Tenth Anniversary (Tin)

[Tin Man]

I started this blog on the 14th of June, 2006, so this is the tenth anniversary of The Imaginary Museum's existence. Five years ago I put up a post which listed five major web projects I'd undertaken in the first five years of the blog's existence.

I've tried to do the same this time (albeit with somewhat shakier chronology). And, just as I remarked last time, every time I complete one of these endeavours I tell myself never again, but the impulse doesn't seem to have dried up just yet ...

So here they are, in rough chronological order:

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2011:




1. (January 1, 2011-August 14, 2012) Tree Worship.



This blog is linked to my novel The Annotated Tree Worship (Forthcoming: Pania Press, 2016), and constitutes the "research project" undertaken by that book's protagonist - with somewhat disastrous results to his professional reputation ... If parts of it seem a little unusual for me, then, it's because they are supposed to have been written "in character." I is another, as Rimbaud once remarked.




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2012:




2. (March 31-July 3, 2012) Jack Ross: Notes on NZ Poetry (Commentary: Jacket2).



Pam Brown asked me to edit a feature on contemporary NZ poets for the American poetics site Jacket2 to match the one she was compiling on Australian poetry. It was a very enjoyable experience (the results can be looked at here, if you're curious), and it went live in late 2011.

As a result (I presume), they asked me to write a set of posts on NZ poetry and poetics for the Commentaries section of their site. This proved a little more arduous, and the results have received a certain amount of healthy criticism - not least from Vaughan Rapatahana, whose own Jacket2 commentary begins with the remark:

Jack Ross has ... enabled a series of earlier commentaries in Jacket 2 (during 2012), where he reflected about ‘my ongoing engagement with New Zealand poetry.’ Yet, Jack, for all his ensuing comments, never touched on the first New Zealand poetry that had existed on the shores of this country for hundreds of years before any English language versifiers ever entered the scene. This, of course is ngā mōteatea Māori, which necessarily must be included as a vital and ongoing component of Aotearoa poetics. ‘Maori language and Māori oral literature may come to be seen as being … crucial to the development of New Zealand literature … an acquaintance with Māori language and literature is a necessary prerequisite for making Olympian judgments about the nature of New Zealand literature as a whole’ wrote the late Michael King back in 1993.

It's hard to quarrel with Vaughan's position on that. I've tried to redress the balance a bit in my editorial for the latest issue of Poetry NZ Yearbook. There are certainly things I would probably write differently if I were to begin this task again, but one does, after all, have to start somewhere.




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2013:




3. (August 18, 2013- ) Opinions: Published Articles, Essays, Prefaces & Reviews - 1987 to the present.



It sounds like a simple enough thing to do - listing your old essays and reviews on a single website - but in practice locating all the texts, scanning all the journals, and collating all the bibliographical information took far longer than I'd expected.

Nor did I have any real idea of how much work I'd actually done in this category (a few statistics: 290 separate pieces, published over 25 years, incorporating over 350,000 words of text). Now that it's done, it only requires updating every time I publish something new.

Occasionally I get flack about some of the information in one or other of these ancient pieces, which makes me wonder if it was worth saving them from the newsprint they could otherwise just quietly fade away on, but I suppose one should face up to one's mistakes as well as the occasional thing I may have got right.




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2014:




4. (January 1, 2014-February 17, 2015) Poetry New Zealand Index: An International Journal of Poetry and Poetics (1951-2015).



This one was a bit of a hoor to get finished, I must admit. "Never again, never again, never again," kept on shrilling through my head as I scrolled through issue after issue of New Zealand's longest-running poetry magazine, entering the contents onto my author index. But now it's done, and I never have to do it again! The only maintenance required now is to update it as each new issue comes out (something I already do - for my sins - for New Zealand's longest-running alt lit journal brief.




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2015:




5. (February 25, 2015- ) Advanced Fiction Writing: 139.329: College of Humanities and Social Sciences - School of English and Media Studies - Albany Campus - Massey University.



