Back in 2021 when the first Poetic City Festival happened, someone or someones put up a bunch of PROSAIC CITY stickers. No one knew who it was, or most likely nobody cared. Recently, one of the organisers of a Poetic City event asked me if I was responsible for the stickers. I can understand why I was asked such a question. Can it be said, over the last thirty years, that you have even had a fringe arts festival in Canberra if it has not been targeted by Anthony Hayes?

I love things like PROSAIC CITY. I would love to claim all things of this kind as mine. But it would be outrageously megalomaniacal to do so–which is, perhaps, more than enough reason to do it. I recall a few years back a poster I stumbled upon in Lyneham. It had been modified, or so it seemed to me. I loved both the original poster and its modification.

Could I have made this poster and forgotten about it? What’s not to like? An observation and a response not only in kind, but itself a modification of another original through displacement. A détournement, as it were. We all die. Hard.

In the 2000s someone(s) graffitied a line from Arthur Rimbaud in an alleyway in Downer: ‘Now Is THE TIME OF THE ASSASSINS!–RIMBAUD’.

« Voici le temps des Assassins ». Murderers. The drug addled ones of the original poem. Did I know the people who had painted Rimbaud’s words in translation? Could I have slept walked through the paint job? A stoned Dervish whirling?

For me, this is the sad truth of poetry in Canberra today. It is marginal, appearing in the pores of the city, often anonymous and unacknowledged. It appears in spite of the city; occasional backchat to the monologue of advertising and state propaganda. And it is this truth that seems only to be partially understood by the organisers of the Poetic City festival, in their rush to mainstream poetic rebellion under the tutelage of the ACT government.

The intent of the creator(s) of the PROSAIC CITY sticker is relatively clear, if somewhat needlessly esoteric. It is obviously a declaration, a statement of fact. To the question, is Canberra a poetic city they answer clearly in the negative. Perhaps we can gain some insight into what they mean by PROSAIC CITY if we ask ourselves a related question.

What is a poetic city? It is far from clear. If such a thing exists on present-day planet Earth, these cities are poetic despite the best efforts of their chief managers, whether politician or capitalist. For instance, some towns in France comes to mind–those parts of the country that recently erupted in righteous violence not just against the cops and the state and ruling class they protect, but everything they represent. These rioters are poets whether they say it in words or deeds:

Masters of wealth and commodities, hoarders of fame, fortune, and power, you are on notice. As our world burns you will burn with it.

I would suggest that the person or persons who pasted up PROSAIC CITY stickers around Canberra back in 2021 would agree that Paris in flames is poetry whereas Paris with murderous cops at work is largely prose.

There is no doubt that Canberra is a PROSAIC CITY. Apart from all its many advantages, derived chiefly from its geographical setting, Canberra is demonstrably home to a high concentration of the prose–in the pejorative sense–of everyday Australian life. Here be the bloated federal bureaucracy in all its mundane glory and horror. Canberra, capital of Australia, mate, late of Afghanistan and the Intervention, more recently beating the war drums with China and Russia. Home to not only politicians and most of the federal bureaucracy and their various shitshows, but also home to Canberra’s own infinite regress of politicians and bureaucracy, which is to say the so-called “self-government” of the ACT replete with its very own bevy of politicians and bureaucrats and business associates like Geocon and Molonglo, all of whom suck upon the taxpayer’s tits. Bureaucracies within bureaucracies, consultancy upon consultancy, an infinity of contractors. Canberra begins to appear like something out of a Borges story, or perhaps a Lovecraft one, with all the terror this implies, though with little of the mind melting bizarreries–unless you’re on drugs. Which we Canberrans all are, in any case.

All this, despite the best efforts of its original designer, namesake of a lake: “I have planned a city that is not like any other in the world. I have planned it not in a way that I expected any government authorities in the world would accept. I have planned an ideal city—a city that meets my ideal of the city of the future.”

Walter Burley Griffin’s utopian plans for Canberra almost immediately met the petty bourgeois narrowmindedness and mean spirit of the federal government of Australia of the day. That Griffin believed the Australian government would help him realise his utopian vision speaks as much to his naivety as it does to the times in which he held such fancies. Initially the plans were cut back due to the artificial need for Australia to participate in the slaughter of the First World War. Since then, the development of Canberra has always been subservient to such needs that were never truly the desires of a majority. Wars and interventions and corporate welfare and such like. Such is Canberra’s premier reason for being, to write, organise and dispense the dull and violent prose of the state.

If there is such a thing as a poetic Canberra, it is that other Canberra, the one that exists in the pores of the city. Surrealist Canberra or Underground Canberra or Alternative Canberra or Fringe Canberra or Anti-Canberra or whatever Canberra. Is this the poetic city that the organisers of the present festival in question are trying to conjure? If so, admirably. Now tell me, how does one get urban riots onto the program? We did it once, in 1996.

I feel that the organisers and participants of the Poetic City festival have missed an opportunity. Much like PROSAIC CITY, ‘Poetic City’ is, implicitly, a claim or an argument that Canberra is or could be a poetic city. Unfortunately, the term here mostly plays the role of an advertising brand that distinguishes Poetic City from similar and different events organised under the financial tutelage of the ACT government and business interests. Indeed, with the clearly advertised support of the ACT government, Poetic City embraces the “CBR” brand that local government uses to sell Canberra to itself and the world at large. At best it is one logo among others, at worst an outright lie.

Perhaps this explains why the organisers of the Poetic City festival have even appropriated the PROSAIC CITY sticker, reducing any and all possible criticism it contains to naught. Now it does able service advertising one of the festival’s sessions. A suitable revenge one might think. You would hope at least some acknowledgment of its provenance or even possible meaning. But no. PROSAIC CITY has been tamed and, what’s more, made productive. Surely branded T-Shirts and posters are in the pipeline.

Given the suffocating reality of capitalism, it is costly to be a poet or an artist or what have you. Most artists don’t live off their art, even if they are encouraged to achieve this apparently lofty height. It is held out as a vague promise to those who most work at their art. But poetry that becomes work ceases to be poetry. This is what it means to let the prose of this world dominate. Whether you want to or not, one is forced to become a brand, become a means of selling oneself. Whether for poetry or the prose of paying the rent.

We must learn again how to bite the hands that feed. Surely our own, most of the time, in slapstick fashion. And no doubt those awfully tasty hands of the state, with all its lovely, lovely moneys, is a tempting snack. The main problem here is that there is usually a catch. For instance, the funding that the Poetic City festival gains from the ACT government translates into the latter using the former for propaganda purposes: come to Canberra CBR and consume our fine cultures and foods…

Today, the vast rift between the obscenely wealthy and all the rest of us who make their wealth has once again become plain to see. This time, though, the world is burning, and we wonder if we have left things too late. What’s more, no one seriously denies that it was capitalism set free across the planet that has brought us to this point.

A poetic city will only be made once we accept that we must take aim at the prose of this world, which is to say capital, capitalism, climate change and all of its other pointlessly destructive avatars. We must refuse the prosaic reality of the city, not daub it with paint and call it poetry. The project of a poetic city is still underway, inscribed in the shadows and byways of the prose of this world. Now is the time to make the implicit, explicit.

The poetic city remains to be built.

Artists, poets, philosophers! One more effort, like a spider spinning in the moon light.

Anthony Paul Hayes
Canberra, 2023