', from the 2002 volume Text Thing, Brown is
stillconcertedly at these meditations on detritus.
that white plastic baghas been driftingfrom the gutterto the
roadfor three days,when the rainwater
I Interviews and reviews of Pam Brown's work include: 'Bev
Braune Reviews Pam Brown,'rev, of Text Thing, Cordite ; Kerry
Leves,rev, of Text Thing, Southerly 63,2 (2003): 190-93; Brian
Henry, rev, of Dear Deliria: New andSelected Poems, Jacket 24 (Aug,
2003): ;Susan M, Schultz, rev, of Eleven 747 Poems, Jacket 22 (May
2003): ; 'Pam Brown in Conversation with John Kinsella, July 5,
2003,'Jacket 22 (May 2003): ; Kate Lilley, 'TruthIs, the Bright
Young Thing Doesn't Get the Drift,' rev, of Drifting Topoi, Sydney
MorningHerald 23 September 2000: 7; Susan Schulz, rev, of 50-50,-
Selected Poetry, Heat 8 (1998):198-200; Kevin Brophy, 'A Long Way,
No?' rev, of This World/This Place, Australian BookReview 159
(April 1994): 44-45,
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THE POETRY OF PAM BROWN
carries it offto the Tasman SeaI think I'll miss it,
(130-32)
One of the intriguing things about this scene from 'Scene' is
its careful noting;of place, colour, time, destination and feeling.
Such care is at odds, hauntingly,with the observation of
transience. But there is also a poignant realisation, in
theunderstatedness of the poem, that the things of the world are
intimatelyconnected to emotions - or at least the observer
continues to make theconnection, albeit tentatively: 'I think I'll
miss it.' The scene is reminiscent ofone in the film American
Beauty, in which the young drug user standsmesmerised by the
plastic bag lifting and falling in gusts of wind. Just why
thatscene was so moving is hard to explain - did it present an
image of transience?A glimpse of nature in a ferociously human
world? Of forces outside humanpower? The scenes from the film and
the poem are linked by their fascinationwith something faintly
glimpsed, distant and understated, that is my clue inturning to an
interpretive reading of Pam Brown's work.
However admiring I am of the spare, sharp, witty and ironic
poetry of Brown,turning on its recurrent tropes of ephemerality,
memory, place and postmodernsubjectivity, this essay will move
beyond admiration. It will read against thegrain of Brown's own
urbane secularity, with its emphases on transience,distance, its
critique of lack of depth in the modem world, arguing for a
readingof Brown's works within a category of sacredness. This is
indeed an uphillargument, one by which I imagine Brown, the poet of
'untranscended / lifeitself, would be bemused. In this climb I will
call on the work of earlytwentieth-century sociologist, novelist
and secular theologian Georges Bataille,and his anti-institutional
and transgressive concepts of the sacred. Further, theessay will
confront ideas about the sacred in Brown's familiar haunt, the
city, sooften the icon of godlessness, whether it be in the guise
of disenchanted, secularmodernity, the technological, commercial,
chartered place; or differently, as theplace of decadence, Sodom
and Gomorrah.
Within this context, here is the opening of Brown's poem
'Pique', from her1997 volume 50-50,-
no oneon the comer
here
silent,not spiritual,
the city is empty
antispectacular&as
deodorisedas heaven
no sleeping boysno density
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LYN McCREDDEN
no belchingpissing bodies
no spittingin the street
utilitarian -make one step
another stepfollows
the pace setby the tedium
ofthe blessed (67-68)There is so much going on in these
seemingly laconic and wittily spare littlelines, though
'sacredness' is not what the poem appears to be focused upon;quite
the opposite, it seems. Brown's poetry could be described as
jauntilyprofane, captured in the little dance of 'Pique', with its
stepped out rhythms andsharp observational city-scapes.
In bis essay 'Savage Metropolis', Andrew McCann argues, through
a readingof Australian colonial aesthetics, and of Marcus Clarke in
particular, 'thatmodernity brings witb it a degree of regret
related to its disenchantment' (325).He argues of Clarke's
view:
In a world where cultural authority resided increasingly with
the agents oftechnological and scientific progress ... pre-modem
'belief in sacred incarnations,in heavenly interpositions, in
personal relations with the awful Spirit of theUniverse, is dead'
[Clarke's words] the 'creed of the nineteenth century'
isunambiguously secular. (325)
Despite this claim to secularity, in McCann's argument
Modernity's regret aboutits own disenchantment in Australia informs
a larger repressed colonial sense ofthe uncanny which arose, again
and again seeking pleasure in the animistic, intbe very things it
was meant to be so far beyond. Further, be argues that 'tberituals
of a "dead and forgotten creed"' - and here he's referring
specifically tocolonial responses to Indigenous beliefs and
practices - are located 'inside tbeWestern Imagination' (330).
