New Otoliths

Issue 15.

"Exotic"

I've been thinking about Scott's review of my chapbook the last couple of days. While it is mostly positive (and more than fair - I am very greatful for his generous reading), There is one thing that bothers me a bit, aside from the Swinburne comment and general (negative) characterization of Victorian excesses (which is relativly standard, but, i think based on masculinist value judgements privileging the (Allen) Curnow-Brasch brand of muscular, austere modernism. Though I must qualify this by saying this is a general comment, Scott does not (wholly) prescribe to this viewpoint, though there is, I think, a subtle indictment in his description of "the flowery, pre-modernist style of unfashionable female writers like Eileen Duggan and Ursula Bethell").

What I found disarming though was his characterisation of my influences being "exotic overseas poets" (my emphasis). I find this strange. Not only does it imply some novelty value, but also, through the ecological connotations of the word (not neccessarily intended, but nevertheless there), that I am involved somehow in bringing "outside influence" - coded (somewhat) negatively - into the pristine enviroment of NZ lit (which, rather than pristine, i would characterise as somewhat stifling, aside from a few notable exceptions).

Firstly I wonder how the importing of, or identifying with, US/Canadian/Continental precidents/influences (which, as Scott notes with regard to Michele Leggott, I am most definately not the first to do. There was those writers grouped around FREED magazine in the late sixties and early seventies, see Murray Edmond and Michele Leggott's anthology Big Smoke. Many of these writers drew from the US, where the recent developments had been documented in Donald Allen's New American Poetry. Later came the influence of Langpo, poststructuralism and fluxus, reflected here in the work most notably of Wystan Curnow and Tony Green, both of whom are active across artistic disciplines, alongside Alan Loney (who straddles both generations) and Michele Leggott.

Secondly, I wonder how this (especially in light of the precidents cited above), is any different from the earlier generation of Curnow, Glover, Brasch et al. Here I quote Curnow (quoted in Alan Loney, "Entitled / Unentitled: New Zealand Poetry" in Reading, Saying, Making: Selected Essays, p 83): "we all began reading Pound and Eliot, [and] shared our modernity with Auden, MacNeice, Day Lewis or Spender”. These NZ writers were hell-bent on creating a distictly 'New Zealand' literature, yet were still modelling there work on old-world (or older-than-us-world, in the case of the Americans mentioned) influences.

Furthermore, in this information age the ability to share influence, theory, thoughts and practice internationally at near instantaneous speed is, i think, something that should be grasped with both hands. No longer is it (particularly) difficult to read diversely. Though most of the shop shelves are dominated my NZ poetry (most of which is published by Victoria or Auckland University Press), that is not all, or even most, of what we have access to. We can read more, and more widely. I find it surprising that more people don't do this - especially when those who read novels tend to read precious little NZ work, and we have such a strong tradition of the novel here.

I Just bought a copy of Ghost Tantras by Micheal McLure. Its excellent. Here are some for perusal - more here.

7

GHHHROOOOOO GAHROOOOOOO EEEKA CAR,
cargroooooooo longkarr GRAHHH!
Cowmrooooooose blooooo mewie-weeeep.
VOOOOOOOOOOOO?
Shgrarrr? Yagabb krahr yellow vipt
mwooo? Swooooooooooooo lub byeeee bwack meee!
MAKE LOVE SOUNDS.
HERE SMELL.
Grahh pallid! Gr-aaah love nowhr
bwooooooooo krahh noooo-boooooose!
Saba-groooooh stahr zaboth mwoooo
kakra graaaah grahh grrrrrrrr
mweeeeeeeee melt.

