Philip Hammial

A selection of reviews of his work

NSW Premiers Literary Awards

Shortlists and judges’comments

The Kenneth Slessor Prize for poetry, 2001

Shortlisted

Philip Hammial, Bread (Black Pepper)

Hammial has a strong, fascinating, individual and reliably original style. What might be mere experimental whimsy in another writer is toughened and made memorable by his well-integrated but unyielding ethical tone: ‘His is an evacuated face. Actually, it’s an extrajudicial face permeated with suck this immunity...A scrummed face. A face, in the final analysis, that’s down on all fours (Howard). This is a beautifully disciplined book, mirroring social and literary genre absurdities back and forth to achieve a stance which is extremely valuable both artistically and socially.

The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, 2004

Shortlisted

Philip Hammial, In the year of Our Lord Slaughter’s Children
(Island Press Co-operative)

Philip Hammial’s book is a spectacular panorama of the horrors of history. His poetry combines a Boschian narrative quality with an abstraction that put Prize judges in mind of Picaso’s Guernica. To slightly misquote E.M. Forster, Hammial challenges the ability of language to only connect. Hammial has one of the most distinctive voices in Australian poetry; his poems have a surreal wit that captures the dream lives of people for whom reality is mediated by news and pop culture influences. His work employs shocking grotesquerie, crudities and cliché that compel rethinking about the devaluing of language whereby humankind is reduced to the lowest form of sexual expression and bodies are things to be abused and discarded in war or love. Hammial’s technique — in terms of language and structures — is astonishing: he leads us to believe than truth can be spoken.


Book Reviews

From Overland 166 Autumn 2002

Bread reviewed by Kerry Leves

If Lou Reed were updating his famous song to these duty-of-care times he might add that if you are taking a walk on the wild side, you are probably moving too slowly for the good of your health. Philip Hammial’s Bread is an alert, prowling lope across the earth-clung, wormy underbelly of our culture. Hammial lifts the stone, rolls it back — shows us the efflorescence of rot underneath, decay as animal action, contempt as a three-ring circus. Hey, that stuff looks amazing — but, Jesus! it’s moving, it’s acting on us...One action is evacuation, principally of the self, which is displaced, kicked out of any certainties regularly and brutally: ‘the party’s/ over, the last guest leaving with my children/ in tow...’ Hammial keeps his syntax almost insanely crisp; he’s very matter-of-fact in linking the least obvious things, the mythic ‘Fourth Reich’ and the mystical longing for a poetry that’s ‘clear and concise’; Christian hypocrisy and its dubious tradition: ‘Fornicators dismantle a resurrection./ Prepare a balcony for takeoff.” What’s startling — and I think original — is the way shibboleths are torn down in a terse, colourful, street-talkin’ style: ‘A 21^st birthday — Jump on a bus & give the moon, your youth & a bar of soap to the bus driver. If successful (if all three items are accepted without question) get off at the next stop & at the no-longer-there moon set up a howl. Persist with this until you’re taken away by the police.’ Hammial also serves up lots of nasty fun at the expense of that poetic afreet, the lyrical ‘I’ — ‘an effigy of myself/ to do with as you will’ — plus heads of state, (‘They are, from first to last, pneumatics./ Anyone, even an infant,/ can pump them up’), colonels, a junta, medicos, a suicide, tourists, armies and a certain ‘Howard’; ‘A face, in the final analysis, that’s down on all fours.’ Zan Ross notes on the back cover: ‘It’s jazz on the page.’ I disagree — it’s rock’n’roll, post-punk; it’s got the directness of rap along with a verbal pizzazz and intellectual fullness that rap doesn’t usually extend to. Hammial is also a kinetic artist, a portrait sculptor in scrap metal and junk oddments, an endlessly inventive materialiser of demons comical and nightmarish. One of them is on the cover. This book could be dubbed UTAOP — unfair to all other poets — because of its brilliance and acrobatic speed at getting its points across. But those are also reasons for poets and non-poets to read it.


From Five Bells, March 1997

Blackmarket (in The Wild Life) reviewed by Zan Ross

...Then I wandered into the text expecting...can’t really say what, other than a bit of narrative, the occasional interesting image/ line, a distinct lack of fascist words (adjectives, adverbs, abstract nouns) and clichés. Instead, I was slapped right out of my CONVERSE/ SONY world with such originality of language, usage and construction that I slowed to a crawl to savour every phoneme. It’s jazz on the page.

