"We" Society (2015)

Jack Ross, ed.: "We" Society Poetry Anthology (2015)

Editor's Note

Mrs. Thatcher once declared, at the height of her attack on the British Social Welfare System, once the envy of the world: “Who is society? There is no such thing! People look to themselves first.”

What Thatcher actually meant by this challenge to the very name “society” was (as she proceeded to explain) the fact that: “Life is a reciprocal business, and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations.”

There is, of course, a lot of truth in this. But that doesn’t mean that there are not certain responsibilities on the individual which transcend simple self-interest. The get-rich-quick beneficiaries of Thatcher’s new order may have done very nicely for themselves, but all those corporate raids and deregulated industries have left behind a bitter legacy of devastated communities – crime, drug addiction, social and political apathy.

I tried very hard, however, not to impose what I feel about society, and its complex relation to the individual, before reading the entries for the “We Society” Poetry Competition. I didn’t want to be only looking for poems I agreed with already.

Sure enough, I was astonished by the range of responses and interpretations to the idea of a society of mutual dependence. Some poets took the competition rubric quite literally, carefully inserting the words “we society” – or some variation thereon – in the body of their poem. Others took a more oblique, nuanced approach. These latter tended to be more successful, I think, but both trends are well represented here.

It was very difficult to make a selection from so many good poems: almost all of the writers who entered seem to have fielded their A-team for the competition, but I was eventually able to come up with a longlist of 70-odd poems (all included in this publication), which I then refined further into a shortlist of twelve. Here is that list (in alphabetical order of title):

1. 10 in a packet
   
   A very accomplished, simple but not-so-simple poem about children growing into adulthood, and the things they leave behind, all achieved without fuss or straining for effect.


2. Caring
   
   This is a political poem – almost a manifesto – but it seems to me to personalise its message very effectively: the form is innovative and the language lively.


3. Everything about us
   
   I have to say that I’m particularly fond of the short prose poem as a genre, and there were some very good ones among the entries for the competition. This one was a standout, though – intensely timely, and expressed exactly.


4. Farm
   
   This poem pleased me a lot. As a city-dweller, I share few of the experiences described in it, but the poet made me feel them from the inside. It struck me as a thoroughly imagined piece of writing.


5. From me in Vanilla
   
   I like the (disarming) simplicity of this a lot. There were a number of poems along such familiar utopian lines, but this one hinted most successfully at hidden depths below the “new society.”


6. I love you very badly
   
   A wonderfully terse, very modern poem, but with ancient resonances to it. The poet formatted it in the tiniest of tiny fonts, but when I blew it up large enough to be visible to my middle-aged eyes, I was quite enchanted by what I read, and its adroit combination of text language and classical love lyric.


7. Ko Aotearoa tenei
   
   The linguistic exuberance and multi-cultural inventiveness of this poem is intoxicating. I must confess that I’d like to read a lot more by this author: this is a dazzling piece of work.


8. Little God
   
   A very intense poem from (I would guess) a very dark place. Once again, what better way is there out of such places than to try and describe it for other people? It can’t hurt, and it often helps.


9. may no disaster escape destruction in our bundle of sticks on fire
   
   There’s a Neruda-esque delight in metaphor and the long line here: a kind of natural surrealism which brings this old language to life – a rich, complex poem.


10. On the way from the ATM
    
    This is the classic New Zealand storyteller’s voice: a well-told tale, almost anecdotal in its simplicity, which draws you in through narrative then forces you to confront uncomfortable truths. Again, the simplicity of it masks the true accomplishment of such a poem.


11. Net
    
    A complex set of associations and memories adding up to a really beautiful piece, one which repays reading and re-reading. This is one of the richest responses to the theme of the competition, I think.


12. The mad ones
    
    I really like this poem. The approach is not unfamiliar (“We are the music-makers, we are the dreamers of dreams” might be seen as a precedent), but there’s a charming directness about these “mad ones,” and I particularly admire that touch at the end: “So nameless they will write you / A poem / And forget the signature at the end.”

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Dr Jack Ross works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University’s Auckland Campus. His latest book A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems and Sequences 1981-2014, appeared in 2014 from HeadworX in Wellington. His other publications include four full-length poetry collections, three novels, and three volumes of short fiction. He has also edited a number of books and literary magazines, including (from 2014) Poetry NZ. Details of these and other publications are available on his blog The Imaginary Museum [http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/].

(21-22/4/15)

"We" Society Poetry Anthology. Edited with a Preface by Jack Ross. ISBN 978-0-473-32197-0. “Stage2Page” Publishing Series #4 (Auckland: Printable Reality, 2015): 1-3.
[Available at: http://printablereality.com/publishing/we-society-publication/]

[917 wds]


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Edmond & Hall, Histories of the Future (2015)

Histories of the Future (2015)

Edmond, Martin, & Maggie Hall. Histories of the Future. Words by Martin Edmond. Images by Maggie Hall. North Hobart, Tasmania: Walleah Press, 2015.

Blurb:

Martin Edmond is the closest thing we have to an Australasian Jorge Luis Borges and this book is a kind of Aleph: a point from which everything in the universe can be seen simultaneously — books, dreams, pictures, memories, bric-a-brac. Every reader will confront here their own frissons of recognition. The photographs, by Maggie Hall, are perfect: sufficiently off on their own tangent to set up a counter-narrative to the prose, but tending round to the same set of atmospheres and obsessions.

(May 8, 2015)

[Available at Walleah Press: http://store.walleahpress.com.au/MARTIN-EDMOND-and-MAGGIE-HALL-Histories-of-the-Future_p_69.html (29/7/15)]

[81 wds]


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Miss Herbert (2015)

G.N. Forester and M.J. Nicholls, ed.: Verbivoracious Festschrift Volume 3:
The Syllabus (2015)

Adam Thirlwell, Miss Herbert (2007)

Adam Thirlwell. Miss Herbert: A book of novels, romances, and their translators, containing ten languages, set on four continents, and accompanied by maps, portraits, squiggles and illustrations. 2007. Vintage Books. London: The Random House Group Limited, 2009.

Adam Thirlwell: Miss Herbert: An Essay in Five Parts (2007)

Dear Mr. Thirlwell,

Permit me to introduce myself.

I am, in and of myself, of little interest. My name will not mean much to you, still less the fact that I was (until retirement) a teacher of French language and literature.