49

SILENCE THE EYES! BECALM THE SENSES!
Drive drooor from the frcsh repugnance, thou whole,
thou feeling creature. Live not for others but affect thyself
from thy enhanced interior - believing what thou carry.
Thy trillionic multitude of grahh, vhooshes, and silences.
Oh you are heavier and dimmer than you know
and more solid and full of pleasure.
Grahhr! Grahhhr! Ghrahhhrrr! Ghrahhr. Grahhrrr.
Grahhr-grahhhhrr! Grahhr. Gahrahhrr Ghrahhhrrrr.
Gharrrrr. Ghrahhr! Ghrarrrrr. Ghanrrr. Ghrahhhrr.
Ghrahhrr. Ghrahr. Grahhr. Grahharrr. Grahhrr.
Grahhhhr. Grahhhr. Gahar. Ghmhhr. Grahhr. Grahhr.
Ghrahhr. Grahhhr. Grahhr. Gratharrr! Grahhr.
Ghrahrr. Ghraaaaaaahrr. Grhar. Ghhrarrr! Grahhrr.
Ghrahrr. Gharr! Ghrahhhhr. Grahhrr. Ghraherrr.

69

((OOOOGREEEOSH-DRATHOR BUTTERFLY
BEATS AND PANTS DRATHOOOOR ABOUT
THE GROWING RING OF PANSIES
where the earth is dry garhroon nahh dree-
opeth barhoooth nohdresh beethorr noh
I oh thah meeerdown emrah gahrsoon.
Oooomreeeoh ahn drahgnooze. Theeeow!
Water seeps within the earth
between the roots.
The bee faints with bliss of overwork
and curls her leg.
Snail hunger fills the air with rasping teeth
thrown out from the cave beneath the leaf.
Ooor ahm geahzthow fon kalein.
Wah lahg dooohr ohgreeeazsh shtahr.))

Another Review - in good company

Scott Hamilton has reviewed my chapbook over at Scoop Review of Books, alonside Mark Young's Pelican Dreaming:Poems 1959-2008 (Meritage 2008). If the company wasn't enough, Scott's reading picks up on things others have missed, nameley the presence of Swinburne (who He describes as "rotten-ripe" - true enough, I suppose), and more so Gerard Manley Hopkins. (I also have a weakness for Robert Browning - see Susan Howe's reading of "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" in My Emily Dickenson).

I really apreciate Scott's generous and honest reading.

Mark Young edits Otoliths, and has been good enough to publish some of my work.

Fisher on Gordon: More

"What's interesting, though, is that, in making the logic of racialisation explicit, Griffin stirs the spectre of class. The neoliberal tactic has been to ignore resentment and aggrievement altogether - to maintain that such feelings are a moral, educational or pyschiatric failure of those who have not accepted metropolitan, "modernising" values ("diversity" on the one hand, neoliberal "solutions" on the other). Much of the BNP's appeal derives from its granting of legitimacy to those feelings of resentment and aggrievement - yes, it says, you're right to feel angry and betrayed, you're right to feel that your anxieties are being ignored, you're right to feel that there is something fundamentally wrong. Here, class emerges - because who has done the betraying and the ignoring if not the metropolitan "elite" which Griffin attacked on Thursday? But this brief flash of class antagonism is immediately subsumed by race-logic: the problem is not the class structure itself, the BNP wants us to believe, but the elite's "pandering to minorities". Needless to say, this has it the wrong way round - the real problems, to name only a few of the most glaring, are the precariousness and poorly paid nature of post-Fordist work, the running down of public services, the pathetically low rate of council house building."

Review of Crumb's Genesis

in the NY Times.

(a result of Owen's recent post on the sound of Sheffield's architecture - Depeche Mode bender. I keep forgetting how gorgeous this song is.)



(and this is new. Still beautiful.)

Johannes: Hipsters, Kitsch and the Specter of Mass Culture

Johannes has a great post here. And there's a Laibach video in the middle of it. Those "Slovenian Retrogardists"....

I especially like the "kitching of the image":

"∑ Adorno argues that the High Modern move towards abstraction is a move away from the kitsch of the image (“mimetic enchantment”).

