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.

Review of Crumb's Genesis

in the NY Times.

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.

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.

Johannes Göransson on the American Hybrid

This review, originally in Rain Taxi, is excellent.

Alistair Patterson's Africa: //Kabbo, Mantis and the Porcupine’s Daughter

This Review originally appeared in The Press on Saturday, August 1.

in Africa: //Kabbo, Mantis and the Porcupine’s Daughter, Alistair Patterson takes on nothing less then the history of humanity – or, more specifically, our collective origins deep in the continent of the title. In his forward Patterson reveals the genesis of the poem in Neil Bennon’s The Broken String, an account of Victorian linguist and philologist Wilhelm Bleek’s studies of the language, culture and mythology of the now vanished /Xam-ka !ei, a branch of the San people, a tribe of bushmen who dwelt in South Africa. The //Kabbo of the title was one of the /Xam-ka !ei who Bleek, along with Lucy Lloyd, interviewed and learned the language from.

Patterson Writes of reading Bennon’s book that: “I was unwell and increasingly aware of my own mortality. The visionary views and beliefs of the /Xam-ka !ei – their conviction that animals, people and their spirits, the past and present, coexist with each other […] resonated with me” (7). These conceptions of history as perpetual and the universal oneness of things manifest themselves on the poem’s narrative structure, which flits backward and forward across millennia. It is through these techniques of temporal distortion that Patterson once again proves himself one of this country’s most skilled practitioners of the extended lyric. Through the almost exclusive use of the present tense as a means to lend immediacy to the past, he brings events such as Pearl Harbour and the voyage of the Beagle into the present, placing current events alongside half-forgotten myths and the legacy of the colonial past. This juxtaposition intertwines events, causing them to imbue each other with a new significance:

//Kabbo hasn’t

heard about it –

about what happened

in the Middle East

of how Israel’s dawn raid

‘rocked the truce’

& if he’d heard of it, what

Would he have thought:

of his brother

who’d been murdered

while he slept (28)

And one of the most powerful lines, given a stanza to itself:

_______________The British have left India … (64)

Or again:

_______________Columbus discovers

_______________the indies … (39)

which we are told earlier “was always there” (25).

This is a beautiful book, and not just for what it contains. Puriri Press’s effort is to be commended. The book is a hand-stitched hardback, and the interior paper stock has a beautiful heft and weight, which makes for a wonderful reading experience, and emphasises the book as an object. This lends the poem a sense of permanence, and adds to its treatment of time and history.

Upcoming

Reviews:
Alistair Patterson: Africa - Coming soon from the Press. After printing, will post here.
Chris Price: The Blind Singer - Also for the Christchurch Press.
David Lyndon Brown: Skin Hunger.

From Action Books:
Lara Glenum: Maximum Gaga.
Sand Florian: The Tree of No.
Aase Berg: Remainland: Selected Poems. Trans. by Johannes Göransson.

Short write-ups, or longer (if I have time) on:
Mark Young: The Lunch Poems
Farrah Field: Rising
Johannes Göransson: In Praise of Virgins & Pilot: Johann the Carousel Horse.

My review of Ted Jenner's Writers in Residence and other Captive Fauna is forthcoming from Scoop.

I also have a poem forthcoming in November's issue of Reconfigurations.

And Rauan Klassnik has given me a plug here.

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.

Kindlefilm by Ed Lust

SFA Campus Gallery 19-22 April. Click images to enlarge.


There is energy and stasis. Bursts of light and movement. The capture of this in images renders the show plaintive, especially in the cold light of a winter's day. At the opening there were crowds milling around, with sci-fi techno music and lovely red wine. Now there are no people, just the hum of the air conditioning.



The sound of the Millennium Falcon was a malfunctioning air-con unit.

This show is elegiac, a nostalgic tribute to a lost future. Growing up with the Hubble space telescope. Star Trek. Ender's Game.

A time when we could dream of interstellar empires.



