Robert McLean

'Strange Self-Congratulations, Flat Whites': Some notes on Bill Manhire

Robert McLean

Black painting XV, from ‘Malady,’ a poem by Bill Manhire, 1970, by Ralph Hotere. — Black painting XV, from ‘Malady,’ a poem by Bill Manhire, 1970, Dunedin, by Ralph Hotere. Purchased 1971. ©Te Papa. CC BY-NC-ND licence. Te Papa (1971-0024-2).

By international standards all New Zealand publishing is small press publishing. The country is home to only 4.73 million people. If a significant proportion of the adult population supports the authors of cookery and gardening books, such enthusiasm rarely extends to buying titles by novelists, playwrights, and poets.

Coda — An Aotearoa poetic reconsidered

Vaughan Rapatahana

Coda: Towards an Aotearoa Poetic…?

I began this three-month commentary post series with a question as to whether there is or could be an Aotearoa poetic.

I noted back then that I had modified my stance so as to say there seemed to be so many poetry scenes within the country of New Zealand, some thriving, some growing, and one still dominant, that there could not be a single identifiable Aotearoa poetic. I have had no reason to alter this viewpoint as the series went on, only — in fact — to say now even more clearly, that New Zealand has several divergent poetics, not always empathetic to one another …

There are the experimentalists, both within and outside a textual framework. Then there are the poetry slam competitors, whereby orality is king. There are burgeoning Pasifika and Asian groupings, depicting their own tropes and utilising their own languages. There are the fighting small presses and periodicals, staunchly keeping open the possibilities of a poet being published at all, while some more off-the-wall publications — such as Cats & Spaghetti Press — are striving to sustain deep diversity.

Recently in Jacket2

Topsy-Turvy

Charles Bernstein

Please buy the book directly from the publisher, University of Chicago Press, or a local bookstore, including Bridge Street Books, SemCoop, Talking Leaves, Indiebound, McNally-Jackson, and Bookshop.Org.

176 pages, paper and ebook. Audiobook is from Chicago and Amazon/Aubible.

Teaching Is Listening

on teaching poetry for Guanzhou University

Charles Bernstein

I made this short video for a conference on teaching English language poetry, sponsored by Guangzhou University, July 2, 2022. Li Zhimin has created an online course, partly based on Al Filreis's ModPo. This meeting is an extension of that course. In the video, I mention the Poem Profiler and Wreading Experiments; for more on this topic, see Attack of the Difficult Poems.

Lyric shard as grief's material

A review of Diana Khoi Nguyen's 'Ghost Of'

Kelly Hoffer

Part archive, part elegy, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection of poetry, Ghost Of, presents the haunting portrait of a grieving family set against a backdrop of intergenerational trauma. Written four years after the poet’s brother took his own life, Nguyen’s poems register this loss as it is refracted through the story of her parents’ immigration to the US as refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War.