I first met Liam in 1994. It was the second year of the Brisbane Writers’ Fringe Festival which was hanging off the mainstream literary event Warana Writers Week in the Botanical Gardens and we had organised auditions for poets to perform in that event. Liam came to us one day to tryout for the festival and he passed with aplomb. We were all ecstatic to have found a new talent in the Brisbane poetry scene and thought that this young, charismatic poet was pretty hot stuff; writing vast mature poetries far beyond his 18 years of age.
I think it was only during the actual festival that it came to light that Liam really wasn’t 18 after all. He was just 14. Which made his writing accomplishments even more promethean in scale and our indecent dealings with a poetry minor, quite scandalous. I’m surprised there wasn’t a Fitzgerald inquiry about his inclusion in the seedy underworld of Brisbane poetry!
What I am proud of is that my original faith in Liam’s ability as a writer of quality poems has been rewarded many times since then. It’s a pleasure to see the poems of your friends rise and rise, to be published in Australia’s top literary magazines and journals, to prove themselves in the hurly-burly of the poetry world. His first collection, ‘Popular Mechanics’ was published in 2004 with great eagerness by Interactive Press; a materialisation of many of the energetic and culturally hard-hitting poems audiences had been hearing and reading in journals since the mid- to late 1990s.
Now we have ‘Career’, a new collection published by Michael Brennan in the Vagabond Press ‘Rare Object’ series out of Sydney. This also gives me great pleasure; seeing Queensland poets published by interstate presses when it is so difficult to publish within our own home state. It is a mark of Liam’s quality as a writer, that he transcends local, state and even national borders; both parochial and literary. Indeed, I’ve always felt through his subject matter and style that Liam is first and foremost an Australian poet who jacked into the critical debates and influences within Australian poetry at an early age, and who luckily for us chooses to reside in Queensland.
‘Career’ is an examination of some of those psychological and cultural borders. Travel is a godsend for writers and being dipped into someone else’s world view can be both immensely liberating and immensely disintegrating for the individual. Like eating a choc-top ice-cream in side-show alley at the Ekka. You try to eat the broken chocolate flakes quickly while vanilla ice-cream is running down your wrists. You end up happy, but twisted at the same time. You feel freed up to revel in another’s insane culture, but simultaneously, the tribalism of your own club takes you like a shamanic fit; it becomes the psychic hide you wear to make yourself feel impervious to emotions of inadequacy and cultural angst. Poetry becomes the bluster of our lives to ward off cheap, neon alienation in cities far grander than our own. In the built environment of our minds, only poems can map our true fears.
Cultural dissonance as Liam suggests in the poem, ‘Small Days’, are recorded by the insignificant details of life; the ‘toothpaste smudges on the mirror’ that many travellers look into; to reveal the dark matter about their own national identities. Why is it that the similar things we see in another culture frighten us terribly; so much so, that we fall back onto acting antagonistically in a nationalistic stereotypical manner and drink heaps of cheap local beer to get us through. As Liam suggests in, “Saturday’s Typhoon”; ‘We prick at the voodoo doll of our routine’, that somehow we cling to our nuggetty cultural values for comfort and protection, to shore up our Western backbone, even though we know our ‘ocker’ posturing can curse us in our efforts at cultural exchange.
In “Career” Liam suggests that, where there should be some kind of cultural ‘transcendence’ or at least some acceptance of vague first world familiarity, particularly in a cyberpunked country like Korea. There is instead often, a nationalistic call to arms, a falling back on old defensive habits by the tourist invader, as Liam recognises in, ‘Think Act’, where early morning cultural abandonment leads to ‘pissing on a power pole in the jackie howe dawn’.
Why do we feign casualness when we’re shit scared of who and what we represent? Some kind of 21st century Barry McKenzie bashing Asia instead of Pommy land. The difference between poets and yobbos however, is that poets reflect on what they do to others. That in all the craziness of cultural sublimation poets can at least report on the aftertaste of unscrupulous experience; ‘of some Koranado driver’s pent up aggression’, of the fist fight in the corner bar, of the local police bashing down your hostel door in the wee hours of the morning. Liam, the poet in Seoul shares fine, surrealist, literary allusions with Federico Garcia Lorca’s seminal text, Poet in New York; an observer’s scarred journey through the strange rites of passage of an alien culture.
So, why do we continue to act terribly in the dubbed version of someone else’s culture? As Liam reflects in, “Say Anything”; ‘You are your own cinema verite soap opera’. You become so self-reliant, predictable and specialist in reaffirming who you are when faced by the crazed ‘other’, a confused stranger in a strange land, that you run the risk of cultural extinction, like a Neanderthal realising too late that the ice age is over, that the ice sheets have at last retreated and that he/she has way too much hair.
Poets carve out their words slowly like a glacier backpedalling over millennia. They make a career out of recording the dissonant; the sound effects of ice scraping inexorably over bedrock. In “Career” Liam continues to fashion an immense literary canyon for himself. This cacophonous collection is an intricately worked arrowhead that will still be razor sharp, when the elements weather other lyric poetries out of existence. Liam is a hard poet who keeps it real with his powerful and sardonic vernacular. As Liam expounds in “Crumpled Elegance”; & that’s how you get suckerpunched:/using bigger & bigger words/as if somebody had tattooed/a scrabble player’s aesthetic/ over poetry’s flexed bicep. He is truly a muscular 21st century poet. I hereby declare, “Career” dissonantly launched.
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