Richard James Allen on his collection, 'Minimum Correct Dosage'
Minimum Correct Dosage offers the image of a diaphanous mind, a disintegrating and reintegrating consciousness that has been through the washing machine of life and is now held in place by clothes pegs on a four-cornered clothesline, twirling in the breeze.
The sixteen poems of Minimum Correct Dosage make up a serial, floating meditation on the whimsical fragility of truth, beauty, tradition, form, inheritance, identity, narrative, and knowledge.
Minimum Correct Dosage may be pictured as a conceptual work of art in the mind of the reader, or manifested as an actual interactive installation, a physical work of art in a gallery, or it could be set up as a weekend hobby project with friends in a backyard.
Each poem should be printed on a separate tea towel, or article of clothing, and be hung up, four on each side of a hills hoist height-adjustable rotary clothes line. The clothesline should be able to be rotated by audience members or by natural and artificial currents of air.
(There could an additional clothes line, with pens and paper and clothes pegs, for participants’ own creative imaginings.)
Minimum Correct Dosage: 16 Poems
1. Sonnet Descending the Staircase
2. My Mind is a Dutch Tilt
3. Fun Fact
4. Dream Management as a Product Placement Poem
5. Hills Hoist Philosophy
6. Bush Philosophy: Rivers and Pools
7. Domestic Time Travellers
8. …Patsy Cline in the desert
9. / Under Lovely Curtains / Maya
10. On waking in the bed of a novelist
11. The Moment Keeper
12. Anangu is pronounced arn-ung-oo
13. Bodyland
14. What the Gargoyle Said
15. Grace at the Edges
16. The ocean’s lullaby