I have met Phil Brown twice. The first time I was introduced by a mutual friend at the Queensland Gallery of Modern art. We had a bit in common; both poets, both from Queensland, both a similar age, and both with past connections to Hong Kong.
Pleasant enough meeting, pretty sure I sent him a copy of my book and heard nothing further.
The second occasion was at a little reading at “Books on Stones” in Stones Corner. Phil was booked to give a reading from the work under review along with some poems. When I say a little reading - I mean a little reading - a single room that sat about twenty people max.
I arrived early, sat myself in the second front row and watched the room fill up. Phil’s reading was mostly from his recently released book “Confessions…” interspersed with a few poems.
I noticed that the poems were read in the same voice as the journalism and were more or less indistinguishable from the prose. Journalistic Impressions of things taken from real life and rendered as poetry. Anyway, after Phil’s bit and the polite applause had died down I turned to the person next to me and said under my breath “he should really stick to the journalism”. As it turns out Phil’s hearing is quite acute - he shot back … “was that a heckle I heard? No, no, I protested it was just an innocent comment.”
At this point Phil stood up and addressed me directly… “I heard you, come on,
what did you say? I turned to the Brett Dionysus, the MC and said “it was just a private aside” but he just shrugged and Phil continued to insist that I repeat the comment and answer for it.
The room that had been slowly emptying was now stopped still, and all eyes were turned to the front of the room listening to what was said next “Well, … I started somewhat hesitantly…your poems seem to me an extension of your journalism - you seem to miss the actual sounds of the words which is, after all, 50% of it” Boom!
Phil had no come back and the room erupted. A few of the regular poets attacked me and said I had no right! One person congratulated me, another asked if I wanted to take it outside.
I did eventually approach Phil on my way out; reminding him of our earlier meeting and otherwise attempting to smooth things over before beating a swift retreat. I know when I’m outnumbered.
So it was that the cover of his book caught my eye on display at my local library and I decided to have a closer look. Had my earlier encounter been an ill-considered rush to judgement on my part or had my earlier assessment been correct. Always willing, always open to a change of mind.
“Confessions of a minor poet” is a somewhat light, breezy romp through Phil Brown’s life from his teenage years at Miami High catching shore breaks off Rainbow Beach, to sitting at the feet of his poet/ mentor Bruce Dawe at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education (DDIAE) through to stints as a copywriter and journo cranked up on booze and benzos, burning a path thru newsrooms from the Goldie to Rocky, Brisbane, Melbourne and back again.
There’s a certain brash heedlessness about Phil the journo that follows him through his various postings. He never seems to last long at any one assignment but like a cat with two dozen lives he always seems to land on his feet. It’s the sort of heedlessness that had him given six of the best at Miami High for something he didn’t do; or getting fired as a waiter in the Celebrity Room for throwing a bread roll at someone; or when told by his boss to stop turning up late for work storming out of his office and pretending he didn’t hear him; I don’t know, the sort of heedlessness that amplifies a private comment at a book reading into a public diss.
It’s also this type of impetuosity that kept this reader absorbed throughout the book wondering where Phil the hapless journo/ minor poet was gonna fuck up next.
Sometimes this book reads like a movie reel of Phil Browns life: both inner and outer.
We read of his “mental episode” at twenty years of age, his interrupted university education, his conversion to Catholicism, his father’s early death brought about in part by his alcoholism and of course Phil’s own struggles with substance abuse. This all the while his journalistic roles went from decidedly regional (Burnett Herald) to decidedly national capital (The Australian, The Age).
As regards the poetry writing we read about his gap year :
“Wanting to be a writer is, of course, much easier than being one.
I spent my whole gap year wanting to be a writer without doing much writing.
It was bliss!”
We read about “fertile periods” followed by “fallow periods ” followed by “long fallow” periods.
We read about poems accepted for publication; we read lists of fellow notable contributors to the journals in which his work appears. We read about poems that were accepted and then after a meeting with the editor - were unaccepted.
And inevitably we read about those poems that never found a home.
Thankfully, Phil is rather philosophical about these lil setbacks:
“Poetry is so subjective, and poetry editors are usually
just other poets with personal biases. Or grudges.”
Ouch!
True. Many poetry editors are themselves poets, but that wasn’t as true in the period Phil was writing about as it is now. Back then there were quite a few non-poet poetry editors and in my opinion the art of poetry was better for it. Nevertheless, they can’t all of had crippling biases or bruising grudges?!
