Each month, we publish an original poem, written in response to a work of contemporary art. This month, poet Nam Le chose collossus / eating a mountain / and then the oceans / and then the earth / and then the stars / and then the universe / and then time / and then its legs / and then its body / and then its soul / and then its butt / and then its peepee / heehee (2025) by Jason Phu.
It’s quite the title. Influenced by cartoons, comics and chan buddhist imagery, the Sydney-based artist’s paintings approach the world with a childlike sense of the absurd. At any turn, you can find Phu staging punch-ups under grinning dandelion suns (a chorus of fish / sing our downfall / or do they sing / of history? / or is the downfall / of civilisation / a metaphor / for my unzipped pants?, 2025); elevating the melancholy hidden within Japanese kawaii aesthetics (im multiplying at a rate i cant sustain, soon the whole planet and then the universe will become a version of me, cute, bubbly and full of regret, 2024); or referencing Chinese minimalism to vocalise living excrement (my head is a giant turd, 2019). The world, in Phu’s brushstrokes, is as serious and silly as you want – or need – it to be. collossus… (knowingly misspelling in the title) recalls early Greek historian and geographer Herodotus, who coined the term as he discovered the statues of Egyptian temples. Phu’s colossus, too, seeks to gobble up the world laid before him, under a starry sky – cherry-red blood spurting from its iron-bar teeth.
Cronos
after Jason Phu
Come the snuffalump! (that’s me!) – dimwit wuhan haircut
atop lightbulb head slaps, stomps the dumb water
upside gorges’ walls three such that – wham! – kerthump!
– it overjumps stalls even spin of mother’s heart.
Father, on the … wait, what?! since when were my hands hands? –
Since they had need to clench you by, my son fingers crunching
into flesh, springing rust slag don’t leave me alone chomp chomp
please don’t go chomp not with those wrong stars, that sickle
I cleaved off father’s balls with (drizzling acid into my no-ear)
– and my eyes eyes? Since they must say in no-word, daughter:
I am why – what, when? And are you youing? The dream has gone
to water. Your skin is off meat, salted green. Stars throng, gawk:
With this forked mouth I thee munch. My child, the mountain.
But why you balled into a lumpen rump a hammer peen?
Swim in a poison sea, they say, your skin will shine of death:
Me the sea – all-dyeing me time, all-chewing, all undoing –
Increase I be, plague of names, waaaay past amount. Are we another
terror out of sleep? What haven’t I gone through what hasn’t been
through me? You any idea how dense this world?
Dang it to the heart! – I break & break my teeth on you.
So tell me: Who’ll break me down when it’s my turn?
Who’ll break me off grease me fast-food yellow,
squeeze me out to spoil? I want to be caught up and no-count
I want to be unspat out. Held. Undone.
Nam Le’s latest book is 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem (Canongate, 2024)
