Auckland

Short Takes on the Long Poem

Auckland, New Zealand, poetry conference

John Tranter

I left Sydney at dawn on Wednesday 28 March 2012 headed South-east over the Tasman Sea, aiming for New Zealand, on an Emirates A380 Airbus, a massive double-decker airplane that drives like an aircraft carrier full of warm mud.

I had been invited to attend the Short Takes on the Long Poem symposium at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, right at the bottom of the South Pacific Ocean. If you look South-west into the setting sun from San Diego and fly at thirty thousand feet for fourteen hours, there it is. From Sydney you do the opposite, more or less, except that is a much shorter trip.
You can read hundreds of pages of poems and commentary and see dozens of sparkling photos on my Main Site here.

State-of-the-Nation poems (2)

James K. Baxter, ‘Ode to Auckland’ (1972)

Jack Ross

"the song of Tangaroa on a thousand beaches" - Rangitoto from North Head

If the Allen Curnow poem I talked about in my latest post looks back on the fifties, that whole post-war “You’ve never had it so good” period, then it seems logical to go on to discuss further “state-of-the-nation” poems commenting successively on the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, and (finally) the twenty-tens.

This is the list I’ve come up with. Not all the dates fit perfectly, but at least it provides some sort of a coverage of styles, ideas, voices and views, over the last fifty years of New Zealand poetry. Each one of them will take a fair amount of contextualising and unpacking, but it’s the only way I can think of to give you a reasonable overview of where we’ve been and where (possibly) we might be going.

'When was it that you stopped using the word 'home'?' Yang Lian in Auckland

Susan M. Schultz

Crater of the extinct volcano Maungawhau or Mt. Eden, in Auckland

At the recent Short Takes on Long Poems symposium in Auckland (see Jack Ross's take here), Jacob Edmond, whose comic-serious talk concerned the literal weights and volumes of long poems, kept asking a single question of other speakers. “In what way is the work you're talking about local?” Or, in the case of my presentation, “Do you think your videos [of people in Hawai`i saying back lines of George Oppen's ‘Of Being Numerous’ as best they could] localize the poem in some way?” Jack Ross argues that the symposium would have been too international had it not included the work of Robert Sullivan and John Adams, writing the interstices between Maori and Pakeha in Aotearoa / New Zealand. This discussion felt like home to me, albeit set on a different stage and peopled by very different writers and critics than is the case in Hawai`i. But of course these distinctions are hard to keep or enforce when (like me) you can leave Auckland at 7 a.m. of a Monday morning and arrive in Honolulu at 7 a.m. the same morning. Yet Lucas Klein, a scholar and translator of Chinese poetry, quoted the Chinese poet, citizen of New Zealand, and resident of London, Yang Lian, as saying: “There is no international, only different locals.”

Recently in Jacket2

From the Jacket2 team

Publishing during the COVID-19 crisis

Jacket2

Like many of you, we are adapting to increased safety measures around COVID-19 at the University of Pennsylvania and other campuses. Our work here at Jacket2 will likely be delayed and/or interrupted; our publication schedule for both commentaries and J2 content at large will be slower than usual as we adapt to the global pandemic. Many of our editors are working remotely, and we will continue to curate Jacket2 as a space to convene and sustain a life in/through poetry during times of scarcity, stress, and shifting imagined communities. We remain committed to bringing you open access content when institutional access and travel for research become compromised and complicated.

A note from the editors and publishers of Jacket2:

Near/Miss

Charles Bernstein

New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book
Audible.com has also published an audiobook of my reading of the full work.

Amy Catanzano

Quantum poetics (revised and expanded 2020)

Jerome Rothenberg

Amy Catanzano at CERN under the Big European Bubble Chamber in the garden of decommissioned experiments, 2019. For this second visit, she was sponsored as a research artist and funded by the Outreach office of the ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Catanzano has been awarded funding by Wake Forest University and CERN for a third visit to pursue collaborative projects.

2020 EDITOR’S NOTE. Above is how I handled the presentation of Catanzano’s work a decade ago, not realizing the strides she would make in the intervening years — most notably through a series of interventions and residencies at major observatories and scientific research centers: among them, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland, the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, and the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University. From this came a further outflow of work and the composition of poems and poetics that went beyond metaphor to the investigative urgency of Olson’s dictum from Herodotus: “to find out for oneself … instead of depending on hearsay.”

Accordingly, then, along with her own projects, she is collaborating on literary-scientific projects with scientists at CERN and elsewhere and has prepared a revised and expanded edition of all of her essays, and “essay-poems,” on quantum poetics. These include those first published here between 2009 and 2012, accessible now in an updated edition presented by Poems and Poetics. Her author’s note and opening essay of this edition appear below. — Jerome Rothenberg

2009 EDITOR’S NOTE. As is true in many cases, Catanzano’s poetics exists side-by-side with her poems in which the intersection between poetry and science plays itself out in a contemporary, even futuristic, form. The key work at present is her Multiversal (Fordham University Press, 2009), of which Michael Palmer writes by way of introduction: