Signs from Asemia: Yasmin Heisler Reviews asemic 15

Posted on September 13, 2017 by Yasmin Heisler

asemic 15
Compiled by Tim Gaze


I was at a tram stop recently when a woman walked past wearing a black dress. There were short white threads sewn onto the material. Each thread was stitched leaving the ends to dangle. These dangling ends reacted to her movement and the gusts of wind, forming individual character-like shapes. I found myself mesmerised, particularly because I had been asked to write this review, and was contemplating the meaning of asemic.

Asemic writing focuses on the visual aesthetics of written language without the legibility of writing per se. Though uninterpretable, according to Tim Gaze, the editor and publisher of asemic 15, asemic writing must mimic what we know to be writing to an extent, so as to differentiate itself from visual art. Some, like Todd Burst, would describe it as the textual residue of writing; others state it lies in the realm of the pre- or post-literate. For artists such as Rosaire Appel, whose work is represented in the magazine, it is more about context. Appel states in zoomoozophone review: ‘Perhaps it has less to do with the graphic itself than the space or territory it resides in.’ Many books of asemic writing have been published and a community of practitioners has formed, some of whom may well feel disenfranchised from more mainstream art / literary communities. Though nebular and possibly confusing, the term asemic is now being used more widely in criticism.

I recognise the importance of endeavours that intersect the writing / drawing divide, however, when first gathering texts relating to asemic writing, the cautionary words of Britain’s conceptual artist Victor Burgin came to mind:

Interpretation requires … tracing of alliances and elegances, dependencies and conflicts between the work in question and the context within which it is produced … In the absence of interpretation we are left with the brute obviousness of the literal content of the work and the manifest declarations of its author and their consensual echoes.

Or perhaps put more simply by TS Eliot: ‘No poet, no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone’. Interestingly, the word asemic does not exist in the Oxford Dictionary or the Macquarie, however it is defined in the 2015 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Psychology:

n. Impaired ability to encode or comprehend signs such as gestures (1) or the spoken and written signs and symbols of human languages. Also called asemasia or asymbolia.

Michael Jacobson and Tim Gaze have written about asemic writing as a ‘wordless open semantic form of writing’:

The word asemic means having no specific semantic content. With the non-specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning, which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret … free to arbitrary subjective interpretations … True asemic writing occurs when the creator of the asemic piece cannot read their own asemic writing … Even though it ‘is traditionally “unreadable”, it still maintains a strong attractive appeal to the reader’s eye’.

Gaze, to an extent, has controlled the discourse. Wikipedia tells us that he is both the producer and mediator of meaning and, in the process, constructs his own artistic and public identity. Disagreements about the definition however, started to appear on the site towards the end of 2016. Co-founder Jim Leftwich is quoted to have said: ‘it is not possible to create an art / literary work entirely without meaning.’ From the information made available online by Leftwich, concerns have been articulated since 1998. In 2012, ‘Olen’ writes on slowforward.me:

How is it possible for anyone already possessing a language to produce something in another ‘projected’ or ‘imagined’ sign system where the producer pretends to have no access? Isn’t asemic writing a species of fantasy?

A 2013 interview between Quimby Melton and Michael Jacobson illustrates just such a quandary:

Melton: […] Since they usually cannot be “broken” – that is, translated into objective carriers of meaning – one can interpret asemic texts as the ultimate encoders of personal insight and reflection. Everything from a little sister’s journal to the rape fantasies of a poetic psychopath could be safely housed in asemic glyphs […]

Jacobson: I have put some of my ugliest and most beautiful thoughts into my asemic texts, and that’s where I’d like these thoughts to stay.

To label a work as asemic, may infer some kind of code or post-truth vessel. Here, illegibility to the reader is seen to be the foremost intention of the work regardless of whether it is actually illegible to the writer.

For Jacobson, interpretation or critical engagement with asemic writing is unwanted. And he is not alone. Gaze, too, views ‘the usual modes of literary analysis taught at Universities… as being similar to the way animals are judged at an agricultural show.’ Similarly, The Asemic Manifesto 111 states:

Asemic workers of all countries, unite! We want to get away from the postmodern layers of meanings into the asemia of class into the international alliance of the new post-literate in the name of sensual unity and dis-alienation of souls.

For argument’s sake, if we take the work as having the conditions of asemic writing (illegibility for the writer and reader), we can see aesthetic arrangements that are an expression of influences, emotions, histories, experiences, prejudices, biases and politics, intended or not. There is no ‘void of meaning’, nor is there what Jacobson calls a ‘non-specific universe of points.’ Instead we find a conundrum: to call something writing without any semantic content is a curious premise. It relies, in the words of W J T Mitchell, on ‘relations and distinctions, that crop up in aesthetics, semiotics, accounts of perception, cognition and communication, and analyses of media.’ The context of art encompasses these relations and distinctions. Art by its very nature seeks to draw our attention to paradoxes, open ended-ness, new ways of expression, the uncomfortable, the tensions and the failures. Art asks us to think. There is a sense of infancy within the realm of asemic writing. As illustrated in the Quimby / Jacobson interview, contradictions give rise to questioning the authenticity of the work. Subjective categorisations also restrict visual and conceptual possibilities that may provoke insight in this field. (The sci-fi film Arrival 2016, comes to mind as an imaginative ‘probing’ of communicative possibilities.) Examples such as ‘attractiveness’ as a criterion for ‘successful’ asemic writing, as well as having a ‘likeness’ to known writing styles come to mind.

Rosaire Appel’s 2009 video piece Liquid Calligraphy questions the term asemic writing in relation to meaning. The video illustrates lines ebbing and flowing in a vertical motion that one may associate with sound recordings (having said that, much of the movement becomes full circular motions of lines). Though the video has been rotated on its side, there is just enough visual information given to understand that the moving image is surface reflections on water. Tonal contrast has been pushed to the extreme, allowing only black and white without any gradation of tone. Prior to this moving image, the video shows typed text stating ‘a piece of the – Hudson river tries to pass as – asemic writing’. The accompanying sound of passing cars and trains is slightly digitised. Appel seems to be playfully questioning the artist’s ability to ‘not know’ the content of their own practice, or how content becomes asemic. Surprisingly, as it is clear from her website, she relates to the term positively.

Appel has two works illustrated in separate locations in asemic 15. One is almost identical to an image from a book-in-progress series uploaded in 2010 under her asemic stories webpage. It is almost like Appel is demanding these marks be both pictorialised – where the marks are ‘enlarged’ and slightly contorted in the central section of the page (to be seen in space) – and ‘read’ – where the marks are clearly delineated into small vertical rows at the top and bottom of the page (thereby occupying time). Was the ‘writing’ originally a singular interconnected work and then vertical sections digitally erased to create rows? The lines in the central section of this page give a sense of torso-ness, a weighted centrality where lines taper in, and at either end, a sense that the lines have been cut. This is an artist whose documentation online shows that she has clearly worked in this field between writing/drawing in an extended way, and for some time.

Pages: 1 2 3
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , ,

Review Short: Aileen Kelly’s Fire Work: Last Poems

Posted on September 13, 2017 by Graeme Miles

Fire Work: Last Poems by Aileen Kelly
Gloria SMH, 2016


This is the last collection by a major Australian poet, and it is a firework in the tightness and effervescence of its poems. Like Aileen Kelly’s previous book, The Passion Paintings: Poems 1983-2006, it concentrates the work of many years. Unlike that book, however, this one was assembled and edited after its author’s death in 2011: firstly by her husband, Paul Grundy, and then by Catherine Bateson and Joanne Lee Dow. At that stage, the text was finalised by Dow and editor, critic and anthologist, John Leonard, who had been Kelly’s mentor for some years and whose press had published her previous book.

Fire Work is also the title of an enigmatic three-part poem about halfway through the collection. There, the fire only appears directly in the second and third parts; the quiet, first section is concerned instead with enclosure and a sense of pressure:

There was a wall around
of course
the vulnerable loves.
Windows, and they looked.
Doors, they went and came

and went. All correct.
The closed space quivers
shocked by the loss of sound.
The windows lapse their hold on light.
Only remains.

This first stanza, like many in Kelly’s poems, leaves open exactly what has happened, preferring to give an impression than to limit it by naming a cause. The poem as a whole, like many in the collection, holds silence and its rupture in tension against each other. Its second section brings words out of the silence, where ‘splinters of darkness might make a blaze upon the hill’. This fire, which becomes the one behind a grate in a fireplace, is both domestic and wild. It might be ‘Blake’s tiger’ or ‘morning day long watched for at barred windows’ or ‘the flare beyond surrendering branches / that must be next to burn’. In its final part, the poem turns to a grimmer kind of firework, in the practicality of letting an animal, even one on which one’s livelihood depends, walk in front ‘in landmine country’. The poem is a miniature of the collection as a whole: in the subtle balances which it works between contrasting elements, in the astute and unexpected selection of details, and not least in the ambiguity of the chosen elements themselves. The comforting is also potentially unstable or destructive.

These poems show an acute awareness of death and dying. Though these are, of course, staples of lyric and elegy, Kelly had an unfailing sense of how to make these old themes new. Her instinct for the concrete and specific is on show in, for instance, ‘Sunday afternoon’, on the weekly ritual of visiting a friend in a hospital (‘Save your jokes all week / for this performance’) or ‘Emeritus’. She sketches the title character of the latter in two uneven stanzas. The first catalogues the marks of surgery on his body:

The long cobbled seam of your heart scar
folds out under the twisted eye of sleep
into the brutal Y of a postmortem …

And yet in the second stanza:

still you carry your laptop
pro bono 
through the transit lounges of the dizzy globe
showing the way to mitigate disasters.

It is this combination of fragility with resilience, unavoidably temporary, which is perhaps most characteristic of Kelly’s collection. In ‘Contract’ the title refers to both book and mafia contract. The unnamed character has had, it seems, a stroke and is aware of her approaching death, still writing, but as if with a contract on her life. The description of her work in this stage as a return to writing on a typewriter, when ‘second thoughts were heavy effort’ is beautifully evocative and prepares the poem for its powerful final stanza:

But now again each touch
seems on the record,
flavoured Send or Print.
The trivial over coffee might become
the last thing she said.
The surge of making
heavies along her fingers.

It is the surge and the heaviness together that make these poems what they are: deliberate but never lapidary, produced by the surge and the heaviness.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

Review Short: Brian Castro’s Blindness and Rage

Posted on August 10, 2017 by James Jiang

Blindness and Rage by Brian Castro
Giramondo Publishing, 2017


Blindness and Rage is the latest addition to an oeuvre that has established Brian Castro as a prodigy of hybridity. Castro’s heritage (Portuguese, Chinese, and English) is as uniquely mixed as the generic categories of his work, such as the blend of fiction and autobiography that won him such acclaim in Shanghai Dancing (2003). Blindness and Rage, at once ‘a phantasmagoria’ and ‘a novel in thirty-four cantos’, reprises some familiar themes in Castro’s signature style: a cosmopolitanism that shuttles restlessly between Adelaide, Paris, and Chongqing; the ludic propensities of an inveterate paronomasiac who wears his learning on his sleeve; a fascination with the vocational archetypes of the writer and the architect.

Blindness and Rage tracks the fortunes of Adelaide town-planner, Lucien Gracq, who moves to Paris after being diagnosed with cancer to dedicate his remaining days (53 on the doctor’s count) to completing an epic poem, Paidia, inspired by Roger Caillois’s 1961 sociological study Man, Play, and Games. Once in Paris, Gracq makes the acquaintance of the members of Le club des fugitifs, an all-male literary coterie that devotes itself to the anonymous publication of works by the terminally-ill. Epicures of self-erasure, the Fugitives raise the Barthesian thesis about the ‘death of the author’ to the level of a civic-minded mantra:

A named author dead or alive limits with fame
the cancerous spread of signification;
dead or alive, the named are pilferers
of status, guardians of unequal truths,
wrecking the liberty of recomposition. (107)

So says Georges Crêpe, frontman of the Fugitives, who are clearly modeled on Oulipo, the group of postwar French writers and mathematicians who set out to enlarge the prospects of ‘potential literature’ by tightening its compositional constraints. The other side of this ‘liberty of recomposition’, then, is ‘a ligature strangulation of meaning’ (142) so that what the Fugitives practice is, one might say, a kind of verbal chemotherapy. A not dissimilar point is made rather sharply by Catherine Bourgeois, Gracq’s concert-pianist neighbor who has her own ambivalent relation to the group:

They all suffer from vowel cancer—
it’s a male reflex
to constrict language;
something to do with the
castration complex. (142)

‘Vowel cancer’ is an uncharitable moniker for the lipograms with which Georges Perec (perhaps the most well-known member of Oulipo) is most readily associated, though it is the letter O rather than the E programmatically omitted in Perec’s A Void (1969) that gets disowned (in theory) by one of the Fugitives as a ‘damp squib/ defusing the presence of the I’ (92). This anxiety about the O’s dissipation of the potency of the I is a graphic joke about the ‘castration complex’ in which the author’s very name is made complicit. Indeed, playing with names has become customary in Castro’s bag of tricks; not only is Crêpe an anagram of Perec (as a number of readers have pointed out), but Catherine’s initials (with ‘the slot above her letterbox/ listed “Bourgeois, C.”’) continue the pattern of mirrored identities in Street to Street (2013), where the fictional Brendan Costa haunts and is haunted by the work of the Australian poet Christopher Brennan.

For all its immersion in the heady atmosphere of what we might call (very roughly) postmodern poetics, Blindness and Rage recalls an earlier moment in twentieth-century verse experimentation: high modernism. While Kafka has exerted a consistent influence on Castro’s work, the decision to structure his novel in ‘cantos’ inevitably calls up the ghost of Ezra Pound, a fellow observer of ‘Cathay’ whose obsession with paideuma (an ethnological term denoting ‘the tangle or complex of inrooted ideas of any period’ of culture) is at the very least etymologically entwined in Gracq’s pursuit of paidia (the Greek word for unstructured or spontaneous play).