Can they?
I’m sure every poet - struggling or otherwise - has had similar thoughts but most bat them away as paranoia . I’m reminded of the saying “a good craftsman never blames his tools”, or in this case his poet/ editors.
Poets, as it turns out, are not Phil’s favourite people.
In one episode he turns up to a journal launch - “The Border Issue” - thinking his contribution was in the contents only to be informed by the editor that his piece
“didn’t make the cut”.
“I was with my Monto friend Wayne, now living in Brisbane too.
He watched O’Donohue (the editor) cut me dead. I just nodded and said okay.
‘You handled that well’ said Wayne.
‘What can you do?’ I replied ‘Fucking poets’.
Later in the book a somewhat exasperated Phil writes:
“It is amazing to me that poets continue writing, considering the amount of rejection dished out - I have had decades of it.”
Nevertheless after the publication of his first chapbook Phil the minor poet
remains chipper about his work and muses about his place
in the literary firmament; (p173)-
“I know the serious poetry world may not have entirely approved
(of his first published work) but what has it ever really approved of?”
It’s a serious question and Phil leaves it open-ended.
While acknowledging that “he has never felt completely part of that world (the serious poetry world) and probably never will” he concludes by saying he is poetically more of a “boundary rider”.
(Here I picture Phil, the Marlboro Man - dressed in his turtle-neck -
riding the poetry frontiers; a somewhat rugged untamed outlier,
shunned by the poetic ways of the big bad city where gun-totting,
trigger-happy, cigar-chomping, editors with nasty grudges
and bad breath rule the roost.)
Phil’s hilarious anecdote of his meeting with Nigel Roberts (p87) and his compadres at the Kings Cross reading just the opening salvo in an ongoing poetry skirmish?
Frankly, this is where I’d like to have seen more depth and insight?
Where does he site his work in the landscape of contemporary Australian poetry?
I wanted to read more about his own poetic practice; more about his poetic influences.
We do hear something of his early influences when he was an undergraduate at DDIAE - Hemingway, TS Eliot, Dylan Thomas, WH Auden, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and later Anne Waldman- but what about in more recent times? How has his practice, his reading, his influences changed over the fifty years. I wanted to read more about the existential struggle every poet must confront between the demands of their practice and the demands of keeping a roof over one’s head; more about the great controversies that rocked the poetasphere during this period: the aftermath of the so-called Poetry Wars of the late-sixties, early seventies; the Spoken Word/ printed page dichotomy; not to mention the great plagiarism scandal that erupted in the poetry scene in 2013, engulfing Brisbane’s own Graham Nunn (AKA Mr Poetry).
None of this.
In many ways I feel that the Phil Brown the poet had less stage time in this book
than Phil Brown the journo and as what happens in so many situations
- including life - poetry gets pushed into the margins in favour of the more serious
(paying) work. In this case journalism. This tendency can be seen even in the way Phil’s own poetry is presented throughout this book - not as verse (verso) but as prose/ separated by slashes/ which, in my opinion/ detracts from them as poems. It also highlights - unintentionally I’m sure - a common criticism made of much free verse - that it’s just prose cut up to look like poetry.
I’m sure the presentation of the poems in this manner was due to constraints around space, nevertheless, fewer poems presented as poetry rather than as prose separated by slashes would have, imo presented the work in a better light.
And this is my main criticism of Phil’s poetry - too prosaic, not enuf sonic elements to lift it into the realm of poetry, while at the same time too many easily rhymed endings which take too many poems into the death zone of sentimentality. The closest influence I can detect is T.E. Hulme, a central figure of the Imagist School. D.H Lawrence, better known as a novelist, but lumped in with the Imagists also appears to be an influence.
So in précis - the title of this book imo represents a victory of Phil’s self-avowed talent as a journo (and by-line writer) over his commitment to accuracy. Phil Brown was in truth never more than a weekend poet. What makes this book readable is not so much his insights into poetry or what it means to be a poet - even a minor one- in the late Twentieth century; it’s the window it opens into the life of a journo where pressrooms, sub-editors, typing pools and clanking Remingtons were still a thing. Phil Brown tells a good yarn in readable prose and he tells it with a huge dose of self-deprecating humour which for me makes this book worthwhile and enjoying.
As for the poetry? Well, if Phil hasn’t found the “off switch” yet
he most likely never will. That’s the good news, and it’s news that you’ll
most likely never read about.
