Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Oscar Schwartz, Giramondo Publishing, $24.00.
An interesting concept of this collection of poems is that it was written for friends on the internet over a five-year period. It’s a debut compilation by a poet whose easy, comical and deceivingly inexperienced poems connect with the virtual realities of the internet.
These friends are spread across the globe and the poet had not met most of them, and was not likely to either. Schwartz, a poet and researcher based in Darwin, is concerned about the intersection between technology and culture.
As Schwartz notes: “to write many of the poems in this book I invented alternate personas who lived on the internet, made friends, got into arguments. The poems are thus spoken by and convey the actions of persons living parallel lives to mine. This doesn’t make the book less sincere, but just shows the sincerity can be an act of creation rather than confession. This is an idea that we’re becoming more familiar with – as we increasingly use our devices to communicate – but is also rarely celebrated or encouraged as a poetic act”.
With the backdrop of a digital age, the book discusses pop culture, relationships, anecdote and story, philosophy and suburban upbringing. What we need from technology, or poetry, differs for every user or reader, but in the languages that describe this terrain, Schwartz is a bright, compelling guide with insight.
It’s also acceptable to just celebrate the simple beauty of lines in ‘how to write an e book of poetry’.
The Honeymoon Stage begins with an intriguing epigraph, “The I, You and We in this collection do not belong to me, but came into being inside the boundless and invisible space in which we now spend much of our time”. The ‘I, You and We’ are section titles of the collection.