Were I, however, to inform you that there has long been a tradition in my extended family that it was my Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Aunt Juliet who was the “Miss Herbert” once privileged to instruct Gustave Flaubert’s niece in the rudiments of English style (as well as – possibly – her uncle … in various other matters), you might perhaps be more readily inclined to listen to me.

The title of your fascinating book seized my attention immediately when I saw it in our small local bookshop (remaindered to clear, I’m very sorry to say). I was especially intrigued to read the passages on pp. 29-30 and 87-88 where you describe the relations between the two (albeit an account substantially indebted to Hermia Oliver’s Flaubert and an English Governess: The Quest for Julia Herbert (1980), as you acknowledge on p.440).

You also quote, on p.29, from one of the Master’s letters to his best friend Louis Bouilhet: “at table my eyes willingly follow the gentle slope of her breast. I believe she perceives this. For she blushes five or six times during the meal,” following this with another quote praising the contours of “Miss Herbert’s” bottom!

But I should get to the point. Not – alas – the discovery among family papers of her famous lost translation, completed under the Master’s own eye, of Madame Bovary, but of a single scrap of paper, which may or may not be in her handwriting (no unequivocal samples of which have survived), in one of my Great-Grandfather’s books, Ford Madox Ford’s Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), opposite the phrase: “the first words of Conrad’s first book were pencilled on the flyleaves and margins of ‘Madame Bovary’” (p.7), containing some scribbles which do appear to be an attempt on the very first sentence of that novel:

Nous étions à l’étude, quand le Proviseur entra, suivi d’un nouveau habillé en bourgeois et d’un garçon de classe qui portait un grand pupitre.

This is Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s 1886 translation:

We were in class when the head-master came in, followed by a “new fellow,” not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk.

The scrap of which I have just spoken, however, reads:

The school bell had just struck half past one when the Headmaster entered our classroom, followed by a “new bug” in mufti and a servant boy bearing a large desk.

The word “mufti” surprised me most of all, I must say. However, my Shorter Oxford Dictionary does confirm this usage as dating back at least to 1816. The addition of a striking clock to Flaubert’s opening phrase also gave me pause, though I note that this variant is recorded as belonging to the “ms. autographe, dans son dernier état, après correction” in the 1971 Garnier edition of Madame Bovary.

This might perhaps be taken as evidence that the translation in question was made from the “author’s own manuscript” rather than any printed edition of the novel – which might, in turn, allow us to associate it with that fabled lost version. Who can say? It may be a complete coincidence. Such as it is, I offer it to you in homage.

(6-10/11/14)

Verbivoracious Festschrift Volume Three: The Syllabus. Ed. G.N. Forester and M.J. Nicholls. ISBN 978-981-09-3593-1 (Singapore: Verbivoracious Press, 2015): 209-10.
[Available at: http://www.verbivoraciouspress.org/festschrifts/volume-three-the-syllabus/]

[564 wds]


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MiStory (2015)

Landfall Review Online

Is MiStory YourStory?

Philip Temple, MiStory. ISBN 978-0-9922578-0-4. Dunedin: Font Publishing, 2014. 271 pp. RRP $NZ34.99.

Philip Temple: MiStory (2014)

Political dystopias – extrapolations of worrying contemporary social trends into the near future (or the far distance) – have a distinguished history in English. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (published in 1726) might be seen as the prototype, but Orwell’s 1984 (1949) is probably the most famous example of the genre.

What’s generally required in these narratives is some kind of Everyman protagonist against whom all these monstrous exaggerations of the present can be measured. Thus Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver (a portmanteau version of ‘gullible traveller’) seldom seems aware of the full implications of what he is describing.

Orwell’s hero Winston Smith is a rather more complex case. He is, on the one hand, intensely ordinary (hence the name ‘Smith’), but there’s far less ironic distance between him and his creator than between Swift and Gulliver.

Smith’s strange, wistful yearnings – against a backdrop of malodorous boarding-houses, barking drill-masters and petty discomforts – seem as relevant to 1948, when Orwell wrote it, as 1984, when it was set. In fact, it’s been alleged that 1948 was his original choice for a title.

Fast forward 20 years or so, and New Zealand got its own version: C.K. Stead’s Smith’s Dream (1971) – memorably filmed by Roger Donaldson as Sleeping Dogs (1977). I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Stead’s main character is also called Smith. And, like Orwell’s, Stead’s Smith is a romantic, an unwilling rebel forced into the Resistance more or less against his will, and (eventually) a hapless victim of its casual brutality. Even as played by a vulpine young Sam Neill, Smith is far more of a pawn than a puppet master.

Philip Temple’s choice of a protagonist for his own dystopic vision of the future, MiStory, is therefore one of the most crucial decisions in his whole book. He could, on the one hand, have chosen to satirise him gently (like Swift): to write in his voice, while winking all the time over his shoulder at the reader.

On the other hand – like Orwell (and, to some extent, Stead) – Temple could have written him as a complete (or partial) alter ego: a boiled-down version of the self, whose views he essentially endorses throughout. In which case it would be essential for the success of the story that we too should find him comprehensible and sympathetic.

The narrative problem here is that the more complex and nuanced his protagonist’s character becomes, the more Temple risks diverting attention from what seems to be the central focus of his book: the possible consequences of increasingly intrusive cyber-security, combined with an ever more paranoid atmosphere of real (or feigned) terrorist threat.

What, then, is the reader’s experience of John Maitland, the average Kiwi bloke whose somewhat disjointed diary MiStory is, (there are also a few sections written by his sister Sophie, as well as various transcripts of recorded conversations)? No doubt there will be different answers for different readers, but perhaps some common points can be agreed on.

Well, to begin with, John (to put it mildly) is no stylist. He writes in a kind of deadpan, cursive telegraphese. Nor does he really particularise the events and people he describes. Of course, that could be seen as a way of signalling the cultural degradation, which is a major part of Temple’s theme. It does, however, make it difficult to feel we’re ever getting to know John really intimately.

This, too, could be seen as a deliberate strategy, forcing the reader to ‘construct’ him as a person from a few hints and scraps of data. New Zealand males are, after all, notoriously unforthcoming in conversation. It would certainly account for his comment about a Scottish refugee he’s been interrogating: ‘I think he’s a good man, you could go pighunting with a man like that.’

There are other, less positive sides to John’s character, though. Let’s take the scene early on where he’s having an intimate dinner with his new girlfriend Jenni:

Jenni wanted to talk about where we go from here and I said, Thats a bit sudden, weve only known each other 5 minutes and she said, It feels a lot longer to me and I thought you couldn’t get enough of me. I felt a real wave of resistance when she said that and I didn’t say it but I thought, What a cheek, what an insult it was to you, as if youd never existed, dead scarcely 2 months. But then I thought isn’t it me who is doing the insulting?

Since Temple’s – and, by extension, John’s – book actually begins with him collecting his (allegedly) much-loved wife’s ashes from the ‘cremate section down Cumberland Street’, one might feel inclined to second that last sentence.

When we learn that he’s never troubled to read the book on contemporary politics which his wife, a prominent academic and dissident, spent so much time working on before her death, he does – once again – risk coming off as a completely unsympathetic character. Admittedly, when he does get round to reading her work, it opens him up to the idea of writing down events as they happen, which results in the diary we’re reading.

The fact, though, that he’s started a sexual relationship with Jenni so soon after his wife’s death seems a little more than surprising. And when his first reaction to her question about where they might be going is to see Jenni as being ‘insulting’, he sounds positively hypocritical. Hypocritical and self-serving, and thus – by extension – potentially alienating to most readers.

At this point one begins to wonder how consciously Temple is setting out to question his hero’s motives: his right to be regarded as the ‘moral centre’ of his own narrative? The (so-called) ‘alienation effect’ – beloved of Bertolt Brecht – is of course a tried-and-true response to the fact that audiences tend to identify with any charismatic protagonist. Brecht’s plays deliberately set out to introduce jarring, distancing moments which (allegedly) allow us to judge rather than simply empathise with the characters we’re watching.

Is this Temple’s intention for John? His complete lack of interest – until and for some time after the beginning of his diary – in his wife’s (and his sister’s) intense political and intellectual engagement with the erosion of freedom in their society does not really tend to endear him to us either. Why didn’t he read her book? It’s not as if he’s described as having anything better to do, and it might have prepared him better for her judicial murder.

There’s no doubt that Temple sees this potential unlikableness of his hero as a problem, because he’s careful to preface the reprinted set of notebooks that constitute John’s testament with some parenthetical remarks by his sister Sophie on how wonderful he was and (therefore) how important this piece of writing is:

But MiStory is not just about my brother and me. It is also YourStory, all our story, and fit to be kept in a safe place until everyone can read it.

John’s apparent lack of curiosity about the forces behind the sinister police state he lives in is dealt with more obliquely, further on in the story:

it took [Sophie] long enough to tell me that she and Annie had kept me in the dark for my own good, but also as a good cover. Glad I was of use.

That little sarcastic aside in the final sentence sounds typical of the man we’re gradually getting to know: those women deliberately chose to keep me in the dark as a cover. It’s actually quite noble of me to forgive them for encouraging my lack of engagement with anyone but myself …

Can the novel survive this failure to win us over to the point of view of the somewhat callous and self-serving John Maitland, or must this be seen as its Achilles heel? The decision to write it as a diary, deliberately restricting us to John’s point of view (albeit with occasional supplementary sections by Sophie, complete with frequent rave reviews of her brother) does mean that there’s very little chance to escape from him.

The choice, too, to write it as almost a full year’s worth of diary entries – it begins in early January and ends in late November – removes much of the element of suspense from the plot. Clearly it was designed to build slowly, presumably to match the growth of John’s political consciousness, but the result is a certain lack of conciseness in the author’s otherwise very telling exposition of this future surveillance state.

It’s important to emphasise here the unrelenting bleakness of Temple’s vision: most of the rest of the world seems to be a glowing radioactive cinder, while even in New Zealand the North Island has been lost to ‘armed refugee groups that … have been kept going by eastasian arms drops and by forming an alliance with Ngapuhi who are using the situation to try and get independence’.

The Resistance fighter who is filling John in about the present state of affairs in Godzone is quick to add magnanimously that he doesn’t see that last development as necessarily ‘a bad thing’. John, as usual, puts it more succinctly: ‘Again? They never give up do they? You have to hand it to them.’

MiStory, then, far from being ‘our story’, as his sister Sophie claims, is clearly John Maitland’s story – and, by extension, Philip Temple’s. Like Orwell and Stead before him, he’s taken all the things that most irk him in modern society and projected them into a brutal and off-putting future.

His book may lack some of the charm and rapier wit of its predecessors in the genre (due mainly to the complicated nature of our feelings about his narrator), but it’s hard to deny its timeliness when it comes to the probable consequences of our present narcissistic, web-based self-scrutiny, combined with the growth of casual violence for nebulous political ends.

Perhaps, then, it’s true that each age gets the heroes it deserves. While I continue to maintain a sneaking preference for Orwell’s and Stead’s twin Smiths over Temple’s John Maitland, I can’t deny that so uncompromising a view of what’s coming to get us may fit more closely with the realities we face.

So, while I can’t say I’m eager to go pig hunting with Maitland anytime soon, I do see Temple’s point in not cushioning his ugly points with a pretty prose style and a more noble and sympathetic set of characters.

JACK ROSS works as a senior lecturer in creative writing at Massey University’s Auckland campus. His latest book A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems and Sequences 1981–2014 appeared last year from HeadworX in Wellington. He also edits Poetry NZ.

(13/1-7/2/15)

Landfall Review Online (2015).
[Available at: http://www.landfallreview.com/fiction/is-mistory-yourstory/]

[1797 wds]


Landfall 1 (1947)


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An Interview with Gabriel White (2014)

Gabriel White: Tongdo Fantasia (2008)

Jack Ross Interviews Gabriel White on Tongdo Fantasia

Jack: I thought I’d start off by asking you about some of the Buddhist themes in the film.

Gabriel: It wasn’t a conscious decision to go around looking for Buddhist things, it was something that happened naturally as I was living there. I’m not a Buddhist, but tended to be escaping to those kinds of places in the weekend, heading for the hills. Then over the years of editing the material I’d filmed, I latched onto this idea of a constellation or network of temples linked by old walking tracks. And I came to realize that this was a nice idea for a structure - to present the sequences for the film as pathways between temples, and of things being linked by the idea of walking.

J: So you’re a pedestrian filmmaker. Would that description be an irritating one?