It occurred to me at this point that Hammial hasn’t gotten the publicity or readership he deserves for much the same reason as John Scott (during his career as a poet): generally, the work isn’t nice. It won’t comfort you if you’re depressed, unhappy about your lover thumping you, or your cat becoming a road kill. You can’t pick it up and stroke it — it bites! This material requires an effort of head, heart and gut to enter and stay with, to rend ‘meaning’ from, and even then can the reader be guaranteed this is THE TRUTH the author intends us to walk away with?

For most of us, no text is worth that much effort or uncertainty. We’d rather put our energies into establishing and maintaining comfort zones, selecting only those ‘objects’, literary and otherwise, that reinforce boundaries. We desire the immediately accessible, the politically/ philosophically compatible. In short, we only want the familiar/ narrative.

To be fair, the shock of content is that much worse with Hammial’s work since he sets up expectations of the ‘acceptible/ inclusive’ with such devices as repetition, chorus, stanzas, alliteration, referential structures of fairy tales and fables, all the old polemics. He then proceeds to deconstruct with progression of idea, every possible resonance of every word, sexual explicitness, literary and mythological knifings, ideological muggings and banditry, and generally curdling the milk of human kindnesses.

Personally, I loved the adventure, the ‘danger’, the challenge at the crossroads. Hammial’s Black Market is where I intend to go when I need to be reminded of the possibilities of language unavailable at retail prices.


From Cordite 18 ROOTS, June 2004

Adam Aitken reviews Philip Hammial’s In the Year of Our
Lord slaughter’s Children

Who is Philip Hammial? If you read Hammial’s 16th book of poems, it will strike you as surprisingly biographical without sounding too auto-biographical — after all it’s Philip Hammial’s poetry. Who is Philip Hammial, the poet? What’s his world?

Is he the hippie tourist on page 12 paying homage to Siva’s lingam in Armanath? This lingam’s in all his books, I believe. He keeps going back to that frozen phallus, that tower of ice. It’s definitely something to do with his Kharma. Or is Hammial the traveler/ poet in Ghana, enjoying Mama Dosa ‘writhing in a trance.../ about to be ridden, bareback, by one of the local gods’? (I haven’t met Mama Dosa before.)

Hammial is also the US sailor, who, in 1958 found himself queuing up for Navy strength penicillin, then on a night on the town fingered by forty hands in a Cuban boudoir. And there’s Hammial the teenage delinquent, this time in Norfolk (Nofuck) Virginia being beaten to a pulp by a bouncer:

Philip of Detroit / as conniveur in the Age of Song and Dance, the backdoor man slipping out in the Age of the would be Poet Laureate.

There’s Phil the car assembly line worker in Detroit struggling to keep his limbs intact on a line ‘more unstoppable than the Balkan Wars’.

Who is the real Hammial? Certainly not the authentically insane, but the friend and mentor of those who are, and whose art keeps true madness from destroying them. The poet Hammial is also the bete noir of those devils whose madness and mad visions he writes about so compellingly, who’s anti-lives consist in the recruitment of armies of young boys drugged into a frenzy of killing.

Where are angels in all of this — safely but sadly bottled in formalin.

Mad Phil is the married man who finds himself and his new wife in a Chicago brothel, on their honeymoon, kept awake all night by grunting men, slamming doors and the squeals of fake orgasms? Philip Hammial lived Blade Runner before the movie was ever made.

And what is a Philip Hammial poem?

Certainly more than ‘wordplay’, certainly more than ‘an interior monologue with its backlog of sordid realities to sort out’, more than ‘painted faces of no significance’. Certainly more than ‘semantically disturbed phrases’.

More than ‘a swamp where the insolvency of imagery / has reached epidemic proportions’, a line in a one of Hammial’s missiles aimed at Australian Poetry?

This book, In the Year of Our Lord’s Slaughter’s Children, answers these questions in a way that’s new in Hammial’s work: if there’s always been violence in his poetry, then this volume answers violence with more than violence — with linguistic panache with regret, certainly, with anger, with a passion for protest than never tilts over into despair or sentimental self regard. This is the power one finds in the visual Apocalypse of painters like Bosch, (it’s no accident that sea-going vessels figure so often: a book conceived as a ship of fools, Captain Hammial at the wheel, in full technical control of the machine, 99% of the time.)