All of that is gone now, and Orson Scott Card is a homophobe. The pieces are strangely soothing, in their evocation of the cold, quiet expanses of space; and unsettling, unearthly beauty.

I sat for hours, watching, listening to the almost-subaudiable hum, finding shapes and losing them amongst the bursts of colour.



I wanted to say more, but alas, am swamped. Ed's good. That's all that needs to be said in the end.

Fast Talking PI by Selina Tusatala Marsh

This review first appeared in the Christchurch Press Saturday 30 May 2009.

Selena Tusitala Marsh's debut collection reads like something spoken, rather than written. This cements her a place in the longstanding tradition of volumes published by performance poets in New Zealand. Notable precedents include David Mitchell, Apirana Taylor and of course Tusiata Avia. The central position of the poem as spoken work is further emphasised by the CD included with the book.

Marsh demonstrates a strong understanding of how the poem's placement on the page, its punctuation and use of repetition can inform the way it is read, evident in the impetus and speed of "Googling Tusitalia", "Not Another Nafanua Poem" and "Has the Whole Tribe Come Out From England?", contrasting with the slow meditation of "Langston's Mother" and "Contact 101".

Also at work is an astute knowledge of precedent and tradition, through which Marsh demonstrates an acute awareness of the history of both New Zealand and the Pacific. The legend of Himemoa and Tutanekai is invoked alongside the Samoan goddess Nafanua (Familliar from Avia's book Bloodclot) and the Hawaiian volcano deity Pele-'ai'honua; Gauguin makes an appearance, as does Bligh with his fellow mutineers from the Bounty. In "Realpolitik" Captain James Cook's Journals are pillaged in a more politically overt echo of Alan Loney's similar treatment in his A Great Antiskorbutick. The eponymous poem of the collection is dedicated to Anne Waldman, to whose Fast Speaking Woman the poem's title does homage. Also present is the ghost of the Oxacan Shamaness-seer María Sabina, whose trance-like chants permeate both Marsh and Waldman’s texts.

Having said all this there are several qualifications that I would like to make, though these are generally on matters of taste rather than objective issues of quality. Certain poems seem weak when compared to other, stronger poems in the collection, and some that are technically strong are let down by their underlying concepts or subject matter, or vice versa. An example of this is “Two Nudes on a Tahitian Beach, 1894”, where the subject matter, the sexual objectification of Pasifika Women in Gauguin’s painting of the same name, and the associated rage, are let down by predictable treatment. Compared with the real emotional impact that a persona poem can manifest as demonstrated in “Mutiny on Pitcairn”, and the stronger treatment of the same theme in “Guys Like Gauguin”, the former poem seems lacking.

In spite of this the collection is a very strong debut, and “Le Amataga”, “Afakasi”, “Cirlce of Stones” and the two Hawai’i poems are reason enough to continue rereading this book time and time again.

The Politics of Anthologising

My Review of 20 Contemporary New Zealand Poets (VUP 2009) Appeared in The Christchurch Press on Saturday.
Here it is:

This anthology contains some excellent work by outstanding individual poets. As an anthology however it is less then the sum of its parts. New Zealand, for a country of its size, has a relatively large number of poetry anthologies, and this should be taken into account when approaching a newcomer to the market. Such collections also necessarily reflect the biases of taste and ideology of their editors. In light of these considerations, the current collection does not stand well up well against other recent publications. Despite this collection’s title there seems to be no concrete idea of the contemporary represented here. Younger poets such as Robert Sullivan (the youngest in the collection, born in 1967) are presented alongside Allen Curnow (1911-2001), Hone Tuwhare (1922-2008) and C. K. Stead (1932). This raises obvious questions as to the purpose of this anthology. Curnow, Elizabeth Smither, Stead and Ian Wedde all appeared in Alastair Patterson’s 15 Contemporary New Zealand Poets in 1980, and Cilla McQueen and Gregory O’Brien were featured in The New Poets of the 80’s, edited by Murray Edmond and Mary Paul. Allen Curnow's son Wystan was excluded from Jack Ross and Jan Kemp’s Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance as his birthdate, 1939, excluded him from their parameters. Though the selections presented of these poets tend toward more recent work, whether or not this is the basis of ‘contemporariness’ is, I think, a valid question. If the purpose of the anthology is to showcase the work of younger poets, this renders a large portion of the anthology essentially redundant. This space could have been better used to do so, as was the case with the earlier Patterson and Edmond/ Paul anthologies. The introduction, too, leaves much to be desired, and does not fare well in comparison to previous works. It is a mere two and a half pages, compared to Patterson’s twelve, Edmond and Paul’s just over seven, and the twelve of Ross and Kemp. There is no discussion of individual poet’s work other than a brief gloss, nor is there any real historical or literary background. The editors celebrate New Zealand poets’ embracing of new American models that arrived here in the 60s, announcing that “[William Carlos] Williams’s dictum ‘no ideas but in things’ spoke to New Zealanders’ strong sense of the materiality of everyday objects, of the landscape, of weathers and climates – and chimed with their healthy scepticism of grand ideological claims.” This is a “grand ideological claim” in and of itself. Why do New Zealanders have this “strong sense of materiality”, and is this a uniquely New Zealand trait? My own “healthy scepticism” would argue that this is a rehashing of the arguments that cultural nationalists such as Curnow, Charles Brasch and Dennis Glover made in the 1930s to 50s, which the editors mention as the outmoded ideas of a previous generation just half a page later. There is also the unthinking dismissal of the writing of women before the “feminist revolution” of the 70s, seemingly ignoring the hard-hitting treatment of issues of gender by poets such as Robin Hyde and Eileen Duggan from the 1930s onward. Comments such as that “the emergence of [women poets] was one of the major factors in opening up the range of subjects and styles that give today’s poets so much space” not only reinforce stereotypes of ‘women’s writing’, but as a truism (women write different types of poems to men therefore these poems are different) seems to mean nothing at all. The inclusion of poetics statements by the contributors adds a great deal to the reading experience, and illuminates the poems and the personality of the individual writers. Finding out what makes some of my heroes tick is something I greatly enjoyed. However this is not enough to save the book for me. I would recommend The AUP anthologies Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance and New New Zealand Poets in Performance, both edited by Jack Ross and Jan Kemp as far better value for money- they cost a bit more, but are better edited, and have the poets reading on CD as well, adding a new dimension to the poems.

I would like to add that this anthology once again disappoints in the same way that The Oxford Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English, edited by Jenny Bornholdt, Gregory O’Brien and Mark Williams disappoints Wystan Curnow, related in his "High Culture Now! A Manifesto". While I do not personally agree with all that is stated in this polemic, a quote from it i think is pertinent here, and while Curnow is discussing the oxford anthology these criticisms can equally be levelled at this more recent one:

“A more important problem or puzzle which the editors have left to their successors is the extraordinary sameness of recent poetry or their selection of it. [...] Since one of the few claims they make is for the diversity of their collection the sameness of it must arise largely from a blindness to it. [...] Usually colloquial, and in the first person, these poems concern themselves almost exclusively with personal feelings, shifts in individual consciousness, as if this was all that poetry could do. In a decade during which the news and entertainment media increasingly personalize and privatize social and political problems, sentimentalize and sensationalize all emotion, this kind of poetry seems a part of the problem of public language in our culture rather than a critical response to it. This kind of poem was designed for the passionless people Gordon McLaughlin once accused us of being, but today everyone is passionate about everything they do, at least they had better be. The new forms of thought and feeling proposed by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry were a response to corruption of public language in America, and yet the editors of the Oxford dismiss them as another foreign fad. In this they are not alone. Policing the boundaries of the ruling forms with cheap passing shots at L=poetry is as close as we get to serious debate in the poetry world these days."

