Kia ora.

Following on from part one, 'experimental' poetry, then, ranges mightily across all manner of media - from strict text juxtapositions right through to poets experimenting on their very own corpus: not as body of work, but on their own body as work. And Aotearoa-New Zealand is no exception, as we shall soon see.

For me, this 'means' that poetry is a vast everyday emotional experience and not a sterile study of neutered lines in some arcane academic book. We - my wife and I - have a home in Pampanga, Philippines. Every Good Friday, without fail, a procession makes its somewhat tortured way past our home: penitents, flagellants, their assistants, while gawpy-eyed spectators lean over balustrades and fences to see the sights - all on their way later to a field just down the road, where some of them also become crucified - literally, with nails being hammered through limbs and hands. Yes, this too is 'experimental' poetry - somewhat extreme indeed - but a definite creative existential statement. The photo below is a milder representation.

Let's look then at some more experimental poets within Aotearoa-New Zealand, some of whom go well beyond the page.

Jack Ross should require no introduction to Jacket 2 readers/viewers as he has written several commentary posts, specifically pertaining to mainly mainstream, accepted-poetry-heroes & heroines here. (He is editor of the well-established Poetry New Zealand journal.) However, Jack is especially interested in 'experimental' poetry. Indeed, he writes, '...what I expect to see in the overall NZ poetry scene in the near future is a move away from monoglot English-language dominance into a more multi-lingual, multi-cultural set of complex social / aesthetic negotiations. How painful and contested this transition will be depends on the state of health of our body politic. I think it will happen, and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be a harmonious process -- but there are grounds for pessimism as well as optimism in certain recent developments in NZ writing...As far as Experimental writing goes, I suppose I feel disposed to experiment when I think there's too much complacency dominating a particular field or aesthetic paradigm. I'm not particularly impressed by attempts to recycle DADA or Oulipo in an apolitical context -- but I do like writing that seems to be responding to real pressures in an interesting way. Nor do I find the term "shock value" particularly offputting -- what's wrong with shocking people if they give every appearance of being asleep? [My stress.]

 Jack Ross goes on to reiterate a point I made some time back as regards the assimilation of what was once 'experimental' being subsumed and neutered by the English-language Anglo-American dominant, given that such ultimate containment of the subversive can occur anywhere. In other words, even despite any 'seduction' process (from Baudrillard) whereby any dominant discourse might be 'beguiled into submission' by crafty poetic subterfuge and play, postcolonial literature - as just one example - is now a staple diet of many university departments globally. Says Ross, '...experimentation tends to be followed by consolidation. It can be more revolutionary to eschew obvious signs of "experimentation" when the culture has got used to grainy xeroxes of concrete poetry. Perpetual reinvention is surely the job of any artist? You don't really know that something won't work until you've tried it...' Which, I guess, is what he is doing in his syncopated poem extract below left, which he describes as 'part Celan translation/part small-town paranoia' -

Iain Britton is a prolific poet: his work seems to be just about everywhere in Aotearoa-New Zealand, including above right (and of course well-spread internationally also.) For him, 'Like some other NZ writers, it seems identifying a certain prevalent theme or style is difficult to determine. We seem to have moved away from and beyond the obvious obsessions with our topography, our pictorial affinities with land, sea and sun. Nowadays poets are prepared to diversify and embrace many poetical forms and variations. I am impressed with the resilience and energy of our younger poets who are prepared to take risks and experiment with how words can be manipulated, bent, buckled and torn apart and reconstituted into various new literary styles...we’re more aware of international trends and the vast resources that are at our fingertips. Poets in NZ have immediate access to the best poets practising on our world-wide stage. I think we learn well, we assimilate, we invent, we strive for originality in what we do and we’re broadening our perception of all things literary...beginning to reflect the multicultural nature of our ever-growing present-day society. This is ongoing and developing as NZ’s provincialism becomes more cosmopolitan...as new New Zealanders take up citizenship and differences are shared. I feel very positive about the varying genres our writers are exploring...However, we still need poets who are rebellious, anti-establishment who are prepared to go against the grain, to be incredibly courageous and to awaken those subterranean fault lines that each and every creative person possesses...Poetry is an experiment - it can fail, it can improve, it can succeed. The serious poet will keep on trying regardless.'