With its lyricism peppered heavily with a magisterial garrulousness, Blindness and Rage in tone and texture most closely resembles some of the more personable moments in the work of the late Poundian, Geoffrey Hill. Like Hill in The Triumph of Love (1999), Castro sometimes deploys puns that just about stave off the literalist banality of the ‘dad joke’ through the charm of the poet’s contingent relationship to his own erudition:

[I]n Australia we play possum.
Possum; because I am able
to be a surrogate for myself;
call it a mortuary aesthetic. (202)

This slapdash appropriation of Latinate prestige savours of an Antipodean egalitarianism that finds another outlet in the figure of The Dogman, a former high-rise construction worker who, after an accidental brush with an electric cable, now sells puppies and The Big Issue in an Adelaide mall. At one point he asks Gracq rather disarmingly: ‘what is this thing/ called deconstruction?’ (156)

As an embodiment of the hybridity feverishly imagined in various guises throughout the story, The Dogman is a totemic figure for the eclecticism of Castro’s enterprise in Blindness and Rage. A mixture of earthiness and ethereality, he conducts the novel’s energies away from the indulgent self-mortifications of European decadence towards an equanimity that is equal parts Eastern mysticism, Southern pragmatism, and animal indifferentism. After such exhaustive and (at times) exhausting cleverness, this equanimity is the closest that Blindness and Rage comes to a genuine touch of transcendence.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

LAND Editorial

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Jane Gibian

LandImages courtesy of the editors

When we chose to edit an issue of Cordite Poetry Review around the theme of ‘Land’, it was with an interest in the inherent openness of the word. Similarly, we came without a strong affiliation to any particular poetics, though of course our own aesthetic, moral and intellectual predispositions followed us. The process of reading through the many submissions was exploratory and open-minded.

But to be clear: we chose the theme foremost out of our love of the natural world around us and a concern for its care. We also chose to forego the most immediate artistic association with land – landscape – a term which narrows the field to a particular set of practices, histories and perspectives. Broad as those practices may be, we doubt, for instance that compost bins might have found a place among them (James Lucas, ‘Karma Bin’).

Instead, land is prosaic, almost concrete, like a smooth stone you can hold in your palm and which might sink quickly to the bottom of a river when cast. It is visceral in a way that landscape, as an abstraction or interpretation of land, is not. Land is something that can be owned – and taken. It is political – think of indigenous land rights and Lock the Gate – and at the same time a place that occupies time and memory; the land where I grew up, my homeland.

These many aspects of land permeate the poems we have selected. For example, the immanence of central Australia’s semi-arid desert-scape glows in Michael Giacometti’s haiku-like series ‘Some portraits of country’: ‘The watermark of a ghost / gum hangs in the mist / where a hill might grow’. Shona Hawkes’s poem ‘lost’ offers an uneasy merging of indigenous connections to land with contemporary urban infrastructure: ‘you walk by the stadium built on a marngrook ground / and the freeway that follows the songlines.’

And then there is the active verbal sense of land: to land a punch, a fish or even a space capsule, as in Isabella Mead’s ‘Final hours, Sputnik 2’, a poem whose poignancy requires some familiarity with its backstory to be appreciated: ‘You travelled in a bullet until the heat / spiked your blood and panic curdled lungs.’

This issue naturally features poems from Australia but, pleasingly, many other countries too – from Pakistan to Poland. This international perspective is critical, given the role that language and culture plays in shaping reality. The manner in which language shapes and constrains the idea of land and the natural world is particularly evident among the Rarámuri, an indigenous group in Mexico. They have a worldview that ‘does not … separate ontological spaces beyond and between the human and nonhuman worlds. We feel that we are directly related to everything around us. The trees are us; we are the trees. I am rain; rain is me.’1

Explicit here is an argument against the dualism and appropriation that seem embedded in western (and many other cultures’) perspectives of land. In his essay ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’, William Cronon argues that our concept of wilderness, even among well-intended environmental campaigners, rests on the notion that we live outside of nature, that wilderness is only defined by the absence of human touch.

Instead, Cronon advocates our constant connection to nature – from backyard gardens and local parks, through to wilderness areas like the Blue Mountains where indigenous Australians subtly shaped and lived off its natural rhythms for millennia. Cronon believes we can find ‘a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word ‘home.’ Home… is the place for which we take responsibility, the place we try to sustain.’2

In poetic terms, this understanding of nature and land invites a resistance to closed meanings: the poem that does not reach a neatly fenced ending. Instead, we preferred works that opened onto the domain of the potential, either through their linguistic playfulness or ambiguous emotional and intellectual fields.

For example, Bella Li’s sequence ‘Circles’ re-interprets Dante’s vision of hell in a disjointed yet earthly framework, a pastiche of literary cut-ups supported by her clichéd landscape photograph collages. Here is a poem that causes us to question the surface-level appearance of the world around us, where psychological unrest lies beneath observations of the everyday. Meanwhile, Ella Jeffery’s poem ‘genius loci’ juxtaposes the spiritual power of nature with its more banal manifestations:

god of the oilslick chests of male wrens …
god with the patience of a skink growing back its tail 
god of lights left on all night 
god of wind that carries off plastic chairs

Many of the poems that appealed to us were those where the lived (or imagined) experience of land was embedded within the poem or poet, ‘the self as field of experience’ as Jill Magi puts it3. In Francesa Sasnaitis’s ‘unstable edge’, land and memory merge, mediated by a photograph and, now, a poem too: ‘Look, there you are – / a red dot floating / in the middle of the blue // in defiance of land’.

So land is not simply a question of nature, but hybridity. Such hybridity is perhaps most explicit in the context of urban land – and no doubt most of the poets featured in this issue are city dwellers. Here our understanding of what constitutes the natural world can be transposed onto what has been termed the third landscape: the interstitial spaces of our cities.

That concern often translates into the realm of the political, as in Lachlan McKenzie’s playful prose poem ‘Endless Summer, 2017’ which merges ecology, culture and (urban) land: ‘I bleached my hair in solidarity with the reef but ended up reflecting the political climate.’

These self-consciously urbane poems tended towards a more explicit syntactic and symbolic disruption. It is means to both entertain us but also cause pause to consider what is hidden in our daily lives – the de facto exploitation, for instance, which takes place out of sight, out of mind in Nicholas Powell’s ‘Flat Pamphlet Chat’: 

The fossil record for this period is rich. The ore typically 
stockpiled in the open, never to be woven into the fabric of the 
trampoline.

When all was revealed – submissions were reviewed anonymously – we were delighted to realise how few of the names we recognised. This issue is comprised of established but also many new voices (new, at least, to us). We hope that they provide an opening onto new perspectives for readers as well.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , ,

The Land as Breath: Can Poetic Forms Be Metaphors for Landscapes?

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Ben Walter

Ben WalterImage courtesy of the author.

We are standing in the midst of a football field doubled in size and then doubled again; a great, flat oval of water covered by streaks of green sedge that strike up from the surface like spindly grass. It’s a wetland, but one that has spent the last few years of drought as land; this year, the heavy winter rains that have filled the island’s hydro dams have tipped this landscape into living water.

Still, it’s only knee-deep, even in the middle. There’s liberation in paddling about; as though the land, hiding in the shallows, is still holding on to something of the terrain. When bushwalking, there can be a certain reluctance to get your boots drenched early on a track. Many are the feeble attempts I’ve made to postpone their transition from dry to wet; skirting swamps and rock-hopping creeks, as though I were still roaming through the domains of concrete and the city. But on many trips it’s inevitable, especially in Tasmania, where the land and water often overlap. And there is freedom in taking a first plunge, as though a whole new landscape has been wakened to walking; like an open moorland where any direction of travel is possible and permitted.

This particular inundation is in aid of project for Tasmanian Land Conservancy at a reserve near the Freycinet Peninsula. The artist Richard Wastell and I have wandered into the middle of the wetland, inspecting old shooters’ hides and swan nests; both of them abandoned, as though each side has given up and gone home. We take notes and photographs. Every now and then one of us will call to the other from thirty metres across the water. This is all an approach I’ve found conducive to poetry; giving close attention to the natural world and letting the landscape trigger images that flick through my head.

In the past, I’ve resisted being labelled as a ‘nature’ poet, but I confess that it’s the wilderness that gets my brain leaping. This was certainly true of the wetlands. In an extract from Sedgeland Nation, I write:

if we are straws slurping
at this pool, it is to slake 
our own thirst; we have 
claimed this land as 
ten thousand flagpoles 
needing no flag, but 
we are gentle scepters;
a nest dispersed and 
cradling paper wings.

this silt: our home, 
where all legs hurry 
as their days dry up;
this rot: our mother,
tadpole to sedge. and so
we murmur the rhythms
of frogs when our strings
are plucked by breeze;
we are instrument and stave,
a hymn to this, our year.

Until recently, this tendency had also been true of my fiction. The judges’ report for Overland‘s 2016 VU Short Story Prize describes my prose as ‘dense, almost overgrown in places, in a way that disorients the reader.’ Such a phrase could be employed of much of my island’s wilderness.

But even as I’ve pursued the natural world for a number of poetry projects, my fiction has largely abandoned the Tasmanian landscape. This could just be boredom, or a function of spending less time in the bush. With the absence of fresh and invigorating spurs, I’ve been drawn to tedious repetition; the same images recycled from memory, canonical scenes of buttongrass plains and the prickles of south-west scrub. This loop feeds back into literary boredom and the search for new ideas that aren’t beholden to landscape.

At the same time, my stories have become a lot less dense.

This could be for many reasons; exhaustion, or an evolution in style. But has my retreat from the bush contributed to smoothing out my prose?

The question of how land shapes text transcends simple content; a jungle and a Subantarctic island will provoke different perspectives on flora. In his short essay, ‘The Influence of Landscape upon the Poet,’ T S Eliot notes that his ‘poetry, like that of other poets, shows traces of every environment in which I have lived.’ Robert McFarlane, in The Old Ways, argues that walking in the natural world enables different ‘ways of feeling, being and knowing,’ while Sara Maitland’s fascinating book Gossip from the Forest outlines – at times persuasively – how the landscapes of Europe shaped traditional fairy tales in a way that deserts would never have done. But we need to venture beyond this into broader questions of form, style, voice and approach. How much does the land ‘speak’ such characteristics into existence?

I find the suggestion that it does, in any comprehensive sense, both attractive and dubious. It resembles a myth that I would like to be true, and suspect may even be legitimate in certain contexts or respects, but which I still fear might have little in the way of calculable substance to it. Are the metaphors that a landscape conjures prescriptive, having genuine influences on the shape of a text, or are they simply ornamental ways of reflecting on place? I find myself returning to two analyses that shape my thinking on these issues.

One is from the Tasmanian poet and environmental thinker Pete Hay. In a conversation with Richard Flanagan more than twenty years ago, published in Famous Reporter, Hay argued:

I’m increasingly thinking that to write Tasmania is to write an anti-Australian literature. There are good reasons for that. The Australian landscape icons for example, the bare brown land and wide open plains of Dorothea Mackellar, they are irrelevant to me. New Zealand poetry speaks to me more than does Australian poetry, because I share the same sort of landscape icons, the plunging, uneven landscape that I’m accustomed to in Tasmania, the forests and ravines and canyons and mountains. That landscape seems to generate a poetry with a lot more passion than the desiccated dry-as-dust understated poetry that mainland Australia generates. So I keep looking across the Tasman for poetic inspiration.

In Hay’s fine recent collection, Physick, the presence of Tasmania is transparent – and his poetics do appear distinct from those of many mainland poets – but it is not so easy to parse the influences of landscape, history, local vernacular and worldwide literary traditions on his voice. In the superb ‘Sound to the World,’ best experienced read by Hay, we can imagine the character Gentle Annie’s sentences finding their extension in the undulating landscape where she lives:

He tells me I am cald Gentle Annie down the Settlement
he says unown woman on the mountain I am much contimplated.

So my name is forgot down there in that gomorra
thay are sound to me and that is just to my likeing.

Hay includes many distinctive voices, some of them derived from interviews and oral histories, but the book is balanced with poems typical of his own assertive, questioning voice. In ‘The Wave: Drift and Echo,’ he writes:

The morning sea was burnished flat
To mirror the sun.
It crinkles now with sackcloth.

It is an angry rising
And the wave is its relentless fist.
This implacable struggle, ageless.

'Sea fences' to the saga-tellers,
They clatter shoreward now
As hurdles crash to a leg-weary horse.

Landscape is present here as content; but how are we to understand its influence on form?

Pages: 1 2
Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , ,

Concrete: A Shikoku Pilgrimage

Posted on August 1, 2017 by J P Quinton


Image courtesy of the author

A long day of road walking out of Tokushima. Twenty-five, twenty-six kilometres including five hundred metres of gravel before and after Temple 18. Rosie and I left the hotel at about 7:15am and walked along one of the main arterial roads. It was like walking from Perth to Armadale along Albany Highway during peak hour. Our main respite from the fumes and heat was a muffin meal at McDonald’s. We kept an eye out for a supermarket because we had been warned that there were no shops for three nights after Temple 19. Unable to read the billboards, we kept approaching what looked like a supermarket but they were either an Officeworks or casino. On the other side of a major intersection, with huge dump trucks idling, an industrial warehouse came into view and inside was the Food Garden where Rosie bought some sick tasting crab cheese sausage that we tried at a worker hut rest stop about eight kilometres later. Imagine a miner’s donga open and available to anyone passing by to help themselves to coffee and snacks. A couple of other Henro’s stopped while we were there. One tidied up and reorganised the slippers in the small vinyl entrance. A chatty guy arrived as we were leaving, taking to Rosie and giving her stories of life in the time I visited the port-a-loo out back.

