Book – Confessions of a Minor Poet

Author: Phil BrownPublisher: Transit LoungeReviewer: Stephen Keim

Since late high school, Phil Brown has taken his poetry, seriously. One of his early poems was reproduced, that is, glassed in and part of the bottom of a surfboard that his mate made for him for Brown’s 18th birthday.

For large periods of his life, Brown worked at getting his verses on paper and sending them off to various publications in the hope that an editor would accept them. Some did but Brown received his fair share of rejection letters. Brown would quibble with “fair share”. He would suggest “unfair share” but he would probably accept that every aspiring and even established poet would feel the same about their works.

Confessions of a Minor Poet (“Confessions”) is a memoir covering Brown’s life from his days at Miami State High School to his placing the last full stop onto the last page of Confessions. Brown is happy to confess that Confessions is his fourth memoir and that he may be turning a life well lived into a life much written about.[1]   

Confessions is not just about the poetry. But it is the poetry that binds the story of a life together. Brown is self-deprecating in his times of greatest triumph. His self-deprecation is the source of much of his best humour. And Brown’s writing is always inclined to make the reader laugh.

Brown’s poetry has not been without success. He was friends with, and his poetry was respected by, greats such as Bruce Dawe and Les Murray. As well as the rejection slips, Brown received plenty of letters telling him that his work had been accepted for publication. He has been published in the best specialist poetry magazines and in less specialist publishers such as the Courier-Mail and the Age newspapers.

Brown is also a successful and respected journalist. As I mentioned in the review of Kowloon Kid, Brown will be known to many readers of this review as a former Arts Editor of the Courier-Mail and a columnist in the Brisbane News.  

Remarkably, however, from somewhere in his secondary school years until about 1990 when he was approaching his mid-thirties, Brown’s life teetered on the edge of chaos. For most of this time, he ate poorly and drank excessively and, very early on, he acquired a stomach ulcer. His poor physical and mental states led to Brown using many medications, both prescribed and non-prescribed. The prescription drugs gave rise to an addiction to benzodiazepine. Along with all of this, came a significant degree of social isolation.

It is a tribute to Brown’s talent and resilience that, despite all these factors ranged against his existence, let alone, success, Brown continued to surf waves; fall into and march out of media jobs; and maintained an output of journalistic writing and poetry of which many in both vocations would be proud.   

Writing Confessions is a pastime that every memoirist would dream of. Creating humour by poking fun at oneself and the world is easy when the writer has a good case that most things that could go wrong were going wrong. And what better for “a minor poet” than to be able to discuss the act of creation as well as to rehearse one’s favourite lines and stanzas across the pages of the memoir.

A lot of this went awry in the early nineties when Brown was approaching his 35th birthday. Brown weaned himself from all of his addictions; met and married the woman of his dreams; and started a happy family that is still going strong. Brown got offered better jobs; acquired renown as a journalist; and stopped telling editors to shove their job, somewhere inconvenient. Even worse, Brown stopped writing poetry for more than a decade.

At this point in the narrative, Confessions is no less interesting but it stops being a rollicking string of side-splitting disasters and becomes more of a well-written travel book. The reader ponders whether the unity has been lost; whether, maybe, she has picked up the other half-read book from the bedside table.

Then, the poetry, in the middle of Covid, comes back for Brown and he starts writing it again. Matt Foley, the Arts Minister’s warning that poetry is an incurable disease turns out to be true.

And the unity comes back. The grand plan of the book becomes evident. The reader realises her error. Confessions was never destined to be just about making light of addiction and hard times. It was always about the poetry and the struggles involved in writing it and finding people to share it with.          

Confessions is a triumph.

[1] Travels with My Angst (2004), a collection of travel stories; Any Guru Will Do (2006), about Brown’s search for meaning in life as a young man; and The Kowloon Kid: a Hong Kong childhood (2019) are the other memoirs. Brown’s poetry collections are Plastic Parables: selected poems (2006) and An Accident in the Evening (2001).