Australian poetry: Atherton; Hose; Huppatz; Kocher – review by Michael Farrell in The Australian
The title of DJ Huppatz’s happy avatar… indicates a different concern with the linguistic present, loopily ironising consumer and internet culture. As the apparently found poem Herbal Essences makes clear, unsustainable products often self-accuse. Huppatz’s immersion in flarf (a New York-based poetry movement which produced poems from internet searches, often combined with deliberate bad taste) is apparent: but the tone is less aggressive, happier. happy avatar’s poems have a conceptual and syntactic ease: their register moving in and out of different modes of internet speak.
It may be partly due to the (small) font, but I had the impression of a particular, sentence-based, collage practice, of sentences arranged to fit regular stanzas. Huppatz’s tonal consistency means that linebreaks have barely any effect: “The afterimage of statistics / flicker under a fluorescent tube / and the carnival is so remote / you can only daydream its edges” (Keep Pressing). In On Golden Soil, sound deforms sense (a Russian formalist definition of poetry), yet a personal intonation in the last line has an ironic boggling effect, as if a computer just turned into a person, so of course they are making sense:
Iron or wiggle unwrought in
petrified matter the market
will bear lambast at last on
sunny shores a former silo
now makes a decent cappuccino
…
Online you forget china’s
peaks and scale time crusts
flooded or quaked rates are
rates but so much of what
goes on is beyond me
Narration veers from super-intelligent to moronic (rutabagas in Hollywood, anyone?) without letting go for a moment. It’s a highly Americanised work, but only, I think, the kind that an outsider can write; and Huppatz uses the approach in order to make local comment: “Whoa, slow down there Banjo, whaddaya / mean there’s a NEW Australian poetry?” (Please Upvote For Great Truth).
The negotiation of internet vernacular is a contemporary experience, and one poetry seems eminently suited to deal with. As is the dissolution — and re-solution — of the subject: “I seem sixty and married … ERROR: invalid access … I should really put in for a raise” (Invalid Access). I don’t want to give the impression of the poems as exercises in ironic knowingness, though that is a risk they take: as much as anything, they seem to be about complicity, of the world as anti-cookie jar, where everyone’s hands smell bad. There is no redemption here, or answers, unless hyper-discomfort can be said to be a form of grace (see Fuzzy-Wuzzy Angels). Yet Huppatz as avatar does seem, in this latest version of impersonality poetics, to be happy.