He continues with regard to what he would like to see more of in New Zealand poetry, 'very simply more governmental assistance/ funding for literary magazines, scholarships, courses - the lack of funding for the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship is an embarrassment to a nation which prides itself on cultural progress.' Britton adds a particularly significant point here, ' Without becoming too political, we need to show off our great writers of the past... With the exception of Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame, we would struggle to find any remnant of another writer’s place of inspiration. We are experts at demolishing physical aspects of ourselves.'

With all due respect to Ross and Britton, both remain rather text-bound. Kelly Malone, however, is one of Aotearoa-New Zealand's few experimental poets who stretches her craft well beyond the page and also induces/introduces her own body as poetry. Her work is significant and ground-breaking. One revealing link to her work is at NZEPC (in cahoots with Makyla Curtis.) Kelly's chapblog = <kellymalone.me>

Kelly is pictured at right sniffing in morse code. She is sniffing her own poem entitled tissue .   [The photo is by Dennis Thorpe, 2015.] The words she is sniffing are '' I cry most days viscose lines of streaming lines'. More of her seminal morse work is here.

She also employs another experimental bent, namely text-weaving, as pictured below and as also featured recently in The Capilano Review.

(HoYa-Wen is also represented in this Canadian publication and I must stress that she too is experimentally-biased, for not only did she instigate Potroast, but in this issue she continues to admix languages. Ya-Wen, of course featured in an earlier commentary post re: Kiwi-Asian poets. Incidentally Vaughan Rapatahana is in this same issue.)

Kelly Malone has a distinctive theoretical-philosophical approach to her twin strike-force experimentalism. She is quite literally unframing poetry into a performance art, traversing several disciplines, centering none. The continuous present tense is the performance mode ambient each and every time, for no two performances can ever be - nor should ever be - the same. Necessarily, therefore, the  theoretical textbook 'How to' approach to 'Performance Writing' is an impossibility. Indeed, her entire creed is a deliberate revolution, an anti-episteme, if you will. Malone is consciously undermining 'established' qua 'mainstream' notions of what poetry and art is 'supposed' to be; is in her Foucaultian symbiosis attacking such regnant (Western, male?) constructs to their very foundations. She notes, 'Performance writing has the potential to shift the subtle power inherent in dichotomies...and the premise of it questions power structures inherent in a literate society and language-as-writing.' The Derridean nuances would also seem obvious; as would the empathies with my own derogation of English language as a voracious Hydra, as when she scribes, 'The social, cultural, and what can often be oppressive modes (certainly in a post-colonial 'English-speaking' context) of identification in writing, and writing-as-language can be examined,' via her approach.

Indeed, I see in her craft aspects of the far looooooooonger standing mōteatea tradition, whereby individuals composed as they went, never writing a thing down, never replicating exactly an earlier performance, always breathing through/out the wairua [spirit] of life - their own, that of their natural surroundings, that of their fellow human beings.  At the same time, such visceral-poetry is interactive event - it streams through a bulk of individuals participating as one, 'The performance is interpreted by the audience from their own radical subjectivity,' notes Malone.

Incidentally, I also perceive elements of an oppositional inclusion here, for in her return to  objects, ex- Charles Olson, I detect parallels with Speculative Realists, most especially Graham Harman and Iain Hamilton-Grant. She writes, 'Olson's relation of objects and 'their' secrets shared, that the human experience and its aliveness is not special but what unites humanity with all other objects is precisely the condition from which Performance Writing unfolds.'

Let's look now at her more specific explication of her art. Firstly her morse code work. 'I took translated writing into Morse code and used it as a score for my breath. The dot was the in-breath and dash the out-breath.  In breathing Olson’s manifesto Projective Verse I brought a new question to his idea of objectism. The use of my breath indicates the active need Olson called for in poetics but my breath is constricted by language, and rather than opening the verse, it shows the restrictions of myself as object for ‘language is not to be got out of’. My own playing of Morse code by breath and digital means was published in fillingStation and later NZEPC created a digital archive of one of my performances.' [Both examples were links above.]

