Drumming to your own march, the Sword is mightier than the pen.
In the tradition of iconoclastic South Island, Aotearoa-New Zealand publishing independence is the innovative and invaluable work of long-term Americano expatriate, Doc Drumheller — through his own poetic experimentalism as personified in his recent book, 10 x (10 + -10) = 0, as well as via his steersmanship and stewardship of the idiosyncratic and instigative Catalyst. I will let him give us a potted (and necessarily selective) history of this significant journal in his own words and also directly from his editorials — 'Catalyst [and here]is a literary arts journal originally published by a collective of artists known as Neoismist Press inside an old volcano in Whakaraupo/Lyttelton, NZ.
Earlier this year I was sent my contributor’s copy of Catalyst 9 (subtitled “Export Quality”). It includes a CD of poetry recordings by local poets set to music by what producer Jody Lloyd calls “a collection of New Zealand musicians”:
For this production I asked dozens of musicians for sound donations in the form of musical samples – a chord, a series of chords, a solo, a bass line, a drum beat and where those were not available, an entire track: whatever they had and wanted to give. [11]
To tell you the truth, I’d almost forgotten about the recording session for this particular project. I remember being summoned to some far-off part of town what seems like ages ago to read out a few poems, and it came as a bit of a surprise to see which one they’d chosen (a rather odd collage poem called “Vampires”). The delay can hardly be blamed on the editors of this Christchurch-based indie magazine, though. As Doc Drumheller explains in his editorial:
Drumming to your own march, the Sword is mightier than the pen.
In the tradition of iconoclastic South Island, Aotearoa-New Zealand publishing independence is the innovative and invaluable work of long-term Americano expatriate, Doc Drumheller — through his own poetic experimentalism as personified in his recent book, 10 x (10 + -10) = 0, as well as via his steersmanship and stewardship of the idiosyncratic and instigative Catalyst. I will let him give us a potted (and necessarily selective) history of this significant journal in his own words and also directly from his editorials — 'Catalyst [and here]is a literary arts journal originally published by a collective of artists known as Neoismist Press inside an old volcano in Whakaraupo/Lyttelton, NZ.