Louis Armand was born in Sydney (1972). Since 1994 he has lived and worked in Prague, in the Czech Republic, where he currently lectures on literary theory & art history in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University and at the University of New York, Prague. He is the editor of a literary broadsheet, PLASTIC (SEMTEXT), a member of the editorial board of Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge and Strange Attractions, and poetry editor of The Prague Revue. His poetry, essays, and short prose have appeared in numerous journals including Sulfur, Meanjin, HEAT, Antipodes, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review and Stand. He was awarded the Penola Festival's Max Harris Prize for Poetry (Adelaide 1997), and the Nassau Review Prize for Best Poem (New York 2000).
Publications
Seances Twisted
Spoon Press 1998
The Viconian Paramour x-poezie 1998
Synopticon (with John Kinsella) Mudlark 2000
La Synopticon (with John Kinsella) Mudlark 2000
Inexorable Weather Arc Publications, forthcoming
The Garden forthcoming
(a volume of experimental prose)
Anthologies
Infernal Cinders Kangaroo 1993
The Zone UNEASA 1994)
Catalyst Folio 2000
Calyx: 30 Australian Poets Paper Bark Press/Craftsman House 2000
eds. Michael Brennan and Peter Minter
Contact Louis: lazarus@ff.cuni.cz
Visit Louis’ Homepage http://www.louis-armand.com
Poetics
in regards to writing, it is only in a figurative
manner that we keep hold of an "original receipt"--a
form of accounting that is both abstract &
denotative, in that it comprises textual fields that
overlap & unsettle one another, & yet which remain
"organised" along a signifying trajectory ... there is
a sense in which writing demands a rethinking of the
aesthetic concepts, of integritas & consonantia. the
french choreographer and dramatist patrick bonte has
put it thus: "in order to avoid dispersal or
cacophony, all elements, at certain moments, must come
together in a signifying confrontation." not simply a
truism, this question of confrontation still remains
in need of experimental re-assertion, & is perhaps the
most pressing of all the questions facing the
avant-garde of today
POEMS
MONUMENT TO V. TATLIN
to calculate the amount of air in a given space—how it could be
situated, attached, positioned, dis-
played—the lifecycle of such a personal appliance, something
awkward, like a carelessly discarded shoe waiting
to be tripped over—the inauspicious movement through air,
flung side-ways, hinged between collapse
& flight—a succession of animated right-angles
imitating a procedure: how could it be born of anything but
precedent? some private recourse to first principles—a downfall
of the last phrase, as "inner necessity": something resembling
a noun & modifier, pitched in rapid
succession (but what is measure when no one part is discrete
from another?) the ever more removable "&"
not what it spoken but de-noted, thrusting them into it—sans
gages / of the nearest next ground "c’est à vous de le trouver"
(to dispel the illusion of itself, on such & such a day, when x
comes to take the place of y—not without warning—or a
parenthesis is opened & through it passes "the
disposable body"—a cause for / belief? &c—to write it
down & then commemorate: here, if for no other reason than
to relish its non sequitur—or it went un-
noticed (as they tried to tell the skein from the face?) i’ll
come back, there’s someone at the door—but who were you?
a window is lighting up in the sleep of the trained
mind—in the "prone" position, & however slight their
evidence; a gallery of ordinary things: street numbers, names (in
& out of sight, at any time eg. october, of that
particular year—the hollows cut into frost, is a question
of which birth full to its shores does not answer—counting back-
wards from the articles that belong to it—& carried them off
from that easy plunder site, archæology? or the
nonlight at the edge of the sea, stripped down
in place of the urgency (as before reversions)—& insular, as the
one flesh: but without nature’s aid
the "coup" itself could not have been accomplished
FROM THE LIFE OF INVERTIBRATES
(each type may thus be said to represent the environment in which it lives)
moving images on a strip of emulsion, or tape—this, too, we seem
to understand:
in ein anderes gebracht—not to experience
but transmit (medium bulk material), an "amalgam"
of different places: satellite dish
streetlight, a body spinning in
mid-air / in a sky that is narrow & jaundiced &
ugly (oh sensibility!)—the talk is of
climate control, sustain-
ability, ranging
into barely tonal regions: a glass tunnel that echoes with its own
immaculate noise, as here
looking through a periscope at the current
"state of affairs," what
is there to see? one single fish-
like type preserved in the living memory, with its
shrewd evolutionary habit
of creating stories out of anything—
the weather, or a scene, for example
inside an automat, passing time, as one intention after another falls
short of its mark
TO PIERRE SIMON, MARQUIS DE LAPLACE
an intelligence which, at a given instant,
would know all the forces by which
nature is animated, & the
respective situations of all the elements of which it is
composed
a door opening & closing & a light going on & off—their
function is not the panacea it seems to be—strange inter-
ludes, other doors not made to be opened, an isolated, un-
shaded electric bulb whose filament is about to expire at
any (given) moment—or a doorstop fixed to a door, to let it
open no more than 45 degrees (what does that mean?)
a calendar reminds him that it’s late already, or he’s alone
standing before a gauntlet of unrelenting symbols, one after an-
other—there’s no more room—falling upwards to thought
& keeping the outside close at hand (the scene itself is
constantly repeated, each time arousing an expectation of
more than it contains); that there are figures or were
leaves nothing to be shown, in the too-deliberate afterword:
what follows is as unrelated as what went before—a window
facing out over a narrow passageway, with stairs & broken
fire-alarm—the rooks raise an ominous sign: "no extraneous
details" (it’s not the uncertain game it at first appeared),
even if the objective is concealed & secretly watched-over
by some accessory before the fact: right down to the last laugh