BLACK
MAGIC -
The
Courier Mail Brisbane Australia 12 Sep 2003
by Hannah Brooks Photograph by Ray Cash
click image for scan of newspaper article
In the introduction to Brentley Frazer's first book of poetry,
A Dark Samadhi, esteemed Canadian writer Robert M Smith
states that '500 years from now, the dictionary will describe
George W Bush as having lived in the time of Brentley Frazer".
It's high praise for a writer who, despite his formidable overseas
reputation, is relatively unknown in his hometown of Brisbane.
But as a poet and founding editor of online literary and art
journal Retort Magazine, Frazer has gained an international
reputation as one of the most innovative of contemporary writers.
Of Smith's comments he says: " I was too afraid to put
it in the book, but the publishers thought it was a good id
ea ... But the accolades don't stop there. His work has been
compared with that of William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski and
Clive Barker, and he recently made the list of the Muse Apprentice
Guild's top 500 American poets - strange considering he has
never set foot on the US continent. " I've been published
in so many really reputable American Magazines I guess they
thought I was American. My old bio doesn't say I was from Australia
- maybe on purpose," he adds, grinning. It's a misconception
particularly evident of the times, thanks to the internet and
its ability to share art unhampered by traditional geographic
boundaries. Retort, now 2 1/2 years old, attracts more the 500,000
hits per edition (three quarters of these from overseas), with
Frazer's personal site not lagging far behind. Frazer says his
popularity overseas can simply be attributed to demographics.
"A cult following in America is a million people,"
he explains. "In Australia, it's 100." He plans to
tour the US in early 2004 to promote the release of A Dark Samadhi,
which is the first publication devoted exclusively to his work.
Frazer's reasoning for a foray into print is simple: "
I am hoping my book will give me more than 3 meals a week,"
he says, laughing. The title of the book, A Dark Samadhi, refers
to what Frazer call " a dark enlightenment. Some things
I was going through opened my eyes and it wasn't all pretty
but I attempted to find beauty in the dark." Yet despite
the books undeniably dark and arresting aura, Frazer says the
main theme of the work is hope. "It goes through the whole
range of human tragedy and comedy but underneath it is hope,
which is what the protagonist of this book is enlightened to,
amongst all the darkness of the current situation that I, myself,
as a poet, and other artists find themselves in in this day
and age." While his work has been labeled political, Frazer
says it wasn't a conscious aim. " The book does contain
some particular aversions but it doesn't
set out to point the finger at any particular regime,"
he says. " I have been accused of being political, but
language is political, I guess I can't avoid betraying some
of my politics with my language." Instead, Frazer's inspiration
to write flows from a wide-eyed fascination with life. "
I write because I am constantly amazed at life. It's just so
full on," he says, " If you stop to think for a minute:
we don't even know what we are. We're kind of self-defined two-legged
animals. I think poetry is one of those ultimate art forms that
helps comprehend a situation." As for accusations that
his work is challenging or confronting, Frazer answers that:
"Poetry isn't meant to be easy. Good art is never really
easy." Or, maybe it's just that, as writer Fakie Wilde
says in the books introduction: "You can only write literature
like this if you are a really weird person."
Hannah
Brooks
TODAY - The
Courier Mail Brisbane Australia 12 Sep 2003
REVIEW
OF A DARK SAMADHI BY KRIS SAKNUSSEMM
I've
been having dark fun and disturbing visions with DS. I think
it's deserving in every way of the Robert Smith and Corpse praise.
There is a quirky and novel sense of craft but also what the
mathematician David Hilbert called "spurkraft"--hunch
power, resulting in both a sense of randomness and precision.
The
first level of reading experience I liken to the CSI/X-Files
thing of a torch being flashed around. We see flashes and hints--like
what we were talking about with the movie Jacob's Ladder or
"Weird scenes inside the goldmine," as Jim Morrison
said. (I saw a few umbrellas and sewing machines on dissecting
tables--I even got a glimpse of a very unnerving toy giraffe
that my sister made years ago out of argyle socks!)
Directly/obliquely,
we get exposed to a very eclectic mix of psychic environments
that feel like a blend of alchemist's lair, morgue, editing
suite, second hand store, backstreets, bodies, primeval broth--and
a complex composite unconscious--not so much Collective as determined
(as only the most sophisticated organism-devices can be) to
dismantle itself. Evolution through cannibalisation. Reality
as rejected organ--and some new species of dream state arising
in its place. The next stage seemed to move past the breakdown
of boundaries into a reconfiguration of associative paths and
symbolic patterns of connection. Like what Burroughs talks about
in "penetrating the silence of the hieroglyph." Getting
to the silence requires a discipline but on the other side is
a very lush garden of interrelationships, which may be some
sort of higher platform analogue of what's transpiring at the
deeper system level of synaptical firings. Or as Kesey would
put it, "What happens when you commune with the spirit
of a monitor lizard." (I don't know if you were thinking
of that in your poem about said beast, but as we know, everything
is connected.)