Further criticism of the hackneyed pseudo-homage to diversity played here is the selection of "minority" poets, which is unsurprising in the extreme. The editors haven't even thought to include "writing in English" or the like in the title, as Bornholt, O'Brien and Williams did so as to not have to do the real work that Wedde and McQueen did in their 1985 penguin in the inclusion of Writers working in Te Reo. There are Two Maori Writers (Hone Tuwhare and Robert Sullivan) one Pasifika Writer (Tusiata Avia) and everyone else is Pakeha-European-Palangi. As Ishmael Reed argues in the introduction to From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas 1900-2002 the "minority" poetries that are endorsed by the dominant culture and selected to be "representative" are often very different to those which said cultures would chose and endorse themselves.

More. A survey of the publishers credited in the acknowledgements shows a huge domination by the University presses of Victoria and Auckland. Of the 58 books credited nearly half (25, or 43%) are published by VUP, 18 (31%) by AUP and a measly 11 by small-press publishers (the others are 1 by Otago, one by Oxford and a Manhire poem from the London Review of Books). Though this may be representative of the state of poetry publishing in New Zealand this domination is worrying (Cf. Patrick Evans on VUP and the IML - this is given simply as a interesting parallel text rather than an endorsement of his argument - though he raises some valid questions I find much of his argument, especially it's regionalism, problematic). This anthology is far from a selection where "each of the voices ... here surprises by its fresh take on language and the world ... offer[ing] a rich, rewarding conversation".

Falst Talkin' PIs, Orality and Identity: the unintended consequences of reviewing

I'm writing a review of Selina Tusitala Marsh's brilliant first collection Fast Talking PI (AUP 2009) for the press, and as I'm reading María Sabina's Selections (Ed. Jerome Rothenberg, Poets for the Millennium, University of California Press 2003) and it's mention of Sabina's influence on Anne Waldman, to whom the title poem is dedicated, so I decide to be all presumptuous and ask Selina about any connection here. Great discussion follows, and is below.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ross Brighton
Sent: Tuesday, 7 April 2009 7:07 p.m.
To: Selina Marsh
Subject: Fast Talking PI
Hi Selina-
I'm reviewing Fast Talking PI for the Christchurch Press, and was wondering, regarding the title poem's dedication to Anne Waldman, are you familiar with the influence of the oaxacan shamaness-visionary María Sabina's chants on her work in "Fast Talking Woman"?
Thanks

Ross Brighton

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 11:44 AM,
Selina Marsh wrote:
Hi Ross
I know Maria Sabina was a formative influence in Anne's performance works and chants, but haven't really looked into the extent of her litanical influences - but will do so eventually since I'm in the middle of writing a piece about the effects of 'Fast Talking PI' and what it really is that people, regardless of whether they're PI or not, respond to. Its like how Bernstein famously noted that you don't know what you've done until you've done it! I think where Waldeman is deeply into avante garde language poetics, my piece works breaks out of a context where voice and representation of the PI can still become so stilted that merely by virtue of claiming space it effects people. I've cut and paste an email I received the other day regarding the title poem, written by a Cook Islander (I've removed his details), to show you what I mean!
Cheers and all the best
Selina