*

After reading the Heart Sutra at Temple 19, a nondescript mansion from 900 A.D., rain started and continued until we reached Katsura michi-no-eki. Because of the minimalist sandals I was wearing, my feet were killing, and I complained to no end despite the fact pilgrims are not meant to complain. The wooden Henro Hut was too exposed and noisey to sleep in, so Rosie went in to ask about postcards and where to camp. The ladies inside said we could sleep on the wooden verandah or the grass patch out the back of the building beside the air-con ducts, the septic tank and drain. Too footsore to continue, we argued about whether to buy dinner or use food we carried and then set the tent up on the verandah looking out over the concrete walled river that flowed down from the mountain we would climb the next day. I found a small step ladder and unscrewed the fluoro light that was shining into the tent and attracting a thousand mozzies. About to sleep we heard huge explosions from the direction of the mining donga we had stopped at earlier in the day. Deep dynamic thuds vibrated the earth in rounds, the cacophony coming at us from distant miles. There must be an agreement, we discussed, between the villagers and the miners to blow up enough earth, enough of the mountainside to keep the workers occupied overnight. As we packed up the tent the next morning more explosions filled the valley for a quarter hour.

*

Temples mark the focal point for the walk. There are reminders you’re on an ancient pilgrimage all along the path. Small statues with red beanies or scarves sit in the leaves beside the track. Ribbons and tags hang from trees. Thousands of years of human history are embedded in the landscape. Where a dilapidated shrine exists there must have once been a Buddhist village. The hamlets we walk through are scarily quiet. Agriculture is intense as each vegetable, fruit or wood type is allocated a small patch to grow. We found an orchard of kiwi fruit, not yet ripe and too hard to eat. That day Rosie and I walked twenty three kilometres over two big hills and still finished before 5pm. There were other Henros around and for the first time we felt like we were part of a group of pilgrims; seeing the same faces, overtaking one another, praying together, sharing a concrete park bench. Seeing all the tired Henros at Temple 21, eating packed lunches from the bed and breakfasts. As osettai, I offered everyone a shortbread biscuit, and as pilgrims they could not refuse because osettai is an offering to Kobo Daishi, the deity who established this walk in the 9th century. No one wants to inconvenience or irritate. There was a chatty woman wearing beige pants and a beige shirt that said ‘United States of Paradise’. She had a wooden staff with a small bell hanging from the top and the top half covered in plastic to stop her hands getting blisters. She said she walked the trail every year.

Pages: 1 2 3
Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged

World of Feelings: Ghassan Hage, Bruce O’Neill, Magic Steven and the Affective Dimensions of Globalisation

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Lucy Van

Lowest prices are just the beginning

Drive anywhere in Australia for long enough and you’ll pass a Bunnings Warehouse. Bunnings, a titanic home improvement merchant whose buying power enables the offering of low prices on products relating to the building and maintenance of the home, was around when I grew up in Australia, but I think my family went to a different, no-name hardware store. I certainly don’t remember counting Bunningses back when I was a child. I only started counting Bunningses when I was well into my twenties, zoned out behind the wheel, happy and relaxed after a day of day tripping. There’s a Bunnings on the way to Rye, Victoria, that I particularly enjoy driving by.

Magic Steven, a Melbourne-based performer of written words, held a popular monthly residency at Bella Union (Melbourne) over the summer of 2016-17. One of the performances, ‘Let’s Be Honest’, saw Magic Steven ruminating over what is written on the side of Bunnings Warehouses:

‘Sometimes in daily life, i drive past, or sometimes I shop at, a Bunnings Warehouse. And I always notice the same thing.
On the side of the warehouse. Will always be written,
BUNNINGS WAREHOUSE.
LOWEST PRICES… ARE JUST THE BEGINNING.
At some point I became conscious of that line, after reading it hundreds of times. and recently I wrote it down… and later, when I read the line back, off the page, I thought. What does it mean?
“Lowest prices are just the beginning.”
The BEGINNING. of What?’

This was trademark Magic Steven, a self-conscious yet casual, underdressed insight into the banal, an eyeing of troubling mysteries beneath our surface realities. Yes, indeed, the beginning of what? Magic Steven’s standard frame narrative, that since a trip to South India he has maintained this practice of writing ‘everything that happens’ to him down in notebooks ‘with the aim of treating every experience as a lesson to open my heart and mind’ introduces his shows with a charming, deadpan bathos. I must say I love that for all the detail with which this daily practice is explained, the audience is never let in on why Magic Steven reads these entries to them. How does performing these words on the stage fit with the ambition of learning a mind- or heart-opening lesson? There’s a lovely and strange omission where all points should meet. In any case, the audience finds the readings entertaining: they laugh – laugh a lot in fact, which directly aligns with the fact that Magic Steven is considered to be a comedian. (He has performed at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival three years in a row since 2014). I suspect Magic Steven’s audience would laugh as much, and in exactly the same places, if were he to present himself as a poet; but I don’t know that the poetry audience would be the same size as its comedy counterpart.

I’m spoiling the metaphor, but it’s worth looking at the way ‘Let’s Be Honest’ arced back into Bunnings Warehouse at the conclusion of the reading:

‘Maybe that’s what the marketing person meant when they came up with the line,
BUNNINGS WAREHOUSE. LOWEST PRICES…. ARE JUST THE BEGINNING.
The key word is beginning.
They know we all like beginnings. Lowest prices are just the beginning.
Everyone loves beginnings. But I don’t know how much we like middles. And endings.
If I keep focusing on beginnings. maybe I’ll be sleepwalking towards a middle and an ending, that I might not like. I thought.
And I closed my notebook.’

Structures of feeling like this make me uncertain of where to place Magic Steven. Comedian, or poet; or, certainly not … storyteller? This last category seems the least adequate of the three – there is little of a recognisable tradition and nothing nostalgic in Magic Steven’s shows. Perhaps he’s better thought of as a word processor, in Kenneth Goldsmith’s sense of that term. I’m impressed by the moments of emotional sincerity that, despite everything, seep in at the edges of the abstract reportage, the cant and the wordplay. The funny thing about feelings is that they’re not that funny – which is why, I suspect, Magic Steven tends to raise them in unadulterated form only briefly at the end of his shows. It seems particularly difficult to speak of communally – or even more ambitious – globally felt feelings in the candid manner with which we associate individually felt emotion. But Magic Steven’s oblique stitching of personal therapeutics upon the Bunnings Warehouse tagline (or the Myki touch on / touch off public transport payment system, or Uber price surges) evidences precisely how individual narratives are caught up in, and moreover written by neoliberal corporate rhetoric: marketing talks to us, and forms the bulk of the ubiquitous and boring text that shapes everyday life around the world. In other words, and quite obviously, globalisation is everywhere. By listening to grassroots activist movements we might learn a little about how processes of globalisation make people feel (usually insecure, but in solidarity, and often angry). But can we distinguish between reactions to globalisation, and the global as itself a kind of feeling? Along these lines, the anthropologist Bruce O’Neill suggests that globalisation is more than a global scale and a material set of flows. What, then, are global feelings? How do we recognise the affective dimension of globalisation?

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , , , ,

Un(dis)closed: Reading the Poetry of Emma Lew

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Ann Vickery

As with contemporaries like Claire Gaskin (Paperweight) and Kate Lilley (Versary, particularly ‘Mint in Box: A Pantoum Set’), Emma Lew has turned to fixed poetic forms like the pantoum and the villanelle. Constraint is both formally enacted and thematically explored. Like Gaskin and Lilley, Lew navigates the (sometimes gendered) limitations of agency against structures of law and an increasingly opaque backdrop of history. What do we inherit both in terms of our tools and our psychology? How might we rethink acts of wrongdoing or bids for freedom within the intimate scene of family and marriage? For Lew, the closed form provides a site to navigate frustration with the claustrophobically familiar and our desire for the unknown. It is a space where one can be both arrested and mobile, housed but unheimlich (unhomed). Through her careful structured refrains, Lew shifts between presence and absence, her objects of study often remaining evasive. At the same time, formal repetition suggests cyclical or more complex patterns of genealogy than simple cause and effect.

‘Arraignment Song’ is a modern pantoum and follows pantoum conventions (a series of four line stanzas in which the second and fourth line of each stanza serves as the first and third line of the subsequent stanza). An arraignment is a reading of a document formally charging a person with breaking the law. Here, the suggestion is an arraignment for murder. The poem itself focuses on legal procedure as it enacts correct poetic procedure. Attention is drawn to genre and formulaic structure: ‘The same show every time—that’s death’ (line 1, 40). Along with the narrative necessities of victim, suspects, murder weapon, and setting, there is also the detective. This is assigned to the poetic speaker. There is an emphasis on objects and a predominantly visual rubric of selection. A central object is a letter that has been mailed ten years after the death. The victim is read off the surface of their body (‘Nice clothes, expensive dental work’ (line 8, 11)) and their apparent lifestyle (‘Flash boats, fast cars’(line 2, 5)). The murder scene is also aesthetically read, ‘Blood pooling poetically around the fingers’ (line 10, 13).

It is around the third stanza and this line that it becomes possible to read the poetic speaker as the crime fiction writer (with the fingers being those of the writer rather than the victim). The process is not only one of deduction but of writing itself. Here the monkey wrench might mean an obstacle or disruptive force in the plan or progress as much as a potential murder weapon. ‘A lit cigarette at a respectful distance’ (line 30, 33) may be part of a detective’s system of surveillance or a momentary reprieve from typing or writing. ‘Stop on one thought, think it over and over’ (line 20, 23) may also be part of the process of deduction or part of the creative process. The ‘Tropical fish and some books on the subject’ (line 12, 15) may be those of the victim or the writer. ‘Night’s your office, shadowing pays’ (line 36, 39) might also refer to the typical noir detective or the writer who must shadow their subject. ‘Who faked a will, didn’t mourn the loss’ (line 24, 27) could refer to the writer who creates a fake subject as much as it might refer to the actions of a suspect. ‘If the family find peace, disturb it’ (line 32, 35) could also refer to the writer’s family as much as the victim’s. The repetition of ‘bitter pills’ (line 14, 17) makes their assignment difficult: is it the victim, the detective, or the writer who has them and does it matter?

At one level, Lew foregrounds how the process of deduction requires trying to work out patterns of cause and effect, as well as issues of motive (intention). While Lew writes that ‘Everyone has solid alibis’ (line 18, 21), the poem’s structure provides a space for the proliferation of alternative storylines. The form of the pantoum reinforces this chain or serial effect. We are told that ‘Slim chance connects you to a name’ (line 34, 37), emphasising this sense of connection. Yet the name itself is never announced or fully assigned; it remains both a shifter and outside the poem.

While the line, ‘Go cosy, slow, investigate’ (line 38) could be applied to the detective or to the reader, the coldness of the case is enacted in the lack of affect in the poem. This is a poem that does not create either a sense of cosiness or a sense of song as promised by the title. Instead, there is a sense of the mechanical and of being at a remove. This is reinforced by the final line which cycles back to the poem’s start, ‘The same show every time—that’s death’ (line 1, 40). The poem offers no transcendence.

‘Rattling the Forms’ is a villanelle. Just as a villanelle has a formal order, so too is marriage a formal arrangement. While the poem’s title suggests a testing or ‘rattling’ of form, it does not suggest breaking or eliminating the form. This is certainly the case with the poem itself, which largely keeps to the rules of the villanelle. It has five tercets followed by a quatrain as well as two refrains. Yet the opening line suggests an alternative desire; ‘I wanted to dissolve my marriage, explode the limits’(line 1, 19). This line also sets up a paradoxical metaphoric trajectory involving both water and fire in the verbs ‘dissolve’ and ‘explode’. The poetic speaker declares that she seeks a series of equivalences, ‘comfort, oblivion, anything in caves,/on a whaling ship, in a hundred other places’(line 2-3) Certainly ‘comfort’ and ‘oblivion’ have traditionally been aligned in a kind of Keatsian ‘easeful Death.’ Psychologists (most notably Jung) have interpreted the dreamer’s dangerous passage through caves as a search for the meaning of life and the cave can be the starting point for spiritual travel or personal growth. The most obvious allusion of the ‘whaling ship’ is Moby Dick which explores our need for signs of destiny and is also anti-Transcendental in orientation. Transcendentalists believed that people would ultimately do good if constraints were taken away from them. Herman Melville alternatively suggests that given freedom, people will make disastrous choices. Yet, there lies within us the desire to take the plunge into the unknown, to seek more. The phrase ‘hundred other places’ is one commonly used to suggest a kind of anywhere and everywhere.

Pages: 1 2 3 4
Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged ,

Architecture, Poetry and Impressions of a Bendigo Chinese Doctor, James Lamsey

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Nadia Rhook


James Lamsey, c. 1888, image courtesy of Dennis O’Hoy

What have architecture and poetry got to do with property? This is a core question in the poetry collection ‘signs of impression’, which explores the operation of possession in a settler colonial context. It does so through the story of James Lamsey, a Chinese doctor, prolific proprietor and philanthropist who forged a space for himself in the regional Victorian city of Bendigo in the late 19th Century. Many thinkers have observed connections between architecture and poetry. ‘Architecture and poetry share a paradoxical sense of “room”’, writes Nicola Fucign, ‘A poem has both space and boundary: room within a room.’1 This spatial connection is beautifully script-bound in the Chinese character for poetry 詩, ‘shi’, a of compound ‘speech’ + temple’.2 However, I am less interested in the alluring spatial synergies between poetry and architecture than the work which poetry performs, and which architecture performs. Poetry and architecture both have the power to impress and move people. More dangerous than this, poetry and architecture can also be ways to lay claims to property through their affective powers. This essay argues that thinking about the synergies between architecture and poetry might deepen understandings of the operation of property.

