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THEMPARKS: ALTERNATIVE PLAY IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN POETRY A thesis submitted in ful@ilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Arts in the Department of English at The University of Sydney Toby Fitch 2016 THEMPARKS: ALTERNATIVE PLAY IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN POETRY POEMS & ESSAYS BY TOBY FITCH © Copyright by Toby Fitch 2016 All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Themparks is a creative and critical thesis consisting of a book of poems—The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau—and two experimental essays that illuminate the praxis behind the book of poems, not by auto-critique, but via a study of other contemporary Australian poets whose poetry involves similar compositional approaches. The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau hijacks the prose poems of Arthur Rimbaud’s famously incomplete manuscript Illuminations and re-verses their content—a “Down Under conceit”—to create “inversions”, radically new poems that are ludic and multiple in form, that complicate authorial subjectivity by employing various methods of (mis)translation and appropriation, and whose subject matter re@lects and refracts political and personal fragmentation in twenty-@irst century Australia. “Themparks”, the @irst critical essay, is a divagation into thempark by contemporary Australian poet Michael Farrell, the poems of which transpose/depose the structures of poems by John Ashbery; “Themparks” also analyses John Ashbery’s translations of the Illuminations of Arthur Rimbaud via a re-reading of Rimbaud’s famous formulation, “I is an other” (Je est an autre). “Aussi/Or”, the second critical essay, is a disquisition on Stéphane Mallarmé’s late innovative poem Un Coup de dés and its various antipodean versions and (mis)translations written by Christopher Brennan (in 1897), Chris Edwards and John Tranter (both in 2006). Both essays/assays explore the (anti)genre of poetic rewritings of previous poems; both trace certain homosocial poetic lineages from self-consciously “experimental” contemporary Australian poets back through American and Australian postmodernists to early modernist French poets; both raise/raze issues of translation, appropriation, plagiarism, and reproduction while employing—metonymically—some parallel theoretical tropes from psychoanalysis, linguistics, philosophy, and science. The guiding thread—the =il conducteur latent in Mallarmé—between the creative and critical components of this thesis is a poetics of the pun. The pun’s promiscuity highlights the highly libinal nature of language-tampering while working to both associate and dissociate parataxis and parapraxis. !iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisors David Brooks and Bruce Gardiner for their time and advice, and Chris Edwards, Michael Farrell and John Tranter for conversing with me about their poetry at various stages over the last few years. I would also like to thank Frances Simmons for her love and support, and Evie, who, arriving in the @inal year of the writing of this thesis, made her own unique contribution to my understanding of the generative capacities of language as well as the impact of sound on personal fragmentation. This Doctor of Arts thesis was supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award. With the help of a Travelling Scholarship from the University of Sydney I was able to travel for research and writing purposes to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Musée Charleville, the Musée Rimbaud and La Maison des Ailleurs in Charleville-Mézières, the Musée départemental Stéphane Mallarmé in Vulaines-sur-Seine, and the Guillaume Apollinaire museum in Abbaye de Stavelot, Belgium. Thanks to each of these institutions for their time and assistance without which this thesis would not have taken the shape it has. !v CONTENTS Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………… ix›› PART I The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau: Poems …………………………………… 1 PART II Themparks: Michael Farrell transposing John Ashbery translating Rimbaud I. Introduction ……………………………………………………………………… 84 II. Michael Farrell: thempark ………………………………………………….. 92 III. John Ashbery: Illuminations ……………………………………………….. 130 IV. Coda ………………………………………………………………………………….. 141 Aussi/Or: Un Coup de dés and mistranslation in the Antipodes I. Introduction ………………………………………………………………………. 147 II. Exposition ………………………………………………………………………….. 154 III. Christopher Brennan: “Musicopoematographoscope” ………….. 163 IV. Chris Edwards: “A Fluke” …………………………………………………….. 169 V. John Tranter: “Desmond’s Coupé” ……………………………………….. 181 VI. Development ……………………………………………………………………… 186 VII. Recapitulation ……………………………………………………………………. 212 VIII. Coda ………………………………………………………………………………….. 