I
think it goes without saying that there are some people--and
in many cases they can be theoretically cultured, regular readers
of both poetry and prose--who aren't willing to take these kinds
of journeys or to give themselves over to the liquidification
of conventional thought patterns that your work provokes. I
would ask, why they bother to read at all--but in any case,
I'm certain you're not trying to write for them and don't care
what they think. So, as I'm sure you know, this is going to
be too "weird" for some and that's all they will be
able to say. Another group will I think talk about the question
of "coherence" and the issue of denotative, representational
meaning vs. the possibilities of abstract language.
"Trance
states prove to be forms of metanoia, temporary restructuring
of reality orientation" - Joseph Chilton Pearce.
This
is where the reading experience began to stabilise and to come
into a sustainable focus for me. I began to see the book as
definitely the work of someone who has trafficked in the visual
arts from several points of view. I came to see the cover art
as not only "appropriate" but as an explicit, literal
hieroglyph for the shadow garden of thought and image patterns
behind and within.
Having
arrived there, my attention shifted back to invidual lines and
the repetition of certain types of phrasing and fixational icons.
I was aware of an underlying sense of structure to the book
as a whole, but I found myself less interested in trying to
delineate and define that and more compelled to examine the
micro level of metaphor and declarative statement--and the hearing/vocal/audio
aspect. The musical sound elements starting coming through very
vividly and I grooved on that for a while--the sit in the sunny
corner and watch the smoke rise part of the acid trip.
In
coming out of that, and moving toward some holistic response
to the book, I found myself thinking of one of my favorite poets:
e.e. cummings. Too often cummings is thought of merely in terms
of his typographic and syntactic mischief, but his real genius
was for lines of preternatural lyric clarity: "a world
of made is not a world of born"..."It's always ourselves
we find in the sea"..."a finger pulls a trigger, a
bird flies into a mirror."
I
think there is a strong spirit of and lyric affinity with cummings
in your work, particularly in the Coda(s) section, which contains
one of my favourites in the book--"It Will Not Be Long
Now". For fully realised, accomplished, always surprising
but still highly accessible pieces, this is the section. I particularly
like "It will not be long" because it is so different
from the overall tone and mood of the book. It lets light in
and humanises the larger whole. The fact that it has such a
powerful effect on a reading of the book at large may suggest
something of its internal completeness and integrity. I think
of it as a hologram.
On
the totally other hand, I admire your explicit focus on "text"
and the painterly and semiotic way that this is experiented
with. What holds these two very different modes together for
me, is an obsession I share with scenes and images like the
"cages of brooding GI Joes".
There
are moments in the book where the "high self-conscious"
language of poetry is invoked--and then subverted, which sometimes
bothered me but other times is very effective. Ferlinghetti
is good at this. Where it works especially well--and morphs
into something all its own is in something like "Ode to
Drowner." I dig the repetition of this imagery and theme,
but this poem is also in my view one of the strongest all on
its own.
I
think the reader comes away from the book with a curious collection
of founds objects to add to the Secret Cabinet and the unnerving
but strangely refreshing sense of having survived exposure to
some kind of industrial strength psychic solvent--to have accessed
forbidden areas of thought--not because of their subject matter--but
because of the medium and semantic chains of connection. It's
a little like the kind of thing John Lilly was getting at it,
when during his LSD sensory deprivation tank experiences, he
became aware of the inherent noise levels within the Central
Nervous System (some people apparently hear high-pitched whistles,
othes popping sounds like bacon frying.)
Or
to put another framework to it-which may link the more straightforward
lyricism with the textual experimentation, information theory
tells us that the concept of "message" is based on
a dynamic ratio of "signal" to "noise".
There is thus an obvious interdependence between signal and
noise, but this only becomes apparent when we have a predetermined
idea of what we will designate as message. I think what your
poems do is play with our sense of message and establish new
ratios of signal to noise. Thanks for the read.
I'm sure I'll go back to different sections at different times
and find something new each time.
KRIS
SAKNUSSEMM
Feb 2006
FAST
FORWARD FANATICSs-
The
Courier Mail Brisbane Australia
May 10 2004 page 13 by
Rosemary
Sorensen
Photograph by Anthony Weate
CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE
from left Mandy Beaumont, Ross Clark,
Brentley Frazer and Graham Nunn.