G: No, not at all. When I started making this kind of travel diary work, in Melbourne in 2001 actually, I wasn’t particularly well travelled, and walking was a good metaphor for my need to make physical and mental journeys - walking and talking.

J: I guess that’s a basic travelogue device, a talking head, but that isn’t really what interests you about it is it? Some would see it as an attempt to gain superhuman status as people become used to your face.

G: Initially I saw myself as an artist appropriating that sort of posture, like David Attenborough on drugs. But I suppose we live in a different paradigm now with regard to representing yourself on screen or on record or even presenting yourself as a commentator. Pretty much wherever we are now, we’re always on record and on screen and we’re encouraged ‘comment’ the whole way through. One obvious downside of that is the loss of meaning where there used to be meaning, because the sense of effort and focus in the act of recording oneself has dissipated, and the cinematic image particularly has a sort of weightlessness or banality now. A long time ago I began to see that banality of the video screen as my modus operandi as a filmmaker. I saw a degree of freedom in it, in that you can easily make films by yourself, you can make them any length etc. It’s a lo-fi aesthetic but it also I think it takes film into a realm that’s closer to more inward, personal processes like writing and drawing. I’ve always preferred to see the camera as a pencil to use in the here and now, rather than something you need to bring to a pre-prepared situation.

J: OK but this film is many many hours of footage turned into one hour, and our reading of it depends on our reading of the way things have been arranged after filming.

G: Yes. So the rawer the raw material looks and sounds, the more you pay attention to the editing and arrangement of it, which is where more care has been taken and where the themes and ideas emerge. I know that some viewers, perhaps most, are going to be turned off by this rawness or the apparent self-indulgence of the first-person approach, or are going to have trouble accepting it as valid and they won’t hang around to perceive the underlying thematic structure.

J: Let’s talk about the way it plays variations on very simple themes then - I guess the main one might be the natural and the unnatural, for example the intersection which you call a lake, which starts to look like a lake as you talk about it. I thought the funniest or sharpest reflection on that theme was that island you visited and you say the main thing that strikes you about it is concrete.

G: I mean those are actually trite observations on the destructiveness of mankind, but they occur in different parts of the narrative and they’re posed ‘in situ’, and in a simple and unserious way. I’m making work as I go about living, I’m not making my art on a cloud of contemporary theory, and yes the old truisms like nature and man arise and recur unintentionally and spontaneously.

J: Yes it wasn’t a diatribe, there was a quirkiness in the way you stated it, and also some of the things became strangely beautiful and you realize that the unnatural sort of becomes a kind of nature. I guess the obvious example from the film is the tyre with all the little things growing in it.

G: I guess I was trying to respond to the radical and, for me, quite troubling transformation of the landscape and the society in Korea. Because modernization happened earlier in Western countries we’re further removed from the trauma of it. In Korea it was so recent and so hurried and sudden; one minute there’s temples, villages and rice paddies, next minute the Americans bomb the hell out of the place, and then it’s smothered in concrete, and the concrete has barely dried.

J: There were a whole lot of things the film didn’t explore that it could have explored. But to me that was a kind of strength. It seemed to me to show a lot of takes on this place but made no attempt to exhaust them or pompously pronounce on them.

G: It comes back to that Buddhist thing - that everything begins and ends with ignorance. That to me is the beauty of having to deliver my thoughts and impressions immediately through speech in a place I have next to no historical or cultural comprehension of. It’s not about pomposity or commenting from on high, it’s about being forced to grope.

J: And also your audience is ignorant too. They don’t care about the history of Genghis Khan but they do care about an immediate shot, a teasing thought. But leaving that aside, you talk a certain amount in the film about your experience of being a language teacher and of course you were teaching in a language school the whole time you were in Korea.

G: That was my one point of real interaction with the people that lived in that place, which was of course with the kids – I mean that’s why it’s all about cartoons. These kids grow up with a billboard video out their window, so I conceived the film as it were from the perspective of a cartoon character, of someone who is at home in a world like that. Of course I was not at all at home in Korea - for me it was precisely like spending a year as a hologram or figment. It was lonely, confusing and alienating if I am really truthful, but it definitely provided me with a challenging experience to try to convey.

J: The thing I was reminded of by the film as an organic whole was Basho’s travel diaries, where you get someone who wants to record moments, but wants to record them as paintings, as poetry, as prose, which is how you ultimately presented your journey - through text, still images and a film. And also because Basho worked on his diaries for years after the ostensible journeys, as you did. In fact he lies and creates stuff for effect, and the result is this masterpiece of Japanese literature, even though in form it’s exactly like a thousand other travel diaries, it’s just that his one is honed and edited and turned into something. He’s using the form to get across this sense of life’s pilgrimage. And I thought Tongdo Fantasia had not consciously imitated it, but had effectively made the same choices and ended up with an artifact you experience in a not dissimilar way.

G: That’s really interesting and flattering Jack. Of course, I’ve never read a single word of Basho, but yes the project was all about stumbling into exactly that kind of unconscious conversation, or forging from my sense of personal dislocation some more intuitive connection.

(2008)

Tongdo Fantasia: Gabriel White on Vimeo (26/10/14).
[Available at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/161mq-mlyTflMRSAyT6zjnbIrvrvF3K3aDukF7ZzOrZU/edit?pli=1]

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Poetry NZ Yearbook 1: Editorial (2014)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 [Issue #49] (October 2014)

Editorial:
From Dagmara to Lisa

Renee Bevan: "Stream of thoughts, a whole year’s work" (2012)

Sitting on a park bench is a form of publishing

So says Lisa Samuels in her poem “A Bird in a Plane.”

Exactly what she means by that is another question. I suppose, in a sense, that sitting out in the sun is as good a way as any of making yourself publicly available, conspicuous, which is after all the basic meaning of “publication.”

“Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to libraries beyond the seas. Getting known.” Samuel Beckett’s bitter words in Krapp’s Last Tape have struck a chord with many writers, I’m sure. Publication, after all, is scarcely a value-neutral term for either professors or poets in today’s “publish or perish” Academic landscape. Lisa is both.

I knew in advance that choosing her to be the first poet featured under the new regime at Poetry NZ might be somewhat controversial. She is, for one thing, American – a fairly recent immigrant to these shores, though one who’s hopefully now put down roots here for good. And even some poetry connoisseurs have commented to me on the “difficulty” of her work. As if being easy were some kind of duty for writers, to be ignored at their peril!