If we accept McCann's argument that colonial writers and readers
such asMarcus Clarke are caught in the gap between modem disbelief
in the old creedsand superstitions, and nineteentb-century readerly
and writerly predilections forthe gothic, the barbaric ritual, the
eroticised, indigenous sacred, surely tbe post-colonial,
poststructurally-informed writer such as Pam Brown is several
stepsbeyond this: aware of these colonial, racial and cultural
blindnesses, but self-reflexive too about language as tbe site most
complicit in constructing suchblindnesses. Looking back at
modernity's ambivalent attempts to dispel thesacredness of tbe
word, looking around at the poststructural word which knowsit will
betray itself, and at tbe post-colonial word which tries but cannot
openitself up enough to alterity, what can a poet do? I want to
suggest several ways inwhich Brown's poetry of the city is a poetry
readable within the context of tbe
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THE POETRY OF PAM BROWN
sacred, a category which gives full play to such questions. Tbe
first indication ofthis is when we look at Brown's uses of
irony.
Jean Michel Heimonet writes that tbe function of irony 'is to
"torture"discourse, to empty it of positive content by pressing it
up against a blind spot, asymbolic no-man's-land that
simultaneously reveals to the discourse its ownfinitude and its
beyond' (63). This is partly what Brown's ironic lines areengaged
in: confronting of tbe finitude of discourse that is at tbe same
time adesire for tbe 'beyond' of discourse. The city of 'Pique' is
empty, unspectacular- there is even tbe asserted absence of
abjection.^ In Brown's city there is 'nobelching / pissing bodies /
no spitting' - although of course her words arenecessarily
'bodying' the very thing tbey seek to negate. Sbe plays here witb
thelimits of her own discourse - its lack of spectacle, density;
its repeated rhythms,just like tbe tedium of tbe blessed. All tbe
poet can do is mimic and ironise suchtedium and emptiness, her
little step down lines making a mockery ofthe rituals,but also of
tbe artist looking for her narrative.
In part two of the poem another strategy is tried, as the poem
constructs itscomically blasphemous vignettes. After tbe hiatus of
'the pace set / by thetedium / of tbe blessed' we have constructed
for us - in a seeming reaction - analmost impersonal, visceral
desire for
demolishinghalf the house
to make roomfor the truck
bashing the brickswith
a blunt tang
aimingthe air rifle
anywhere
blasting dovesfrom
telegraph poles
shouting and struttingdown
BBQ lanesetting fire
to lakes. (68-69)
2 Abjection is another major site of contemporary investigations
ofthe sacred, particularly in thework of Julie Kristeva, notably
The Powers of Horror, and in Catherine Clement's TheFeminine
Sacred.
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What else can you do in the empty, unspectacular city, but run
amok, disrupt thesilence, bash, aim, blast, shout and strut? In
such a vacuum, how to find a role,how to write, how to live? One
thing you can do is tum the irony back onyourself, the poet:
& here am I,nibbling
my jejune nourishmentwith the laxity
of a cultivated& singular minority
languidlyerasing
all legend
fiick fiick fiick, (70)Nothing sacred here - all legend (text
and belief) casually self-erasing. Or is it?One effect of the irony
is to mock the languidness of poet and audience, the'cultivated /
& singular minority', the eradication of all legend
simultaneouslyhailing its own laxity, the very thing it claims to
mock. So narrative excitementis mocked as 'the tedium of the
blessed', and comically whipped up in theviolent acts of nameless
larrikins (and poets). The poet or the poem recognises, ala
Bataille, that she is confronted by 'the finitude of discourse, and
its beyond'.Language refuses such silence, but is constantly
submitting to it. In fact, I amarguing that this is Brown's
recurrent theme: the impossibility of the sacred, andthe
impossibility of resting with that impossibility.