An Interview with Brentley at Vibewire ( July 2003 Sydney
Australia)
An Interview at Tin Lustre Mobile ( July 2003 Washington
USA)
Brentley
INTERVIEWED
by Star Jewel Smith of
Getunderground.com (los Angeles)
A
DARK SAMADHI
Melbourne Launch October 2003
Speech/Review by Brett Dionysius
© Copyright Brett Dionysius 2003
Early
on in A Dark Samadhi, we get an indication of the type of poetry
manifesto that Brentley Frazer has been writing for well over
a decade now, his sublime, neo-symbolic, maladapted, but forward
thinking imagined world. In the poem “Abstract Building
(hands)” Frazer suggests that, “We all have the
technology, access to the symbols, the perfume to/make it pretty,
the gloss to make it sell. Only a few in the herd hear the word,
a particular sleight of syllable.” Frazer is like the
first beast of a bewildered pack to sense a new danger, to flare
its nostrils, lift its head, and hunt for the source of this
unarticulated malice.
A
universal “I” rages throughout this text; a disturbed,
triumphant, paranoid, self-proclaimed inheritor of our neural
system meltdowns, that unleashes multi-tonal diseases to ravage
the ‘lyric’ carcass. This is anti-lyric (anti-high
aesthetic, capital “P”) poetry at its very best;
the signification of human experience is rarely epiphanous,
reality is almost always discordant, a come down of intellectual
and emotive grief, “East of certainty that’s for
sure” As the poet relates in the poem “Juggling
with Nothing”, “we crossed the void in yellow linen
safari/suits, carrying mobile phones and a giant stash of miracle/thirst
quenchers. Truth, beside you, carries two things, and neither
seem useful.” The history of Western philosophy and religion
is inverted by the slick techno-gods, cast down into metaphysic
ruin, and out of these ontological ashes society grows a new
dream skin; mottled, alien the Petri dish filthy.
In
A Dark Samadhi the human soul puts up brave resistance against
the forces of ‘Narrowspeak’ as Les Murray has called
them or ‘Newspeak’ as George Orwell did. These forces
that even now put a knee in the small of the worlds’ back
& apply excessive political, social, economic and cultural
pressure. In the poem “Memorandum for the Birds”
Frazer describes our apparent powerlessness against the technocrats,
oilmen and industrial-military complex; “You could have
just taken me apart with/the ease of a machine.” Sounds
just like when US soldiers opened up with MI Bradley Fighting
vehicles & 30 calibre machine guns on a van during the Iraq
War, containing an extended family, that quickly became brutally
“unextended”. But Frazer rallies us against this
defeat of our common and resistant psyche as in, “Watering
an Uneasy Beast”, when he warns us against becoming “digital
insects” and suggests that we, “don’t just
give them something to read, infect them with a memory.”
Frazer
is post-romantic in his investigation of the 21st century human
condition; as this line from “Plastic Daffodil”
suggests; “Her mouth is where I hung my soul, an ode in
a round window.” This sentiment undercuts both our 19th
century romantic and 20th century colloquial assertions of the
‘self’. Or even musing on the mystery of universal
suffering as in the poem, “Tempting Sleep”, Frazer
looks for the abnormal, even the para-normal to explain these,
“Exit wounds without an entry point”, but discovers
instead, a banality of human metaphysics overridden by hyper-natural
despair, or “a dance of movement on the back of a wardrobe,
an intricate waltz bled there by wood.”
For
Frazer, we inhabit a ‘shapeless’ body that is yielding
to the ministrations of conventional dogma, becoming dumber,
obese, brain dead and impotent as in “A Dog Theology”
where “the blunt edge of shadows hit us through phonebooks”,
or not surprisingly, we inhabit all three states simultaneously,
a “kingdom of joined together heads. A tinny symphony
of cheap die-cast clockwork, a little lonely if it happens to
be evening.”
A
Dark Samadhi is Philip K Dick melded with Andre Breton; a Rimbaud
modified to produce the diaspora of Ballard. This is a post-surreal,
techno-lingual savvy text that uses the oppressor’s corporatist
and jingle-laden language against them. Like the smart arse
kid who always sat at the back of the class and pushed the Maths
teacher that little bit further, until the imploded in hollow
anger, Frazer tempts the reader to counter-experience the world
as we know it, to reorganize and reprocess our consumer enhanced
daze. Or as the poet says in ‘Blood Psalm’, “…What
do you do, there is no menu bar on the screen.”
A
powerful, brooding voice in contemporary Australian and International
poetry, a voice that has (secretly) simmered away for ten years,
has now shifted to the front hot plate of human debate, the
heat turned up. I declare A Dark Samadhi: poems and microtexts
duly launched.