Last year my research about colonial doctors of colour took me to the Bendigo Golden Dragon Museum. When I arrived, the Research Officer promptly and generously introduced me to two buildings with apparently quintessential Victorian façades. One is an austere, dark brick terrace on Howard Place; the other, a lush ornate and garden-girt red and white brick villa on McCrae Street, the main highway. Compared with the red-trimmed, lion-protected Museum a short walk away, the façades of the villa and terrace give no surface impression of Chinese-ness. Their existence, though, is intimately bound up with 19th century Chinese migration; more particularly with James Lamsey’s migration from the Southern China province of Toi San to the Antipodes.

Owning Jubilee Villa and Howard Place meant James had somewhere private to practice medicine and somewhere to live with his wife, Jane Boyd-nee Lamsey, and their adopted daughter, Kate. It also meant Lamsey conspicuously took up space in a white-ruled city at a time when the presence of people of Chinese descent in the Australian colonies was highly contested. This is my intellectual interpretation. But how do I – a Melbourne-based historian of Anglo-Celtic settler background – respond to Jubilee Villa and Howard Place? How do these buildings mediate my relationship to the colonial past, to the cities I live in which remain shaped by Chinese migration, and, to Lamsey himself? I find that formal scholarly writing does not do justice to the impression that Lamsey’s buildings leave on me. Poetry, though, allows room for emotional suggestion, and truth.3

Property in the life of James Lamsey

Lamsey was born in Canton in 1831 into a family of successful physicians and trained at the missionary-founded Canton Hospital before migrating to Victoria. Here, he initially worked in Geelong, Melbourne, and Beechworth before settling in Bendigo in the mid-1870s; a wealthy gold rush city built on Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Lamsey’s proprietorial life came to public attention in the mid-1880s when he hired two of Bendigo’s most prominent architects, German-born W C Vahland and England-born William Beebe, to design the Jubilee Villa and McCrae Street medical practice respectively. At first glance, it appears that Lamsey’s commissions reflected the dominant aesthetic value of settler society. Middle-class Europeans celebrated the buildings for adding value to the city at a time there was ‘a dearth of architectural progress’, and when nearby Chinatown was seen as ‘squalor’.4

Like other contemporary practitioners of colour, Lamsey had many an incentive to acquire property, and to associate his name with façades that would protect his medical and social authority against the exclusionary forces of white racism.5 Lamsey made his home in Bendigo at a time when the process of white Australian nation-building, with its much ado about property and possession, was in full swing. From 1788, British colonists had been asserting their right to own Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land based on the mythical concept of terra nullius, ‘no man’s land’. ‘The right to take possession’, critical race scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson has written, ‘was embedded in British and international common law and rationalized through a discourse of civilization that supported war, physical occupation, and the will and desire to possess.’6 In the 1880s, European settlers in Victoria were reinforcing their numerical dominance via dual edged modes of possession – exercising their right to remove Aboriginal people off their lands, and onto missions and reserves under the 1869 Aborigines Protection Act, and formulating their right to exclude people designated ‘Asiatic’ – a grossly generic racial category that included Chinese, Indians, Afghans and Syrians – from the space of the colony. The 19th century had seen the introduction of Immigration Restriction Acts across British settler colonies; Acts that gradually denied Chinese people property rights, albeit in ways that varied between the colonies. In 1881, Chinese people in Victoria were disenfranchised and the 1901 introduction of the Immigration Restriction Act would more stringently deny Chinese citizenship, voting rights and rights to welfare.7 Lamsey applied for and received British naturalisation in 1883, and so became legally entitled to purchase property, which he did three years later.8

While Lamsey had imperatives to impress a polity of increasingly hostile and self-consciously ‘white’ settlers with his architectural choices, any assumptions that an assimilationist rationale lay behind Lamsey’s buildings are challenged once Bendigo is located in relation to the Chinese Empire. In 1887, Bendigo (then called Sandhurst) came under the discerning gaze of the Chinese imperial commissioners when they toured the Australian colonies to investigate reports that their people were subjected to the harsh treatments of settler racism. It was thus no coincidence that Lamsey built the Howard Place medical practice in 1887, in due time to impress the Commissioners. Lamsey was the first to greet them when they alighted at the Sandhurst train station, and that night the Commissioners were ‘entertained at dinner’ by ‘their medical countryman, James Lamsey, of Howard-place.’9 The following day they undertook a seemingly convivial tour of various Bendigo buildings of pride; a tour that took a tense turn when the group were prevented from entering the hospital by one Doctor Colquhan, who refused to let the party enter with ‘the Chinese doctor’.10 If this moment exposed the spatial limits to Lamsey’s medical authority and the racist attitudes of some of the medical establishment, it seems Lamsey nonetheless got what he wanted out of the tour. Before they left for Sydney, the Commissioners wrote and signed a testimony of Lamsey’s good character and medical skill. They also bestowed Mandarin Honours on Lamsey, as well as on herb merchant Louey O’Hoy, who effectively worked as Lamsey’s pharmaceutical support.11

Lamsey, though, was not one to rest on his capital. Two years after the Jubilee Celebration he married his housekeeper, Ireland-born Jane Boyd, and the two moved into Jubilee Villa. The settler press reported the Villa’s features in detail:

There are two verandahs … each being 8 feet wide, and the floors are tiled with red and white tiles. The front verandah has ornamented cast iron columns, frieze and brackets, with wood moulded cornice, covered with curved iron, the whole being painted in various shades of gold. The façade of the building is built with red and white bricks, having red and white tiled panels on each side of the front door.12

The use of red and white rather than stucco brick was in vogue with contemporary fashion, and most of the design features were familiar for a settler readership accustomed to Victorian aesthetics. One of the Villa’s features, though, was marked as ‘strange’; ‘A strange feature in the design is a pressed cement lion placed over a pediment in the center out of respect for the British nation.’13 Lamsey later informed confused journalists that the lion was a symbol of his loyalty to the British nation. To me, the strangeness of the lion raises questions about Lamsey’s intent in displaying this prideful ornament. Is this lion subtly subversive in that it digresses from a normal lion-free settler house façade? Does it suggest that Lamsey was even more loyal to the British Empire than the average settler? Is he reminding settlers of his right to own property as a naturalised British subject? Or, perhaps the lion also gestured toward Chinese power given that during the reign of the Qing Dynasty, as this was, stone lions, albeit of a different stance and design, were commonly placed in temples and gardens?

What is clear is that by the time that Federation harbingered the long-feared Immigration Restriction Act, Lamsey was a publicly empowered figure. His medical business had earned the trust of a large and loyal customer base, he was head of the Masonic Association, and he played a prominent role in the annual Bendigo Easter Processions. In contrast to many other less affluent and trusted contemporary practitioners of colour, Lamsey’s position in the uncertain times of the early 20th century was more stable than tenuous, and more prone to celebration than degradation.

Pages: 1 2 3 4
Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged ,

Possession, Landscape, the Unheimlich and Lionel Fogarty’s ‘Weather Comes’

Posted on August 1, 2017 by David Brooks


Image courtesy of Ellen van Neerven, black&write! @ QPF

I: A note on Indigenous Australians

A great many Australian poets are in an interesting and ironic state of dispossession, although perhaps only a small proportion of them actually feels that way – that proportion, let’s say, whose subjects and predispositions draw them towards the landscape, its flora and fauna, and their human experience thereof and thereupon. And perhaps we are speaking only of a proportion of this proportion – although even as we contemplate this we cannot exclude the possibility that some proportion of those great many who turn their backs upon such subject matter do so themselves out of some unacknowledged sense of impropriety or dispossession.

I speak of non-indigenous Australian poets. ‘Invader’ poets, some may prefer to call them (or us, since I am one of them). And ‘dispossession’ might not be quite the right term. Let’s say, instead, a being held back from a place or state they (/ we) might wish to reach, as if they were looking, from a ridge or a fence-line, at the field they want to go to, just over there, but find they have to travel a very long way round, or perhaps not go there at all, but instead to find somewhere else, to translate or re-site their desire. Nor am I suggesting that this is in any way like the dispossession indigenous Australians have themselves experienced. Some non-indigenous Australians, it is true, have experienced something very like it, in the homelands from which they have come as refugees, but this is not the case for most of those to whom I refer – though there are some minor yet tantalising points of comparison. We might see it, this new dispossession, as a kind of poetic justice.

Living all one’s life in a country, a landscape or set of landscapes, camping in them, walking through them, growing up with their sounds, their smells, having no other place so intimately available to one, no other place where one wants so much to be, knowing this as ‘home’, and yet knowing also – accepting, intellectually, as one must – that it is also an invaded place, and that one is descendent of those invaders, or that one has been invited, accepted, hosted and made complicit by their descendants, one is already dispossessed, or, since one did not possess, by right, in the first place, then in a state of not possessing. But I mean something other or more specific than that. I am thinking about writing or in other ways representing this state of being – or rather, since that state itself is not so difficult to represent, of representing one’s feeling about, one’s relationship to, that place, that landscape, which one loves, which has shaped one, and which one wants to – has no choice but to – call home, and yet which one cannot claim.

Even here I have not quite got it right. Claiming is not what it’s about. Nor, really, is possession. Each of those concepts is something we should probably be trying to overcome – why do we need to ‘possess’? – and we might eventually be grateful for this chastening spur. Let’s approach it yet another way. (This diffidence, this two-steps-forward-one-step-back, after all, is part of the poetics of this predicament.) Let’s say that the place, the landscape, does shape one, that it impacts upon one – that, if one has spent all of one’s life there (/ here), or even only a part of that life, and found oneself deeply drawn, then it has somehow in-formed one, taught one how to feel and think about it, how to structure one’s feelings within it. One’s writing – one’s representing – may very well become, then, an attempt to express this place and these feelings, the things which one perceives in this place, which this place has taught one to perceive within it, as best one can. One might even say that some part of one’s writing – some part of one’s poetics – might seem to have grown from this place. And yet, of course, one has brought – has been brought – an alien language, alien forms, with which to perform the task, and one cannot expect that here will be a ready match between these things (the language of the place itself, and the language one has brought to it): even when one has overcome all or most of the other cultural barriers and inappropriate behaviours and assumptions, the patterns and habits of other places that blinker and preoccupy an immigrant culture for so many generations – even when the living here has generated something of its own idiom, to make up for the insufficiencies of the imported languages and forms – there will not be a ready match, since it is not just a matter of terms and idiom, but of the deep grammars which deploy them.

There is always a path. Let us call it the Indigenous Path, though it is in truth a path of appropriation of the indigenous. We stare at it. It seems to stare at us. Some writers go down it with no qualms. Others may itch to follow it but, conscious of the manifold signs, actual and conceptual, tacit or vociferous, warning them against doing so – or perhaps simply from their own senses of respect, difference and mis/appropriation – choose not to, no matter how much it might ease their way.

The indigenous peoples have been in this country, on this land, within these landscapes, many thousands of years – whether this period be of forty, sixty or one hundred thousand years seems scarcely to matter when one is comparing it with the barely more than two hundred years of non-indigenous occupation. And if, as indigenous culture asserts emphatically, the land moulds the lives, ideas, languages and dreams of those who live upon it, then indigenous culture will be much more deeply steeped in these ways, will have been taught things by the place that it might take non indigenous culture many thousands of years yet to learn. It is almost a ludicrous understatement to say that indigenous culture has a great deal to teach the non-indigene who would express his or her feelings and experience of that place truly. And, as already foreshadowed, there have long been non-indigenous writers and artists who intuited or understood this, and attempted to learn, from indigenous culture, habits of thought and feeling more appropriate to the place they were finding themselves loving and wanting to express. At least one school of Australian writing, that of the Jindyworobaks, was dedicated to following this path – one of its tenets, naïve and presumptuous, was the substitution, wherever plausible, of terms and concepts from indigenous culture for English images and concepts. And, as it happened, this school suffered the ridicule of its own white culture for so doing – ‘Jindyworobaksheesh’, ‘Jindyworobakwardness’, ‘the boy scout school of Australian poetry’ (terms from James McAuley, R H Morrison and A D Hope respectively1). But as indigenous culture becomes more and more articulate, and articulated – better to say as its articulation is better and better understood – in the contemporary Australian and international environment, and better and more successful at asserting its rights, it becomes more and more clear that this path cannot morally be taken, or that earning one’s right to take it can take a long, long time.

And for non-indigenous poets this is a dilemma. If it is true, as indigenous culture asserts, that the land teaches, then those non-indigenous who are open and willing enough to be taught, by the land itself, without recourse to indigenous culture, will find themselves learning – find themselves inhabited by – things that, if they give them expression, will appear to have been appropriated from indigenous culture anyway. From a certain perspective, in other words, those who would learn and bear into their work the lessons of the place itself are damned if they do appropriate indigenous concepts, and just as likely to be damned if they scrupulously avoid doing so.

But already this discussion has begun to take on a freight of assumptions and misconception. There are numerous under-examined issues here and we should take a little time to note some of them.

There is, perhaps first and foremost, the issue of landscape itself – not exactly the field that the aforementioned dispossessed or, to put it more accurately, as-yet-unpossessing poets look at from over their fence, since that field, as we shall see, is a combination of actuality and concept, physicality and affect, thing inside and thing outside, but a large part of that field nonetheless.

