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.

•

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.

•

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.

•

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.

•

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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Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 (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.

[385 wds]


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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.

[177 wds]


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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.

[139 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 (2014)


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Raspberry Money (2014)

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

Books and Magazines in brief:

Alison Denham. Raspberry Money. ISBN 978-0-9864529-3-2. Christchurch: Sudden Valley Press, 2013.

Alison Denham: Raspberry Money (2013)

Alison Denham’s first book of poems, Pieces of Air (1999), was published by the late lamented Theresia Liemlienio Marshall, who also published my own first book, City of Strange Brunettes, in 1998. So let’s just say that I’m predisposed to like her work. I’m very pleased to report, then, that this second book has been well worth the wait. There’s a kind of Gothic exuberance about her poetry at its best which seems to suit the South Island ethos of Sudden Valley Press very well:

Tuesday night a bell ringers’ practice
someone notices another gravestone gone over.
[“Spring comes to the villages,” p.51]

This is more a poetry of discomfort than of complacence. Denham’s poems read like chants against the dark.

(26-27/9/14)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 1 [Issue #49]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 227.

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10 x (10 + -10) = 0 (2014)

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

Books and Magazines in brief:

Doc Drumheller. 10 x (10 + -10) = 0: A ten year, ten book project, 20/02/2002-21/02/2012. ISBN 978-0-473-27757-4. Christchurch: The Republic of Oma Rāpeti Press, 2014.

Doc Drumheller: 10 x (10 + -10) = 0 (2014)

You can open this huge, mad book on any page and find some irritating set of silly rhymes designed to set your teeth on edge: “Homesick / sailors lick / salt from their thick / beards tasting oil slick / oceans that are seasick” [Part 8, p.6]. Like Zukofsky’s almost equally eccentric “literal” translation of Catullus, it seems more calculated to enrage than engage its readers. And yet, the sheer scale of the performance – in both cases – gives one pause. Is it madness? Or is there an underlying message here about the multiple effects of language? Drumheller is an addict of text-experiments such as those pioneered by the founders of Oulipo. He’s certainly not unconscious of the effect such deliberately baffling texts can have on this predisposed to look for a reassuring orderliness in their reading. I think, finally, that Drumheller’s book could be said to make as much – or as little – sense as the equally baffling rhymes of Edward Lear. A haunted spirit of unease seems to lie at the roots of both projects. Dismiss him if you dare, but I suspect that Drumheller has more to teach than to learn from those of us who live within slightly safer margins of experimentation. It’s no accident that his work is prescribed reading in some at least of Lisa Samuels’ university writing courses.

(26-27/9/14)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 1 [Issue #49]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 227.

[249 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 (2014)


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