Brett
Dionysius
© Copyright Brett Dionysius 2003
A Review of A Dark Samadhi - Prat Magazine February
2003 Issue 1 pp 12-15
A
BLEAK ENLIGHTENMENT
from Prat Magazine Issue #1 2003
A
Review of A Dark Samadhi
[Brentley
Frazer: PC Press ISBN 0-9750397-0-9 Australia 2003]
Prat Magazine February 2003 Issue 1 pp
12-15
Poets have long been acknowledged as an intellectual group that
hold unique abilities to shape public thought. Their historical
position at the very forefront of social, political, and cultural
change has meant that one of the first actions of aspiring dictators
has long been to silence those that weild the lyric word. Brentley
Frazer may not be a name that has graced international bestseller
lists as yet, but in A Dark Samadhi he is revealed as one of
the greatest writing talents of our time. This
collection of poetry and microtext is a fearlessly confronting
yet utterly compelling dissection of the modern human condition.
It overpowers, then drags its reader on a twisted journey through
the dark alleyways and slum neighbourhoods of the universal
metropolis. Frazer speaks with the unnerving conviction of an
angry young citizen who has seen and knows too much. His words
impact like bullets shot from a gun, and at books end, a graphic
yet profound picture has been sprayed across the canvas of the
readers mind. However, Frazer is not content to merely sicken
or alarm, and swirling above the fire and fury is a sense of
splendour and grace. It is this desperate struggle between redemption
and damnation that earn A Dark Samadhi its masterpiece tag.
This, the fifth collection of Frazer's work, is sure to confirm
the cult status that Frazer commands within underground circles.
His first 4 collections, all self published offerings, sold
out within hours, and it seems an outrageous travesty that the
publishing world has waited this long to identitfy his unmistakable
talent. Here is writer that has been included in some of the
most prestigious international compilations, has been the recpient
of numerous accolades including a description as ' the Salvadore
Dali of the written word,' and yet it has taken some five years
for a serious publishing contract to come his way. This lack
of mainstream interest can probably be best attributed to Frazer's
inexorable ability to shock and unsettle, even against a backdrop
almost uniform apathy. Or perhaps the umbrella of patriotism
inspired censorship under which publishers are currently operating,
has led to Frazer being placed in the 'too hot' basket until
now. Whatever the case, the wait is over, and this is one author
that will receive his due reward, as A Dark Samadhi captures
the international attention that it so rightfully deserves.
On
top of his print acreer, Frazer is the founder and editor of
retortmagazine.com, an online journal of poetry and art that
boasts in excess of 1000 000 hits per edition. The gravity of
this statistic is only truly appreciated when it is understood
that no formal publicity has ever occurred. Over half of the
site's visitors come from North America, where word of mouth
has also aroused the interest of Australian, US, and other world
governments, suggesting that the power of the poetic word is
something that still evokes fear within the corridors and cubicles
of political power. Such attention only confirms the threat
to the status quo that a literary genius like Brentley Frazer
represents. [scan
of article *dialup
warning LARGE image]
An
Interview at Vibewire ( July 2003 Sydney Australia)
An
Interview at Tin Lustre Mobile ( July 2003 Washington USA)
An
Interview at Get Underground (los Angeles USA 2002)
Speedpoets,
Best of 2003, Impressed Publishing. ISBN 0-9751618-3-0. price
$A16.45.Reviewed by Justin Lowe There is a vibrant
scene in Brisbane, by all accounts, right across the creative
spectrum, and in the past few years it has produced some formidable
poetic talents – Paul Hardacre and Brentley Frazer being
the two towering figures to emerge so far, in my humble opinion.
In fact, this collection opens with a generous sample of Frazer’s
work, and I’m still undecided whether that was a wise
decision on the editors’ part. You see, Frazer knows precisely
what he wants to say. He goes straight to the heart of the matter,
but once he’s in there he likes to take a look around.
All his poems are journeys. He seems to have an entire universe
stored away in his head just bursting to get out, and his mastery
of poetic and narrative technique is at times truly breath-taking.
Like all true artists, he makes it all seem so effortless. Unfortunately,
at least for this collection, nothing else that follows comes
anywhere near the mark.
Speedpoets,
Best of 2003, Impressed Publishing. ISBN 0-9751618-3-0. price
$A16.45.Reviewed
by Justin Lowe
beautiful, unfinished -
MTC Cronin (Salt Publishing,2003)
a dark samadhi - Brentley Frazer (PC Press, 2003)
Reviewed by Justin Lowe http://retortmag.com/content/08.03/id_review_lowe_cronin,frazer.htm
As
a young, pimply, virginal adolescent I was much taken by Andre
Gide, by the loss of mind (and apparent intent) and the proximity
of (writing) hand to heart. It seemed like the word of God to
me, nebulous as my own pubescent desires. But over a relatively
brief period the lustre faded. What had before seemed pure and
spontaneous suddenly seemed stilted and contrived, as though
some great violence had been visited upon me. I felt empty again,
deaf to the song of the world. Then I discovered the visceral
outpourings of Nabokov, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Joyce, Pound, Celan
et al. They became great friends of mine, but the pang of that
first love never left me and nothing could quite replace it.
