Are we ever content? Are we ever content to leave things alone? Are we just content to put up with things the way they are? These questions could pluck out the very mystery of Liam Ferney’s fourth poetry collection Content, which follows on from his other successful volumes, Popular Mechanics (2004), Career (2011), and the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize and Judith Wright Calanthe Award, critically shortlisted, Boom (2013).
Without a doubt, Liam is one of the most significant satirical poets practising and publishing in Australia at the moment, and indeed one of the most textually interesting of the new generation of Australian poets bristling with confidence in their millennial modalities, whose poetry examines the role of the interconnected artist in the information age, the writer who is both extended by the information-communication technologies, but also has negotiate the moral and institutional irregularities and ambiguities of our cultural, economic and political masters. Indeed Liam will be represented this year in a Puncher & Wattman anthology of Australian poetry from 1990-2015, due recognition of his rising status as a poet of national significance. Liam is to a degree the poetic embodiment of that much flouted cultural trait of a quiet achiever; someone who just gets on with his work without fuss and succeeds because of the quality of his writing, not because of who he knows.
The publication of Content, by John Hunter and Hunter Publications confirms this status, as Liam delivers a clever, witty, polished and thought-provoking stab at the heart of his staple killing fields – Australian popular culture, political two-facedness, our social media currency, the 24/7 news cycle, and our burgeoning attention economy of the 21st century, where we now check our status updates involuntarily like blinking or breathing, in the lulls in our busy lives where we used to have thoughts about more important issues. Where we are glued to links of the next famous dead pop star who didn’t quite make it to 70, in Facebook’s digital obituary.
His poetry is a type of colloquial hyper-lyricism that digs in like the head of a tick, into the corpulent body of Australian modern society, and where it feeds off the rich blood supply of instant fame, visual narcissism, fake profiles, reality TV attention-seeking and ideological hypocrisy that characterises much of our mainstream media and political culture. Just take for example the last two weeks and poor old brutish Duncan Storrar, a working class man who asked a simple question on national TV; who challenged the privileged tax position of the wealthy elite of this country, embarrassed an Assistant Treasurer and found himself hounded by the rabid right wing media into suicide watch. This is the very painting of the culture of fear and loathing that Content attacks, unpacks and sucks up in its clinical and sharp parody proboscis.
Liam is a chronicler of these defenceless scapegoats who must be sacrificed by the neo-liberal powers because they threaten the status quo with simple truths. The content of Storrar’s truism was so repugnant to our right wing government and their Murdoch media cronies that he had to be silenced with a hatchet job on his integrity, family and personal history. As Liam states in the opening poem of the collection, When God Dies, “Isn’t it enough that we have already diminished ourselves?”
A major theme throughout Content, is that we are slowly falling from grace with every bit of pettiness and greed that characterises our dealings with each other; our domestic and international behaviour is damaging our collective psyche, we are shaming ourselves through gutter politics and divisive polices that diminish us all.
Haven’t we done enough damage already to our prized reputation as that lucky country with boundless plains to share? Tabloid attacks on the powerless and disenfranchised, those apparently illiterate refugees, those boat people who’ll steal our jobs even though they’ll add to the burden of the cost of the unemployed, the ill and poor who don’t drive, are political footballs kicked across the screens of commercial media outlets and have diminished our status internationally, where ironically institutions like the UN now label us on par with other so-called failed states and their human rights abuses. Liam foregrounds the decayed moral compass of our political and media masters in poems such as Monsoon Season who, “stick to a hot issues brief”, “so when the cycle rolls over in the morning/the frumpy bloggers know exactly where you stand.”
Liam’s poems are intricate tattoos on the skin of Australian society, that itch the reader long after the ink has dried and the welts have healed. Satirists such as Forbes and Johnston would be stunned by the glitz, rapidity, ethical contradictions and downright pettiness of our contemporary hyper-textual culture; blogs, Facebook, YouTube, EBay, iTunes, malware, memes; a virtual world whose PayPal technology was created to download pornography faster, characterised by instantaneous gratification, cute videos of cats with moustaches, anonymous hacking and paltry revenge, where people complain about petty things on community Facebook pages and post pictures of number plates and shopping trolley/car park infringements. A greedy Tiddilick of sucking up vacuous content, where gangs of dash-cam scoot jockeys record their neighbour’s driving misdemeanours, where people bleat their daily moral panic as if their lives depended on a response and as Liam suggests in Listening to Maggot Brain for the First Time, “where outer suburbs feast /on the outer outer suburbs.” Our electronic culture is eating itself. Liam takes up the assault in Content where his parodying forbears left off, their grand parade of poetry cut short by cough syrup and cheap wine.
There’s also a sorrowful subtext running through Content, where in the face of being assaulted by the inanity, deep contradictions and hypocrisy of the internet, real meaningful cultural encounters are losing out, to be mourned in their slow retreat as concentration spans melt quicker than ice shelfs: “no d-day, all Dunkirk” laments Liam in ….of the Dead. Throughout many of the poems in Content are lines that postulate this ignominious retreat of critical, engaging, powerful and deeper cultural modalities:
“And somewhere literature is dying a death/of a thousand ‘splosions”
“Our dictionary is out of date”
“fading from my memory/ like the spine on a book”
“hoping the harvest/ reaps better poems”
“those pictures yellowed with vanity”
“while I sneak a peek at my neighbour’s/phonebook-thick teen vampire love novel”.
However, Content does not necessarily hearken back to some nostalgic pre-digital age of taking long walks past Camp Hill State School, watching Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch or listening to TDK cassette tapes of ABBA songs taped off the radio. Instead Liam urges the reader to harness those core Australian values of humility and humanity, developed in the suburbs and small country/beach towns of the 70s, 80s and 90s to counterpoint this dark web of a globalised economy, which makes cultural refugees out of us all.
Content is the kind of poetry that J. G Ballard would have written. A high rise of cultural anarchy and parody that has a splash of love in the middle of the battle to reach the top of the building. The tone is conversational, like talking to a mate at the pub, inviting the reader into a mixture of mix-tape memories, of sometimes simpler pleasures, youthful aspirations, love letters, nostalgic sporting moments, and meditation on where our identity goes to from here, in order to offset the rampage of economic rationalism that sees arts budgets slashed, the welfare state reduced, tax relief for the rich, pursuit of the almighty AAA credit rating, future prosperity for some not all, extraction industry subsidies for political donations and the mongrel country we are becoming that mauls the dispossessed.
Finally, I think Liam is ultimately suggesting that we shouldn’t be content at all to let everything we’ve worked for, everything we’ve gained in this society from slipping away. To let governments bring in tougher anti-demonstration laws, or retain your metadata to sift through for terror suspects. To mandatorily detain children in prison.
Content prepares us for the moment “when the networks go down [and)] we all look up/from our smartphones and ask – /what next?”
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