I Saw the Best Memes of My Generation

Judges' comments

I Saw the Best Memes of My Generation alludes to the famous opening of Ginsberg’s Howl but pastiche is not the poetic mode in Dominic Symes’ debut collection. Like Ginsberg’s, Symes’ work is encompassing in its themes, ranging from love and freedom, high art and pop culture, to contemporary concerns like climate change and cancel culture. But there is none of Ginsberg’s rant in Symes; the intelligent balance and wry humour, his quirky and refreshing way of coupling big issues with mundane things, and the controlled measures and lines laced with irony ensure a voice that is original, arresting, funny but also deep, and entertaining in a Billy Collins way.

Robert Frost’s maxim ‘No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader’ might be Symes’ poetic method. One sets out reading a Symes poem never knowing where it is leading. The poem becomes a walk through the everyday, and random thoughts, ideas, impressions and events that happen along the way are amalgamated in a kind of collage. Rauschenberg, Streeton, the Rolling Stones, Mary and Percy Shelley, Philip Larkin, Rilke, Cavafy, Paul Simon are strange but fitting bedfellows here. This is not name-dropping but testifies to the depth and breadth of Symes’ intelligence and the inclusiveness of his poetics, as well as the porousness of borders in his work. There are unpredictable thematic shifts and spatial turns, especially in longer poems like ‘Greta Thunberg Ode’, which opens with ‘how big is your carbon footprint?’ and wanders to the memory of being ‘a real Mowgli figure / of inner suburban Adelaide’, to Mel Gibson being cancelled, e-cigarettes, ‘the golden age of capitalism’ and in this ‘36-degree day’ watching Greta Thunberg clips and then reading the newspaper ‘which almost no one my age / or younger / is reading’. These are poems to savour and follow, their meandering, beguiling lines, handled with dexterity and an unerring ear for rhythm, revealing at every turn startlingly fresh perceptions, memorable imagery, and delightful, funny moments of profound insight.