Hammial’s poems ride the sonic waves that still radiate from the impact of Expressionist art, the art Hitler most despised, which the fascists labeled ‘decadent art’ because it refused to ignore the perverse and perverted. This was art that could hold a mirror up to the erotomania and fetishism of Hitler’s and any other megalomaniac’s own war machine. It is a satiric style that strips the fascists of their gloss. This book invokes a world where the Commandant and a whole Schloss of pissed brownshirts vomits on their own uniforms. This is burlesque and a passion play for devils where real people get killed, tortured, raped.

Heavy stuff, for sure, but perhaps this is the sort of poetry to stop us feeling relaxed and comfortable in Howard’s Australia — and Howard also goes through the mill that is this book. So I don’t think Howard would endorse it.

I think this is a book of poems that never rests, that does not claim another world that transcends the waste of this world. Nor do I think this is an unhappy book or one that is resigned or resigns its function: as a kind of repository of sympathetic magic, of soothsaying magic. In one poem, Hammial speaks direct to his long dead mother, like a conversationalist Shaman Hammial absorbs the negative energies and turns it to what? A spectacle, a ghost train ride, but a hundred times better.

It’s better than aspirin, ecstasy, or dope. It’s a book that harnesses the great power of the satirizing crowd, the mob, the people or the proletariat — at the same time it a book that knows that the very same mob can kill. Still, this is a book of voodoo incantations without the grandiose tone of the Beats. This is collection to be read on the 430 on your way to work, I guess. Who knows? In a poem about writing poems that embody the life of the body, Hammial writes it’s ‘the thrill of swim or sink’.


Martin Langford’s Launch of Bread
at the Burning Lines Festival, April, 2001

There is a wonderfully apt epigraph to this book: ‘He gluts himself on astonishment’, and in some ways, astonishment is the bread of the title.

Bread, like, perhaps, all of Hammial’s poetry, is fuelled by astonishment — at the craziness, weirdness, dumbness, marvellousness of the life in which he finds himself. And he does, in some ways, glut himself on it — in that way artists have of returning again and again to the material that drives them crazy and delights them, the material they can never quite get out of their systems through their art.

This astonishment, however, is not something which just happened without forebears or context. Hammial’s deck of literary possibilities was formed not by the Anglo-American tradition so much as by the Continental modernists — the French and Spanish surrealists, the later French writers such as Michaux, Char, Jabes.

There is something syncretic about the Anglo imagination: it prefers to work in consonance with a comprehensive explanation of the world. Somewhere along the line, the French diverged from that need — that thoughtfulness, that insecurity — and let the imagination loose without, as it were, feeling that they need always be beholden to reasonableness.

As I read Hammial’s work, it is written in the spirit of that tradition. The imagination is free to respond directly to the world without being mediated or restrained by the need to construct a plausible explanation of what is happening.

For a long time this tradition has been alien to the Australian cast of mind, and sometimes Hammial has struggled to find readers because of it. I would suggest that, with the greater tolerance for alternative possibilities that is around now, with the greater expectation that poetry is a mansion with many rooms, it is worth taking another look at Hammial’s verse — or a first look if you haven’t already done so.

Bread seems to me to have been written out of a desire to produce something in language which was equivalent to the craziness and intensity of the world itself. And in the way that language has of being found to contain whatever it was that the seeker was looking for already within it, Hammial discovered a repertoire of violence and craziness already there. Many of the poems, for instance, are built around puns. But these aren’t little wry-smile puns, they are bearers of absurd or demonic alternatives (see: ‘Sound’, p49). Others are built around verbal patterns — recurring linguistic events might be a better term — which develop a momentum and charge of their own as imagination takes hold. ‘Problems & Solutions’ is built around a kind of absurd folk-wisdom which might always know what to do in every situation. The really absurd thing, of course, is the assumption that life is a perfectly ordinary thing, but Hammial’s tone never moves from the rituals and conventions of that assumption. It is just that as his solutions get weirder, so, too, by implication, does that assumption become more absurd.

I don’t recommend Hammial’s solutions, by the way. I don’t think people will find them helpful at all.