The very term ‘landscape’ is a difficulty, as much a way of not seeing as it is of seeing, a way of preventing our understanding as it is a way of enabling it. A collective noun, a version of ‘Asia’, say, that one term which at once attempts to designate and obscures that huge panoply of nations, ‘landscapes’ and peoples that comprise it, each with their own specificities. Or of ‘the Animal’, a term which, as Derrida so clearly and simply explains , not only performs in actuality an act of considerable intellectual violence in reducing to the abstract One, and so enabling us to hold at bay, the countless differences of a vast array of distinct species, but also, since it bears so little relation to those to whom it is supposed to relate, says more about us and the way we wish to construct ourselves than about anything outside or beyond us.

From such a perspective there is no landscape. There are only landscapes, in the plural, in a multiple that becomes only the more so the more closely we approach it. Identify a landscape and you will find, as you look at it more closely, landscapes within it. Look at any one of these more closely and you will find landscapes within that. And no, it cannot be claimed that this is a problem unique to the way we relate to our particular environment. It is of course a problem inherent in language itself. Nor (at the risk of introducing a measure of paradox) need it necessarily mean that, cautiously, under erasure, we cannot use the term. The ‘landscape’, after all, as ‘nature’ outstretched, has been and remains the greatest symbol and metaphor we have for that which is beyond us, outside and obscured by the systems that comprise our knowing. We can talk, as we have been doing, about a mode of writing that brings us closer to the landscape, is somehow more appropriate or faithful to it, but surely all that any new mode of writing can ever be faithful to is our own sense of a replica or simulacrum of our own current understanding of the landscape – the body of ideas and beliefs and intellectual / conceptual fashions and frameworks that make up that understanding. To think that we are somehow getting closer to some actual ‘fact’ of the landscape is a little troubling, if not actually paradoxical or absurd, and flies in the face of so much we have come to believe about the impossibility, given the nature of language and all other systems which compose our modes of apprehending anything, of our apprehending anything directly, of any actual, immediate and unmediated seeing or knowing. From this perspective, all is – can never be anything other than – gesture.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , , ,

Placeways in the Anthropocene: Phyllis Webb’s Canadian West Coast

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Stephen Collis


Photograph courtesy of Lawrence Schwartzwald.

Change is the true nature of every place we inhabit, everything we are. I live on what was an island that became, in time, a peninsula only to – one day in the not too distant future, with the changing climate and rising seas – most likely become an island again. Indigenous peoples travelled down this coast – when it had a different coastline, a different sea level yet again – thousands of years ago. European settlers arrived, in numbers and to stay, just a century and a half ago. Today, migrants the world over are being displaced by wars over resources and climate change driven droughts. No man is an island, John Donne famously wrote. Islands, too, sometimes cease to be, are swallowed by rising seas, gathered in by land formations, only to be cast adrift once again. At these time scales, life is a dizzying and mutable dance. We are such temporary stuff – but we love each other just the same, trying to hold each other on our turning Earth we tinker with at our peril, far arm of a galactic spiral, midst a universe that exploded into being billions of years ago, whose speeding shrapnel we, fiery-minded beings, are.

Salt Spring Island, like my Tsawwassen home, is part of the Coastal Douglas Fir biogeoclimatic zone on Canada’s Pacific coast. Lodged between Vancouver Island and the mountain chains of the continental mainland, scattered across the Salish Sea, it is in a rain shadow, dry by west coast standards. Not only Douglas fir dot these mossy, summer-browned islands, but arbutus trees are common too, red and undulating over exposed shoreline rocks. Garry Oaks twist and writhe in unique dry meadows where camas flowers and crocuses rise in spring from the yellow grass.

Seals and pods of resident orca whales ply the waters amidst the hundreds of islands. Salmon swarm towards river mouths to spawn. Ducks and all manner of migratory birds go north and south along the Pacific Flyway, making seasonal stops on rich river delta. Plants and people move along the coast too. The blackberry has spread – following the pathways humans carved for roads and railways – from California to Alaska in a little over a hundred years. It is often difficult to know the difference between indigenous and invasive species. The Garry Oaks, seeming so much a part of this landscape, were brought by the Spanish in the eighteenth century. The more human beings have travelled (and perpetually travel) all over the world, the more we may have to embrace what French gardener Gilles Clément calls the ‘planetary garden’ – a conceptual shift that, in poet and Clément translator Jonathan Skinner’s words, ‘entails a certain hospitality to ‘invasive’ species.’ For Clément, the ‘management of movement [human, plant, animal] is a mode of investigating displacement.’ Blackberries may be colonisers, but they inhabit mostly abandoned and waste spaces, providing a bounty of free fruit to wayward humans and foraging animals.

I’m trying to write about poet Phyllis Webb, her ‘failure’ (that’s how she describes it) to write a projected anarchist epic ‘Kropotkin Poems’ in the 1970s, and the discoveries she began to make in her local environment as she settled into life on her island retreat.

There was, for instance, a well-known petroglyph carved on a bear-sized sandstone boulder on the beach at Fulford Harbour. With large concentric eye circles, a grill of long teeth and the outlines of a head, it has been described as a seal. Across the harbour is a deep, oval bowl carved in the bedrock, near the top of the high tide line. There are, in fact, bowls carved in the bedrock of each and every harbour on Salt Spring – in the south (Fulford Harbour), west (Burgoyne Bay), north (Hudson Point), and east (Ganges Harbour) – offerings in every cove, the island encircled in ceremony.

On a May Day visit – unseasonably warm, the news filled with reports of wild fires about to descend on Fort McMurray, where in the midst of northern Alberta’s climate-change feeding tar sands, 30 degree Celsius spring temperatures were setting the boreal forest alight – I walk from the Fulford ferry to the tiny catholic church tucked into the slopes above the beach. Descending there through bracken and curving blackberry canes – harangued by a kingfisher – I quickly find the bowl carving in the arching bedrock and set myself down beside it so I can look at the bowl, and look out over it at the harbour beyond, stretching away towards the other islands sparking there in the south. It is as though placed there – how long ago? – to invoke and invite entrance to the harbour – to funnel the ocean into its confines – perhaps for the sea to feed those living behind the bowl, at the end of the harbour where a small creek spills out onto the beach, the deep shell midden on the small alluvial plane marking long human habitation. On this day the bottom of the bowl is crusted with tiny yellow-brown and decaying maple flowers, the boughs of which drooped low over my head, dappling the bedrock with a network of sharp-tined shadows.

On another visit, another season, arriving on Salt Spring and taking the bus from Fulford Harbour to Ganges, I take a detour, following Phyllis’s instructions to the location of the real prize – Wilson’s Bowl, the stunning stone spirit of Webb’s titular 1980 book. No maps or guidebooks of the island note the location or even the existence of the bowl – the greatest work of art the island possesses. I follow the harbour around from Ganges to the east and head out Churchill Road. Somewhere here, at the end of this winding, up and down path, Phyllis’s friend Lilo Berliner stayed for a time in a small cabin owned by anthropologist Beth Hill. Somewhere here, in 1977, she walked into the sea, after leaving a small archive on the steps of Phyllis’s home.

The rain has been steady, but now it slows and I lower my hood to let in light and sound. The beach at the end of the road is shell midden, the sea a low flat basin. People would have lived here for millennia – the bowl itself dates to what anthropologists call the ‘Marpole phase’ (roughly 1500-2500 years ago). A 1973 dig in the midden near the bowl revealed some 7000 beads and many skeletal remains. I walk toward the west corner of the beach where rocks jut, clamber over slick boulders under low-hanging arbutus boughs. Sky all tattered rags of cloud, the water pewter reflections, liquid lead. I almost miss the bowl.

It is much smaller than I’d imagined – Beth Hill gives its measurements as 24 x 23 cm, maybe not much more than a centimeter deep, a ‘shallow saucer in bedrock’ with ‘pecked rim.’ Just slightly more oval than round, the area outside its lip also carved away, to better shape the bowl, give it its raised rim. It is no accident of rocks and tide – is definitely made by human beings. Limpets and barnacles – small and isolate – round about. Bottom of the bowl slicked dark with algae under a skim of water, smooth as I gently, reverently draw my fingers across its surface. I move to catch the light in the bowl – grey sky silvered in its reflection – some raindrops falling again, ripples ringing out to its rim. The rock it is carved in is sandstone (and so easier to perfect its shape, as opposed to the other, typically granite bedrock bowls), yellow-green / brown, buckled grooved and riven.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5
Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , , ,

12 Pigment Prints on Paper by Tony Albert

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Tony Albert


Mid Century Modern-Aboriginal Corroboree | 2016 | pigment print on paper | 50 x 50 cm, edition of 2 + 1AP
Image courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf.

Tony Albert’s art practice interrogates contemporary legacies of colonialism in a way that prompts the audience to contemplate elemental aspects of the human condition. Mining imagery and source material from across the globe, and drawing upon personal and collective histories, Albert questions how we understand, imagine and construct difference. Certain political themes and visual motifs resurface across his oeuvre, including thematic representations of the ‘outsider’ and Aboriginalia (a term the artist coined to describe kitschy objects and images that feature naive portrayals of Aboriginality). Albert’s ‘Mid Century Modern’ series uses hundreds of collected vintage retro ashtrays and tablecloths depicting Westernised stereotypes of Aboriginal culture, assembling them to create a vibrant and relentless photographic series that examines cultural appropriation and the erasure of Aboriginal racial and cultural identity.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Posted in ARTWORKS | Tagged

‘a serpentine | Gesture’: The Synthetic Reconstruction of Ashbery’s Poetic Voice

Posted on August 1, 2017 by David Dick

JA

In 1966, John Ashbery published Rivers and Mountains. The departure from the fractures of The Tennis Court Oath (1962) are immediately apparent: it is a return to a language still distinctly marked by Ashbery’s usual probing and misdirection, but without the direct dislocations committed to denotative meaning, form and syntax in the earlier book. Indeed, much of what would become Ashbery’s characteristic fluid, evasive and evolving later style(s), can be found in Rivers and Mountains. And though its final epic poem, ‘The Skaters,’ holds a central place in the canon of Ashbery’s poetry, and more pointedly his long poems, the speculative and living voice of his poetry can be seen to have to been launched into its perpetual shapeshifting in the marvellous penultimate poem of Rivers and Mountains, ‘Clepsydra.’

A ‘clepsydra’ is an ancient device that measures time by the regulated passing of water (or mercury) through a small aperture. Considering Ashbery’s vague, but pointed, statement about ‘Clepsydra,’ being ‘a meditation on how time feels as it is passing’ (Kostelanetz 101), it is an appropriate object for the work to be named after. One of the last poems Ashbery wrote while he was living in France (Gilson 502), he has said in interview with Richard Kostelanetz that he is particularly close to ‘Clepsydra,’ feeling in it a poetic unity that he hadn’t experienced before,1 noting in the same interview:

After my analytic period, I wanted to get into a synthetic period. I wanted to write a new kind of poetry after my dismembering of language. Wouldn’t it be nice, I said to myself, to do a long poem that would be a long extended argument, but would have the beauty of a single word? (101)

Of course, considering this is the poem that he believed moved him on from his ‘analytic’ to his ‘synthetic’ phase – terminology rooted in Cubist art criticism and history, which traces phases of artistic development analogously similar to Ashbery’s own early development as a poet – it makes sense to think of ‘Clepsydra,’ alongside ‘The Skaters,’ as the poem which illustrates the reconstruction of his poetic voice after its dispersal in The Tennis Court Oath. As Ashbery writes in ‘Clepsydra’:

                                                   We hear so much
Of its further action that at last it seems that
It is we, our taking it into account rather, that are
The reply that prompted the question, and 
That the latter, like a person waking on a pillow
Has the sensation of having dreamt the whole thing,
Of returning to participate in that dream, until
The last word is exhausted
                    (Collected 141)

One of the defining features of ‘Clepsydra’ is how it operates on various reversals of expectation and a persistent self-cancellation, darting from ‘Untruth to willed moment, scarcely called into being’ (Collected 140). In this sense, it truly is ‘The reply that prompted the question.’ John Shoptaw perceives this to be an essential drive in the poem: ‘that unforeseeable ends are somehow written into forgotten beginnings’ (89). The poem maintains its development on the back of this indeterminacy, digging so deep into itself in search of an answer – which will provoke another query – that the ‘sensation’ becomes one of a ‘dream.’ It is a ‘dream’ that will only disperse, maybe concretise into something more readily familiar, when ‘the last word is exhausted,’ which, as ‘Clepsydra’ unfolds, seems impossible. Notwithstanding the best destructive efforts of the irrational subconscious, there will always be another word, another meaning, especially as these things come into synthetic relation with other things. The intuition of the speaker, then, is clearly favoured in the near automatic, but ultimately controlled, musing of the poem. If The Tennis Court Oath aimed to ‘exhaust’ Ashbery’s ‘words,’ it was ‘Clepsydra’ that ‘anchor(ed) this new way of writing’ (Kelley). It is the ‘reply’ he purposefully sought in asking questions of his poetry that effectively opened it to new questions and explorations.

As such, ‘Clepsydra’ is important for laying the groundwork for later works, like the perpetual argument, sentences and motions of Three Poems, the evasive sense of a just out-of-grasp meaning in ‘Litany,’ and the long lines of poems like ‘A Wave’ and Flow Chart. Nonetheless, it still looks back to The Tennis Court Oath in the indeterminacy of its grammar and syntax – it is still of Ashbery’s self-proposed ‘French’ period (Kelley) – albeit in a manner no longer at the service of exposing the fractured nature of the poem’s objects, so much as creating a continual, sinuous, shifting and prosodically elegant link between them. ‘Clepsydra’ is hinged on a concessional language that lends it a sense of constant and correcting momentum, its words encountering and portraying a sense of time as an unresolved, contradictory and unexplainable entity. Nothing in the poem is fully present, except for the text itself, and thus it is in need of the reader to directly engage it in an, often troubling, attempt to bring it to presence; not necessarily to ‘make sense of it,’ but to understand the kind of aesthetic sensation of ‘time’ that Ashbery is endeavouring to provoke. In essence, they are responsible for bringing the poem to ‘life’ – ‘this crumb of life I also owe to you’ (Collected 145) echoing the apparent appeal to multiple readers (or lovers, though for a poet what is the difference?) in ‘A Blessing in Disguise’: ‘I prefer ‘you’ in the plural, I want ‘you,’ | You must come to me’ (Collected 139). This appeal toward, and acknowledgement of, his readers is vital for Ashbery’s future poetics, particularly in the sense that he still refuses to grant them anything particularly easy. In fact, the work’s difficulty is its invitation.

