Love is the New Hate by Sean M. Whelan
My friend is reading Sean’s poem, ‘A Dick of Her Own’, and she thinks it’s hilarious; ‘this is really my kind of thing’, she says.
I guess I like it too. It’s curiously romantic:
"One gin soaked evening while you were sitting together on a couch in a gay bar watching gay porn on a big gay screen, you told her this. ‘I know you’re not my girlfriend but one time I’d like to kiss you just to see what it tastes like.’
And she said, ‘Well I guess the taste would depend on what I’ve been eating, or what brand of lipstick I’m wearing at the time. Or,’ and she held up her finger for the final point, ‘it might also depend on which boy I kissed last.’ And hearing that felt like a midget punching you in the heart, so you dropped the subject and you both stared back at the big gay dicks in the big gay porn."
My friend likes that poem and I think she would like to be that girl. I’m not sure if I’d rather be the amorous pretender, the midget, or one of the guys on screen.
Love is the new hate. White is the new black. Let’s leave our insecurities at the door. Let’s be close, let’s watch gay porn together in a spirit of undefined companionship. There are ten poems in the book, poems that are dedicated (I think) to love instead of hate, freedom instead of possession, confusion and frustration in preference to toeing the line. Are they poems? If they are poems, the lines are very long. They are half-way between poems and very short stories. Sometimes they are just a series of points:
"The moon landing was faked.
You keep my scarf by your bed knowing my scent is caught there.
Humans once slept standing up there.
David Letterman is a robot."
The poems are intimate and absurd, surrealist in a postmodern kinda way. They don’t explain or barrack for anything, which can be alternately disappointing or thought-provoking. But there is almost always an edge of wit:
"Every evening at dusk she climbs onto the roof. She tells her housemates that she’s meditating. But she secretly reads the day’s news events to the evening sky.
So that God can learn from his mistakes."
Sean is a master of the killer one-liner--a capacity that may have been honed in the fearsome dog-eat-dog bloodbath of Melbourne spoken word. The flip-side to this, as it turns out, is often a lack of structure. If we are to believe the poems, perhaps this chaos is apt: Sean has little idea how to structure his poems, just as he has little idea how to structure his life. So maybe it’s a willful characteristic: who needs structure? FUCK structure. Maybe.
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Total Cardboard caught up with Sean in one of Melbourne’s most prestigious gay bars. In response to our probing he scribbled the following thoughts on a napkin:
What is poetry?
I always seem to get poetry and irony mixed up. And sometimes I even get pottery and ironing confused too. You should see how dirty my hands get on laundry day. Sometimes it just seems,
to be,
about,
line,
breaks.
Poetry is the flickering ‘O’ I can see from my bedroom window in the ‘PORCHSE’ sign above the old silo on Victoria St that morse-coded me for a couple of days last week before being fixed. Poetry is not my diary, or yours. Poetry is a craft, or at least it should be. It doesn’t happen by accident, or if it does it’s an accident that the poet noticed thereby giving the accident a second chance; life. Dr Frankenstein was a poet. Ears and brains are sensitive creatures; let’s look after the little critters.
What are your views on the Melbourne spoken-word scene?
Huge, pulsating, glowing thing. Wonderful to be able to call it a scene at all, we’re probably the only state in Australia that has one. But… in a minor state of crisis at the moment I believe. Clint Greagan (publisher of Salt Lick Quarterley) wrote in Deadline recently that he thinks there are actually too many readings in Melbourne and I’m inclined to agree. Readings should be real events, lately I’ve seen a lot of readings that are tired and lonely. There are some really amazing writers and performers kicking their stuff all over Melbourne, but I’ve seen way too many of them doing it to tiny, tiny audiences. I don’t think I’m being unkind when I say a lot of readings are averaging only 10–20 people, if that. These writers and audiences deserve better. And I agree with Clint who believes that this is a result of too many readings and people taking regular events for granted. There’s nothing quite like being in a packed room listening to a talented reader and having the audience riding every corner and curve. I’d like to see more of that and less of readings that feel a little like a wake. How this is to be achieved, I’m really not sure. I think maybe a little more savvy marketing perhaps, poetry is still a pretty dirty word to most people.
(originally published in Total Cardboard, a bi-monthly review mag out of Melbourne, Australia)
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Love is the New Hate is and one of four new poetry collections published by Hit & Miss, as part of their emerging poets series. The other three are:
Emilie Zoey Baker, She Wore The Sky On Her Shoulders
Dan Disney, The Velocity Of Night Falling
Angela Costi, Dinted Halos
In Melbourne, Australia, They are available from Readings Bookshop, Carlton; Brunswick St. Bookshop, Fitzroy; and Collected Works Bookshop, City.
Hit & Miss Publications:
P.O. Box 272, Brunswick East, Victoria 3057
Phone: 03-9380-2528
Contact: Kevin Brophy
