#stu hatton

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'ticker', a poem from my latest book, In the Not-too-distant Present, available in paperback & ebook (PDF). The book will be launched on 2 December at the Taproom, Castlemaine.

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Very happy to have a poem in the Australian Poetry Anthology 2024. Many thanks to guest editors Andy Jackson and Marcella Polain, and to all at Australian Poetry.

This year’s anthology showcases many poets who (like myself) live in regional Victoria. Great to read fresh work from friends, idols, and (to me at least) some intriguing new voices.

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oddly-familiar trickster-deity pumps the halo doof stick that’s always just out of reach

a Rainbow Serpent-inspired poem for the Moral Highground Crew et al, with apologies to Luke & Peachy for sampling from the genius of their Rainbow bingo cards

 in memorium JL

  how a doof chocked with gnomic tripper-traps for wholesale avant-garde mind-laundering suffers a brush with the mainstream is anyone’s impromptu welcome to country with alleged MD caps’ PMA shadow sown anew to make no waste given there’s no such thing as no such thing in a post-truth paean to science dancing in labcoats to study the playground stage’s hypersamsaric vicinity sneaking a selfie with dude dressed as Trump in a burqa pulling yoga asanas what the schlock was that mankini thinking doing burnouts in a motorised couch the gradients not so conducive to chummy cops dancing on stilts was that the piratical dealer wearing a feather or the one selling nose spoons his camp a fort eminently patched from campervans, annexes & armoured tents with no (obvious) turret for semi-automatic bubble-cannon but in the evershifting gallery I sipped bodymind’s slowburn how the air hovers like the lines for Sat morning coffee at the Psybus how even a naked hippie gets his sleep on a handheld screen that may yet promise consciousness like a random act of kindness trapped in a ball pit presumably imprisoned by mushies of the effortlessly deflating giant ‘not a lifesaving device’ flamingo orgy I remember zero did I really meditate in the lap of the forest overlooking the festival fluking a cheeky snap of some rare extent of the towering universe filtered through churning sub-bass soil frequencies a death in the family something we all have to tearfully dance through or coping idiosyncratically e.g. riding a rainbow log to devour pulp sci-fi novel as the DJ to end all DJs drops her ‘ketamine’s for beginners’ hellspawn apocalypse plum in the eye of the dancefloor but our friends will ever be everywhere thus the cork of the age of compassion clenched between our teeth about to launch us from this glassless hall of mirror-realms into some other beginningless, endless non-queue

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sleeping/waking

while asleep I am wicked; upon waking

                                           I try to make amends

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Glitching has been reviewed by Rosalind McFarlane in Colloquy.

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Review Short: Stu Hatton's Glitching

David Dick's review of Glitching for Cordite Poetry Review.

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Glitching launch: author speech & set-list

Thanks to everyone who made it to the launch of my book Glitching a few weeks back. The speech I gave at the launch is reproduced below, along with a set-list of the poems read at the launch (with links to online versions of the poems, where possible). You can also read Josephine Scicluna's launch speech for the book over at the Rochford Street Review.

A paperback copy of Glitching can be ordered from here, or downloaded as a PDF (for free, or pay what you feel) from here.

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It’s difficult to trace the beginnings of this book, where it emerged from, where it began. It was and is a series of files, of Word documents and PDFs, of pages, of text, of characters, of fragments, of particles. It became an obsessive process, a work, and a network of gradual and sudden shifts in its unfolding. It was a space in which poems could be placed and shaped and reshaped. Transformations took place, and, I hope, continue to take place in it. It is now settled in a sense, but it remains unsettled.

  Thank you so much, Jo, for being here to give Glitching its send-off into the world. Thanks to everyone at Readings, especially events manager Christine Gordon. And thank you all for being here. It really means a lot to me.

  I’d especially like to thank my family and friends for the part they’ve played in making this book possible, and in keeping me sane (but not too sane!) In particular I’d like to thank Monica, Mum & Dad, and of course, Arthur, who’s now 8 months’ old and is hopefully sleeping at the moment, and not giving the babysitter any trouble! Glitching is dedicated to my brother, Mark, who’s in London. He and his wife Kam are soon to become parents themselves. I wish them well. Glitching is, in a way, a gesture of gratitude to Mark for being who he is.

  Special thanks to Matt Hetherington and Paul Fearne for their generous and helpful advice on the manuscript. I’d also like to acknowledge their initiative and good humour. And thanks to Rory O’Donnell, the graphic designer who created the images that appear on the cover, and kindly gave permission for them to be used for this purpose. However, I’m the one responsible for the overall design of the book, so any issues with the design are my fault, not his!

  Thank you to the poets who allowed their work to be adapted or remixed to create poems which appear in the book: Dana Guthrie Martin, Jill Jones, Michael Farrell and Kristen Bissaillon. And thank you to the editors of the journals, websites and anthologies that first published many of the poems which now find a second home in Glitching.

  There are too many names to name here and now, but thank you to everyone else I’ve thanked in the acknowledgements, for your advice, encouragement, inspiration, friendship, and beautiful gestures along the way. And apologies to anyone I’ve forgotten.

  I’d also like to thank the students I’ve had over the years, for allowing me opportunities to practice paying attention, patience and being present. And thank you to my teachers and mentors, some of whom are still living and breathing, while some are not. Since I never held a public launch for my first book, How to be Hungry, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the late, great Dorothy Porter for the significant role she played in making that first book what it is.

  But back to this book, Glitching. I should point out that when I chose the title, I was only dimly aware of the meaning of ‘glitching’ in a video game context. According to Wikipedia, ‘Glitching is an activity in which a person finds and exploits flaws or glitches in video games to achieve something that was not intended by the game designers.’ I guess there’s a kind of parallel here with what I’m trying to do with language, with text, with poetry. But on the other hand, I wouldn’t say I’m trying to do things with language that language wasn’t intended to do. And that’s partly because I wouldn’t necessarily frame what language is, or how it came to be, in terms of intention—but I won’t go into that here! However, I do believe in attempting to write, and to read, in ways that push language to its limits in order to test the limits of the possible, the thinkable, the speakable, the imaginable. Perhaps these are impossible tasks, but as Gertrude Stein said, ‘If you can do it, then why do it?’

  Glitching is a new book in the sense that it’s just been published, but to me it is already ageing; it has aged. It is on its way to dissolution and passing away. Some of Glitching’s poems were begun several years before How to be Hungry was published … so, in the mid-late 2000’s. Indeed, many of the poems in Glitching are from earlier times, lost worlds, trips that were taken many years ago—including a trip to Europe with Monica in 2008 (the poems ‘amsterdam’ and ‘avignon’, for example, derive from that trip). Some of the situations, some of the methods of composition, some of the concerns in Glitching seem almost ancient to me now. But I’ve elected to retain them in the book, to allow them to be read for whatever they are. They are no longer mine … in fact, they were never mine … And now, if anything, they are yours, if they are anyone’s. Although, yes, I do take responsibility for them, I will shoulder the blame for them. But they cannot be owned; perhaps they cannot be contained in a book, because they’re too unsettled, too ephemeral, too glitchy.

  If anything, I see this as a book of transformations, of becomings and unbecomings. I’ve been holding it for some time, trying not to grasp it too tightly. And now I let it go …

    Set-list (poems read at the launch)

'the 6-star experience'

'outrovert'

'departures, arrivals'

'no better hold'

'waterclock'

'fractalina'

'rims'

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the poem has no self

is unsatisfactory

& impermanent

what a relief!