Dallas Angguish - Poetic Style

Poetic Style

In the eighties and nineties Dallas Angguish performed at many spoken word events in Australia garnering a reputation as one of Australia's most enigmatic spoken word performers. A recording of his spoken word piece "The Pugilist", set to music by composer Luke Monsour, was played on Australia's national youth radio broadcaster Triple J. Angguish's poetry is in the tradition of queer poetics initiated by Walt Whitman and consolidated by Allen Ginsberg, a tradition that foregrounds the colloquial voice, a first person, personal point of view and the expression of an erotic and mystical vision.

Angguish's work is often highly evocative and self-reflexive, as in the passage below:

I am part libertine, part priest. I have dual yearnings. On the one hand I like solitude and introspection. I am a sky-gazer whose goals are universal. I crave the freedom of simplicity. On the other hand I am drawn to the communion of skin. I yearn to abandon myself, and thereby become free, in physical delight. These two impulses have often been at odds with each other. I struggle to find a balance.

Much of Dallas Angguish's poetry, written primarily to be spoken, deals with themes of eroticism, alienation and mysticism. The excerpt below, from his poem 'Embrace', is a good example:

As I walk away from your embrace I feel the cold shadow of your pupils falling on the small of my back where I have that tattoo which is an emblem against you and you fire those daggers from your eyes which embed themselves like anchors under the skin of my shoulder-blades and hook me to you with long tethers that are desire not wanting to let go, that are thin streams of poison, and when, in the night as I try to arm myself against you by whispering the long and perfect names of all of my Buddhist saints, you slip your arm under my head like a pillow and your breath comes in close to me like a breeze which has on it all the saltiness of sex and the sea...

This passage illustrates Angguish's use of the Beat Generation inspired flowing stream-of-consciousness style he deployed in a series of poems that fuse the paradigms of eroticism and (Tantric Buddhist) mysticism. Angguish spent five years as a Buddhist monk and is still committed to Buddhist practice. Another example from his poem 'The Tempo of Shamans' makes the fusion of these twin concerns in Angguish's work explicit:

Your rap pounds on my heart like on an animal skin drum with the deep rhythm of thunder over oceans, that are the bass clarinets of our most holy thoughts, and each consonant that leaps from your tongue is a missile of enticement that heat-seeks-out my longing for you and inflames it and as your syntax evolves into ideas I feel drunk and need to close my eyes and invoke you with my mind's eye and in that picture your rap is a ballad that has tones like wet silk and you are a fierce troubador, who holds a hard hand over my mouth to keep me quiet and listening, who chants with incessant power, words that are waves of erotic assault that bring me close to that precipice that is petit morte that is silence and the dark void, that is a window into the true nature of things, and as the blitzkrieg of your thumping voice hits me square in the chest I feel explosions of ecstacy that shake my place in space and time and whir the electrons of my being into a whizz fizz sort of a thing that is just like being a mushroom cloud of mass destruction