∑ Steven Shaviro: “Behind all these supposedly materialist attacks on the ideological illusions built into the cinematic apparatus, should we not rather see the opposite, an idealist’s fear of the ontological instability of the image, and of the materiality of affect and sensation?”"

Mark Fisher is the Truth: on Nick Griffin and the BNP

"The fact that Griffin's 'arguments' don't stand up to rational scrutiny means nothing. Since when has racism relied on rational argument?"

Nada Gordon on Flarf and 'generation'

"Let's discuss this, shall we? Or rather, deconstruct it. Firstly, Flarf is not (in the robotic sense of the term) "generated." Flarf poems are written. Their materials are, in Kasey's term, sought. I almost prefer the word rescued. Some poems may be "generated," like that wonderful "Random Poem Generator" that was hanging around the internet for a while, but Flarf poems are very much willed and constructed.

In a larger sense of the term, I suppose you could say this poem was generated if that is how you think of the mechanism of creation: I do often think of poems as almost biological extrusions, like skin tags or fibroids or, as I posted recently on facebook, reflux."

Read the whole post. It's very good. Especially the thing about "valor sets".

Though I would have to argue that a "generated poem", be it aleotory work like that of Mac Low, or a found text, or even the product of the "Random Poem Generator" Nada mentions, is still "Willed and Constructed", though in various different ways. Cages Mesostics allow for the insertion of intentionally chosen "Wing Words", and Mac Low would carefully recraft the proccesses he used if the initial product did not turn out as he wanted. The craft, the will and the construction are simply removed a level from the text.

In the case of generators and the like (i use various online text-alteration programs in my own work - the two pieces in Brief and the sequence in Otoliths utilised these - these could be thought of as collaborations of a sort; and even on the most basic level there is will and construction inherent in the act of pressing a button, and in recognising what comes out as a poem.

Self and Interconnectivity

Over at Mez's blog (_knot404_):

"The self that results is actively defined in terms of its connections and
associations, in varying degrees of intimacy and intensity. The emphasis
is not on person but persona: as Mez Breeze has suggested, this self is
an assembly generated through clusters of distributed identity markers,
which does not add up to stable meanings or groundlevel actualities
because it also coalesces in terms of the volume, degree and intensity of
its connections. Less a reductive experientiality than a connective
extensibility."

-Jordan Crandall, Artivistic 2009 Lecture.

She's got a piece in the latest Brief (as do I), and it's got me very interested.

The piece linked to in there is very interesting. Recommended. (hence the link).

R Crumb's Book of Genesis

Complete and unabridged. Picture should link to the Publisher.

Pierre Joris: a Poetic of Nomadism

Jerome Rothenberg posted this. It's great. Peirre blogs here.

Ecerpt:

"A nomadic poetics is a war machine, always on the move, always changing, morphing,moving through languages, cultures, terrains, times without stopping. Refuelling halts are called poases, they last a night or a day, the time of a poem, & then move on. The sufi poets spoke of mawqif - we will come back to this.
A nomadic poetics needs mindfulness. In & of the drift (dérive) there is no at-home-ness here but only an ever more displaced drifting. The fallacy would be to think of language as at-home-ness while "all else" drifts, because for language to be accurate to the condition of nomadicty, it too has to be drifting, to be "on the way" as Celan puts it.
[...]
If the mind is only the body's invisibility (Merleau-Ponty) then the poem is merely the unreadability, the non-transparency, the opaqueness of that mind. An opacity grounded in the materiality of language as much / if not more than in the viscosity of psyche. A turbulent opacity -not a monumental, laminary , marble-or-granite opaqueness."

Catalyst 8 - launching!

Wednesday 4th November - time TBCAl's Bar, 31 Dundas St Christchurch

Just advance notice about the biggest party of our year! Please come along, celebrate the launch of the best Catalyst yet, maybe even buy a copy. Or three. We'll be selling subscriptions on the night also: get your Catalyst delivered!Stay tuned for more information leading up to the launch.