I’m sure most of you know what I mean. Nothing smells
like the first car we sat in, the first person who ever kissed
us back.
However
I have been fortunate enough to survive not just into a new
millenium, but into an entirely new epoch. One in which peace
is proving more deadly than war, where democracy has become
galvanized as the dictatorship of the mean, and where the word
has been poked and prodded so often by the spin doctors of either
God or Caesar that it has come out of hibernation with teeth
bared and foaming at the mouth
Why
can we not find out
more than television?
Sitting side-by-side
like two identical buildings
we cannot feel god
Cannot feel the pitch-black pain
of the joined
(MTC
Cronin - Canto LXV)
A
sentence for you. We are in a lake and glory floats past
us. On her shoulder perched a very complex nightingale;
with silent finger points at an animal in the camera. Only a
clown lights a fire and laughs as he puts it out. Fear would
then rise up with its battalion of shadows, part animal part
angel, as I had imagined it. War in the evenings when
insects beat their wings. War in your hair this morning.
(Brentley
Frazer - 365 Day Guarantee)
For
10,000 years poets have been asking: why war? There has never
been a satisfactory answer, but what these two books tell me
is that perhaps war is simply because it alone of all our dubious
progeny fuses us to the moment. In war past and future all but
evaporate, the moment is everything and here we have two poets
not only brave enough to face up to this new doubly terrifying
universe, but who possess the requisite genius (by which I mean
dexterity) to take a handful of that awful perennial moment
and sculpt it before it dries like clotted blood
I,
like a dejected apostle, have so rarefied the organ of
sight and the use of symbol as avenue for observation that
I have become a sinner in the pantomime. God, from his
box seat up in the exclusive members area may have said -
where do you begin, o dancer, to sing the chorus from all
those tragedies you so despise; and then - are you mute
child or are there weeds in your ears?
(Brentley
Frazer - Writing Proverbs in the Mould)
We
have no more need of these lands
The sky has a very hard heart
And we want it to
There is a peculiar trust in the tyrant
Who knows how brittle bone
Was it the air that snapped our legs and broke our arms?
But looking up there is no answer
Slay the dragon knave and the fairytale may come back to our
hearts
in music
We have need of the land for graves
Flowerful
(MTC
Cronin - Song of Bone)
There
was a time not so long ago when I didn’t believe poetry
of such tragic intensity and mercurial wit would ever be written
(let alone published) in this nation of kitchen bards. To be
honest, I never imagined in even my most intense hydro/amphetamine
see-sawing visions, that times would ever get this tight. That
I, like Milosz, would be huddled in a doorway watching bullets
tear up the street to my home. Indeed, that we would all be
held hostage by the very air we breath, by which of course I
mean language. I guess I should have read my Milosz more closely.
Of
the two poets, Cronin is far more prone to the historic kaleidoscope,
Frazer far more suspicious of stories passed down to us as fact.
If I could fault him it would be on this point, except there’s
no fault on his part, only a point, and that point is literally
that: not anything as tremulous as an argument or a posture,
nothing that casts a shadow
In
this boat on these waters
I have floated before, tho’
then, the arms that reached
to save me had no hands, and
now I feel their nails pierce
my palms.
I
have been brave enough
to wash my own blood from
the planks and in the process
learned a thing or two of love
but now as the water fills my
lungs, all I want to do is dance.
(Brentley
Frazer - The Drowning Review)
Where
Frazer has perhaps argued with History in private, Cronin prefers
to do her arguing on the page
I
am numb to the last pain
of the last man
so
many eyes
a common moon
violence
comes hopefully up
from misused hands
only
a necessity
like the well sunk
where
there was no water
and digging by my side
the
man whose face
I couldn’t see
trying
to drink
the earth from a tin
(MTC
Cronin - From a Tin)
It
is important stuff, this. For too long there was only speak
or listen, noise or silence, but in this new epoch there are
no barricades, no front lines, no sparring. All is stealth and
subterfuge, the visceral made manifest where poets laugh and
cry over the same tiny word. Anyone who wants to know who fired
off those flares on the pitted horizon should buy these books.
Like the times they’re razor wire sharp and wild and ancient
as the last lie uttered with a smile.
