Poetics

…the poet must stake everything against the world in order to be for the world – … poetry must assume the form, as Blake says, of an excess that constantly opens language to the experience of the possible, & whose ethics is not vested in the poet’s judgment but in the conditions of poetry. It may be that poetry makes nothing happen, if only for the reason that poetry is what happens – it is the language by which the world speaks to its becoming, to its possibility, to its invention.

Solicitations

 

“Gravity’s Aspect,” in The Winter Anthology 3 (2013).

“Gagarin” (excerpt), in Always Crashing (May 2020).

“Descartes’ Dog,” in Burning House Press (March 2020).

“Gagarin” (excerpt), in Big Other 3 (May 2019).

“Monument” (excerpt) (with John Kinsella), in The Enchanting Verses XXIX (July 2019)

“Descartes’ Dog,” in Blackbox Manifold 18 (2017).

“A House for Hanne Darboven,” in Cordite 83 (2017).

“Tom Raworth’s Blues,” in Blackbox Manifold 18 (2017).

“Diseases of the Blood,” in Burning House Press (April 2019).

“Unitary Pleasures: Masturbating in Space,” in Cordite 48 (2014).

“Light Gradually Descends on the Obsolescence Curve,” “Sotades the Obscene of Maroneia,” “Tête de Femme,” “After Donald Friend’s The Outrigger (1974),” “Object Lessons,” in E.ratio 18 (2014).

“Brunswick Street Nocturne,” in Cordite  46.1 (2014).

“Monument” (collaboration with John Kinsella) excerpt performed at RichMix, London, hosted by Steven J Fowler (Saturday 16 November 2013).

“Agreement,” “Tür zum Nichts,” “Leon Paul Fargue,” “Pictor Ignotus,” in Jacket2 (2012).

“The Rumour of Martin Smid,” “Variations on Line,” “Sonnet (After Vítězlav Nezval),” “Something like the Weather,” “Plutonium 239,” “Une Femme à Claudel,” “Letters from Ausland,” “Boy with the Red Piano,” “Later I Would Think of America,” “Correspondences,” “Utzon,” “Composition [After Boyd, Nolan],” “Perpetuum Mobile,” “Jídlo,” “Preparations for Winter,” “1989,” in Poetry International (2012).

“Ozenfant,” “Earth Terminal and Graph,” in Quid 10 (2011).

“Hugh Tolhurst, with Lines for a Poem,” “Melbourne, Night (Albert Tucker, 1974),” “Private Objects,” “East Side Alien Abduction & Horace Greeley,” “This Fictitious Thing,” “De Kooning, Fire Island (1946),” in Moria 13.2-3 (2011).

“Circus Days,” in When Pressed (2008).

“On Henrik Galeen’s Student of Prague,” in When Pressed (2008).

“Drinking at the Vandenberg,” in Warwick Review 1.4 (2007).

“Synopticon” (with John Kinsella) at Mudlark poster #29 (2000/2002).

“Jacques Cousteau est Mort,” in Jacket #9 (1999).

 

 

what       is the

matter

of

fact                ?

 

 

“I believe that the reason Louis Armand has not elicited the recognition & praise granted to other equally prolific & innovative new Australian poets is that his work does not, as [Kevin] Hart would have it, convey a whimsical “nostalgia for the avant-garde,” but that it instead presents an unsettling & rigorous continuation of avant-garde poetics, & by so doing Armand’s poetry exposes the limitations of new Australian poetry.”

Ali Alizadeh, “Against Representation: Louis Armand and the Limits of New Australian Poetry,” Antipodes 25.2 (2011).

 

“Armand’s poems force us into the void, flinching. We are “hooked into the ear of things” — into his lines & their extra-sensory power.”

Jane Lewty, “Implied Offerings in this Universe” (2011).

 

“Armand’s poetry takes off, in certain respects, where Tsvetaeva’s leaves off. Distinguished by its aggressive recourse to typographic concreteness, Armand’s prosodic texture … moves us yet another step further towards a radically visual verse form.”

Vadim Erent, “Revolutions of the Minor: Kafka, Tsvetaeva, Armand,” Thresholds (2011).

 

“The work that precedes and informs Armand’s writing is itself compositional. Jakobson’s analysis of the communication functions of language, Kristeva’s rupture within practice, the nomad poetics of Deleuze and Guattari and Pierre Joris in turn are put to work, not simply on show. This places the reader of Armand’s work on the horizon of language, the meeting point of sensual experience, perception and the everyday with cognition, signification and idea, unfolding false dichotomies in their multiple relations and matrices. His poetry works to derealise the abstract processes of signification and unsettle readings of the self and the symbolic alike.”

Michael Brennan, Poetry International (16 July 2012).

 

“Louis Armand is a writer and thinker who has a kind of Derridean incorruptible ethos, of someone who writes and edits magazines and collections of essays without conceding to public opinion, the media or the phantasm of an audience that might tempt him to simplify or repress.”

Pam Brown, “Indirect Objects,” Southerly (April 2015).

 

“If one were to criticise Armand, it would not be for of the complexity of his arguments so much as the joylessness with which his language encounters experience—as if the idealism implicit in language invited the world to fail, and it were somehow satisfying that the failure occurred in the predictable way that it did. But preferences for one response over another are inarguable, and if Armand has decided that that is what the world is like, then the reader must simply accept it as a given of his poetry. Even if we do not share his comprehensive dismay, we can still admire the artistry with which it is marshalled.”

Martin Langford, “Five Contemporary Masters,” Meanjin (Autumn 2016).

 

“Louis Armand knows it’s a fatal flaw of avant garde poetics that marginality requires a centre, that radicalism needs a conservative edifice to kick against, that it’s about the fall between essence and the descent, where any nihilist anarchist posing will preserve the despised centre in parenthetical existence or else vanish.”

Richard Marshal, “Louis Armand’s The Combinations,” 3AM magazine (16 August 2016).

 

 

no access

kein zugriff

forbidden reality

verbotene realität

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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