In the poem 'Relic' we read: 'what faith! / flailing &
thrashing / beating drybones / on rust-flaked drums / practising
ritual / as if it were possible to swallow/ an arrow' {50-50
71-72), In 'Pique' the gap between the patterned tedium ofthe
silent city and the random violence of bashing bricks, blasting
doves,shouting and strutting down BBQ lane sets up an ironic
interplay between whatwill not shine - the city as not spiritual,
deodorised, one step placed dutifully orploddingly after another -
and the bizarre violence of language, or poets, seekingto force
event or response. Like Walter Benjamin's flaneur, the characters
inBrown's poetry go about declaring the decay of aura, the loss of
sacredpossibility or depth in the modem urban world, with its
commercialisation andprofane surfaces. But for Brown's city
dwellers, again as for Benjamin's flaneur,the city taunts or
seduces with its flickering aura, and is simultaneously, I
amarguing, the site of 'displacement of the religious into new
forms of the sacred'(Hegarty 114). Here is 'City', also from
50-50:
CityA yeamed-for somewhere
adverb-physicallyas lost as now
gazing acrossthe chunky valley
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THE POETRY OF PAM BROWN
to a hillof quivering lights -
There is nodestination -
just a placeno site
not Olympicvillage site
not harboursidecasino site
nor sectionof expressway
just eastof where
coincidencehas determined
your residencein a city
you returned toto rememberwhy you left -
Inventingnostalgiafor elsewhere -
you'll live therein the future - (28-29)
The fmal dash - recalling another biting minimalist of tbe
sacred, EmilyDickinson - is wonderful. Is it a linguistic lurch
into tbe future, a beyond? Oranother ironising stroke of the
computer key, signifying a no-place, no show? IsIt a signifier
ofthe 'languaged' nature of tbat future? Here, place is emptied
ofits definitive meaning, emptied of sacredness, it might be
argued, for hereeverything is negated; and it is randomly circular,
a place that 'you returned to /to remember / wby you left'; wbere
'coincidence' rhymes with 'residence'. Buttbe city is also yearned
for, a place that, because it is an invention, can be seen
asenabling invention. And there is tbe flickering postmodern aura
of meaning(possibility, substance): the quivering lights, the
cbunky valley, the shared storyof vulnerability - yearning, gazing,
memory - told only between tbe lines, and inrelation to the
city.
One of tbe main projects of Georges Bataille, in 1930s and 40s
France, as aleading member of the Parisian College of Sociology,
was to invent SacredSociology (Hegarty 101). He sougbt 'the
profanation of tbe sacred' (109). Hisapproach was 'to sites tbat
predate modernity but persist within it ... tbat couldbe
characterized as (im)properly modem' (109). As Bataille scholar
PaulHegarty writes, Bataille revealed
... the transvaluation of sites valorized by Christianity in
terms of holiness (thechurch, arguably the home ... ) or in terms
of sin (the brothel, the bar, the woods)such that they are part of
an economy of transgression, or of an ever-mobile
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sacrifice [my italics]. Only after such a shift in value, which
is the removal ofvalue (insofar as this fixes a phenomenon) can the
move be made to bring back thereligious sacred, this time as part
of a Bataillean sacred, such that 'a brothel is mytrue church,'
(109, qtg Bataille 12)
The premise here is that only in the removal of value can the
sacred be openedtowards. And it is a question of experience rather
than fixed space, category,value or definition. As Hegarty
describes it, sacred acts or places
cannot permanently exist as sacred, but they can be brought ,,,
and this bringingrequires time - a time not of progress, or even
process, but of waiting, of non-occurrence because unrealizable -
unliveable except in hindsight, except perhapsin anticipation of
its not being liveable. But this space is far from abstract,,,
(105)
This is not the sacred of the cathedral or mosque, bush or city.
Nor is it thesacred of moral codes, nor of the legalism which often
attends such codes. It isthe experience of the individual and of a
community (readership? peers?): whatis yearned for. awaited,
dreamed of, leaned towards, recognised asunpurchaseable in a
linguistic or geographical or legal or material economy. It isthe
coming to realise that there is no destination (as Brown's metaphor
writes it),even as you arrive at your latest port of call. But as
Hegarty argues, it is also farfrom abstract, this sacred. In
Brown's 'City' the sacred and political areimbricated, in the comic
refusal of all those alluring national and commercialand
class-transcending promises - 'no site / not Olympic / village site
/ notharbourside / casino site / nor section / of expressway / just
east,' This sacredundermines fatuities and glittering prizes, just
as Bataille's sacred understood thebringing of sacred experience
away from institutional or codified versions of thereligious,
including, most particularly for Bataille, European fascism.
