Sunday, November 29, 2009

New Reconfigurations

Is up. Find it here. There's a poem of mine in it.
I haven't read it yet, but look forward to doing so - more on that soon.

4 comments:

Andrea said...

I like how the sound works in that poem of yours - I finally got that Ronald Johnson sound thing working too - very interesting, I'd never come across his poetry before.

It continues to surprise me that people are surprised about overseas influences and so on, re what was said in the intro to the issue.

Ross Brighton said...

Yeah, I know -
The whole history of literature (and language), and both of those in New Zealand, is/are narrative(s) of intermingling, interborrowing, misappropriation, hybridity, resistance to thus - a kind of chaos, really.

Unless one has a concrete political/ethical reason not to (aside from their being alien), I find it difficult to understand a resistance to the appropriating and redeploying of tools/techniques that can be used to further poetic practice here or elsewhere.

If some people don't want to do that then it's their prerogative, obviously, but to criticise others for doing so is the same as if I was to sneer at them for being "backward" (which is ridiculous in a wor(l)d of plurality, and where a lot of the work that I do/am into is undeniably fringe and will never have mass appeal (though a lot of similar practitioners seem to hope desperately that such is not the case - which would be nice, but is unlikely).

We all create our own narrative of poetic history (as we do all history), privileging some writers/movements/eras over others. It is the lack of consensus, these differences, this disorder that makes things interesting.

or so i figure.

Ross Brighton said...

Oh, and the John M Bennett stuff in the issue is great - cant wait to dig through the rest of the vispo feature. I've got to try my hand at some of that kind of stuff.

Andrea said...

I agree about the creating personal narratives - I've always thought of reading in that way and it's great that it's different for everyone.

As for the vispo, I read quite a bit of Apollinaire at one time - good to get into some more recent stuff.