Kate Middelton’s recently published book length poem Television (Giramando) is an emotional survey of the poet’s tv watching history. Both in its form and compositional approach, the poem owes much to A.R. Ammons’s Garbage. As Middleton writes in the book’s notes, “Re-reading Garbage, I was struck by the fact that in taking garbage as his subject Ammons could include everything. As I began to write about television, I wondered if the same might be true of this subject.”
Television, like garbage, does include everything, however, everything has to pass through the very specific medium of television to be included, with its unique peculiarities and predilections. Divided into thirty-three cantos (Inferno, Purgatorio or Paradiso?) of unrhymed couplets, Television embraces and investigates these peculiarities; at times the poem prosecutes tv’s preference for scandal and the sentimental, it’s (corrupting) influence and ability to distort (particularly in the poet’s teenage memories of watching Beverly Hills 90210 and Twin Peaks, “the autopsy / on Laura an autopsy on girlhood”), while at other moments extols it’s virtues, however flawed: “television, / you are spiritual: teach attention and inattention in equal measure”. Notice Middleton’s deft use of the colon, borrowed from Ammons, as a means of “linking the disparate but coexisting, and so staving off completion”, as Mark Ford wrote.
Kate Middleton is a Melbourne based poet whose collections include Fire Season, which was awarded the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry in 2009, Ephemeral Waters and Passage. In 2020 she was runner up for the Australian Book Review’s Calibre Essay Award.
From “Television”
6.
I want to celebrate Astro, the robot boy I loved, his Pinocchio
ache, a moment’s solace that time he found a robot girlfriend:
incandescent eyes at last find eyes to beam right back: and him
fallen in, into, unprogrammed love: but soon the complication
revealed, its violence: his robot girlfriend not just another robot but,
also, a bomb, the bomb, the one he needs to find, defuse, and his
girlfriend sacrificed: a higher pathos: so: her body on a table,
disassembled, redeemed, everyone but her saved, (a celebration,)
except the robot boy and his lonely deathlessness: did he understand
time’s passage in a different way, its metronomic tick echoing
in his ever-childish body?: did he understand the replaceable,
Argonautic parts of himself as his own, as bodily integrity,
autonomy?: for all his griefs, there’s that final shot—a wink,
a playful secret: Astro tells us, his audience, his only confidantes,
he kept her legs, which, non-explosive, did not require
sacrifice: and he caresses his own thighs, calves, and we
understand it: her legs, shared legs, now his legs, no rejection
of the transplant, no foreign tissue, instead a flawless
interchangeability, the comfort of this particular
inheritance incalculable: I recapped the scene to the boy
at the video store counter, our own private form of payment
for my late fee, as if it were just gross and not wondrous
as well: and, to me this transplant only feels complete
years later, its longing for closeness, the intimate fact of being,
at last, one being, like me once telling my lover I want to feel with
your skin: Astro usurping this longing, Astro the only one
who ever really felt it
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Author: Thomas Moody