And, last but not least, a work in progress: the website for my latest Creative Writing course, our new stage 3 Advanced Fiction Writing paper, which I'm teaching as a kind of backward glance over traversed roads, as befits its status as a follow-up to my colleague Thom Conroy's Fiction Writing course (139.285). It kicks off in semester 1, 2017.

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So what does the future hold for this blog - and for the bloggy empire to which it constitutes the gateway (38 at last count)? Who can truly say? These are deep waters, Watson.

More of the same, no doubt, but perhaps it might be a good idea to learn to expend my energy in ways which make more sense to the authorities presiding over my professional development: PBRF [Performance-Based Research Funding, for those of you lucky enough not to be in the know], for instance... Nah, just kidding.

[Off to see the Wizard ...]

Jack Ross: Opinions

James Ko: "Jack" (c.1996)

So I've started another blog. You may have noticed that it's crept unobtrusively into the sidebar over there, listed under "Bibliography Sites." This particular one is devoted to providing consistent, accurate texts of all of my published essays, introductions and reviews, together with full details of the journals and books they originally appeared in. Thrilling, no? It's called (for what I suspect will be fairly obvious reasons): Jack Ross: Opinions. NINO: Nothing If Not Opinionated, as they say ...

I suppose that it sounds like a pretty egotistical thing to do (hence reproducing above that caricature of me by my ex-Language School student, James Ko). There have been previous suggestions, from time to time, that I should collect some of these essays - the poetry ones, in particular - in book form, but I have to say that I've always resisted it. It isn't that I don't enjoy reading collections of essays: just that my own ones, on examination, always seemed too clearly connected to particular arguments or controversies (or publishing contexts), and I found it hard to imagine them making much sense in isolation.

I have devoted a good deal of time to working in this form, though. Poetry and fiction remain my areas of predilection, but you don't always find poems and stories to hand when you want them - and editors do often seem to prefer commissioning essays and reviews. Academic committees like them, too.

Anyway, while the site is not yet complete (I've put up a bit over half of the essays I'd like to include on it eventually), I find that there are 125 pieces there already, covering the period from 1987 (when I published my first review, in Scotland) to a piece which appeared in the latest issue of brief [49 (2013): 129-45].

For further details on precisely how to navigate between these various sites, you could do worse than consult the post called Crossroads (listed on the side bar opposite under "Site-map"). It'll give you some idea of the extent of this web-based madness of mine.

I won't say, either, that I haven't blushed from time to time at the silliness and general effrontery of some of the opinions included on the site. But then, you have to start somewhere, and the only way to learn is to fail: again and again, repeatedly. My original plan was to suppress some of the more embarrassing ones (and - who knows - the links may not function quite so well to those ones) ... But I decided finally to throw them all up and let anyone who can be bothered to read them sort them out.

That isn't really the point, anyway: "You can't know where you're going until you know where you've been," as Laurence Olivier sagely informs his big-screen son in the Neil Diamond remake of The Jazz Singer. There are a lot of repetitions, tics of phrasing, favourite quotes which I've begun to notice now I've been forced to trawl through all of these pieces again. I'd like to avoid as many as possible of those in future.

Finally, though, the whole project has been (and continues to be) redolent of the same kind of schadenfreude Kendrick Smithyman so accurately describes in his 1968 poem "Research Project":

I fossick among very minor novelists
of our nineteenth century, ours, by God,
peculiarly by virtue of whatever was
held in common with other colonies.
Or, what held them.
I have picked pockets
of several shrouds and more than one
fashion of shroud, for crummiest of crumbs,
driest fragments, dust of droppings, bone
flakes. A shard flint-sharp at the edges,
that was prematurely aspiring red muscle,
a heart. Pick, and pocket.
Someone knew
an impulse to act, entertained a dream
of action

That "ours, by God" phrase rather sums it up for me: good or bad, these reviews and essays are mine, by God. They were the best I could do at the time, and - with all their obvious imperfections - I simply can't disown them, however much I'd like to sometimes.

Neil Diamond: The Jazz Singer (1980)