As so many poets, local and international, have done over the past decades, I sought the wise counsel of Alistair Paterson on the matter. He is, after all, the outgoing Managing Editor of Poetry NZ, and can be forgiven for still feeling a proprietary interest in the journal to which he’s contributed so much time and love for so long.

“Excellent idea, Jack,” he told me. “I was intending to do it myself if I edited another issue.”

So there you go.

But why? Why Lisa Samuels? It’s not as if she needs the exposure. She’s already very well thought of in her twin communities of experimental post-Language American poetry, and the Academic teaching of literature and creative writing. No, it’s not that she needs it – it’s that we do.

I said in my review of her book Wild Dialectics (2012):

The best analogy I can come up with for what Samuels does with language is what Charlie Parker and the other prophets of Bebop did with the preset idioms of Jazz. They got inside the phrases, turned them over, referenced and looped around them, and the result was a newly self-conscious, airy, tightrope-walker’s music. [brief 50 (2014): 152-53].

That description may or may not give an accurate idea of the surface appearance of a Lisa Samuels poem, but it certainly leaves to one side the whole question of just why she writes in this way.

That, of course, is where we get into larger questions of what poetry – and poetics – are actually for: the transference of content, or the interrogation of mode? The idea that how we communicate is at least as important as what we communicate is a truism in the post-McLuhan world. It’s actually quite hard to guess what a poetry entirely uninterested in the former would look like. Chopped-up prose, presumably – naiveté speaking to naiveté.

The brute discourses of power are familiar to all of us from the six o’clock news, but it’s the more subtle variants of misinformation and occluded truth in every other form of contemporary language, oral or printed or streamed, which cry out so urgently to be interrogated. And that, it seems to me, is Lisa’s special skill: the reason for the complex soundscapes and Babel-like confusion of her unique and idiosyncratic idiom.

One innovation in this new bumper format for PNZ is the space to include a reasonably lengthy interview with each featured poet. I suspect that you’ll find Lisa’s answers to some of these questions extremely interesting – not just as a series of suggested approaches to her poems, but as a window on her whole project, the intentions behind her multifarious encounters with language.

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Another poet I’m especially happy to see in this first issue of PNZ under my editorship, and under the auspices of Massey University’s School of English and Media Studies, is Dagmara Rudolph.

Dagmara wrote to us earlier this year enclosing a poem entitled “Life is Unfair.” Her covering letter included the information that she was an 11-year-old girl, and that she had her parents’ permission to send us her poem. The poem is about bullying, and tyranny, and being misunderstood. It seems to me to achieve exactly what it sets out to achieve, with minimal curlicues and poeticisms.

The moment I read it I was impatient to see it in print, in the hope (I suppose) that its publication might persuade Dagmara that the world is not always an entirely malign place, and that the best way to react to injustice is to put it on record – to do, in short, precisely what Dagmara has done. Or Lisa Samuels, for that matter. It’s no particular accident that these two poets appear to be writing about essentially the same thing.

I should emphasise that I didn’t think Dagmara’s poem was “good for an 11-year-old” or a “good start” – I thought it was a good poem. End of story. All the other poems in this journal are here for the same reason: because I thought each of them, in its own unique way, was just that: a good poem.

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There are a number of vital acknowledgements and thanks to put on record here:

First of all, to my Creative Writing colleagues at Massey’s School of English and Media Studies, Thom Conroy, Ingrid Horrocks, and Bryan Walpert, who – together with our Head of School A/Prof Joe Grixti – have helped so much with settling Poetry NZ into its new institutional home. The same goes for the other members of the new Poetry NZ Advisory Board: Jen Crawford in Canberra, David Howard in Dunedin, and Tracey Slaughter in Hamilton.

Secondly, to Alistair Paterson and John Denny of Puriri Press, respectively managing editor and publisher of Poetry NZ since well before the turn of the millennium, for allowing us the opportunity to take it over earlier this year.

Thirdly, to the production team: our Administrator Bronwyn Lloyd, cover designers Ellen Portch and Brett Cross, not to mention the able assistance of Rob Roberts, Marian Thompson and their team at the Massey Printery.

Finally, to all the subscribers and contributors – most noble of all, the subscriber-contributors – who’ve kept this journal in all its multiple guises alive for over sixty years, and look set to keep on doing so for the foreseeable future.

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The cover image for this issue, Renee Bevan’s “Stream of thoughts, a whole year’s work” (2012), expertly photographed by Caryline Boreham, shows what happens when you burn a whole year’s worth of your own carefully crafted journals, pulverise the ashes to dust, and then tip the results over your head.

It’s an arresting notion, certainly – a kind of blaze of glory: a moment of confusion and blindness succeeded by light.

I hope you can see the analogy with the kinds of poems included here: sparks of light in an ocean of stultifying babble, laser-beams penetrating the Stygian darkness of our contemporary linguistic wasteland.

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This first Yearbook issue of Poetry NZ since 1964 is dedicated to three illustrious predecessors:

• Louis Johnson (Managing Editor, NZ Poetry Yearbook, 1951-64)


• Frank McKay (Managing Editor, Poetry New Zealand, 1971-84)


• Alistair Paterson (Managing Editor, Poetry NZ, 1994-2014)

(14-17/9/14)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 1 [Issue #49]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 7-10.

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Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 (2014)


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An Interview with Lisa Samuels (2014)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 [Issue #49] (October 2014)

An Interview with Lisa Samuels
[via email / August-September 2014]

Emily Dickinson

Lisa Samuels

teaches at the University of Auckland in English, Drama, & Writing Studies. Her B.A. in English is from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; she also has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. She has published nine books to date, as well as soundwork, chapbooks, and essays on poetry, criticism, and theory. Her novel Tender Girl is forthcoming from US publisher Dusie Press.