'In fillingStation my use of breath as code, the human aspect of language, was contrasted with computer code. I used Pure Data programming (thanks to the help of Drew McMillan) to enable my computer keyboard to play a note simultaneously to the letter being typed. The poem is typed and the subsequent sound that occurs is the result of the scale (the note to letter scale I programmed and titled remorse scale). I breathed in Morse code Olson’s ‘the heart, by way of breath, to the line.’ The iteration of sound and breath, along with embodied instantiation questions the relation between machine and breath and what happens to the transference of energy in digital poetry. In addition, my breath is both blocked and released by language rather than my breath freeing-up the verse, much in the same way as the self is an object blocked and released in language-writing and technology.'

Exciting also, her explanation for her text-weaves. 'Every morning I begin again. I write three pages of A4 in an exercise book. I’ve been doing this daily for eight years. Its only a 24 hour practice. Last year I threw out seven consecutive years of 30-odd exercise books at the rubbish dump. Begin again. Earlier this year I was unable to read or write due to concussion. (A ‘language-embodied accident’? I slipped on Braille dots at the curbside and fell back onto my head.) My morning ablution of writing became my absolution of weaving. I took exercise books that hadn’t been discarded and used the spider weave and later discovered this weave is known by Māori as a healing weave. The focus for my eyes when weaving was intense but the ceremony that accorded the practice made peace with my prior ‘dumping’ of my writing practice–my written-self, or self-in-writing.'

'Text-weave comprises of strips of paper from personal writing (i.e. no audience intended). While it is possible to unravel and piece back together this crafted writing (the strips are taken from consecutive pages) the unwritten contract between reader (viewer) and writer (artist) is not for semantic cohesion, or transparency–from a once transparent space–but for the work to remain opaque, woven in its ‘new’ iterative pattern of figurative lines. To unravel the weave would mean the work would return to that which is defined by the specific requirements of specialist writing practices i.e. journal writing.The text-weave moves on from a Burrough-esque cut-up, to return to a sculptured page having extended from the page. The text-weave is comprised of hand writing and the writing-as-weave with the paper. The writing is a rewriting, full of iteration, and the context of the writing no longer knows what it is doing, nor is the writing sure of what it does in relation to the weave.The lack of semantic cohesion in text-weave draws attention to how one traces oneself in language-as-writing. These strips graft a stripped back self, recouping, and reconstructing the unraveled self, expressed in writing–and discarded. The edge of language becomes a threshold to the self, the written yet unreadable, and now as text-weave it performs Olson’s ‘language not to be got out of’. When held up to the light the mesh of writing illuminates like a decomposing pile of human hair or an energy map of language...Text-weave enacts the metaphor of crafting writing through weaving words which creates the inverse; an incoherence when woven. Similarly, the unspoken contract (and culturally assumed set of conditions) between reader and writer is contradicted. If the reader (also the writer in this case) seeks semantic cohesion they need to break the contract with the ‘other’ writer.'                [ Terry Moyle redux on right.]                               

Malone continues, 'The energetic event of weaving, and its art form is complex, intricate, and culturally significant amongst many cultures. In Aotearoa (New Zealand), traditional weaving is often present because of its significance to Pasifika and Māori. The use of weaving suggests an influence of Pasifika and Māori on Pākehā in a post-colonial New Zealand. Combined with the use of written language, in this case, English, an oblique reference is made to my own colonial roots, colonial power, and its violent history ‘discovering’ the Pacific. The ‘context’ of text-weave is the writing. And that ‘self’ in writing, asks, who am I if I am not in performing in writing?'

Kelly Malone is an experimental poet par excellence, incurring dis-conn-ection deliberately; ensuring un-ease as a re-focusing machine for us all, herself included. Similarly, I [Rapatahana] have chosen to weave further images of Terry Moyle's own experimental three-dimensionalism into discussion of Kelly's work. We must upset to extend; we must experiment to evolve: notes Malone, 'Experimental writing similarly is a practice of questioning the sanctioned. Language as art form and tool can lock-in codes of behaviours that left unquestioned allow power structures inherent in a literate society and language-as-writing to proliferate.' Echoes of Lisa Samuels resonate. Enough said.

