In early 2006, Maged Zaher emailed me at Jacket and asked to have one of his poems considered for publication. As often happens, he forgot to attach the poem. A pithy correspondence ensued and it continued between us even after the poem, my software mission, was published in Jacket issue 29. At some stage in our email exchange Maged asked me if I’d be interested in writing a poem in collaboration with him. So began a project that continued over a year or so and resulted in twenty-one poems that can be read as a continuing long poem. Susan Schultz published the poems that we’d assembled and titled farout_library_software as a Tinfish Press chapbook in 2007.
I first read about Mina Loy in 1987, in Shari Benstock's book about twenty-odd women artists and writers living and working in Paris in the decades 1900 until 1940 - Women of the Left Bank (University of Texas Press, 1986). Of course Gertrude Stein was the prominent or most-known figure in this community. It took many years for some of her less widely read contemporaries to gain notice. London-born Mina Loy was a painter, poet, essayist, sculptor, collagist and a member of the prestigious Salon d'Automne in early twentieth-century Paris. She was in a relationship with the proto-Dadaist poet and pugilist, Arthur Cravan until he disappeared, mysteriously, possibly into the ocean, off the coast of Mexico in 1918. She became involved in the Italian Futurist movement but soon became disillusioned by it and began to write satirically about Futurists' attitudes towards women. Her poetry was praised in journals by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and, later, by Kenneth Rexroth. She lived for three decades in France and Italy moving, in 1936, to Lower Manhattan and the Bowery in the United States of America.
To complement the current feature on 'tabis' - Aboriginal song poetry from the Pilbara, I want to revisit the first issue of Jacket, published in 1997, in which Philip Mead, poet, anthologist and then an academic at the University of Tasmania, interviewed the contemporary Australian indigenous poet, Lionel Fogarty.
Lionel Fogarty talks about growing up on a government controlled reserve in Queensland, Cherbourg Aboriginal settlement, and about the effect of Christianity and white state education on Aboriginal traditions. He also relates the death of his brother, Daniel Yock, a dancer and song man who died in a police van, after being roughed up by the Brisbane police. Lionel was engaged in fighting for justice for his brother's death in custody.
Editors of deceased poets’ collections of papers, essays and letters usually inhabit the background of the material and can be overlooked in the reader's enthusiasm for the topic. These editors are often friends or close colleagues of their subject. I’m interested in what might prompt someone to undertake the laborious and meticulous work of assembling a poet’s writings. Poets and other readers are fascinated by the biographical elements and the intimacy of what were once the private communications of their favourite, influential poets. And of course there is also diverse reception for their critical thinking and opinions about things other than the poetry.
Dirk Van Bastelaere (Photo by Krystof Ghyselinck, 2005)
In 2005 Tony Frazer's UK-based press, Shearsman Books, published a selection of poems by Dirk Van Bastelaere. They were translated from Flemish by Willem Groenewegen, John Irons, and Francis R. Jones. Dirk Van Bastelaere is a postmodernist. I read the book, The Last to Leave,and found its polysemy and pace enthralling. To me these poems seemed made by an intertextualist in pursuit of the limit-experience. Here was a poet who was unfastened and fast. He was influenced by John Ashbery and by Gertrude Stein, and often referenced contemporary art and culture - films, pop songs, literature and so on - an aspect that apparently led to his being attacked for "intellectualism" by critics in Flanders.
In 2008 Dirk Van Bastelaere caused some controversy in the Flemish poetry scene with Hotel New Flanders, a large anthology of sixty years of Flemish poetry that he co-edited with Erwin Jans and Patrick Peeters. His poetry operates in flux and it seems that he sees anthologies similarly. He wrote in the introduction to Hotel New Flanders:
Jacket the first