This sensation is comparable to the ‘unanalyzable transcendental claim’ proposed by Kenneth Rexroth in his essay, ‘The Cubist Poetry of Pierre Reverdy’ (1969),2 where the reader is lured into the world of the poem to recognise it not as something ‘other,’ but as an additive to the world already known. Or, correlatively, in Maurice Blanchot’s discussion of Surrealism:

Surrealists understand, moreover, that language is not an inert thing: it has a life of its own, and a latent power that escapes us. Alain wrote that one must always verify where ideas are – they do not stay in their place, that is why they cannot be on their guard. It is the same for words: they move, they have their demand, they dominate us. That is in part what Brice Parain called the transcendence of language (‘Reflections on Surrealism’ 88-89).

‘Clepsydra,’ then, through the slippery vagaries of how its language freely develops into a poem, plays insistently on notions of presence and absence, seeing them not necessarily as opposites, but as active and parallel corollaries in pursuit of an idea of existence and selfhood – ‘light sinks into itself, becomes dark and heavy’ (Collected 144). It opens with a seeming promise of illumination, but is always circling back to contrast this with darkness, noting near its conclusion that ‘because everything is relative’ in the poem – opened to a kind of Cubist simultaneity – it is impossible to grasp any ‘more than groping shadows of an incomplete | Former existence’ (Collected 146). Ben Lerner argues that Ashbery uses ‘time’ to pin the reader ‘to the moment of reading,’ effectively frustrating ‘retrograde interpretive strategies that would stop the flow of language at its source’ (203): its ‘incomplete | Former existence.’ This is a particularly apt way of looking at ‘Clepsydra.’ The poem is present in ‘the moment of reading,’ but is guided by a speaker who nonetheless attempts to lead its busy language to absent itself from the breadth of its connotations as it emerges on the page, is consumed, then dispelled in this moment. The extensions of the lines in ‘Clepsydra,’ and the hint of it arriving at a point that is always skipping away, establish a sense of time as the simultaneous creation and fulfilment of the work by writer and reader – the moment of reception in the ‘shadow of | Your single and twin existence’ (Collected 146). Its words are always moving, creating a patchwork of themes and images that read back and forth, with no firm indication of their import or even beginning; of where retroactive reading should occur; of where the self can actually reside. To read ‘Clepsydra’ is to experience ‘time passing’ in the sublimations of its voice wrestling with the inevitable grinding forward of time itself, as the voice or poem attempts to know itself in a present that is always threatened by the presence of the past.

The ‘long extended argument’ based around the significance of a ‘single word’ that Ashbery claimed was the aim of the poem, which it indeed pivots on, is an argument between the resistant, half-formed consciousness evident in ‘Clepsydra’ and the presence of time which insists on this consciousness’ continual renewal to arrive at individuality: the self. Although this self exists in the present, it cannot know itself in the present, only retrospectively in the moment just passed:

Each moment seemed to bore back into the centuries
For profit and manners, and an old way of looking that
Continually shaped those lips into a smile. 
                    (Collected 143)

Time, as he notes in the later poem, ‘Soonest Mended’ from The Double Dream of Spring, ‘is an emulsion’ (Collected 186): it is suspended in itself. The argument, then, is about the significance of past and present time, which ultimately cannot be rent apart. ‘Clepsydra’ is not even broken down into stanzas to perhaps lend some respite to the harried speaker, who pursues and evaluates point after point to only watch them shift away as the sentence or line extends and moves on. The voice of the poem, often adopting an almost legal or even academic rhetoric amid its flights of emphatic lyricism, attempts to bring together these disparate parts to form a whole, but finds itself thwarted by the onward and circular momentum of ‘Clepsydra’ – the never still and self-negating language enacting the sensation of a nonlinear time the self has little chance of reconciling, controlling or understanding. The argument and poem are lost to the presumably ‘white noise’ of a ‘recurring whiteness’ (Collected 140), leading to a ‘white din’: 

                                                  But the argument, 
That is its way, has already left these behind: it
Is, it would have you believe, the white din up ahead
That matters: unformed yells, rocketings,
Affected turns, and tones of voice called
By upper shadows toward some cloud of belief
Or its unstated circumference. 
                    (Collected 140-41)

Whereas in Three Poems, Ashbery places his speaker in a state of Bergsonian ‘duration’ – even parodies it, or the Modernists’ appropriation of it, in the poems’ grandiose, seemingly infinite, never resolved extensions that similarly demand ‘wholeness’ – in ‘Clepsydra’ the sense of the eternity of the moment is muted, building via colons to an ‘unstated circumference,’ to examine instead how the self only really has the sensation of the passage of time, swirling around, de- and re-constructing the individual moment-by-moment in the midst of the ‘unformed,’ ‘affected,’ and disruptively blank ‘white din.’

As Ben Hickman writes, the poem is concerned with ‘becoming complicated’: ‘that is, both how things become complicated, and how becoming itself is a complicated matter’ (35). What it attempts, then, is to ‘represent … the movement and essential ungroundedness of moments of thought’ (37). The opening of ‘Clepsydra’ presents this indeterminacy, dropping the reader and speaker into a question only seemingly half-asked, as if it is ‘thought’ emerging without any clear notion of its beginning. Or as John Koethe writes: it is ‘a question in search of a subject.’ The question mark seems to indicate the following sentence is the question’s answer, even if, without the grammatical sign, it can be seen to syntactically follow the question – the question mark can feasibly be moved to be after either ‘dropped’ or ‘go’:

Hasn’t the sky? Returned from moving the other
Authority recently dropped, wrested as much of
That severe sunshine as you need now on the way
You go.

‘Clepsydra’ appears to use the ‘sky’ and ‘air’ to establish a sense of the poem’s desire for ambiguity and openness – the transparent spaces around its language, which even attempts to invade the language. Here, though, the speaker seems to be asking if they have done enough, if they have adequately performed their role. Has ‘the sky’ not given ‘you’ enough ‘sunshine’ to, suggestively, light up the ‘way | You go’? Will the poem be bathed in this early light to achieve some clarity? Evidently not, as it quickly goes on, and the reader is left to wonder what the ‘other | Authority’ is? Moreover, who is the second person in reference to? Who exactly is, or are, the ‘other | Authority’? The ambiguity of these four lines indicate the way in which ‘Clepsydra’ will unfold from this strange, but contextually apt, half-asked question: there is always doubt and evaporation, never a sense of being fully present: it’s all ‘half-meant, half-perceived’ (Collected 140).

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Posted in ESSAYS, SCHOLARLY | Tagged , ,

Vorticist Portraiture in Mina Loy’s Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Urvi Majumdar


Mina Loy with friends, image courtesy of My Poetic Side

Mina Loy’s book-length poem Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923-25) essentially presents an alternative, revised understanding of the modernist figure of the artist through a ‘polyglot’ language and avant-garde form (Perloff, English as a Second Language, online.). I argue in this essay that each of the characters within the poem is constructed through a Vorticist model, which also encompasses elements of Futurist and Cubist theory, as well as structurally incorporating Steinian poetics. Loy eventually distanced herself and her work from a purely Futurist model because of the movement’s misogynistic overtones as well as their exclusive focus on speed and dynamism. Although she was not formally associated with the Vorticist poets and painters, their combination of analytic stasis and poetic dynamism are elements which assist in illuminating Loy’s approach. Vorticism’s formal focus on transformation complements a deeper study of Loy’s poetics and constitutes the vitality with which Loy created her verbal composition of an artist.

Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923-25) chronicles the childhood and early adolescence of Ova, a character who represents Loy in this semi-autobiographical work (ibid., online.). The poem is broken into three main sections through which verbal portraits of Exodus (Ova’s father), Ada ‘The English Rose’ (Ova’s mother) and Ova herself are presented. By using Futurist and Cubist techniques, which can be directly related to the contemporaneous aesthetic principles of Gertrude Stein’s ‘portraits’, Loy presents these personalities as fragmented elements of motivations and traits revolving around an epicenter of conscious and unconscious intentional energy. Whilst Exodus in the poem is defined by his constant unease and need to migrate, Ada is defined by a continuous negation of the self; Ova’s primary interest becomes a need for artistic expression which she inherits in part from her father, and utilises to give expression to the corporeal and bodily experiences her mother denies actively for herself. Ultimately, Loy uses Ova to refigure the modernist trope of the artist, particularly in its feminine construction. In doing so, she combines Wyndham Lewis’s and Ezra Pound’s idolisation of artistic genius with Gertrude Stein’s call to displace subjectivity from its position of centrality within the text, in order to suggest that the ‘artist’ is found in moments of relational action, especially in the relationship between a creative individual and their dynamic environment. Her poetry must also necessarily be understood through its abiding concern with the question of gender: like her contemporaries Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein, Loy endeavoured to represent a reformed female consciousness through its role and function within the modernist avant-garde. Ultimately, an irresolvable conflict emerges from the core of Loy’s poetic subjects which maintains their defining qualities (gender, environment, ideology) within a dynamic tension. The artist is rendered as an accommodating space or entity. Loy’s method of representing the various elements of her characters’ personalities in a constant state of flux, while located in terms of a central concern which struggles to express itself through language, can be considered Vorticist.

Mina Loy lived in Italy whilst the energetic popularity of Futurism began to spread across Europe. Her romantic affiliations with the founder of Futurism – F T Marinetti – as well as with Giovanni Papini, a member of the group, has been widely noted. However, it is likely that Loy was in fact involved in the creation of the movement and it is certainly the case that Futurist aesthetic principles heavily influenced her early poetics1. Marinetti’s ‘Futurist Manifesto’ called for the ‘destruction of syntax’ (Marinetti, Futurism, 143) and for a liberation of words from traditional linguistic modes of representation. He stated that the poet must ‘cast immense nets of analogy across the world’ so that a new and unusual relationship is formed between otherwise unrelated images and ideas (ibid., 149). For the Futurists, in the dawning ‘machine age’, subject and object, foreground and back ground, could be expressed through a ‘sense of speed or dynamism’ (Adams, Blasting the Future, 10) that essentially blurred the division between interior and exterior realities, with a renewed focus on movement and sensation. Whilst Loy does not submit fully and as ferociously to a worship of modern technology, she does embrace the changing ‘Modern’ world by texturing her writing with selected words from various scientific and technological discourses. She often incorporates repeated references to biology, physics, geometry as well as other physical sciences (Prescott, Moths and Mothers, 198). Thus the very fabric of Loy’s poetry is created through her ‘polyglot’ vocabulary and reflects a more nuanced and unstable vision of the Modern, technological world (Perloff, English as a Second Language, np.). Additionally, a confusion of subjectivity and the phenomenal world is a major concern in Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, as Loy comments on the formational roles of nationality, culture and society in the shaping of the subject’s language, consciousness and sense of agency. Marjorie Perloff notes that the poem itself is an encompassing of linguistic hybridity. In its satirical nature, ‘the language itself is as “mongrelized” as are the principles of her narrative’ (ibid., np.). Ezra Pound, with Wyndham Lewis, would later incorporate this Futurist ethos to disrupt society on all levels through the Vorticist movement.

Futurism is often contrasted with the contemporaneous artistic movement of Cubism which began in 1908. A major concern with spatiality in the visual arts is common to both schools, however, Futurism’s ‘plasticity’ and spatiality itself, for the Cubist, is imbued with perspective2. Rather than art transcending in a vertical manner to a higher realm through symbolic means, the Cubists prized a spatial transcendence which provided an analysis of multiple perspectives. Particularly influential for Loy was Gertrude Stein’s realisation of Cubist principles through verbal portraiture. Susan Holbrook concisely compares Stein’s works to Cubist theory. Whilst Stein re-organised syntax, treating adjectives and verbs as nouns, Cubist paintings held no singular viewpoint, ‘democratising components of a composition.’ Stein’s obscured and disavowed verbs represent the Cubist collapse of time in painting. Their subjects are ‘viewed from different vantages presented in two dimensions’ (Holbrook, Companion to Modernist Poetry, 351). Loy’s verbal portraits, whilst quite different from Stein’s, still echo a self-reflexive focus on the ‘materiality of language’, complementing the simultaneous use of language for ‘representation, reference and enlivened realism’ (ibid., 350). Perloff draws a similarity between the achievements of both artists in their poetry and verbal portraiture: ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose represents a rupture with lyrical tradition that parallels Gertrude Stein’s break with conventional narrative’ (Perloff, English as a Second Language, online.).

Mina Loy associated with Stein in Italy and Paris and wrote about Stein’s poetics. In Stein’s texts she finds ‘the very pulse of duration’: as she writes, Stein ‘invites you into the concentric vortex of consciousness involved in the most trifling transactions of incident’ (Loy, Manifesto, 242). What interests Loy most about Stein’s writing is her portraiture, particularly her ability to evoke a concrete sense of personality through a foregrounding of the materiality of the language. She compares Stein’s texts on the one hand to sculpture, and on the other characterises them as encompassing an essential dynamism – ‘the flux of being as the ultimate presentation of the individual, she endows with the rhythmic concretion of her art, until it becomes as a polished stone, a bit of the rock of life – yet not of polished surface but of polished nucleus’ (my emphasis) (ibid., 238). Loy’s terminology here strongly echoes the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1955), an influential figure for Futurism, Vorticism and Steinian poetics. Using Bergsonian ideas, Loy identifies in Stein’s compositions, an ‘inner life’ of movement and ‘flux’ complemented by a heightened attention to form. The ‘nucleus’ of the text or subject is hardened or ‘polished’ and their various, outwardly resonating movements are in a state of flux: this is in many respects similar to Vorticist theory.