Courtesy of the Catalyst boys.

Dog Food

Jared has a new blog. I'm not sure what was wrong with the old one, but hey.

It's here. There's erasure works.

Dominic Fox: What is / to be done

This is fantastic. I recommend you follow the link and read the rest of it.

"My main observation is that we have two crises to contend with. The first is the fundamental crisis affecting not only the financial markets as they now stand (or totter), but the entire modus of “financialisation” as it was developed during the Reagan/Thatcher years and subsequently elaborated to its current pitch of sophistication. The markets may recover, to a greater or lesser degree, but it’s widely accepted that such a recovery cannot readily be secured against a likely future catastrophe: the conditions for such a catastrophe are endemic to the global financial system as it currently operates. This system, therefore, is acknowledged to be in crisis, and whatever happens next (on a grand scale, e.g. “to capitalism”) will happen in response to this crisis. “Regulation” is unlikely to turn out to be the preferred answer.

"The second crisis is “the crisis” as it is instrumentalised by the ruling class in their efforts to impose “reform” and restructuring on institutions. Here the stage is set for a series of confrontations, between workers – faced with job losses, pay cuts, casualisation, increased hours and workload and the general evisceration of any service ethic covertly developed on the job in favour of an endless carousel of stupid and insulting cost-cutting shenanigans – and the management bureaucracy which will seek to enforce these losses as a matter of (regrettable, but non-negotiable) necessity. These confrontations will keep “the left” busy for quite some time. There may be some real gains to be won, and certainly some real losses to be resisted, but in an important sense the conflict over “the crisis” will be a kind of phoney war, a war in defence of an old covenant with exploitation against the privations and indignities of the new."

Two from Action Books: Sandy Florian and Lara Glenum

The Tree of No
Sandy Florian.

Maximum Gaga
Lara Glenum
South Bend, IN: Action books 2008

It was inevitable that Florian's book would invite comparison, in my mind at least, with Ronald Johnson’s RADI OS, his epic reworking of Paradise Lost through the lens of Blake and by a process of erasure. However Sandy Florian’s book is a totally different animal. Johnson’s text opens:
O___________________tree
______________into the World,
_____________________________Man


___________________________the chosen

Rose out of Chaos:


____________________________ song, (3)
Sparse, contemplative, verging on the hermetic, these lines/fragments sailing in a sea of metaphysical whiteness. Constrained by the properties of the original text, Johnson’s writing takes place between the words by a process of removal, “with God and Satan crossed out” (as the book’s blurb states), “reduc[ing] Milton’s baroque poem to elemental forces” and giving those words that remain space to breathe outside the strictures of Milton’s syntax. Johnson writes silence as an invocation of the primal and the metaphysical, and the silence enacted by the deletion of the divine, in the face of unanswered prayers, becomes inaction of the texts intertwining of chaos and celestial order, chaos out of which rises man, or out of which springs this new-blossoming flower. Here I am also reminded of Paul Celan’s “Psalm” and it’s “Niemandsrose”, the “No-one’s-rose”. The implications of this metaphysics of absence or deletion are to vast to go into here; perhaps the place for this is another essay. There is a kind of deformance at work (see Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann, “Deformance and Interpretation” available through Samuels’ EPC author page), and this is also evedent in Celan’s reversal of prayer in “Tenebrae”: “Bete, Herr, / bete zu Uns, / Wir sind nah” (Pray, lord, / pray to us, / we are near).

In contrast with Johnson’s stillness, Florian’s book is one of perpetual movement. Her poem opens:

Beastly I fall at Adam under the shade, unclocked, first frocked, ovened at the core, from words no western man can wet. Beastly I fall at Adam under the shade, shaking shadows from the shadows, pretending, beastly, that the toads aboard the oncoming train are throned, green toads of the godliest worth. Beastly, debarred, hunted, wanton, I take refuge in the timber, entrapped in the awkward position of waking. (1)

The text is dense, animalistic and driven. It is “beastly” and “wanton”, enacting a very different conception of humankind’s creation “under the tree of no” (2). The dawn of humanity is in falling, in movement, timelessness and heat, and “words no western man can wet” brings to mind Emanuel Levinas’ ur-language – a language of communion and contact prior to any necessity of signification or “regime of signs” (Deleuze and Guattari).

