Maya Heads

Some very cool vispo from John M Bennett over at the New Post-Literate.

"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.

present?

This sounds awesome. Someone want to buy me a present? My birthday is next month.

Some Thoughts on Tan Lin's BLIPSOAK01

I've been meaning to post this since I started this blog. It was meant to be published quite some time ago, but even when it was written it was a bit late. However then I still had the excuse that BLIPSOAK01 was Lin's last full-length publication, but now there is HEATH (PLAGIARISM OUTSOURCE), which I must get a copy of.
I've mentioned Lin's work in several conversions online recently, so here's the review.

Tan Lin’s latest full-length book, BLIPSOAK01, [Ed: not any more.]like 1999’s Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe (Sun & Moon), draws on those realms opened up by practitioners such as Bruce Andrews and Steve McCaffery. However this book breaks new ground in its genre through its manifestation as what Lin describes in the preface as an “extended play (e. p.) poem” employing theory that draws not only on the work of the Toronto Research Group and ‘language oriented/centred’ poets, but also the work of Kenneth Goldsmith. Goldsmiths theory[1] is echoed in Lin’s preface: “The poem is born out of our mutual dis-interest” (15) and again “the most beautiful page makes you look away accidentally from what you were reading (13)[2]”. However Lin, rather than following Goldsmith’s mantra adapted from the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler that “the world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more" (“Being Boring”), Lin’s ‘boredom’ is rooted not in repetition and non-interventionism but in a-semantics and banality.

In this way one can reconcile the creative output contained in Lin’s work with a pseudo-goldsmith-esque aesthetic of boredom through a dismissal of conventional economies of interest and information in favour of production of response through the privileging of surfaces, repetition, sonority and textual slippage. Thus the poem is carried along by affect and plastic tonality in a propulsion of starts and stops, staggering passages and smooth surfaces.

The poem extends for over 300 printed pages, operating as around 150 two-page splashes, with the lines of text extending over the centrefold. This typographical twitch creates a new plane operating in a similar way to a line-break, an awkward pause of misconstruance and half meaning:

I open the vanish and try to recover the cancer[/] ‘s instructions (126-7).

(note - the gap won't appear here. it's where the [/] is)

It is this awkwardness and start-stop kinesis that informs the trancelike unthinkingness that Lin describes as boredom, the page that is to be “experienced at the synaptic level, which is the level of looking” and thus the experience of reading becomes “very very easy and relaxing”.

Thus there are 300/150 pages of extended ‘un-boring [pseudo-] boredom’, the poem flitting from the opaque plasticity of:

gon___ist ______________ me’enr

ati _____tennis 55 w;______ kio’s ____st98

so mor3#

youl essen _____ ilt ________(148-9)

into faux-lyricism reminiscent of writers such as Lyn Hejinian and Myung Mi Kim.

Here the process of reading is informed by dislocation and juxtaposition, starts and stops, the not said and the almost said. The reader’s consciousness flits across the surfaces, making connections and basking in the almost-meaning and meandering sprawl of repetitions:

Somewhere, it begins to rain, somewhere

it begins to be boring

If it is February, I wrote of your clutter

If it is February, you are listening at the door where snow is falling (104-5)

the reader is invited to read (non-) meaning or enjoy the poem’s surfaces as a field of play. The poem’s “extended” nature creates manifold openings, hollows and creases in this surface, allowing for reading/play as a series of constructions and deconstructions of conflicting (mis-)readings, interacting, contradicting and rubbing up against one another.

The poem is a constant, and a flow. The reader can step in and out at will, and re-reading/re-turning offers new experiences and (non-)meanings, as the “content” is not fixed-dogmatic-finite. This way the economy of reading exits the closed system where meaning production can exhaust itself, into new, empty openness.

---

[1] for example his essay “Being Boring”, available through Goldsmith’s author page on the EPC at epc.buffalo.edu

[2] Lin’s critical work on goldsmith can also be accessed through the EPC

Wow. when I cut and paste, footnotes come too. Good to know.

Addenda:

There is an interview re HEATH.... here, and a review here. Thanks to Tan for the links.

Langpo in NZ, kind of.

There's stuff about me here. Yep, I'm stroking my ego. The origins of said stuff are here, then moving to here.

on a only-very-slightly related note, interesting stuff going on here, especially regaring avant-gardism, the grotesque, poetics of excess etc etc.