In the anti-institutional and anti-colonising aspects of
Bataille's sacred thereare obviously synchronicities for artists
working in contemporary, post-colonialAustralia. But of course the
context of the necessarily political and spiritualstruggles against
entrenched hierarchies and dogmas in early twentieth-centuryEurope
is not the same context in which postmodern poets in the West are
nowworking. What was at stake for Bataille and other anti-fascist
artists was theneed to disarm the mighty push towards political and
religious centres,programmes which were yet again establishing
themselves. For Brown and herpeers, poets such as John Forbes, Ken
Bolton and Laurie Duggan, there is adifferent, Australian starting
point in relation to the making of meaning, and itseems almost a
converse one in relation to any idea of the experience of meaningor
sacredness: Brown's cynicism, satire, attractions and repulsions
seem builtaround an absent centre, something always already (in the
poetry) lost in thetedious non-occurrences of contemporary
(Australian) life. At times this absentcentre seems to be what
needs attacking, eradicating, repulsing. At other times itcontinues
its function of holding out the possibility of meaning. In this
lattercontext. Brown's poems are perpetually beginning:
setting out,a scarlet flower
behind an ear.
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THE POETRY OF PAM BROWN
into the wideworld intobanner-adorned cities
fakingpermanent festivity
('Anyworld', Cordite 20)or,
leaving nature'sbarbarism (spiderin a glove) behindme I enter
mypaved city -pocked concrete& traffic carbonsky's allcoppery
night'scoming up
I followthe man-in-the-dressalong a lanelitteredwith
litterwhereCarlo and Zanzihave signedthe sub-stationroll-a-door
-more than a tag -a declaration -white strokeswide brush('In
Ultimo', 50-50 93-94)
Momentarily adorned as Romantic poet, 'a scarlet flower / behind
an ear', thenarrators of Brown's poems have to leam again and again
that there is no return,that nature is barbaric, just as the city
is, 'faking / permanent festivity', 'pockedconcrete / & traffic
carbon'. But her repulsions constantly, momentarily pivotinto hope,
a leaning towards, observing intimately 'my / paved city'. This is
notBlake's blasted London full of marked and desecrated citizens,
nor theArmageddon of Eliot's Wasteland. Brown's poetry is less
dramatic, moredemocratic, accepting, following without judgement
'the man-in-the-dress',observing the verve and particularity of
Carlo and Zanzi's 'declaration',experiencing in the marks of 'her'
city what she sees in herself- not the need forredemption arising
out of some extraordinary fiat or mighty pronouncement, andpossibly
foreshadowing no redemption at all, but still a continuing need -
in thecitizens, in the poet - to declare, to sign, to transgress.
Postmodern theologianMark Taylor writes:
For Bataille, [the sacred is] the soiled, it's the dirty, it's
the polluted, it's that whichis ordinarily regarded as negative ,,,
Because he sees in that kind of hierarchical
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LYN McCREDDEN
Structure of high and low, extraordinary repression. And he's
trying to release that- to cultivate, indeed solicit, the return of
the repressed.
At the end of the poem 'Anyworld' Brown declares:
re mem ber Ba,Are-e Bam
ancient city of sandand mud
collapsing in an earthquake,the cultural heritage building
slipping subsiding,consigning
any recordof the archaic ruin
to dust*
the memoryis
ruined*
who can accepta given world,
who canlive in it? {Cordite 20)
This essay has been reading in Brown's work an openness towards
thelittered, un-Romantic, pocked and transvestite city, 'my paved
city'; to thetransgressive, unaffiliated, anti-hierarchical; to
defilements, blankness and little-ness. Brown's poetry places a
finger on the pulse of small, everyday defilements,registering the
mystery of abjection, of loss, and the unlocatableness of
meaning.In 'Anyworld' all cities, including the human body, are
sand and mud,collapsing. The final question of 'Anyworld' - 'who
can accept / a given world,/ who can / live in it' - is almost
imponderable. The question strains with irony,the word 'accept'
pulling in opposite directions: not to accept is to judge,condemn,
repudiate, dismiss. But to judge what? In the context of this poem,
toaccept seems an act of complacency, a simple, total forgetting.
But if the worldis 'given', there is no direct mention here of a
giver, divine or otherwise. Unless,in approaching that liminal
place between acceptance and rage, living andrefusing to live, the
experience of the sacred emerges: a waiting, a non-occurrence, a
mobility. Of course this poem's question is potentially moral
andpolitical, for one answer is - I will not accept, I will change
the given world, asin Brown's poem 'At the Wall' (77;/.!?