The tree of the title is the Biblical/Miltonian tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This, however, becomes far more complex through the dissolution of this moral binary, and the appropriation of the signifier as the title, and designator, of the text itself. The “No” within this title becomes the unutterable/blasphemous statement of God/”Montgomery’s impotence and complicity in humanity’s fall, evil, and “beastly” nature, created “fit to stand, fit to fall” and, in God’s own image, “unhesitant[ing] to taste the waste”.

The “No” becomes a pseudo-synonym for the post-human “I” enacted within the text, denoting a collectivity or assemblage of humanity as flow and flux, driven and driving at breakneck speed (in parallel with the text’s analogous performance) toward destruction, absolution, or something different. This No becomes, paradoxically (and in true Nietzschian fashion) an affirmation of human animalistic passion and velocity: “But the sin in me says ‘I’”.

This arboreal metaphor mirrors the post-human assemblage, supplemented (and made more realistically complex) by the text’s rhizomatic network of interrelations, mirrorings, stammers and repetitions.


A certain post-human quality is also apparent in Lara Glenum’s second collection Maximum Gaga. Her first book, The Hounds of No (also published by Action Books) placed her at the forefront of the group of poets whose aesthetic tendencies Arielle Greenberg has termed “Gurlesque”, including Sabrina Orah Mark, Catherine Wagner and Chelsey Minnis. These poets work by drawing on overt femininity, kitsch, gratuitous ornamentation and a open, often aggressive sexuality, all tainted by a grotesque treatment[1]. Maximum Gaga builds on the groundwork of her earlier collection, taking the use of recurrent characters, theatricality and perverted romantic quests as the basis for this books oscillation between drama and verse in a baroque grotesquerie. The verse transforms into a horrific parody of Jacobian theatrical spectacle, literalising Deluzian tropes such as the Desiring Machine and the Schizophrenic machine alongside abominations such as Trannie Mermaids, Ultraclowns and Normopaths.

The text becomes the stage for a burlesque revue of perverse horror and debauchery, the players being assemblages of disparate parts and organs, orifices and frills, taking on roles as parts of sexual assemblages that mirror and move beyond those of De Sade and Pierre Guyotat.

Within the heavily ornamented theatricality of the text, where agitprop hangs “like gonads / from the walls of [the] voluptorium” the logic of gender and biology is lost in a seething mass of folds, questing phalli and labia that Minky Momo can stretch “around her body and [zip] herself inside”.

All concepts of bodily and sexual normalcy are destroyed, crushed under the tread of the “Visual Mercenaries”. Their rallying cry to “beg refuge in Maximum Gaga and its glorious excesses” paradoxically implies the amoral ethic of the collection: that these anti-real excesses are not something to take refuge from, but to enter into, and escape is only possible obeying their call to “submit to Maximum Gaga”.

This is what James Pate, writing on her first collection The Hounds of No, describes as the power of “obscenity as a site of possible liberation”. Submitting to the horror and excess allows the manifestation of escape from totalising realism and its hegemonic politicality, “through the secret side-door to the Sublime rather than through the mock world of realism”, manifesting itself as the “displace{ment of] causal logic with a totalizing logic of violence”. . The performance of gender and sexuality becomes conflated with violence as a liberating force, clensing these sites of the hegemonic forces of normativity / reterritorialization, allowing for a utopian (used in full knowledge of the words etymology), anti-realist project of construction to take place on the ashes of what once was.

This collection (assemblage?) is truly arresting, and truly liberating in its voluptuous carnage. It must be read to be believed.

