Adam Aitken

Beware exotica and its institutionalisation, its mass marketing and production seems to be the ironic twist in the back of the critic approaching Aitken’s work. For a body of work that is generally engaged with as a fine example of postcolonial hybridity mixed with a post-New York School cosmopolitan cool, below the fascinating surfaces of Aitken’s work runs a lucid and finally lyrical voice. There is a detachment to his extreme playfulness that at once allows for an ironic sense of the vignettes he assembles from the bric-a-brac of travelogue, language theory, family history, poetics and everyday life – that these are made things, designed for an audience – while also, and perhaps more subtly than such irony would allow, engendering a sense of the human subject amidst and at the mercy of the ever multiplying flows of cultural information and identification.

Aitken’s poetry is a circuit-breaker in the flux and flow of competing theories and arguments about inculturation in its various, often crossed and transmuting forms, from ethnicity to pop, from imperialism to nomadicism. Aitken’s poetry is formidable for its ability to form a sense of the subject as a meeting-point of the various competing and conflicting discourses and markers (conscience, advertising, political theory, travel brochures, current affair programs, Dante, consumer goods, Marxism).Take for example, the unrelenting cut-up denoument of ‘Learning Paralinguistics’:

He says Pay Up, or you’re Tragedy.
Sheena, from Bradford,  
contagious Kharma, murmurs
just wait till we get to the endless
corridors of silken Heaven
where she’d be waiting,
like an eight armed Swiss army knife
of a goddess on wheels.
The monkeys smear her with a kiss.
Sulphur bubbles up from the gutter of Conscience.
Commandos playing tennis
see me to the witness box
at the trial of an Empire – the crime:
uncontrollable all-inclusiveness
and a weak back-hand.

There are traces of Tranter here but for all of that, there is a basic human identity at work and at play in Aitken’s poetry that enlivens the language games, disallows cryptic crossword poetics, by maintaining a sense of a human centre, which might be best seen in Aitken’s ability to question with empathy, self-directed irony and a degree of censure:

Some days I pass the handiwork of tribes, that tribe that’s gone,
Why make their loss
speak for us or me, the nation’s patchwork
constitution?

Why make of their defeat
the lyric lie you call preamble

which says we mean to keep it

(‘Terra Nullius’)

The voice is human, forceful before a bewildering influx of cultures cross-wired and at cross-purposes, and gives bent to a sense of a slave new world. At times, amidst the deluge of cultural white noise there almost seems to be an inverted animism taking place, wherein the anima mundi was produced by a material, rather than an immaterial, soul – coined by Marlboro, Coca Cola or the World Bank (recall the “eight armed Swiss army knife of a goddess”). For all of that, still human: not a product of language, or humanism, or postcolonial theory, or contemporary poetics, or inherited traditions, but that most contemporary point at which all of these forces collide and coalesce, breaking the circuits of established thought and order through the sheer force and sometimes violence of the speaking voice.

Aitken’s work is wholly original on the Australian scene and a vital point of reference in English-language poetry attempting to access the new territories the shifting and shifty nature of colonialism is opening up (as much through Getaway Programs and frequent flyer points, as through the democracies of an American peace). Aitken’s work shows us with ludic wit the shifting, pixilated selves we become and become again in the contemporary datastream of light. Poetry

Letter to Marco Polo. Island Press, Sydney, 1980
In One House. Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1996
Crossing Lake Toba. Folio (Salt), Cambridge, 1998
Romeo and Juliet in Subtitles. Brandl & Schlesinger, Sydney 2000
Impermance.com. Vagabond Press, Sydney, 2004


Links

Poems and articles in the Cordite Poetry Review.
Poems in the Jacket Review.