"Saw your piece on Tagata Pasifika last week and wanted to wish you
Congrats on bringing out the book Fast Talkin PI. Had a listen of
the audio version but listened on a website - elsewhere.co.nz.
(Tried NZEPC but being.... 'a computer illiterate PI, a cant afford
a computer so i use the libraries PI'... i didnt know how to work
the site..haha) First impressions of the audio version of the poem -
Brilliant and brought a smile to my face!..Had a distinctly Pacific feel
to it and felt inclusive as it had a very modern relevant take on
Pacific Identity - I felt like the poem represented me all of us as
Pacific Islanders in 2009 at present and wasnt an out dated version
of our identity as Pacific Islanders .
The play on PI stereotypes were cunningly clever!..Made me chuckle
in moments thorughout the poem (Only a Pacific Islander could get away
with some of the topic matter you presented) and at the same time
when topic matter of social injustices against Pacific Islanders e.g.
the Dawn raids were raised, struck a cord of anger and sadness.
It conjured different emotions and reactions and in that respect perhaps
is the poems greatest strength - as it makes you contemplate the issues
raised in the poem and for me as a New Zealand born Pacific Islander
makes me try to make sense of the social, political and cultural landscape
i have inherited and am apart of - my identity, and in essence helps me
to navigate a destiny that matters to me and not be defined by
stereotypes whether they be positive or negative.
Moments actually gave me shivers down my spine!.Very inspirational
to hear a modern Pacific point if view and to hear it be done well. Well done!
Looking forward to having a proper read and disection of the text
afterall 'im an intellectual wanking PI, im a disect a poem and rip
it to shreds PI, im a have to make myself feel brainy PI'..haha
I think this line "Im a...PI" will be stuck in my head all day..Thanks for the that.haha"

-----Original Message-----
From: Ross Brighton
Sent: Wednesday, 8 April 2009 2:30 p.m.
To: Selina Marsh
Subject: Re: From Selina: Fast Talking PI
Hi again-
Thanks for that - the context in which i was thinking of Sabina was the obvious oralaity of your work, and the politics of transcription - Jerome Rothenberg is realy good on that (along with the politics of translation, both literal and into the western catagory of "poet") in the introduction to the selections of Sabina in the Poets for the Milenum series he co-edited with Pierre Joris.
If you want it, here's a bit of my take so far, as a liberal academic Palangi:
The way you have 'captured' the spoken is really impressive, as Deleuze and Guattari state (if i may jump on the poststructuralist band-wagon) "however important the writing machine is to the imperial bureaucracy, what is written retains an oral or nonbook character".
The negotiation of various histories languages, vernaculars and subjectivites in the book is massive, and gives voice to a multitude of pluralites without being pigeonholed as "representative" of any specific "minority" position and i mean this without negating the specific Pasifika subjectivity of the book (if i remember rightly in her introduction to Recyclopedia Harryette Mullen reports on a fellow Black writer in one of her classes complaining regarding 'language' poetry that "we need our subjectivity"), ie you speak through the book without "speaking for" anyone in the patronising manner such a statement takes within popular socio-politics and 'post-colonialism'.

Any thoughts?

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 2:59 PM, Selina wrote:
Hi Ross,
Wow - I'm guessing this isn't for the local rag...Ha! Regarding representative non-representativity, I really like Mestiza writer Gloria Anzaldua's thoughts on existing in the 'borderlands' as a person of mixed blood. It reflects the particular situation of the afakasi Pasifika diaspora and offers insights into the politics of identity.
I find that performance of the written word, either live or when read in the head, momentarily captures the intangibility of shifting identities and the necessity of living between worlds in that liminal space. Anzaldua argues these spaces are transformative, occupied as they are by who she calls the "Los Atravesados" (just sayiing that word gives me tingles on the tongue!): "the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed.those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the "normal" ('This Bridge Called My Back').
I've found that the orality via chant in my work, alongside its relationship to music and rhthym forms bridges across commonly divisive demographics making the work a bridge builder. I've recounted in a Radio NZ interview with Kim Hill (its posted somewhere) the response of Murray Gray (organiser of Going West Literary Festival) after hearing me rehearse. He announced in front of everyone: 'I'm a slow-talking palagi, all the way from Titirangi!' I had a silver sea of grey haired palagi folks come up to me with their own versions: they became honorary PIs! Certainly I take pride in being Pasifika, but its not to the exclusion of the pride I feel as any one of the other mixes that comprises me - and that's what I feel to be one of the most emancipatory things about my work: I don't pigeon-hole nor succumb to the pressures I felt of 'having to choose' when I was growing up.
Anyway, thanks for your interest - send me a copy!!

Manuia

Selina