Justin
Lowe
Katoomba 7/8/03
brentley...master
of precision
...a dark samadhi reviewed by star...
for Poetic Inhalation Washington DC USA
http://www.poeticinhalation.com/samadhi.html
only
one man is able to transform poetry and literature...written
art...to the highest level of exploratory expression with graceful
manipulation...
brentley
frazer the creator and editor of retort magazine shares today's
most mind challenging and enlightening writing sound and art
electronically from selected artists all over the world with
readers all over the world...the daily updates and bimonthly
volumes of retort magazine are the most progressive on the internet
today...needless to say retort is the saving mint freshness
from the redundancy of online magazines who profess world wide
web supremacy...the carefully plucked visions from a secret
garden of rising and already soaring creatives are the voices
and visions of today as well as tomorrow...including brentley
himself...
to
read a dark samadhi...his compilation of poems and microtexts...is
a journey of the mind...brentley shines bright bold and blinding
as the well known word politician and master of communication
deconstruction and reinvention...his experimentation with english
prime as in putting your fingers into a stinky puppet and talent
for smashing the barriers and excels reader expectation as well
as surpasses the accomplishments of many if not all current
literary figures published on the world wide web and in print...
just
as effective if not more powerful is brentley the skilled word
magician...master of evocative precision...his language speaks
to everyone...based on a familiar world...reality...brentley
weaves the known into a delicate...rich...deeply vivid...and
alive human tapestry...
i
embrace the warmth of his dark beauty...
In
this boat on these waters
I have floated before, tho'
then, the arms that reached
to save me had no hands, and
now I feel their nails pierce
my palms.
I
have been brave enough
to wash my own blood from
the planks and in the process
learned a thing or two of love
but now as the water fills my
lungs, all I want to do is dance.
...The
Drowning Review
with
gossamer lightness i immerse myself in his heavy visions...
The
expression of a music-box ballerina often betrays her
yearning for a little more plasticity. The tune she moves
her eternal tutu to is often evocative of the sometimes
contents of the box which sprawl before her plastic pearls
like a kingdom of joined together heads. A tiny symphony
of cheap die-cast clockwork, a little lonely if it happens to
be evening.
...Unknown
Music Box Tune
and
dance rhythmically in the beauty of his inner world...
in
the shallows, your skin
& your hair, it will not be long now.
I will find faith & covet her, as
the salt cloying your lashes.
on the blue wall that floats
& these hands, grateful as an
e-note upon the symphony of your lips,
held you there, but for a moment,
yet for an eternity. in my heart
there is a star I stole for you,
it will burn dull beside the other
memories, the assorted longings &
the china swans your voice sculpts
behind you as you glide.
...It
will not be long now (I will be believing in shadows)
brentley
is a visionary who projects the past present and future of mankind...precisely
molds the basic skill of human expectation capability and knowledge...transcends
the ordinary into a uniquely picturesque and passionate art
form...
http://www.poeticinhalation.com
comments
made about my text in the october
issue of Ink Magazine (USA)
Your writing is looking at a canvas painted blue hanging in
the Met and wondering why you didn't think of doing it yourself.
Better - watching two Chineese women fight over the last pair
of Levi jeans. Cooley / Tuesday 28 October 2003
pretentious and inaccessible. - michael / Monday 27 October
2003
I really liked your work, and your website is awesome! I"m
going to check into that book of yours. - Nallely / Friday
10 October 2003
this was awesome - kc / Wednesday 8 October 2003
madman or genius, u decide ?? - nach / Wednesday 8 October
2003
?... - lesley / Monday 6 October 2003
word... good piece of art.. - nessa / Friday 3 October 2003
-------------
Brentley
is the David Lynch of word
Ink
Magazine - Chicago USA
true
underground poetic visionary
Identitytheory.com
USA
Brentley
has precise nightmares in prose! We fear them…
Exquisite
Corpse Journal of Letters
An
Interview with Brentley at Vibewire ( July 2003 Sydney Australia)
An
Interview at Tin Lustre Mobile ( July 2003 Washington USA)
Brentley
INTERVIEWED
by Star Jewel Smith of
Getunderground.com (los Angeles)
Clever.
Ethereal. Medical. Evil. Brilliant. Beautiful. Grimy. Pornographic.
Low-brow Art. High Porno. Vaginal. Manifesto. Poem. Talk to
me... Mr. Frazer is a poetic, naive, scared, remarkable, spartan
Writer with a gift for description, a style similar to Clive
Barker and more than a passing similarity to William S. Burroughs'
inculcation (i.e.: "but strange clear suckers filled with black
blood and decorated wings like paisley, vast wings sought after
religiously by otherworldy taxidermists..."), and Charles Bukowski
(See: Entire ouevre)...and that ain't bad. Looking forward to
reading more from this strange, erudite, neo-literate oddball
Bob
Freville Staff
Writer GetUnderground.com USA
Frazer's
text teeters on the thin line between consensus reality and
insanity, flirts with the postmodern nightmare
Adam
Pettet:
Assistant Director Queensland Poetry Festival 1997-2000
Brentley's
poems are scriptures of modern despair and dark sexuality that
invite the reader/voyuer to participate in an exploration of
the self
Brett
Dionysius
: Director Queensland Poetry Festival 1996-2001
Brentley
Frazer is the Salvadore Dali of modern texts...It would appear,
that his pespectives are shrouded in a guise of cannibal techniques...all
contrasts eat themselves... We, all of us stay receptive to
the strange: genius sublime.