[1] See Greenberg’s essay here.

Another Review

Michael Leong has posted a fantastic review of my chapbook.

Would Ayn Rand like Radiohead? or: You Are a Target Market

Adam Fieled, in a post (largely( about WCW, concluded by saying someone found his blog by googling this question.

Weird world, huh?

However,I think she would.

(tangent - this is very, very cool)

Let me justify myself (while still being as voiciferous as is to be expected in such a situation).

Radiohead, in my view, are/were kind of like the Pink Floyd of the 90s, and are comprable to Sonic Youth in their appeal to an audience of disaffected middle class youth (often University Students - witness both band's success being driven by exposion on college radio) who are, by and large, disenchanted with capitalism though still heavily invested in the individualism that they have been (though the capitalist apparatus) intdoctrinated with. This paradox, plus this generation's (that's my generation, by the way) largely apathetic outlook on political action, spurred by a dissilliusionment with the efacacy of such, creates a situation where the anti-captialist (or more accurately ambivilant-toward-capitalist) sentiment finds unlikely bedfellows in the political apathy and individualism that are direct product of the capitalist aparatus, and this individualist ideology has it's logical (it's what we're taught) expression in consumption.

This means that the kids buy DVDs called Meeting People is Easy, with "You are a target market" plastered in large, uppercase type across the front cover, with mocking (and partial) awareness that this banner is true; and, i'll warrant, less awareness that they are behaving just as the trained consumers that they are looking down their noses at.

Watching all of this, Ayn Rand laughs.

Ted Jenner's Writers in Residence and Other Captive Fauna

Writers in Residence and Other Captive Fauna
Ted Jenner
Titus, 2009

(This review first appeared in Breif 38)

This collection should be compulsory for anyone interested in innovative writing from New Zealand, and Scott Hamilton’s introduction offers a fantastic entry-point into what is a startling and difficult oeuvre. The opening piece, “A Quiet Shape”, is dense and somewhat daunting; but like the best of Jenner’s work becomes a sparse lyric, steeped in the detail of minutiae and with a diction pillaged from various sciences (in this case anatomy and biochemistry), and is as rewarding as the best texts of other notoriously difficult writers such as Samuel Beckett.
However unlike Beckett these texts are not empty, devoid of meaning, or demonstrative of hopeless existential angst. There is a profound thirst for knowledge at work here, a keen mind, and a very sharp wit. This comes across with great joie de vivre in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Shirt” an analytic and self aware investigation into absurdism, reminiscent more of Donald Barthelme channelling Ludwig Wittgenstein than James Joyce.
Barthelme and Joyce, alongside Beckett, are good comparisons, as Jenner shares with them an astute, occasionally hermetic (and I do not mean this in a pejorative sense) wit. This is bolstered by a keen eye and ear for the absurd, and a healthy sense of the play and the performative in language. A good example of this is the piece “Arthur’s Pass”, the pun in the title being intended I’m sure, most likely with a grin and a knowing wink. The circular recurrence of the text mirrors the figure-of-eight path of Arthur’s run, with all the implications of a symbol for infinity. The paragraphs themselves in the third section (“He Fits Her Description”) rush headlong onwards, “don’t stop, no, you’ll never stop” (36), lacking final punctuation marks, having an impetus all of their own independent of speaker, narrator or writer. This piece reminds me somewhat of John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”, a favourite in creative writing classes, but my opinion is that Jenner has outdone him. This being said I must add that I was never a particular fan of Cheever.
***
In an uncanny parallel with Scott Hamilton, who has written a fantastic introduction to the volume, I too first encountered Jenner’s work through his piece “Progress Report on an Annotated Checklist for a Motuihe Island Gazetteer of Ethnographical Topology and Comparative Onomatography”, though this was in an old back-issue of Parallax, the short-lived journal of “Postmodern Literature and Art” edited by Alan Loney 1982-3. I’d become interested in ‘Language’ writing through the work of Michele Leggott, and was surprised to find that Charles Bernstein, co-editor of the movement’s eponymous magazine, had been published in a NZ journal, and was interested to find what other gems were there. There was Jenner’s prolix title, alongside the work of such as Tony Green, another innovator long overlooked (in New Zealand at least; he has recently recorded for the PennSound archive of audio poetry based at Pennsylvania State University). I encountered Jenner’s poetry through the long out of print volume A Memorial Brass, produced by Loney’s Hawk Press, and am glad to see his poetry, as well as his prose, included in this volume.
Poetry, though, is often besides the point when it comes to Jenner’s work, which can oscillate between genres, or (again with a grin and a wink) refuse to fit nicely into the category of either poetry or prose (again, much like Joyce in Finnegans Wake, or in the later chapters of Ulysses). Take, for example, the following passage from “A Concise Natural History of Southern Malawi”:

tropical boubou ma tew tew ma tew tew three-streaked
twitter swizzle bunting larklike twitter zack blackcap tew tew (82)

This piece, like “Progress Report…” titles itself as a scientific treatise, however rather than masquerading as such on a textual level (as “Progress Report” does, at least at an initial glance), “Natural History” functions in a similar way to the avant-garde poetics of Gertrude Stein, Ronald Johnson and Clark Coolidge, privileging the phonemic aspects of the words, their sounds and feelings, over any normal coherency. The piece as a whole is held together thematically by naturalistic and taxonomic references (in keeping with the title). The result is a piece of great beauty.
This is a fantastic, and long overdue book, full of the unexpected, that constantly startles and surprises. It doesn’t get boring, it doesn’t get old, and I have a suspicion that it is one I will return to and find completely different at each reading.

I've been treated (/painted/obscured/abused) by Ron Klassnik.

Alan Loney has included me in the addenda to his top ten NZ poetry books.

It's a good list, I'd second books by Wystan Curnow, Michele Leggot, Murray Edmond and Tony Green, Though those listed by the latter three I haven't got copies of, and in the case of Tony's book I haven't read (I've got his three pamphlets from the 70s though - Doc Oxide, Londonettes/Underground Reading and Untold Angels (all published by Gee)). I'd replace Wystan Curnow's Cancer Daybook (though it is fantastic) with Back in the USA (Black Light, 1983), and add Ian Wedde's Earthly: Sonnets for Carlos (Amphedesma Press 1975), David Mitchell's Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby (Stephen Chan 1972), some of Alan's own work (though I'm not sure what at this stage - I do very much like his latest (?) Day's Eye (Rubicon 2008)- and probably some late period Allen Curnow, Probably Trees, Effegies and Moving Objects (Cats Paw Press 1972) or The Loop in Lone Kauri Road (Auckland University Press 1986).

Scott Hamilton interviews Michael Arnold.

RIP Leigh Davis

Liegh Davis has died.

For those of you who don't know, he was a seminal figure in the NZ experimental poetry community through his work at Jack Books, and his editing the shortlived but hugely influential magazine AND. The publication of Willy's Gazzette in 1983 (self-published as a collection of stapled photocopies) was a massive event, recalled by Alan Loney here.

Though it was reprinted by the Writers' Group in 1999, it is still a hugely sought after publication, and I haven't been able to get my hands on it (though I have a selection of the sonnets in various magazines).

He will be sorely missed.

ADDENDA: Charles Bernstein has an obit here.

Johnson vs. Goldsmith

Johannes has linked to a very interesting post by Robert P Baird on Kent Johnson's plagurism of Kenneth Goldsmith's Day.
Johnson: Here
Goldsmith: Here

Boo!

Issue one of Boo, a "Journal of Terrific Things", is up. It is edited by Nick Demske, and "exclusively publishes offensive things".

Contributions by Rebecca Wolff, K Silem Mohammad, Johannes Goränsson, and others.