Koel (2017)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2017 (March 2017)

Reviews:

Jen Crawford. Koel. Introduction by Divya Victor. ISBN 978-0-9942596-8-4. Melbourne: Cordite Books, 2016. RRP AU$20.00. xiv + 81 pp.

Jen Crawford: Koel (2016)

This bird sits in a tree near my bedroom window and likes to start calling from 5am onwards and continues throughout the day!!

So says the online contributor of a YouTube video of a Koel making its distinctive call. The Koel, it appears, is a species of cuckoo ‘colloquially known as the rainbird or stormbird, as its call is usually more prevalent before or during stormy weather’, as Wikipedia adds helpfully.

This seems an acceptable way to begin my review of Jen Crawford’s latest book, given that one of its distinguishing features is the wonderfully erudite series of notes which occupy five pages of it. These reference sources as diverse as internet news articles, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, and even a 1926 jazz recording by Charlie Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers!

It would be fair to say that the presence of these influences would not be immediately apparent to a reader. There are few landmarks, few solid places to stand: the admittedly somewhat tenuous narrative threads of such earlier works as Admissions (2000) or Pop Riveter (2011) have mostly been abandoned. Crawford’s own preface says of her writing process:

It seemed important to be as close to sleep as possible, so I closed windows and wore headphones. Not to shut things out or make them stranger, but to soften and modulate the tensions of exchange. (p. ix)

What, then, is she getting at in such poems as ‘abandoned house music’, which starts the book off? I suppose, most obviously, that she wishes to immerse us in a range of sensory inputs: to encourage us to use all of our senses, not just sight and hearing.

There’s more to it than that, though. If the collection has an overall theme, it’s the interconnectedness and indistinguishability of all things, living and non-living: animal, mineral and vegetable. It isn’t so much that Crawford sees humans as part of the natural world, as that even the biosphere itself is only part of the complexity of being she herself experiences and wishes to convey:

In Bangkok, excavators swim up and down the canals. They float on barges and scoop themselves through the water. The water pools and resists, carrying places to places on its way. (p. ix)

Note that Crawford uses verbs of active intention to describe what these excavators do. Are they alive? Perhaps the question should be flipped on its head: are you alive? How are you alive? What are the tendrils that connect you to the spaces you inhabit in what she refers to as our ‘epoch of simultaneity’?

It’s interesting that one of the very few poets referred to in her notes is Allen Curnow: specifically, his famous lines: ‘Not I, some child, born in a marvellous year, will learn the trick of standing upright here.’ Any number of New Zealand poets have — somewhat embarrassingly, if the truth be told — claimed directly or implicitly to be that child. Crawford’s poem ‘growing cloud’ seems, by contrast, to be mainly concerned with the experience of being overtaken by the pyroclastic surge of a volcanic eruption:

in the blanket becoming and not at the
same time wrapped
in the disappearance of
friction between your particles your larger
particles floating
in suspension in the solid-gas matrix … (p. 67)

In other words (to quote the original Ghostbusters): ‘Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.’ Worrying about standing upright begins to sound just a little bit ... introverted, wouldn’t you say?

Crawford’s latest book, then, is nothing if not ambitious, and — while there are certainly precedents for some of the things she’s doing: Chinese-American poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge is one of those mentioned by Divya Victor in her insightful introduction — it’s hard to be sure-footed when you’re working entirely in the dark.

A poetic that aspires to be all-inclusive can find the necessity for exclusion a very difficult thing, which is where Crawford’s careful attention to the details of her own life comes in. Not: what is to be human, but what is it to be me? Insofar as such a thing is communicable at all, that is.

One often says of a book of poems that it repays repeated readings. Jen Crawford’s positively demands them: it grows, and glows, more and more with each new ritual of immersion.

(27/8-5/9/16)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017. ISBN 978-0-9941363-5-0 (March 2017): 300-02.

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Poetry NZ Yearbook 2017


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Poetry Shelf, Poets' Choice (2016)

[NZ Poetry Shelf]

Paula Green:
Poetry Shelf’s Annual-Books-We-Loved-in -2016 Lists

Jen Crawford: Koel (2016)



• Jen Crawford. Koel. Introduction by Divya Victor (Melbourne: Cordite Books, 2016).

Jen Crawford’s wonderful new book of poems is my first pick for 2016. Mind you, there’s been nothing simple or straightforward about Jen’s development as a poet – from the fractured narratives of Admissions or Pop Riveter to the post or trans-human thoughtscapes of her latest book. Anything can speak in a Crawford poem: a rock, a bird, a human – but does it choose to? That’s the question. Also, what might it have to say? The world can no longer be divided up neatly into natural and artificial halves in her vision: nor is it any longer talking to us or trying to instil moral lessons. Rather, it is, and the question of what it is (or might be) is a matter of pressing concern to Jen. The Koel is a bird with a particularly loud and raucous call – a little like the dredgers that inhabit the canals, half-amphibious, half-land-creatures, in the Eastern cities where so many of these poems were written in (as she tells us) a hypnagogic state between waking and sleeping. This is a book to read over and over again – to experience in many moods.




The Poems of T. S. Eliot (2015)



• Christopher Ricks & Jim McCue, ed. The Poems of T. S. Eliot: The Annotated Text. 2 vols (London: Faber, 2015).