218 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………… 228 !vi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Cover: Sidney Nolan, Luna Park, 1941, Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, http:// www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/35.2003/. THE BLOOMIN’ NOTIONS OF OTHER & BEAU Figure 1. Toby Fitch, “Self Portrait”, 2014, manipulated by Google “deep dream” image generator Dreamscope, https://dreamscopeapp.com/editor (photograph taken at La Maison des Ailleurs, Charleville, in which Arthur Rimbaud lived brie@ly). Figure 2. “Paraid”, collage, after Rimbaud’s Parade (and Ashbery translation). Figure 3. “Ponce”, collage, after Rimbaud’s Ponts (and Ashbery trans.). Figure 4. “Villainesque”, collage, after Rimbaud’s Villes I & II (and Ashbery trans.). Figure 5. “Flooze”, collage, after Rimbaud’s Fleurs (and Ashbery trans.). Figure 6. “On Gwass”, collage, after Rimbaud’s Angoisse (and Ashbery trans.). Figure 7. “Night Drips”. Figure 8. “Dig”, collage. THEMPARKS Figure 1. “Random Noise Theme Park”, Google “deep dream” image, 2015, Google Research Blog: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com.au/2015/06/ inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html. Figure 2. Gherardo de Jacopo Starnina, Thebaid, 1410, Florence: Uf@izi Gallery, http://[email protected]/thebaid.html. Figure 3. Henri Fantin-Latour, Le Coin de Table, 1872, Paris: Musée d’Orsay, http:// www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/index-of-works/notice.html? no_cache=1&nnumid=211&cHash=d91f2e93d6. !vii Figure 4. Le Coin de Table, manipulated by deep dream image generator Dreamscope, 2015. Figure 5. Giorgio de Chirico, The Anxious Journey, 1913, New York: Museum of Modern Art, http://www.moma.org/collection/works/78736?locale=en. Figure 6. “Cats are Liquids”, popular cat meme, 2015, Weird Nut Daily, http:// www.weirdnutdaily.com/6q1. Figure 7. “Cloud”, and Google deep dream transformation, Google Research Blog. Figure 8. “Dog Nebula”, Google deep dream manipulation, 2015, We Hunted the Mammoth, http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/07/07/face-in-a- cloud-how-ideologues-are-like-googles-deep-dream-neural-networks/. Figure 9. “Random Noise Pagodas”, deep dream image, Google Research Blog. Figure 10. Beate Dalbec, photograph of Bagan, ancient city of Burma, 2012, http:// beatedalbec.com/2012/01/23/the-ancient-city-of-bagan/. Figure 11. Blaine Harrington, photograph of Dakota Badlands National Park, 2011, http://blaineharrington.photoshelter.com/image/I0000q8JM.RXGjMA. Figure 12. Giorgio de Chirico, The Double Dream of Spring, 1915, New York: Museum of Modern Art, http://www.moma.org/collection/works/ 78956?locale=en. Figure 13. Étienne Carjat, “Portrait of Rimbaud”, 1871, manipulated by deep dream image generator Dreamscope. AUSSI / OR Figure 1. Nicholas Desprez, “Lorenz Attractor”, Chaoscope, 2009, http:// www.chaoscope.org/gallery.htm . Figure 2. “Brownian Motion”, gif, in “Brownian Motion”, Wikipedia, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion. Figure 3. Christopher Brennan, title page of “Musicopoematographoscope”, Prose- Verse-Poster-Algebraic-Symbolico-Riddle Musicopoematographoscope …, Erskineville: Hale & Iremonger, 1981 (photo taken on mobile phone). Figure 4. Brennan, last line of “Musicopoematographoscope” (photo taken on mobile phone). !viii Figure 5. Paul Bourke, “The Lorenz Attractor in 3D”, 1997, http://paulbourke.net/ fractals/lorenz/. Figure 6. “Casper the friendly ghost, and cat”, screenshot from Casper the Friendly Ghost, New York: Famous Studios, 1945. Figure 7. pro@killjoy7z, “Unicron Eats the Death Star”, 2012, Deviant Art: http:// [email protected]/art/Unicron-Eats-the- Deathstar-325554426. Figure 8. “Disney’s Chesire Cat”, screenshot from Alice in Wonderland, Burbank: Walt Disney Studios, 1951. Figure 9. Konrad Polthier, “Klein bottle”, gif, in “Imaging Maths—Inside the Klein Bottle”, Plus Magazine (2003): https://plus.maths.org/content/os/ issue26/features/mathart/kleinBottle_anim. Figure 10. “Timescape” of Arthur Rubinstein's 1939 recording of Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 68 No. 3, CHARM: AHRC (2009): http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/ projects/p2_3_2.html. Figure 11. Dušan I. Bjelić, “Freud’s Chemistry of Words”, in “Balkan Geography and the De-Orientalization of Freud”, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 29.1 (2011): 37. Figure 12. Theodoros Pelecanos, Ouroboros, drawing in a 1478 copy of a lost alchemical tract by Synesius, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Ouroboros. Figure 13. Caravaggio, Head of Medusa, 1597, Florence: Uf@izi Gallery, http:// [email protected]/medusa.html. Figure 14. Athanasius Kircher, “Map of the ‘lost’ island of Atlantis”, Mundus subterraneus, Amsterdam, 1665, 82, Rare Maps: https:// www.raremaps.com/gallery/detail/20754. !ix INTRODUCTION This Doctor of Arts thesis, Themparks, consists of a creative component—a book of forty-three poems called The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau—followed by a critical component comprising two long essays, “Themparks” and “Aussi/Or”. The essays illuminate the praxis