The displacement of the subjective from its central role in the text is a fundamental innovation that Stein brought to modernist literary aesthetics. Whereas Marinetti, Pound and Lewis designated a ‘superhuman’ will to poetic subjects in order to penetrate matter with form, Stein’s poetics insisted on a variety of perspectives and a complex relationship between matter and form itself. Peter Nicholls describes Stein’s ‘different modernist poetics’ as expressing ‘continuities between self and world’ with an attention to ‘texture as opposed to meaning’ (Nicholls, Modernisms, 198).

Ultimately, Stein’s poetics presented Loy with alternative ways to think about language in a modern way: her ideas at once complement and run counter to those of the Pound tradition also evident in Loy’s poetry. In Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, Loy primarily employs the present tense, especially in pivotal moments in her characters’ consciousness when depicting revelations – she thus achieves a version of Stein’s ‘continuous present’. Like Stein, Loy’s portraits demonstrate a desire to ‘achieve an immediacy of presentation’ that is ‘normally identified with painting or drawing’ (Blau, The Artist in Word and Image, 132). Her characters’ subjective realities do not occupy a linear relation to their surroundings. Rather, Exodus, Ada and Ova experience their language, and by extension, consciousness, as being overtly shaped by their environment. Changes in thought and patterns of behavior emerge suddenly and spontaneously, as a combination of both subjective will and environmental circumstances. Thus, Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose problematises the concept of artistic agency in Steinian terms.

Founded by Wyndham Lewis with the help of Ezra Pound and others, Vorticism developed as an English response to preceding European avant-garde movements. Pound himself describes Vorticism as an amalgamation of ‘imagism, neo-cubism and expressionism’ and defines it as characteristically an ‘intensive’ art (Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 90). Crucially for Loy, its conception of the human subject is also one of continuous movement and transformation: instead of a person being passively and receptively that ‘toward which perception moves’, the Vorticist subject directs forces and conceives, as opposed to merely ‘reflecting and observing’ (ibid., 103).

Within a project of characterising influential Modern poetry as combinations of ‘Logopoeia’, ‘Melopoeia’ and ‘Phanopoeia’, Pound specifically termed Loy’s poetic style: ‘Logopoeia – the dance of the intellect amongst words and ideas’ (Pound, Literary Essays, 25). Logopoeia, Pound asserts, ‘ employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the words, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances and of ironical play.’ (ibid., 25). Loy’s frequent use of poetic irony – which she inherited, like T S Eliot, from the French poet Jules Laforgue3 – also injects clarity and wit into her verse. Nicholls explains that the ‘dance of the intellect’ is ‘the dance of irony which offers the necessary escape from sentimentality and romantic expressionism, providing a strategic means by which to affirm the self as strong and authoritative, ‘modern’ rather than ‘decadent’’’ (Nicholls, Cambridge Companion, 55).

Loy’s logopoeic poetry expresses itself with machinic efficiency, but this technique is used primarily to develop her characters as well as for social critique. Often in Loy’s verse, especially in the case of Exodus and Ova, the characters encounter and are fascinated by new words and phrases. Loy initially presents their intellectual processes through unexpected, physical and proficient vocabulary before the words are worked into the rhythm and texture of the verse itself. This method draws attention not only to the materiality of the text, but also to the nature of consciousness itself. The reader is required to engage actively with the poetry through numerous perspectives in order to find significance in the changing patterns of the verse. Through her logopoeic style, Loy keeps ‘different elements’ distinct within a scene, although the scene itself is constantly changing.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Posted in ESSAYS, SCHOLARLY | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Petrus Augustus de Génestet’s ‘Peaen to the Netherlands’

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Fiona Graham

Peter Augustus de Génestet (1829-1861) was a Dutch poet, theologian and preacher. Having lost his widowed mother to TB early in life, he was brought up by his uncle, a well-known artist. He studied theology in Amsterdam with the Remonstrant Brotherhood, a denomination that had broken away from the Dutch Reformed Church, and became a liberal Protestant preacher in Delft.

De Génestet was among the most popular poets of his time, publishing several volumes of verse that was widely appreciated for its musicality, and often for its humour. Yet his short life was marked by tragedy. TB took his much-loved wife, Henriëtte, and one of his four children. De Génestet died of the same illness aged just thirty-one.

Peaen to the Netherlands

Oh, land of bogs and fogs, of drizzle dreich and chill
You soggy scrap of ground, imbued with damp and day-dew
Immeasurably mired, your muddy roads have drunk their fill;
You heave with gout and toothache, with overcoats and ague!

Oh, dreary land of marshes, land of spats and overshoes,
Of dredgers, frogs and cobblers – where it either rains or freezes –
Land of ducks of every species and of any size you choose,
Hear the plaint of this your scion with his autumn coughs and sneezes!

Your climate, so inclement, turns my very blood to sludge:
I have no song, no appetite; no joy, and yet no patience.
Oh, blest land of my fathers, don your gaiters for a trudge!
Country wrested – unrequested – from the briny by the ancients.

– Nov. 1851




Boutade

Oh land van mest en mist, van vuile, koude regen,
Doorsijperd stukske grond, vol kille dauw en damp,
Vol vuns, onpeilbaar slijk en ondoorwaadbre wegen,
Vol jicht en paraplu’s, vol kiespijn en vol kramp!

O saaie brij-moeras, o erf van overschoenen,
Van kikkers, baggerlui, schoenlappers, moddergoôn,
Van eenden groot en klein, in allerlei fatsoenen,
Ontvang het najaarswee van uw verkouden zoon!

Uw kliemerig klimaat maakt mij het bloed in de aderen
Tot modder; ‘k heb geen lied, geen honger, vreugd noch vreê.
Trek overschoenen aan, gewijde grond der Vaderen,
Gij – niet op mijn verzoek – ontwoekerd aan de zee.

– Nov. 1851
Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged ,

3 Translated Takako Arai Poems

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Rina Kikuchi

Takako Arai (1966 —) was born into a silk-weaving family in Kiryū city, Gunma Prefecture, on the outskirts of Tokyo. She began publishing poems in the early 1990s, and since 1998 has run a poetry magazine, Mi’Te, which features poems, translations and poetry criticism. Her second poetry collection, Tamashii Dansu (Soul Dance) was published in 2007, and received the Oguma Hideo Poetry Prize. Her latest collection, Betto to Shokki (Beds and Looms), published in 2013, explores the lives of female textile workers, applying a unique language inspired by the local dialect of Kiryū.

Takako’s poems in English translation are anthologised in Four from Japan: Contemporary Poetry and Essays by Women (Belladonna Books 2006) and Poems of Hiromi Itō, Toshiko Hirata & Takako Arai (Vagabond Press 2016). Her poems have been translated into many languages, including Chinese, French, Italian, Serbian and Turkish, and recited at International Poetry Festivals in countries such as America, Argentina, Italy and Turkey. Takako will perform her poetry at the Poetry on the Move Festival in Canberra in September 2017.

A Lightbulb

Withered while bowing, tsubaki1— single bloom on the hedge. Scoop it up & there’s— this old girl, lipsticked, watching from a doorway: “A lightbulb. Perhaps you could help?”

It startles me, her stranger’s phrasing. Yes. Better go in, better shed these worn-out scuffs. “The same socks as him!” Her voice runs clear & cold down my back. The floor creaks—

Her ceiling’s unbelievably high. Can’t reach it—not me. She points, I go for the stepladder, come back,

& she’s standing—
this old girl
in her bright red wrap

In dim light through paper screen I can see her looking down, touching her sash, her sleeves, standing on the kimono’s fallen layers—feet bare already! Crazy! I drop the ladder, of course, & turn to go—

“Pardon me. I’m not going to do anything. I just want you to take a look.” Her voice is pleading, catching me. Thin, thinner, sharpening, red, the whet barb hooking my ear’s depth. Ahh—ahh—her breath pushes back, her scent’s rising like smoke, my heart chokes, I turn—we turn to one another. Her make-up’s slipping. I can see her naked face.

Ogres, snakes—I’ll take what I can get. Pull it together, go to her. Push her down, tear open the wrap—what? Another underneath—silk, fine and white as a shroud. “I told you, I just want you to take a look.” Her thighs are twisting, she’s wrapping herself back up. Her face smooths, cool & waxy, her eyes flash a deep red. I grab the neck, pull at it, grab her breast—

it’s not there
her breast

a handspan cut
smooth as mountain snow
& Scolopendra flat.
“The operation was twenty years ago.”

*

the operation         twenty years         ahh         like this         you’ve looked down on me the sea of my breast surging         reviving         ahh         so red         the scar that tips my heart reviving         as if new-born         ridges swelling, yes?        Scorpius         of my breast ahh         these stitches         the scissors
like the tail, yes?         the needle-tip puncturing
and should I let this stretch         ahh         ahh         with my deepest breath?

That morning a bloom                 single, on the hospital hedge.
I was put in a white gown. The doctor looked like you, with your strong nose.
The anaesthetic began to work

                                and through the haze to my lost ears
        the voice echoed

                                                        Let’s begin

frantic         I prised open         my inner lids
        & the bulb’s sting                 was printed
        on the water mirror

                                                        my inner abyss

Quickly, turn it on         again
you look like him         today again
                                                                                the hedge
                                                        and in a white gown
                                                I         bloom         yes

Turn it on                         c’mon

you just brush past me         with your scissors         so chilly
and I’m surging         surging         showing         hot red scissors
I         forever         and ever in a white gown
you         forever the doctor

slashed them, didn’t you? the white tsubaki
chopped them into pieces         so I came in red!

Why doesn’t it turn on!
                                                        the single bulb
the poisoned needle         prising         scratching         at my eyelids
scratching me         stabbing         pushing me down         stinging bright

Just turn it on!

                                                                                so sweet, this anaesthetic haze.
                                                                                                                                so chilly
I’ll puff         puff till I burst
swell
                        and swell
                                                my belly
                                                                        gross, yes?
                                                                                don’t
let me hang on the hedge.
Red or white, it doesn’t matter.
        it blooms anyway—
                the flower
                                lightbulb swinging in the wind
                                                                                        I
                                                                        pendant         star of the sour night dew
        clambering, stitched thread clenching         clambering
                hanging, dangling, Scorpius, bound up, springing droplets
                        swollen                 scorpion belly
                        reflecting         in this image, this compact
                                lightbulb, a lightbulb, a lightbulb

                                                                                                                Turn it on



Pages: 1 2 3
Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged , ,

3 Translated Nguyễn Man Nhiên Poems

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng

Nguyễn Man Nhiên (1956 —) was born in Nha Trang, Vietnam. He has published a number of poetry and essay collections within Vietnam, as well as with the literary magazines Da Màu and Tien Ve. He is also a well-known folklorist and prolific visual artist. His most recent book of poetry, Đêm dịu dàng thế kia, và gió… (Night How Graceful, And the Winds…) was published in 2011.

Out There the Sky Turning Grey and Winter

mad twenty years old
denied a place to plunge into the sea
I sat still like a portrait
the dockland of mine smoky-grey

no longer here the ailing brownish-red sun
night like a bar of syrup-ice melting, dripping
a song, blue and single, a song from the dark foliage licking it open

a revived season for many a bouquet of flowers in the laundry at dawn
the banging and thudding loud noise of devils hanging low under the garden’s
clusters of light globes
I stuck my teeth into the edge of this rotting suburb of grey ash that pulled
one in like opium

distant stars like a flash of lightning
upon small altar-cups, the unblemished souls now haemorrhaged on the rooftop
            of the district-cathedral
let me be with my prayer on the icy-cold sidewalks

I closed my eyes, resting my head on my own shoulder
resembling act of holding and caressing that youthful  love once upon a time
the street lamps were being soaked in dripping purple rains, late evening 
I was leaving the ship-cabin, an empty seat




Ngoài Kia Trời Xám Màu Động

tuổi hai mươi điên 
không có chỗ lao vào biển 
ngồi như một bức chân dung 
bến tàu của tôi khói xám
không còn nữa mặt trời đỏ nâu ốm yếu 
một thanh tối chảy như kem 
bài hát xanh đơn của tán cây liếm mở
mùa tái sinh các bó hoa giặt sáng 
tiếng ầm ầm của quỷ sứ kêu vang treo lủng lẳng dưới bóng đèn chùm 
tôi gặm mòn ngoại ô màu xám tro gây nghiện
những vì sao xa xôi như ánh chớp 
những chén lễ nhỏ và sự thánh thiện chảy máu trên nóc nhà thờ 
hãy để tôi cầu nguyện trên vỉa hè băng giá
nhắm mắt và dựa đầu bên vai 
như ấp ủ một tình yêu trẻ dại 
đèn đường trong mưa tím rịm chiều 
tôi bỏ lại boong tàu ghế trống
Pages: 1 2 3
Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged ,

4 Translated Gerhard Fritsch Poems

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Vincent Kling

Gerhard Fritsch (1924—1969) began publishing poetry and literary criticism after his service in WWII. He also authored two novels; the first, Moos auf den Steinen (Moss on the Stones 1956), followed standard conventions of realism, while the second, Fasching (Carnival 1969), with its fierce indictment of Austrian complicity and its stylistic concentration, reflected the personal and artistic upheaval Fritsch passed through during his tragically short lifetime. Fritsch took his own life in 1969, just five days before his 45th birthday.