Bibliography:

• Anti M (creative nonfiction). Tucson: Chax Press, 2013.
• Wild Dialectics (poetry). Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2012.
• Double CD, Tomorrowland (voice & soundscapes). Birkenhead: Deep Surface Productions, 2012.
• Gender City (poetry). Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2011.
• Mama Mortality Corridos (poetry & drawings). Auckland: Holloway Press, 2010.
• Tomorrowland (poetry). Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2009.
• Throe (poetry chapbook). Norfolk: Oystercatcher Press, 2009.
• The Invention of Culture (poetry). Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2008.
• Increment /a family romance (poetry chapbook). Milwaukee: Bronze Skull Press, 2006.
• Paradise for Everyone (poetry). Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2005.
• War Holdings (poetry chapbook). Columbus: Pavement Saw Press, 2003.
• Editor. Anarchism Is Not Enough. By Laura Riding. An annotated critical edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
• The Seven Voices (poetry). Oakland: O Books, 1998.
• Guest Editor. Special Issue, “Poetry and the Problem of Beauty.” Modern Language Studies 27.2, 1997.
• LETTERS (poetry chapbook). Buffalo: Meow Press, 1996.

Lisa Samuels
photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd

• What writers do you keep on coming back to, and why?

The more I think about your question the more I realize I have to express an answer in terms of categories. My reading is pretty catholic: I’ll as soon be inspired by patterns, sounds, place histories, images, philosophy, statistics for a country’s fabric imports, dictionaries, encyclopedias, poetry, experimental drama, strange comics, physics hypotheses, theory, and manifestos as I will be by particular writers. Nonetheless certain writers are recurrent for me, sometimes as a matter of the note I need to have plucked at a moment of thinking. Writers of excess can help me re-imagine our boundaries and exposures in the world – here I’m thinking of William Blake, Lautréamont, Friedrich Nietzsche, Laura Riding, Georges Bataille, Kathy Acker, William Vollmann. Writers who metaphorically compress such excess give me great – not to say painless – joy: Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Robin Hyde, Lorenzo Thomas, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Bill Griffiths. Writers whose opened-out pages, polygenres, and intellectual visions seem interested in populating whole micro-worlds of thinking and feeling are also real food for my reading: Kamau Brathwaite, Leslie Scalapino. And writers who jam (as in press, and the sweet stuff we put on toast) visuals with interesting words are amazing in their models of how visuals and semantics can really operate each other: Bob Brown, bp Nichol, Tom Phillips, Cecilia Vicuña, Lisa Robertson (in her Soft Architecture essay book), and Maggie O’Sullivan. I’m also really transacted by translingual writers such as Myung Mi Kim, Sawako Nakayasu, and Stacy Doris, whose French infuses her English, in my reading, though she’s more a translational writer than translingual, I suppose. Stacy Doris also sits for me with writers like Robert Duncan, Lyn Hejinian, Alan Halsey, and Renee Gladman as occidental imaginers who turn the forms and categories of self and cultural givens into strange attractors and repellers – they repopulate the examined world as attentive ways of constituting it. Another category here is imaginative theory: I’m certainly thinking of William Blake, but also of medieval mystics such as Theresa of Ávila, Marguerite Porete, Julian of Norwich, and the Cloud author. Imagination theorizing sometimes gets focused in poetics or philosophy-theory itself: in that rank I’ve been especially responding to Charles Sanders Peirce and Theodor Adorno, while the poetics of William Carlos Williams always points toward an appealing freedom. And yet another category is sound intensities, often carried for me in syntactically, metrically, and rhythmically sophisticated poets such as John Donne and Gertrude Stein. In other words these embrained sound writers are doing something like what the aforementioned images + words writers are doing, only with a sound emphasis that performs their alternative visions of what the world yields up. Then there’s a whole ’nother category of the exposed psychic self. The writers I already mentioned definitely demonstrate psychic amplitude, yes, but writers like Georges Perec, Scott Hamilton, and Nathanaël read as though they are not hiding anything, which is a particularly admirable self-exposure – at times a cultural evisceration, or a co-evisceration.



• You mention in your reply “a whole other category of the exposed psychic self,” and give Scott Hamilton and Georges Perec as two examples of what you mean. A number of people have mentioned to me that they “don’t understand” or “don’t get” your work – by which I presume they mean they find its lack of conventional syntax or lexical connections confusing. What would you say to such people? Is it simply a matter of confusing an abstract with a representational artistic practice? Georges Braque with Andrew Wyeth?

I would say my work is completely representational, in the sense that what people call abstract – particularly in language – is also representational. But I suppose I use that word “representational” in a kind of all-encompassing way. I don’t think there is any such thing as “anti-mimesis” or “anti-representation.” Everything represents; it’s just a question of what and how it represents.

I don’t choose to write the way I do, nor do I choose it to be confusing. I suppose some people might say they’d wish to find their star in the work that is of most moment to their contexts, so that they could feel a dialog was happening. But most people don’t have any such opportunity – which is a different, though related, subject. For here, what I mean is that everyone I’ve ever observed is lonely with the diremption between what happens in their inner experience and what is reported as normal in normative representational works. In those latter – maybe the kind of thing people don’t find confusing, the kind of writing they “get” – we see Ordered Words that purport to explain things, and syntax whose shapes are familiar, and we presumably believe in the reality of the stability they represent. And then, when we’re alone, when we’re not being “guided,” we reorient into the dispersed inexplicable. Recognizably ordered words are good for many circumstances: it’s comfortable to ride familiar syntax and to feel like there is a cultural narrative that ties things together or shows some kind of given real. But I want to represent the dispersed inexplicable, since that for me is the most real. For example, when I am driving across the Harbour Bridge, I am simultaneously walking at the bottom of the ocean water and remembering my body in some other position in a truck and composing fragments of music in the sound part of my mind and thinking about how humans are related to the buildings I can see and wondering how on earth we can evade ideas of possession and thinking about what events have happened that can be traced in the atomic substrates that perfuse this whole geophysical area and feeling my nose’s dryness and blinking my eyes and pondering the number of eyeblinks we’ll have in our lives, etc. All those dispersals are reality, phenomenologically, and that’s just in one body moving across one event. I am very conscious of the billions of people on earth alive now who are dispersed from each other and each other’s experiences and each other’s assumptions about historical and cultural and bodily coherence. I mean that both traumatically, in terms of human beings suffering constantly, and also descriptively, constatively. There is no center of meaning nor norm of representation I wish to cling to, for there is no center of meaning nor normal representation, though there are representational norms in different times and societies.

Imaginative writing, for me, is most importantly a challenge to cultural givens, not a re-instancing of them – except to the extent that it cannot escape such re-instancing, given the languages we know and the times we live in and the particular cultural knowledges we have amassed. I am not in search, to quote William Carlos Williams, of “the beautiful illusion.” What I’m interested in is how the particulates that are used to examine, understand, and constitute any person, situation, or society are contingent and can be reassembled – which is the very thing that makes it possible to challenge what is given and to be attentive to the dispersed real.

