Marty Hiatt is a Berlin based poet and translator who runs the intrepid Baulk Press. Originally from Melbourne, Hiatt’s work keeps alive the correspondence between the experiments in French poetry of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and those taking place in Australian poetry today, exemplified by his great long-poem “The Manifold”. His translations include works by Philippe Soupault, Apollinaire’s “Vendémiaire” and Nathalie Quintane’s contemporary masterpiece Tomatoes.
Hiatt’s own poetry is infused with the spirit of those writers he translates, who seem to give him, as Soupault said of Apollinaire, “permission to go faster and father”. In “Transit of Venus”, discordant images crash against one another, creating a kind of junk energy: both energizing and enervating. “Possible arcs are continually amassing”, but they are of “almond milk or intratelluric menses”. Engines and alien dialects lull either the monsoon season or the speaker, or both. The effect is a curated disorientation (“I look down but not back”) that embodies precisely the defining features of our postmodern selves: we haven’t simply “had enough of the old world” but are addicted to the new world we continue to fashion around us, a world that causes us to be at once both perpetually exhilarated and permanently exhausted.
Transit of Venus
standing on top of the helicopter counting
the bristles of my toothbrush
i look down but not back
for with precision instruments we’re raked
a vision of my next career move pins my eyes
but it turns out to be just another thundercloud
to hack through like one more enemy toad
gliding past black n red wreckages
in whose erstwhile spans we’re serried
as one — whether baggage attendant pilot or stag beetle
we kiss one another’s lofty bitumen with creaking lips
my lust for diesel is becoming
a problem n water’s too hard
though other possible arcs are continually amassing
like almond milk or intratelluric menses
that help me through the dilation of the monsoon season
lulled by so many engines n alien dialects
about the garbage press
the circular koan foreseen by the oracle composes itself
trips on a splattered helmet
pronouncing radio static that implores me to return
to my neglected duties to world’s best practice rooftop dining,
silt deposits n jubilant mastication
mammoth concerns devour one another in the lagoon
i’ll have to leave the slack-water revert to aerobic status
even as the advancing front engulfs what little
oxygen i’d extracted n carried through
suns set at 9am
after peak hour broke its banks
damaging conveyors n other infrastructure
it is time to pick up my thighs
from the dry-cleaners. no cash
so steam torture in its stead
platoons flush by too quick to indict
though silken families stranded on the pontoon
compliment my figure, at once
offering their condolences n implying
the loss was worth it all told
but their countenances turn with my shoulder
in the application window tread on the
heads of the buoyant while
distilling new perfumes to compliment
the scum of enslavement
i frankly didn’t lack a post (i’ve blades) but
to run with the exhumed midst manifolds
lengthens the spinal casing improves bee fertility
n at time of writing no synthetic substitute
has yet appeared on the open market
then so spruced, break left, set course for
high-voltage transmission lines
for the great axis has at last been precisely determined.
they’re winking as adult themes in children’s books
but to whom? so am i:
not even the blind could miss em
Marty Hiatt’s latest collection of poems The Months Of (2022) is available now through Baulk Press.
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Author: Thomas Moody
