Coedited by Lisa Samuels and Sawako Nakayasu, A TransPacific Poetics is a unique anthology of essays and experimental poetry by sixteen writers who live in or between different Pacific Rim countries. As the “trans” in the collection’s title suggests, this is a regional trans-Pacific anthology — the first of its kind — that privileges the work of writers defined by the Pacific Ocean.
Coedited by Lisa Samuels and Sawako Nakayasu, A TransPacific Poetics is a unique anthology of essays and experimental poetry by sixteen writers who live in or between different Pacific Rim countries. As the “trans” in the collection’s title suggests, this is a regional trans-Pacific anthology — the first of its kind — that privileges the work of writers defined by the Pacific Ocean. To take a few examples: author and translator Don Mee Choi was born in Korea, moved to the US via Hong Kong, and now lives in Seattle.
Let’s take a spin and tumble into “experimental” poetry — more specifically within Aotearoa-New Zealand, but not necessarily resticted to that thin locale.
NZEPC frontspiece imagery - No. 8 (kia ora Richard Killeen)
Kia ora ano (Hello again; literally 'be well again')
In this Commentary I want to outline two very important electronic resources pertaining to Aotearoa-New Zealand poetry and poetics, which are not poetry publishing sites per se, but which are available to freely peruse and to contribute scholarly articles to (most especially to Ka Mate Ka Ora,which I will cover far more fully in #2) and to view recent trends, listen to poets reading their own works and so on. These sites have been established via the University of Auckland — my own institution of tertiary studies waaaaay back last century — and indeed some of the people responsible for these sites had a fair bit to do with my studies then. More of which later. This Commentary is less of a critique and much more of an introduction to these valuable sites — themselves introductions to many aspects of poetry in the skinny nation.
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:
Lisa Samuels, one of the three co-organisers of the Short Takes on Long Poems symposium (with Robert Sullivan, mentioned in my previous post, and Michele Leggott, pictured above with her guide-dog Olive), writes in to specify that it was she who was responsible for the two words "begin anywhere" which started off our long, collective, ten-part beach poem the other day:
Nice to see your Jacket2 write-up, and that you used the 2 words I wrote at the beginning of our very very very very very very very very very very long beach poem – I'm sure I am pulling 'begin anywhere' from some co-making moment, and that too is par for the symposium. …
Which prompts me, in turn, to claim responsibility for inscribing the four words visible in the picture above, beside Michele and Olive, which were meant to be a quote from the last line of the title poem of Allen Curnow's 1982 collection You Will Know When You Get There:
Down you go alone, so late, into the surge-black fissure.
'Experimental' poetry — part one
'Experimental' Poetry - part one
Kia ora ano.
Let’s take a spin and tumble into “experimental” poetry — more specifically within Aotearoa-New Zealand, but not necessarily resticted to that thin locale.