Another 'person of interest' in this investigation into experimental poetry in Aotearoa-New Zealand is Lynley Edmeades. Lynley is particularly interested in the study of such poetry, given that it is - for her - an elusive concept: 'I think there is some great experimental poetic work being done in Aotearoa, but I think "experimental" is a slippery term to begin with. There are a lot of very good poets here doing experiments with language and pushing it to various limits, while the result might not necessarily be termed "experimental" in the regular sense. On the other hand (and my feeling is that this isn't only in NZ), I think there are some poets self-consciously doing work that is more concerned with a particular trend or fashion of the experimental poetic world. So, to begin with its a tricky label to pin to anyone or anything. The most interesting experimental work, I find, is that which is authentically engaged with language and language-play. I think there is some resistance to this, and the more traditional lyric still reigns in most domains of publishing...However, my feeling is that experimental poetry is not being recognized in ways that it should or could and, at times, many poets and artists have left NZ for more supportive and stimulating climes.' [My stress.]

Lynley also brings up a particularly pertinent point here, which I completely agree with, namely that, 'My feeling is that an experimental NZ poetry would do well to look towards its musical counterpart. While it remains relatively fringe, experimental music and noise in NZ has a strong-hold of devout practitioners, critics and listeners. I'm often envious of the camaraderie and support I sense in that community. I'd love to see these two realms working together more too, a kind of sonic marriage between sound/language poetry and noise music.' I [rapatahana] would refer interested readers here to a worthwhile book on an alternative New Zealand music scene - Erewhon Calling, Experimental Sound in New Zealand  edited by Bruce Russell (2012), which does touch on this malleable perimeter: indeed I am inclined to view many of the experiments as outlined in this valuable book, as poetry. And below left, is a code-switiching poem by Lynley coming from inside the same ballpark. I would like to hear it.

Now, we have already delved into the wonderful world of Makyla Curtis on a couple of occasions in our exploration of experimental poetry in this thin  e x t e n d e d  land, and her comments here make for a fitting summary, 'The experiments that I am interested in are ones that do their best to destabilise the reader' - which which I completely concur. She then goes on to reference accordingly,  Kelly Malone, Ho Ya-Wen, Terry Moyle and 'Alexander Abraham (especially his Barnabas Brown works which play, too, with page formatting)' here...and then extrapolates further, 'So, the experiments that I personally like to play in are code-switching/heteroglossia/translingualism; sound and performance - ie, how the words come out of the mouth, the breath, the projection, the running on of words and alliteration; collaboration is one of my favourites, producing opportunities for other poets to participate in an experiment with me - such as the 'abstract compositions' project [which is well-worth a visit] and lastly, the physical and material forms of language, whether that's the printing process (I am a letterpress printer and a printmaker) or whether it is the physical manifestation of writing, namely typography and asemics.' Again, she summarises this experiential experimental zone succinctly as she  panders to some of her playmates in her poem above...and here I also would really like to hear the heteroglossic gloss.

Finally, I do want to make further reference to two New Zealand publications which have, over the years, especially focused on 'experimental' poetry - Brief and Catalyst. The latter I will save for a further commentary, while the former remains somewhat of an enigma in these non-Creative NZ funded days.

Brief, as have mentioned in part one, was instigated by Alan Loney and was initially called A Brief Description of the Whole World and in those first nine issues from 1995 to 1998 he zeroed in on his determinedly experimental stance.  For Alan subsequently, however, Brief,  'bears no relation to my original magazine and its editorial process and purpose - in other words the later mag exists by having destroyed the original mag...,' as he wrote to me.

Alex Wild is the incumbent editor, who penned recently that, 'brief is an open-minded literary publication. Poetry, stories, essays and reviews are welcome, as are works that don't sit comfortably in any one of those categories. Visual components are welcome. Verbal ones too.' But I can offer no more about the current situation as regards this fine publication, which has indeed published many, many textually experimental works over the years. Indeed as Jack Ross points out, 'I think...the fact that brief has lasted twenty years now, with different formats and approaches, makes it a subject of interest to people concerned with NZ experimental writing. It must surely be the longest lived NZ experimental magazine ever, in fact'...There is also a further non-English language experimental poetry website run by Julio Campal in Christchurch, which is another site worthy of a tour....

In the end then, is the end. Performance poetry personified in Philippines, as below. Pure experimental poetry, eh.