Parting in November

Don’t take the silence
out of the morning fog;
the train platform is
talking quite enough:
the poster for Venice in September,
the pungent soft brown-coal smoke
and the obtrusive heartache
of a withered vine
of wild grapes.




Abschied im November

Nimm nicht das Schweigen
aus dem Nebel des Morgens,
der Bahnsteig redet genug:
das Plakat vom September in Venedig,
der scharfe Braunkohlenrauch
und die aufdringliche Wehmut
einer vertrockneten Ranke
wilden Weins.
Pages: 1 2 3 4
Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged ,

Rattling the Forms

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Emma Lew

I wanted to dissolve my marriage, explode the limits,
seek comfort, oblivion, anything in caves,
on a whaling ship, in a hundred other places.

Shrewd reverie in my perilous head,
I struck out through the shambling waves:
I wanted to dissolve my marriage, explode the limits!

Beyond waterfalls and time lost and the first chastities to mar the shore,
defenceless men set me aflame,
on a whaling ship, in a hundred other places.

Not me at all, but my double, my look-alike;
not someone, but anyone in a sort of cloak and hood…
I wanted to dissolve my marriage, explode the limits.

How bare the narrative seems!
And nothing! And nothing and nothing and nothing…
on a whaling ship, in a hundred other places.

If you could only see me riding on and on,
babbling like a saint in the open fields!
I wanted to dissolve my marriage, explode the limits,
on a whaling ship, in a hundred other places.

Posted in 82: LAND | Tagged

Arraignment Song

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Emma Lew

The same show every time – that’s death
Flash boat, fast cars – it’s all going to end
Go cosy, slow, investigate
Dead ten years when the letter was mailed

Flash boats, fast cars – it’s all going to end
Assume a certain monkey wrench
Dead ten years when the letter was mailed
Nice clothes, expensive dental work

Assume a certain monkey wrench
Blood pooling poetically around the fingers
Nice clothes, expensive dental work
Tropical fish and some books on the subject

Blood pooling poetically around the fingers
Back where you started with the bitter pills
Tropical fish and some books on the subject
Psychos like to work together

Back where you started with the bitter pills
Everyone has solid alibis
Psychos like to work together
Stop on one thought, think it over and over

Everyone has solid alibis
So listen and record the names
Stop on one thought, think it over and over
Who faked a will, didn’t mourn the loss?

So listen and record the names
No one wants to sit with frailty
Who faked a will, didn’t mourn the loss?
Killers get jittery in spring

No one wants to sit with frailty
A lit cigarette at a respectful distance
Killers get jittery in spring
If the family find peace, disturb it

A lit cigarette at a respectful distance
Slim chance connects you to a name
If the family find peace, disturb it
Night’s your office, shadowing pays

Slim chance connects you to a name
Go cosy, slow, investigate
Night’s your office, shadowing pays
The same show every time – that’s death

Posted in 82: LAND | Tagged

Archiving the Present: Ivy Alvarez Interviews Conchitina Cruz

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Ivy Alvarez


Image courtesy of Conchitina Cruz

Conchitina Cruz teaches creative writing and comparative – literature at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. Her book, Dark Hours, won the 2006 National Book Award for Poetry. Cruz is also the winner of two Palanca Awards: one in 1996 for Second Skin, and another in 2001 for The Shortest Distance.

Demonstrating bodily athleticism and a steady, generative interrogation of the physical and liminal world, Cruz’s enumerative poetics moves smoothly between many forms, from spatially-oriented poetry, prose poetry and micro-fiction, to letters, lists and invocations, to forms that take their cue from reference texts. All the while invoking a language of the hyper-real, the mythic, dramatic, and the routine.

From November 2016 to April 2017, I corresponded with Cruz over email. Commensurate with an ongoing political emergency, and in the face of turmoil and bloodshed in the Philippines, this conversation is, out of necessity, open-ended.

Ivy Alvarez: How has your drive to ‘convert the perishable to the permanent,’ as you wrote in your statement introducing ‘Three poems’, manifested recently, compared to how it was when you published your work in ‘The Centre Cannot Hold: Six Contemporary Filipino Poets’? How has it evolved in the meantime? Have there been any reversals to this impulse, wherein you explore its opposite?

Conchitina Cruz: I find myself wincing at the phrase ‘convert the perishable to the permanent’, which strikes me as quite arrogant now that I’m seeing it in isolation, fished out from a brief statement I wrote a few years ago to describe my work. It seems so casually convinced of poetry’s capacity to enforce meaningfulness, or to transcend material realities. It isn’t something I would say now without wariness, I think.

I know the phrase is meant to gesture (clearly inadequately) toward my interest in the idea of the archive, or what it means to engage in archival work – which I suppose is another way of saying, I am interested in the work of committing to memory, in what goes ‘on the record,’ how and why it gets counted, how and why this one is memorialised and that one is not.

In my latest book, There Is No Emergency (of which the three poems published in Cordite are part), this archive is generated by a lyric self in the aftermath of personal catastrophe, who, while in this catatonic state, is haunted by larger catastrophes, both socio-historical and natural, which turn nursing private tragedies into a painfully indulgent endeavour.

This self’s tactic for survival is to collect ephemera – thus the many poems in the book that are running inventories, catalogues that begin and end, but don’t exactly have a beginning or end. Forged in the nexus of private and collective suffering, this archive of the mundane, to my mind, was a means for the ruins to become liveable – continuing access to the humdrum must mean that indeed, life goes on.

I tried to write poems that were decidedly unfinished, unpolished, monotonous even, or ordinary – qualities that I think tend to be excised from a piece of writing for it to become a poem. I also wanted to write with an acute awareness that there is always an outside to any archive – things both inevitably and intentionally forgotten, omitted, suppressed, discarded. An archive of the mundane, I thought, in explicitly staking no claim to relevance, would magnify its own partiality and invite contestation.

Of course the impossible that is at the heart of the project is ephemera [that] ceases to be such when collected (you could say that ephemera is what the archive displaces), and a poem, especially when published or ‘recorded’ becomes a particular iteration of a generalised desire to go beyond its current version. It achieves permanence, so to speak – which is what I said I set out to do, so I guess you could say that realising my intention was also my limitation.

Still, I feel uncomfortable ascribing permanence to poetry. Sure, this is true, and we need only to turn to the poetry we love from places far and centuries past for proof. I think, though, that too much faith in poetry’s transcendence can also be a source of complacency for living, breathing, working poets – as if writing poetry were in itself a sufficient form of action.

‘Historical revisionism’ is a widely circulating term in the Philippines these days because our president is (among many other things) a staunch Marcos loyalist. Thanks to his efforts, and with the aid of the Supreme Court, the long-dead dictator and plunderer Marcos, whose carcass has been preserved for close to three decades by his family, was recently buried in our Cemetery of Heroes, a move that has caused widespread outrage among Filipinos.

Pages: 1 2 3
Posted in INTERVIEWS | Tagged , ,

‘The concept of risk is intensely personal’: Jonno Révanche Interviews Hera Lindsay Bird

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Jonno Révanche


Image courtesy of Rachel Brandon

Hate

Once………………I tried to give hate up
But I was born to feel a great pettiness
To lie face-down in my catholic schoolgirl outfit
and pound the cobblestones of the Royal Albert hall

New Zealand writer Hera Lindsay Bird has been described as many things in recent times; internet poet, a crisp new voice in a constantly shifting medium, the sole cause of poetry’s demise, a conspirator and revolutionary, historical necromancer, albatross, a stern jewellery thief. Considering the ephemeral history of the genre of ‘internet comments’, none of those descriptions are singularly defining. What matters is that legions of readers who might not otherwise have engaged with poetry are now responding enthusiastically to her work.

Bird has an MA in poetry from Victoria University – she is based in Wellington – and her debut poetry collection exploded online in the viral way that poems are not known to do. Additionally, her work has received attention from a litany of publications that often underestimate the poetic form, and recently lead to her appearance at the Sydney Writers Festival and Emerging Writers’ Festival. Her work intermingles the frayed literary conventions of the past with a gripping, yet fittingly conversational tone, striking an equilibrium between two contemporary poles of feeling. Bird writes with gravity about attachment and sentimentality as much as she does the exquisiteness of decaying castles and ’90s celebrities, making keen and often alarming observations about the peculiarities of mundane life. The enthusiasm she shows for the modern simile – as in her poem ‘the ex-girlfriends are back’ – could conceivably function as a self-jab as much as it could be a light-hearted take-down of fourth-wave / academic feminism or lazy pseudo-intellectualism. For those who eschew camp and kitsch out of fear that they have lost their place in poetry, Bird is writing to convince them otherwise. The collection Hera Lindsay Bird spouts off in the face of morbidity and shame while sinking deeply into its gratifying embrace like a favourite old armchair, and with nary a trace of fear or apprehension.

Having spent years experimenting against restrictive conventions of poetic structure, Bird’s debut collection demonstrates how she’s outlasted self-doubt and created a collection of snappily clever, moving, profoundly validating and balanced poems. Despite all this, maybe it’s just liberating to read work by a poet who is clearly cackling, internally, while writing their work, thoroughly enjoying the process no matter the result.

Jonno Revanche: One of the things that stands out from your poetry collection is not just how funny it is, but it’s a very precise kind of humour, one that allows for introspection, sentimentality and emotional involvement. For example, in ‘mirror traps’ you declare it’s ‘love that plummets you down the elevator shaft.’ Sort of blunt, but still honest and witty in its own way. Do you find it hard to accommodate all these things? If so, do you feel like it took a lot of practice to get there?

Hera Lindsey Bird: This is a hard question to answer because it’s so second nature to me now, and I don’t mean to sound like I’m dashing off poems while laughing in a stolen Cadillac, but that particular hybrid of humour with a base of emotional honesty or engagement is almost all I care about in writing these days. There was a period when I first started, and I was writing a lot of controlled, aesthetically rigid poems but I quickly became bored of that, and when I get bored I get reckless, and when I get reckless I send a lot of joke poems about oral sex to my masters supervisor. But most of the work was admitting to myself what kind of writing I truly had the energy and enthusiasm for, and giving myself permission to write that way. My favourite writers in every genre always straddle the line between comedy and emotional engagement, George Saunders, Chelsey Minnis, Mark Leidner, Frank O’Hara, Lorrie Moore. It was just a matter of admitting that to myself, and then hot-wiring Cadillacs became a lot easier. I never write well when I’m sombre. Even my greatest personal tragedies I like to turn into a joke, which might be a personal failing but I don’t think has been a poetic one at least.

JR: A lot of the imagery in your book recalls medieval symbolism, but it’s also fringed with elements that reference pop culture, whether that be from now or the ’90s and noughties. Is this blending together of the old and the new an automatic thing, a product of the culture where you’ve grown up / living, or are you purposefully trying to tie these together?

HLB: I am totally obsessed with medieval imagery. Historical re-enactors are one of my great obsessions in life, and I take any opportunity I can to casually mention turrets and get away with it. I like my historical content to be camp and poorly realised, like a seafood buffet served in a Medieval themed restaurant, which is not to say I don’t have a genuine love for real, un-franchised history without a current liquor license but I love the way it’s been so poorly and enthusiastically translated into a contemporary context. My entire room is decorated with pictures of the Rosetta Stone and Stonehenge and Roman columns and the wonders of the ancient world, but I’m also a true contemporary dirtbag, and I love Paris Hilton and figure skating rivalries and Liza Minelli made-for-TV movies. Basically, what I am trying to say is all of the imagery and references in my poetry are things that I deeply love, and want to include regardless of how thematically relevant they are to the poem.

JR: In a recent talk you mention Lauren Gould and how her influence helped you to understand moving outside of poetry’s conventions. Have you had any other similar experiences with contemporary poetry in the last five years that moved you in the direction you’re travelling now – whether you were making work in opposition to something or whether you were affirmed by the voice of other poets?

HLB: I try not to make art in opposition to anyone else, because I think, for me at least, it makes my work reactionary and didactic, and being didactic doesn’t produce good poetry. I think there is certainly a place for a good literary eye rolling, and there are a few in my book, but I’d always rather work towards something I was excited by. If you define yourself too much by what you oppose, than what are you left with when the old institutions crumble, as they inevitably do? I don’t want to spend too much of my writing life screaming at clouds, unless they’re naughty clouds and they deserve it. Besides, my favourite writers were never reactionaries, or when they were, they were reactionaries on ideological leave, like when the Surrealists got a bit lax with their manifesto and started writing love poems. The way I have always learned to write was to imitate the writers that I loved, and there have been some new additions to my personal reading list, but the direction I’m travelling in is still the same. I have recently discovered Crispin Best and Kimmy Walters and Max Ritvo and Richard Siken, all of whom have pushed me to work harder and risk more.

Pages: 1 2 3
Posted in INTERVIEWS | Tagged ,

signs of impression

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Nadia Rhook 
design

I see iron, wrapped, to posts 

windows-snuggle-triangles, a hose,

draped, on concrete-lion’s-prowl

the verandah … keeps bricks-from-climbing grass 


this
asymmetry keeps its rhythm






main house            horse way            servants’ quarter

cemented-lion-centre





and that church over the road? isn’t far away / Bendigo designs / Irish eyes / Big White 

Lies you’ve been laying designs / two sides of 

the creek ever since / this story fell for possession            and the architect scribbled “city” 

far across this gangly colour line


the lion? ruled from the roof so

it’s more than red - white - brick - thick

foundation / brick walls brick Jubilee / Villa






1:3 panels 1:2 windows 1:1 home
Pages: 1 2 3 4
Posted in 82: LAND | Tagged

Trompe l’oeil

Posted on August 1, 2017 by David Felix

Posted in 82: LAND | Tagged