TEXT poetry

Dominique Hecq

Theory

for Mark Carthew

To hell with Lacan and his linguisteries, says one
Next time I hear Barthes I’ll puke, says the other

That makes bullfighting sound appealing
I’d rather take up ballroom dancing

        And so they do—after a fashion

It’s rhetoric in the eye and in the ear
with the expert conjugation of limbs
of fabulous form playing on the I
as guitar strings strum
and spangled jargon turns
to stunning sentences
with prepositional grace
and grand structure—all
in perfect rhyme and the present tense
they announce their favoured metaphors:
Paso Doble, Fox Trot
the Samba and Rhumba

they enhance their grammar
with fluid ornament. The mood

of this discourse is periphrastic and muscles up
into lyrics of glamorous freight

silken transitions resonate in the air

to meter and flair and love of words

Dominique Hecq is the author of The Book of Elsa (a novel), Magic, Mythfits and Noisy Blood (fiction), The Gaze of Silence, Good Grief and Couchgrass (poetry) as well as two short plays (One Eye Too Many, and Cakes & Pains performed in 2004). She won the Martha Richardson Medal for poetry (2006), and her poetry collection Out of Bounds was released by re.press in 2009. With Russell Grigg and Craig Smith, she co-authored Female Sexuality: The Early Psychoanalytic Controversies. She has published in the areas of literary studies, translation, creative writing and psychoanalysis. She is a Senior Lecturer in Writing at Swinburne University of Technology. DHecq@groupwise.swin.edu.au