Fakie
Wilde
- Author of Pox & the Forthcoming Xonnox
Brentley's
images are startling and mysterious, which makes one read over
and over, searching for the true meaning (or meanings.)
Kristen
Biss,
Editor Voices Literary Magazine
A DARK SAMADHI
Poems + Microtexts by Brentley Frazer
PCPress
ISBN 0-9750397-0-9
TRADECOPY PAPERBACK
$14.95 AUD
plus postage + handling
AVAILABLE online @ Retort
Magazine
and @ Selected Bookstores nationally
Partner
in a Dark dance
An Introduction to A Dark Samadhi
Appears in the 1st Edition
by Fakie Wilde
If
you think that you're in for an easy ride, I'm afraid you've
caught the wrong number seven bus. This particular number seven
has been hijacked by a madman in tailored clothes who laughs
as he listens to terrible reports on the un-tuned am radio,
glancing around the footpaths as children twist out from under
the bloodied mud guards. All those tiny little irrelevant thoughts
you have when you discover the underside of a grey suburban
sky...if each of those little ideas was a tiny weed growing
in your psyche… most play gardener and pluck them roots
and all. Hurling them carelessly to be forgotten, or worse still
trodden back into the mind beneath the dirty feet of more practical
thinking. Brentley has chosen to set each little idea or thought
up in an elaborate greenhouse. Hooking them like a sinister
1956 fiend to advanced hydroponics, he has grown monsters of
amazing misproportion. In his world, everything has an abnormal
twist to its trunk. Everything has a slightly unnerving, fleshy
hue. It is a world where nothing makes complete sense to the
lost and confused visitor, and yet there is a nasty familiarity.
If this book were a carving, then the author has cut at the
surface with a microscopic blade. Working for so long and yet
sometimes appearing to change nothing at all, who else can cut
the perfect sculpture of a psychopathological society? All the
veins in perfect place, all life forms created with a knife,
or in this case, an inky ball. To me, these texts are just the
foundation. A blueprint to a body of work of which the final
product can only be dreamed. All this leads to the sublime and
Brentley has seen it, cut it up into paragraphs and given it
names. Texts and languages painstakingly put together from the
remains of what never was. You can only write literature like
this if you're a really weird person, one of those people who
spends whole waking days enhancing discarded parts of the mind.
A Dark Samadhi is a doorway to the waking dream.
Fakie
Wilde
January 2003 Brisbane Australia
BRENTLEY'S
CODE
an overview of A Dark Samadhi
Appears in the 1st Edition
by Robert M. Smith
In
A Dark Samadhi, we enter a psychedelic dream world, in which
a lyrical poet is confronted with a kaleidoscope of images from
the emperor's dominion. The times are evil, and there is something
rotten in the state of Denmark: sometimes children play in these
visions, and there are innocent little animals dancing, but
inevitably, tragedy awaits them. The poems are baffling, because
the sequence of logic is absent, and the events described are
connected by the dopamine links of a dream. And in the corners,
there is a clown doing some abomination to an innocent victim.
A
Dark Samadhi is a world after the holocaust, after all hell
has broken loose, "a luminescent garden harmony a little out
of tune," it is "Smurf Town," the world of "the semantic terror
found in the daily newscast." And it is not as though the author
delights in this discord, it is cast upon all of us. And yes,
these are the end times, during which "the Board of Jokers"
are plotting evil plots from their mansions in Parliament.
These
are pictures from the gone world, reminiscences from childhood,
dream material, psychedelic perceptions, and pure poetry. Because
despite the banality and the evil of our times, despite the
unfreedom and subjection in which we are all "headless and hollow"
, there is a hope. A hope against all hope, and it is expressed,
if not contained, in the pledge: "I will take up arms and face
the Beast myself." The author has definitely not succumbed to
the cruelty surrounding him, to "those called Commodity (who)
have poisoned the path to the indwelling mind." Although he
is wounded by the assaults of the Shadow ("Here I stride, a
disjointed man"), although "the headlines of the paper today
announce sadness," he has "penned in freehand (his) manifesto
onto the approaching stormfront," he has created for us "soft
and cryptic signals written in the wind."