Ever since I first picked up The Waste Land as a teenager and fell under its spell, I’ve been wondering just how Eliot got there – and what happened to him afterwards. If any of you have similar questions then this rather monstrous version of his complete poetical works will offer you as many answers as there have been commentators on his immense, almost unprecedented eminence over modern English-language poetry. There’s a tidied-up version of the “original” Waste Land here – free of its editing by Ezra Pound. There are notes and drafts and commentaries beyond all reason and proportion. It’s either a treasure trove or a madhouse: it’s hard to decide which. I certainly wouldn’t be without it, though – and while it may not be all that easy to read through, it’s very rewarding to browse in.




Erin McPhee: Anne Carson's Float (2016)



• Anne Carson. Float: "A collection of twenty-two chapbooks whose order is unfixed and whose topics are various. Reading can be freefall" (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016).

It’s quite funny to see just how mixed is the response on Amazon.com to this, Anne Carson’s latest opus. The fans are fine with it, of course: yet another example of her wide-ranging erudition and versatility of invention. The less whole-hearted complain about the difficulty of actually reading this collection of mini-chapbooks. And, to be honest, the whole thing does resemble the little sets of pamphlets one often gets issued with in offices far more than the kind of arthouse production represented by NOX or Antigonick. One guy actually said he was waiting for the hardback version (I presume there will never be a hardback version?). Needless to say (for anyone who’s ever looked into one of my own books), I’m fine with gimmicky layouts, so I’m really just looking forward to getting to grips with the wide-ranging set of Carsonian idées fixes on offer here.




The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis (2015)



• Don W. King, ed. The Collected Poems of C. S Lewis: A Critical Edition (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2015).

I don’t quite know why I have such a soft spot for C. S. Lewis’s poetry. I was brought up on the Narnia books, then switched my allegiance to the science fiction trilogy and Till We Have Faces when I got a bit older. But why the poetry? How could the same person who enjoyed the fractured Modernist deathscapes of Eliot and Pound enjoy the simple pieties of C. S. Lewis? I guess because there’s nothing simple about them: from his early attempts to write long narratives in verse, to the wonderfully crafted (albeit somewhat occasional) poems he produced in later life, there’s a definite charm to almost all of his work in this genre. While his First World War poems cannot bear comparison to Owen’s or Rosenberg’s, they do have their own logic and place in his development as one of the most arrestingly visual of Fantasy writers. Some of the early pieces about his love for his birthplace, County Down in Ireland, are also beautiful: quite perfect in their way. Who cares whether a poet can be called “major” or not? Writing a few poems a reader feels compelled to go back to is, to my mind, the only distinction worth having.

(25/11/16)

'Poetry Shelf’s Annual-Books-We-Loved-in -2016 Lists.' Ed. Paula Green.
NZ Poetry Shelf: a poetry page with reviews, interviews, and other things.
[Available at: https://nzpoetryshelf.com/2016/12/05/poetry-shelfs-annual-books-we-loved-in-2016-lists/ (5/12/16)]

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Poetry Box: Paula Green


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Jen Crawford (2009)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ 38 (March 2009)

Jen Crawford


Jen Crawford

Jen Crawford was born in Patea, Taranaki in 1975 and spent her early years in New Zealand and the Philippines. In 1994 she moved to Australia to study and later completed a PhD in Creative Arts through the University of Wollongong, for which she wrote on images of the child in New Zealand literature.

Her first short collection of poetry, ‘tigerbutter’, appeared in the collaboration Fathoms (scarp productions, 1996) alongside work by Australian writers Lucy Alexander and Porsche Herbert-Funk. In 2000 Five Islands Press published her narrative poetry sequence Admissions, which was highly commended in the Anne Elder award and shortlisted for the Dame Mary Gilmore award. Jennifer Harrison said of it in Australian Book Review: “The structure is brilliant.... the poems disintegrate into blocks of raw, pressured thought; time and identity distort.” Her most recent poetry book, Bad Appendix (Titus Books, 2008), has been described in similar terms as “a series of lightning strikes – strobe-like and disconcerting, drawing on the deepest aquifers of human need.”

She has taught English and writing subjects at the University of Auckland, Massey University and the University of Wollongong. Between semesters she works at a range of temporary occupations, including as a factory hand; a couple of recent factory stints gave rise to the “Pop Riveter” sequence. About “Pop Riveter” Jen writes:

These poems are my attempt to acquire a poetics apt in shape and diction to a particular industrial environment. I wanted to respond to certain factory conditions: sensory saturation, procedural monotony, proprietal language, the deceptive temporalities created by the movement loops of manual production and the alternately overlapped and repelling identity orientations created by working collectively as part of a physical function. The poems also record my pleasure and frustration both in this setting and in the people I shared it with.

“Pop Riveter” might perhaps be better seen as a series of pageworks or concrete poems than an attempt at conventional lyricism. One interesting aspect of the poems is the way in which this attempt to evoke directly and literally the pressures of an industrial environment has resulted in work which looks (superficially) very similar to L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poetry. It’s as if theory and praxis have brought her, by very different paths, to precisely the same destination.

If you give them time I’m sure her poems will end up speaking to you, too.

(12/08)

Poetry New Zealand 38. ISSN 0114-5770 (2009): 10.

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Poetry NZ 38 (2009)


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