World/This Place 93-95) and its outrageover 'Sarajevo Srebrenica
palestine / rwanda kabul'. But a parallel response is toacknowledge
the sacred dimension of the question, a sacredness experienced
inthis active play of possibility and impossibility, Taylor
writes:
,,, at the heart of the experience of the sacred is the conflict
between attraction andrepulsion. The sacred is never simply one or
the other, it is at one and the sametime attractive and repulsive.
That's what lends it its power and horror. Whathappens in a lot of
Christianity is that the positive and the negative get split
and
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THE POETRY OF PAM BROWN
posited on two different realities - God and the Devil, whatever
framework we'rein.
The rigour of Pam Brown's poetry lies in its very refusal to
merely collapseinto one or the other reality. There are no gods or
devils, no unironic negativesand positives. Rather, I have been
arguing that in Brown's poetry there aremetaphorically rich
experiences of a yearning, one which recognises language asthe
chief ally and enemy, the poetic site being not one of celebration
orrepulsion, but of both. The aura glimpsed fieetingly may well be
only thoseflickering lights across the valley, but the poet makes
them props in anexperience ' , . , of waiting, of non-occurrence
.,. unrealizable - unliveable exceptin hindsight, except perhaps in
anticipation of its (possibly) not being liveable'(Hegarty 105),
This is 'an ever mobile', languaged experience of
sacrednessencountered in the ordinary, faking, littered and
flickering city.
WORKS CITED
Bataille, Georges, Inner Experience. Trans, Leslie Anne Boldt,
Albany: State U of NewYork, 1988,
Brown, Pam, Sweblock. Glebe, NSW: The Author, 1972,, Cocabola's
Funny Picture Book. Sydney: Tomato Press, 1973. An anthology of
prose, poetry and graphics,-, Automatic Sad. Sydney: Tomato
Press, 1974,, Cafe Sport. Sydney: Sea Cruise Books, 1979.,
Correspondences. Sydney: Red Press, 1979, With Joanne Burns,,
Country and Eastern. Sydney: Never-Never Books, 1980,, Small Blue
View. Adelaide: E,A,F,/Magic Sam, 1982,, Selected Poems 1971-1982.
Sydney: Redress/Wild&Woolley, 1984,, Keep It Quiet. Sydney: Sea
Cruise Books, 1987, A prose collection,, New and Selected Poems.
Sydney: Wild&Woolley, 1990,, This World/This Place. St Lucia,
Qld: U of Queensland P, 1994,, Little Droppings. Sydney:
Never-Never Books, 1994,, 50-50. Adelaide: Little Esther Books,
1997,, My Lightweight Intentions. Cambridge/Perth: Salt/Folio,
1998,, Drifting Topoi. Sydney: Vagabond P, 2000., Text Thing.
Adelaide: Little Esther Books, 2002,, Eleven 747 Poems. Ireland:
Wild Honey P, 2002,, Dear Deliria: New and Selected Poems.
Applecross, WA: Salt, 2003,
Brown, Pam, Ken Bolton, and Laurie Duggan, Let's Get Lost.
Sydney: Vagabond P,Stray Dog Editions, 2005,
Clement, Catherine, and Julia Kristeva, The Feminine and the
Sacred. Trans, Jane MarieTodd, New York: Columbia UP, 2001,
Cordite. . Accessed 7 Dec. 2004.Hegarty, Paul, 'Undelivered: The
Space/Time of the Sacred in Bataille and Benjamin,'
Economy and Society ll.\ (February 2003): 101-18,Heimonet, Jean
Michel. 'Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of Mysticism,'
Diacritics
Id.l (Summer 1996): 59-73,Henry, Brian, Rev, of Dear Deliria:
New and Selected Poems. Jacket 23 (2003):
.
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LYN McCREDDEN
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans,
Leon S, Roudiez, NewYork: Columbia UP, 1982,
McCann, Andrew, 'The Ethics of Abjection: Patrick White's Riders
in the Chariot.'Australian Literary Studies 18,2 (1997): 145-55,,
'Savage Metropolis: Animism, Aesthetics and the Pleasures of a
Vanished Race,'Textual Practice 17,2 (Summer 2003): 317- 33,
Taylor, Mark, 'Georges Bataille,', ABC Radio National,
Encounter: 22 April 2001,.
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