This
manifesto is a call to arms. However, there is neither artifice
nor rhetoric in these lines; they are pure poetry, stripped
of any device which would make it easy reading. Samadhi is pure
image, sometimes dreamlike, other times waxing lyrical, as in
Ode to a Drowner: "O tell of the night my Brother." And the
author extends a hand of solidarity to us, who are also under
the shadow of the beastmind, unwilling citizens of "the New
World Reichstag."
Brentley
sums up his poetry anthology for us in these words: "A purity
as yet unmoved by beauty seduced by and yet afraid of innocence."
The only work of art I am reminded of is the film, Last Year
in Marienbad, with its surrealistic sequences arranged by a
dreaming editor, and also touching and poignant. It is only
unfortunate that this world is what it is, and that Mr. Frazer
is not given the leisure to fly towards the sun. He creates
a world of his own, which reminds us of our real world, with
its adult and child tragedies and contradictions.
The
time is out of joint, and Brentley adds his magnificent voice,
"both glorious and horrible" to the march of writers who dare
go against the grain, who stand up to government and do not
compromise with Mammon.
I
am told the pen is mightier than the sword, and five hundred
years from now, the dictionary will describe George W. Bush
as an American politician who lived at the time of Brentley
Frazer.
Robert
M Smith
Montreal Canada
January 2003
GET
YOUR COPY
1st edition LIMITED 1000 copes only
A DARK SAMADHI Poems+Microtexts
by Brentley Frazer
PCPress
ISBN 0-9750397-0-9
TRADECOPY PAPERBACK
AVAILABLE ONLINE @ RETORT MAGAZINE
Within Australia $23.95
Overseas $28.95 AUD
includes postage + handling
$18.95 AUD rrp at bookstores
from WRITE SITES
a review of Australian Literature Online
by Dean Kiley REALTIME+Onscreen
John
Tranter’s jacket (still going strong, still a great read)
has an unOedipal rival in Brentley Frazer’s Retort (motto:
‘think forward answer back’) which is equally compacted,
similarly slickly micochippy in minimalist but striking design,
also cites Australian work in a lattice of international and
heterodox contributors; and is likewise bristling with links,
interviews, reviews and contextual articles (e.g. Burroughs
meets Baudrillard). But against jacket’s historiographic
sensibility and elegant thematic clustering, Retort pits a feral
diversity and a growly avant-gardist manifesto against “the
established cult of ignorance consensus idiocy.” Again,
a la Tranter, there’s so much jack(et)-in-the-box-folded
into this Salon-stylish mag that an afternoon goes languorously
by on any one issue. It offers downloadable posters, both a
public and a subscribers’ forum (threaded articles, comments,
meticulously organised, laid-out and archived, startlingly practical,
surprisingly engaging), extensive archive, dynamic newsletter,
daily updates, serialised novella, featured artists (e.g. Shannon
Hourigan’s sumptuous velvety Se7en-gothic doll Photoshoppery),
eclectic proliferating links, a fashion and style section, spoken
word and mp3 performances (Mary the Robot reads Linguistics
is the Opiate), excerpts from new books, a Brisbane poetry gig
guide, and Bjork’s new online video. The poetry is sinuously
sharp, its readership is exploding, its sense of connection
to (and interaction with) an active community of writers, readers,
artists, designers etc is strong and productive—and it’s
got that early-hours-nicotine buzz performance poets specialise
in. Full of unwhimsical surprises. Yum.
from
Hyperliterature as a product? - papertiger #02
A TRACE
REVIEW of Paper Tiger Media #02 by Edward Picot
http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?article=37
After
"Text" comes the "Audio" section: poems being read aloud, mostly
by their writers. Some of them are set to music, some not. In
each case the audio file is accompanied by a printed version
of the poem. For me the results are paradoxical. I would normally
expect a poem designed for reading aloud to be simpler than
its text-based equivalent, if only because a text can be read
through again and again, whereas a heard poem needs to connect
with its audience straight away. But since the written texts
are made available here, this rule ceases to apply. Some
of the audio poems in papertiger are actually extremely difficult
to construe - here, for example, is an extract from Watering
an Uneasy Beast by Brentley Frazer: "You have not before seen
this manifest, attorney over this district of pigs, outcast
with an immaculate manicure. Outside as we speak amass an army
at the walls, we have done the repair work for over a decade
now. Preceptor extrordinnaire (sic) my spoils in rucksacks strewn
from hackled plastic logo sewn with hemoglobin..." Verse of
this kind doesn't seem particularly well-suited to reading aloud;
yet curiously, I find that the reading voice urges me through
the density of the text.
listen
to 'uneasy beast' from papertiger
#2
BUY
PaperTiger #2
all
material on this website unless otherwsie specified ©
Brentley Frazer 2006
