Poetry NZ 40

is out now (available here), including my essay "Recent Developments in American Poetry" - covering the Gurlesque and related poetries, Flarf, and Conceptual Writing. Here is the section on Johannes Göransson:

"The phenomenon of grotesquery as a means of questioning gender norms and identity isn’t confined to women. Johannes Göransson is a male poet working in this field. He relies on the Julia Kristeva’s framework of the Abject, which centres on the othering, fracturing, exploding and mutilating the speaker’s body and consciousness through a regime of continual violence and transgression:

My girlfriend is gasping for air; she’s going catatonic
in this bargain bin of a winter, she’s scared of pigeons.
I own a shoddy collection of pigeon skeletons.
I never thought I would be able to fit so many
disparate parts in my mouth at once. (35)
and:
I keep mentioning my torso because I wish I were a zoologist. I wish I were a surgeon. Or Darwin. Or a ballet impresario in Paris. Or a mole in the ground. Or a reptile collector. Or 5000 accidents. Made of Swans. Or Darwin. Or an injury. Or going home in a wheelbarrow. Or moving into the Hotel Fuck. Or bleeding slowly into a silver bucket. Or plundering. Most of all I wish I were Darwin. (17)
Here the text becomes a battleground for competing desires and pulsions, the ‘so many disparate parts’ of language that emanate from the ‘mouth’ compete as vehicles for the assertion and explosion of self. The humanist distinction between human and animal, and the rationalist distinction between subject and object collapse as zoologist and mole become one and the same. Darwin is conjured as the archetypal destroyer of epistemologies and metanarratives (as in his impact on Judaeo-Christian cosmology). In this respect Göransson is a Darwinistic regressor, a user of the name as a vehicle for becoming animal. Being is discarded in favour of movement. The body, both personal and political, becomes the site of conflict and abjection as in the titles of some of the poems in the collection:
‘Shotgun Wedding in the Ribcage of the Bourgeoisie’ (9), ‘Ronald Regan Brought Me to this Country – Me and the Anti-Abortion Movement’ (29), ‘I Write Like a Girl, You Read like You’re in the Closet’ (68).
Such titles appear as interruptions to the flow of a longer poem reading like catch-phrases or shouted announcements as a result of their large, bold typeface, all-caps formatting or pop-up ads announcing what’s coming next on the network."

"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.

Difficulty

My write up of The Gilt show Before Dust has been lambasted as too difficult. Am I overly obscure?

Before Dust

My catalog essay/review of the above-named show has been posted at Gilt Gallery.