In some ways, Hammial is a joker-poet. Reason and reasonableness are just the flimsiest of constructs. Having no credibility, their main attraction is as the source material for inconsistencies, puns and strange ideas. But from another angle, Hammial is close to being a poet of dream. Not dreaminess; one very noticeable characteristic of this verse is its rapidity of verbal movement. But dream in the sense of being unpredictable, unsettling, vivid. There is, for instance, none of that clear distinction between ‘dream’ and ‘waking reality’ that we maintain in our everyday lives.

In Hammial’s memoirs of his somewhat testosterone-fired youth, Travel, he writes of how he was continually confronting authority. He has carried something of that attitude into his writing of verse. These poems strike one as direct imaginative confrontations rather than being, say, meditations or expressions of some feeling.

All this, however, is made accessible by his instinct for form, which seems to me to have gone on developing throughout his work. It is form — the lists and motifs and variations and recurring constructions — which provides the lens to his craziness, and, by being the expression of human effort in the face of something difficult, becomes a kind of implicit awe (‘Autumnal’ or ‘Me, Myself, No Other’).

There are no places of rest in this poetry — unless one counts the somewhat uncomfortable tightrope of humour. But then, there aren’t, really, any places

Philip Hammial is one of the most distinctive voices of Australian verse, and Bread is an excellent place in which to start to explore that voice.


From Cordite No.3 1998

‘The Practice of Poetry’
by Philip Hammial

When I was asked if I’d consider writing the first Practice of Poetry column for Cordite I told the editors I was hopeless at poetic theory, possibly because my view of what poetry is is so excessively romantic that any attempt to describe it would, however sublimely begun, soon move to the realm of the ridiculous. But then I thought, so what, why not give it a go anyway — full speed ahead and damn the banana skin that might trip me up. Perhaps, with so many poetry magazines polluted with the jargon of postmodernism, some old fashioned romanticism might, if not clear the air, at least provide a bit of entertainment. So I propose to describe an experience that I related to Chris Kelen three or four years ago. He found it interesting. Perhaps some Cordite readers might as well.

Usually when I sit down to write, the muse appears with little or no coaxing. However, if I’m tired or have a mind filled with rubbish I use one of several tricks/ methods to bring her around, one of the most effective being some form of tantric meditation.

The Kundalini is the serpent of tantric practice. I’ll assume the enlightened readers of Cordite are familiar with the chakras (centres of spiritual power in the human body) etc. and simply add that in Tibetan tantric practice the Kundalini is often envisioned as a drop, the thig le. At the beginning of a meditation the thig le is visualized as a small ball, about the size of a marble, that can be moved by the experienced meditator from chakra to chakra. As the meditation proceeds the thig le can, if so desired, be enlarged and ‘warmed up’. Practitioners of tumo use the thig le, enlarged and red hot, to keep themselves warm in winter in the mountains of Tibet. No doubt you’ve heard stories about novice monks drying blankets dipped in icy streams on their naked bodies.

As a non-Tibetan I find many of the Tibetan visualizations too alien and complex, so I make up my own, spontaneously, as I go. I’ve been assured by people in the tradition that my home handyperson approach is acceptable. One day, several years ago, sitting down to write, I found myself playing with the drop, heating it up, moving it up and down the channel. Suddenly, on one of its runs down, it kept going, right down to the base of my spine which I visualized as a deep well, circular and lined with stones. It was miles deep. As the drop plunged into the ink-black water it turned into a bucket. In my mind’s eye I used a rope on a pulley to haul the black water-filled bucket up, rapidly, rocket-fast. It went soaring up through the channel, out through the top of my skull, the Aperture of Brahma, and up into the noonday sky. When it was about a mile high I had an impulse to use the still-attached rope to jerk it to a stop. Of course the black water kept going. It spread across the sky, turning into white sky-writing-like words as it went — a sentence, a line of poetry that I was able to write down before it faded. That’s amazing, I thought, I wonder if I can do it again. Down went the empty bucket, up came the full bucket, another sentence splashed across the sky. In about five minutes I had a thirty line poem.

Links:
www.geocities.com/memnom/phammialindex.html

see also:
www.thylazine.org/issue7/thyla7g.html
http://www.thylazine.org/hammial.html