from the editor's desk
Review of ‘Public. Open. Space.’ by Kate Larsen
Larsen, Kate. Public. Open. Space. Fremantle Press, 2023. RRP: $29.99, 112pp, ISBN: 9781760992163.
Ellie Fisher
Kate Larsen’s Public. Open. Space. is a conversation as much as it is a poetry collection. Through a series of hybrid lyric narratives over the course of the work, discussions are opened between writer and reader: on political power, on personal control, and on the ways in which these forms of restraint might—and can be—resisted.
Through free verse poems and a series of imagined digital windows, Larsen sets out not only to challenge her reader, but also herself, through the act of writing. In her opener to the collection, ‘Whose space is it, anyway?’—a foreword, an essay, a provocation for the volume as a whole—Larsen begins with an anchoring statement that breaches the walls of possibility: ‘I am a resident of the internet,’ she writes (11). This sentiment is a common enough one for the digital age, echoed by many. ‘We all live on the Internet now,’ states A.V. Marraccini (n.p.), as if the internet were a satellite in orbit around other, stranger, darker, matters of the world. To be present within this netted void—to be moored in the ether—is to propose a paradox: an error code running between the tangible, ‘real’ world, and the internet. In ‘Tense’, Larsen’s poetics move to bridge this space:
Calculate:
the tense
of <insert poem>.
The sum of:
always here (yet)
always here-then-gone.
The less-defined
by character
than word count:
(a)
plus (b)
plus (c). (28)
The idea of ‘always here-then-gone’ introduces the sharp, disruptive scratch of the glitch. In Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell considers the abutments and slippages that occur between these physical and digital spaces, and how, in moments where the two come into contact with one another, the resultant friction fires a sense of malfunction. ‘A glitch is an error,’ Russell suggests. ‘Glitches are difficult to name and nearly impossible to identify until that instant when they reveal themselves: an accident triggering some form of chaos’ (57). For Larsen, the event of the glitch brings with it the idea of liberative disruption. It is political and personal: disorderly, but also deeply (dys)functional. The digital world, both her ‘means’ and her ‘muse’ in terms of writing practice (11), functions as both a frame and a mirror. It works as a means with which to connect with others, but also functions as an intricate series of questions about what one is permitted—or, in many cases, not allowed—to post about. This dynamic holds tension throughout the collection, evidenced in the many poems that play with polysemy:
Connected.
(Dis)connected.
We are plugged
and (un)plugged.
We are waiting
in the dark.
We are a part.
We are apart.
We are (a)part. (‘Connected’, 78)
This layering of conceivable connotations—are these lines heavy with meaning, or blindly offering binaries of possible answers?—gifts the reader a sense of the nervous hum of the glitch: a constantly revolving state of anxious electricity.
In addition to this sense of online (dis)orientation, Larsen also navigates the particular (un)settlements of a colonised space. As an Anglo-Australian writer inhabiting the position of poet-in-residence at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, she struggles to articulate her ‘discomfort and [eventual] adjustment’ (20) to Hong Kong—politically, digitally, materially; she is sensitive to the complex colonial inflections present within her role, and tentative in her writing, too—with ‘no appetite to write yet another white author’s colonial (mis)interpretation’ (18). Through this nuance, and in observations of bias and positionality, Larsen’s work avoids many—but not all—of the pitfalls which have, so obviously, if with a little too much self-conscious self-awareness—been carefully avoided. Despite these precautions, Larsen’s position as a white outsider grounds her poetry within a certain estranged Otherness, nested within that of the plural dichotomy between real and digital, which never quite reaches a point of direct confrontation in Public. Open. Space., which is an unfortunate malfunction—a bug, if you will—within the collection as a whole.
Just as digital spaces are boxed by the systemic structures that facilitate them, so, too, are the users which populate them. While the glitch offers a kind of luxurious ambiguity—even providing the illusion of anonymity—this promise is as fleeting and mercurial as the glitch itself. As Russell argues, ‘on- and offline, the boxes we tick, the forms we complete, the profiles we build—none are neutral. Every part of ourselves we mark with an X’ (57). For Larsen, the letter ‘X’ serves as a variable; a placeholder that can be read multiple ways: as an exit button on a digital window, or as a proxy for a universal user, an open invitation for anyone. In ‘Write Fault’, she employs an ‘X’ as personifying the state of glitch: an error code that runs across multiple lines, both corrupted and corrupting:
[X] has encountered a problem.
[X] could not read.
[X] could not be read.
An attempt was made to log on by [X]. (74)
In these unfolding attempts at reconstituting order, these grazes against regulation and uniformity, Larsen’s ‘X’ becomes a signifier for something larger: it exemplifies the activism woven into the poetics of Public. Open. Space. ‘The system,’ states the last of the many imagined digital windows in the text, ‘needs to be shut down’ (103). If only the reader could reach out, click the ‘X’, log out of the program. But is that even possible? It’s a question which is almost impossible to answer, just as the internet both is and isn’t a reflective ontology of our human-ness, but it’s one which Larsen dares to ask—and, to a degree, answer.
Public. Open. Space. remains stubbornly physical, paper and ink. Yet Larsen’s poetics—and politics—span the gap between the tangible and digital worlds in a way that embodies the inherent strangeness of the glitch. In so doing, her collection manages to resist many of the traps writing about the internet can entail. It flickers in and out of itself like a line of corrupted computer code; a nervous, electric rhythm.
Works Cited
Marraccini, A.V. ‘The Built Environment Makes Me Horny: Bachelard, The Internet Space, and Ruin.’ Soft Punk Mag, 13 December 2021, https://www.softpunkmag.com/criticism/the-built-environment-makes-me-horny.
Russell, Legacy. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. Verso, 2020.
Ellie Fisher is a writer. Her work has appeared in print and online in Westerly Magazine, Pulch Mag, Gem zine, Night Parrot Press, and Swim Meet Lit Mag, amongst others. Ellie is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at The University of Western Australia. She splits her time between Kinjarling and Boorloo.