Another answer I might have, for those readers you mention who generously pay attention to my work but aren’t sure what to make of it, is that I love sound. When I teach I talk about “somato-psychic” enactment: you cannot know the consequences of a given practice as an abstract quantity of information in advance of trying that practice. You have to put your body – the body of your words, in the case of writing – into that practice in order to experience its consequences. So maybe listening to my writing can teach you what it knows better than I can say it separately, since paraphrase is only one part of apprehending any language practice. In other words sound is meaning, and the sonics of my writing want to mean via the ear of the mind, to perform meaning rather than report on it afterwards. This is one way I read Gertrude Stein: that the sound is the meaning, that making the world in and as the sound patterns of language is a way to build and apprehend reality. Language is our most important tool for organizing the “meanings” of the world. It’s also our most important tool for challenging the meaning orders of the world. That’s why it’s controversial to use language in ways other than normative communication, which relies on obscuring the abstraction and contingency of language in order to assert its putatively real elaboration of a stable cultural situation. So people learn to think that there is a sense and that language makes it (only) in certain ways, and that using language in other ways is “not making sense.” But that’s a learnt attitude, not a real fact about language or the organizational possibilities of the human world. Another answer is that I want my writing to be like machinery for imagining. I hope it moves any reader through differential experiences and thoughts, of sound and memory and realization. I want it to open (to quote William Blake) “the doors of perception” – to help us, as I’ve said before, imagine what we don’t know. I don’t expect my writing to represent what is already there; I want it to activate the machinery of ethical and bodily attention, of embrained feeling, at the moment that it is happening. Like a music box that activates you when you open it.



• I really enjoyed your description of driving over the harbour bridge and delineation of all the other things going on in your mind at the same time! Would you see the task of gesturing towards the immense multi-levelled complexity of our relationship to language as one particularly and uniquely suited to poetry, or is poetry, for you, just a nonce word that stands in for writing? Looking at the draft of your novel Tender Girl which you sent me, I wonder if you would regard that as significantly different – except, of course, in scope and length – from the work you do in “poems” (so-called)?

Yes I do regard Tender Girl as different: everything in it is directed toward a reading of the experience of a being who was born from the union of a human and a shark. Girl is also amphibious, though we see mostly her land aspects, with her breathing pores and being around air and humans. The novel’s language is put into the service of a psycho-biological portrait of Girl encountering human events and consequences. So the experiment of that book, which is forthcoming with the U.S. publisher Dusie Press, is how to imagine language performing this character consciousness. I did not want to circumscribe the impacts or understandings of Girl’s encounters too much – I didn’t want to turn them in to a report from a distance. So the language is unusual, perhaps, as a report from within a strange, literally impossible, imagined ontology, with the tracings of the effort of that report.

Poetry is an emphasis within writing rather than a segregated field. Maybe we call something an example of poetry when it’s labelled “poetry.” After all, given the amplitude of poetic experiments over the past 125 or so years, it’s impossible to deny writers the right to use the term “poetry” to describe their work. That self-naming right is part of an ethical development in our assumptions about identity. Given the importance of language for social order and explanation, maybe it’s no surprise that “poetry,” with its huge appetite and its resistance to limited definition, is a crucial language zone for contests about identity and representation. The “immense multilevel complexity of our relation to language,” as you put it, is certainly one of the manifestations and topics of the poetic. But I don’t think poetry is a term for all writing. I think we need as many kinds of writing as we can get.



• The British writer John Cowper Powys once described his novels as “propaganda for my way of life.” Looking back over your work to date, would you say that you detect common themes or overriding intentions in forming all of it? Or is each of your books and poems designed as a new “raid on the inarticulate”?

I’m so happy you mentioned Powys, as he has been a favored author for me sometimes. His adamant sensual broken animistic excess pleases me – he’s like the tortured-happy modernist version of the kind of energy that animates William Vollmann’s best fictions. Anyway, to your question. I reckon all writers are extruding from their preferences, “doing what comes naturally,” writing their obsessions. But propaganda, hmm. I think not, though I wouldn’t be the best person to be clear on that, given ideology and the return of the repressed and all those fun aspects of being human. And I know you aren’t necessarily ascribing Powys’s self-summary to anyone else’s work.

Since I started writing work that has been important to me – since my first poetry book in 1998 – I have certainly had themes and styles recur. It’s pretty clear that semiotics, materialism, and phenomenology are touchstones, in theoretical terms. No matter what the style or genre, my books are focused in identity, transculturalism, ethics, the body, violence, love, social power, perception, and imaginative unknowing. No matter what the focus, my styles are transfixed by an urge to manifest representations that come out from the observing subject to report on the real fragmentations of being human. In other words, we are fragmented, and fragmentary language is a true reflection of our experience – it feels true to me, truer than styles that try to render language as transparent. So a thematic of encounter with fragmentation could be said to characterize my writing. Moreover, a release from singular identity is crucial to my perceptions in language: the writing is not the same thing as a person standing in a biological and social place. That’s why what I sometimes think of as dramatic polylogs are a recurrent pronominal and experiential part of my writing – they come quite naturally as I lift away from social me to write in the linguistic transhuman. Plus “polylogs” sound like little frogs, which is rather nice.

Still, I’ve changed from writing exclusively “lyric” poetry books – if we can define “lyric” loosely, as relatively short poem-events – to also writing longer and different kinds of works. For example booklength poems like Tomorrowland and Gender City, with their recurrent personae and sustained focus on, respectively, transcultural transmigrations and embodied urban creation trauma. And prose works like Tender Girl and the manuscript I’m sometimes fiddling with these days, The Long White Cloud of Unknowing.

I think you are asking only about so-called creative books, but I also write speculative talks and essays about particular authors and about how we read and what representation and genre and critical practice is and can be. For example I’m working right now on two talks for upcoming conferences, thinking about concepts I call “withness” and “recurrence.”



• What advice would you offer to young poets starting out, or – for that matter – older people trying to enter (or re-enter) the world of poetry?

This question takes me back to the ethics of self-naming. The possibilities of poetry are completely open, which may be one of the things that makes some people uncertain about how to approach such an infinity of potential – and which I suppose is why you ask this question.

Bearing that openness in mind, I’d give three pieces of advice. First, learn the infinity of poetry’s potential. Learn everything you can about as much as possible in anything called poetry: approaches, times, authors, styles, topics, sounds, open and strict procedures, techne like books sound paper and canvas, typefaces, inks and printing, new media ventures and forms, oral performance techniques and histories, rhythms, syntaxes, names of linguistic and grammatical parts, past and present poetic “movements” that draw together manifestos and visions, magazines that present intense editorial judgments and drives, canons and repressed works (i.e. celebrated and relatively unknown poetry), topical obsessions (history, ecology, sexuality, race, nationalism, magic, identity, the nature of thinking and imagining) and how they are approached in different times and places, styles of representation and how they mingle and swerve into and out from simplicity to complexity and back, and the permissions for, arguments about, and experiments in what is called poetry.

Second, write poetry in different styles so you can expand your poetic skills. Be patient with yourself as you write in different ways. Each distinct style can be as challenging as learning to write in a heretofore foreign language. Accept that difficulty and presume it’s part of expanding your abilities – don’t stop too soon because you want things to be comfortable in your use of language.

Third, after – and while – you work these first two registers of learning and expansion, do exactly what you want. Write freely as often as you can. Understand that composition needs to be unfettered in order for you to produce charged and committed writing. Anything charged and committed can be shaped once you get to the revision stage of your poetry (if you turn out to be interested in revising, which not everyone is). This third self-permission will help you bring into focus what poetry can be for you, in your languages and communities. And overall this third piece of advice is the one I would give most emphatically, since poetry should be free. That freedom and openness are what draw so many people to want to write poetry, which is why it’s so plentiful and so everywhere.

(28/8-15/9/14)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 1 [Issue #49] (2014): 42-50.
[also available at: http://www.academia.edu/9470445/Jack_Ross_interviews_Lisa_Samuels_for_Poetry_New_Zealand_2014]

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Beyond the Ohlala Mountains (2014)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 [Issue #49] (October 2014)

Books and Magazines in brief:

Alan Brunton. Beyond the Ohlala Mountains: Poems 1968-2002. Ed. Michele Leggott & Martin Edmond. ISBN 978-1-877441-47-9. Auckland: Titus Books, 2013.

Alan Brunton: Beyond the Ohlala Mountains (2013)

The book is, for a start, overwhelmingly beautiful. Who would have anticipated those scruffy old papier-mâché masks from old Red Mole performances could look so striking, photographed as they are against jet-black backgrounds, like Picasso sculptures, or – even better – gaudy folk skulls from the Mexican día de los muertos? In terms of design, then, it’s hard to imagine how it could be bettered. Kudos to Brett Cross, Ellen Portch, and the rest of their team at Titus Books.

But was Brunton really any good simply as a poet? This, after all, is our best chance to find out – a careful selection from the whole body of his work by his old colleague Martin Edmond and the careful conservator of his literary legacy, Michele Leggott. There’s a kind of persistent myth that Brunton was all about performance: the sound of the living voice, the impressiveness of his sheer presence. And, having witnessed some of those readings and performances, I can certainly testify to his skill in this regard. What, after all, could be inside here to merit such packaging? I open the book at random:

People here!Yeah. Fucking lots.
See the game?Yeah. Fucking primo, eh? …
Great game.Yeah. Fuck. Watched it on
TV. I got fucking nutted. …
[“Pindaric – Victory Parade,” p.287]

I don’t know about you, but this kind of cruelly accurate transcript of how we actually speak is something I haven’t heard nearly enough of in Kiwi poetry to date. But that’s only one of his many tones of voice: there’s the tenderness of “the heart is a lover with beautiful hips” [“Guru Hoodoo,” p.270]; the high hieratic of “My father died in December. / With my brothers I carried him / to the low house reserved / for dead soldiers” [“Move,” p.263]; the everydayness of “the Ides of March has found us here / & the dope / has all / given out” [“Black & White Anthology,” p.131]. I just can’t convey all the riches inside here. You’re crazy if you don’t get down on a copy of this collector’s-item-in-the-making while you still can.

(26-27/9/14)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 1 [Issue #49]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 225.

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Born to a Red-Headed Woman (2014)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 [Issue #49] (October 2014)

Books and Magazines in brief:

Kay McKenzie Cooke. Born to a Red-Headed Woman. ISBN 978-1-877578-87-8. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2014.

Kay McKenzie Cooke: Born to a Red-Headed Woman (2014)

This is Kay McKenzie Cooke’s third collection of poems and, like the first two, it depends heavily on reflections on her Southland heritage: “You could say that this book is all about time; its capricious brutalities and its saving graces,” as Cooke herself explains. Another interesting feature here is music. The book concludes with a list of all the pieces of music she’s sampled from for the titles of the various poems. At times, in fact, it reads almost like a DJ’s version of existence: “the soundtrack of our lives,” as some radio station or other once claimed (“Classic Hits,” was it?) It seems quite a good conceit for isolation within a “close-knit community,” as the cliché describes it. There’s definitely a lot going on under the surface of this collection:

Let’s look at each other
long and hard.
It may be our only way
of knowing
where we are going [‘“it feels new,” p.70]

(26-27/9/14)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 1 [Issue #49]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 226.

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After Lunch with Frank O'Hara (2014)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 [Issue #49] (October 2014)

Books and Magazines in brief:

Craig Cotter. After Lunch with Frank O’Hara. Introduction by Felice Picano. ISBN 978-1-937627-18-8. New York: Chelsea Station Editions, 2014.

Craig Cotter: After Lunch with Frank O’Hara (2014)

I guess that my first thought about this was that it was rather an in-joke, a strangely dependent way of titling a book of poems, but I now think that that was a mistake. Frank O’Hara was, after all, a trickster who spent an immense amount of time and energy subverting and undermining the pomposity of his poetic peers and predecessors, and this book is definitely written in that spirit. “More like a Monty Python send-up than a nostalgic paean,” as Diane Wakowski puts it on the back of the book. Or, as Cotter himself expresses it:

I’m tired
but Frank and John want me to write on.
…
It’s how we learn –
knocking each other off [“Good Friday,” p.58]

(26-27/9/14)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 1 [Issue #49]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 226.

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Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 (2014)


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