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 ...]

Jacket 2: Notes on NZ Poetry

Coromandel
[photograph: Simon Creasey]

First of all, a quick apology. Over the years I've tried to average about one post per fortnight, as those of you who've been kind enough to visit this blog on a regular basis will attest. Over the next few months I'll be lucky to achieve half that, as I have another gig which will be taking up a good deal of my time.

You recall, a few months ago, when I was asked to edit a selection of New Zealand poets for the US-based website Jacket2? No? Well, I was. You can read all about it here.

I guess they must have liked what I had to say, because I've received a follow-up invitation to write a commentary for them, in a section of their site devoted to poetry and poetics-related posts by a variety of guest writers. I suspect that it's more my status as a living breathing New Zealander that inspired the choice than any other personal qualities, as my subject matter is more or less restricted to "Notes on NZ Poetry."

Never mind. I'll just have to make it as interesting as I can.

My column - as I like to think of it - kicks off this weekend (on April Fool's Day - though fortunately the Americans, in a different time-zone, have attributed it to March 31st) with a brief account of the Short Takes on Long Poems" symposium I've just attended (see the post below for details).

I'll try and keep up my other regular blogging "duties" so far as I'm able, but please be patient with me. I know it doesn't really matter to anyone but me how many posts I manage to put up on this huge snake of a blog, but it's nice - sometimes - to fantasise about a huge cadre of devoted readers, eagerly devouring every word one sets down ...

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Jackette

[Jacket 2]

Jacket, the Australian online journal edited by John Tranter and (latterly) Pam Brown, is generally regarded as one of the most influential poetry magazines of the past two decades (you can access its entire forty-issue back catalogue, 1997-2010, from either the link above or the one below).

It's now succeeded by Jacket2, a website including Articles, Features, Reviews, Interviews, Commentaries, Reissues & Podcasts, all centred on contemporary poetry and poetics. The site is based in the US, but retains strong links with the Antipodes.

As proof of that, when I was at the Poetry & the Contemporary symposium in Melbourne in July, Pam Brown approached me about editing a New Zealand poetry feature for the site to parallel the one that she was doing on Australian poetry.

Both features are now up online. You can check out Pam's (which is pretty comprehensive: it's planned to include - eventually - 51 contemporary Australian poets) here, and my more modest selection of a dozen Kiwi poets here.

Once before I went through an exercise of this kind -- in 2004, seven years ago, when I co-edited 12 Taonga from the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive with Jan Kemp for the nzepc, at the end of our work on that 40-odd-CD-long, 171-poet-strong compilation of recordings and back-up materials.

Interestingly enough, there are two overlaps with the Jacket2 feature: Apirana Taylor and Richard von Sturmer. Besides that, though, I've tried to keep to the same principle of unearthing overlooked treasures in this new international showcase. Once again, it came down to 12 poets (though a number of those I asked were unable to participate for one reason or another -- I'd originally planned on including 15 or so: still well short of Pam's 50 -- we are only a quarter of the size, though: in population, at any rate ...)

The number rises to a neat Baker's dozen when you add in the strong, strikingly colourful images of local artist Emma Smith, which I attached to each page to give a kind of consistency of tone to these otherwise wildly various materials.

[Emma Smith:
"Even though you have lost your horse, don't pursue it"
[oil on canvas] (2011)]

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So what's in the feature? It's entitled "Look and look again: 12 New Zealand poets," and the twelve poets in question are (in alphabetical order):

[Bio: John Adams]


1. John Adams:
   
   
   
   • Fishing, off Kawau
   • Did you hear the snicker/ of that piwakawaka?/ In which fold/ is the artist squeezed?
   • Out the window there was a round goldfish pond with netting to keep the birds out and an aviary to keep their birds in



[Bio: Raewyn Alexander]


2. Raewyn Alexander:
   
   
   
   • 'aged famous rockers tour the world'
   • girls soft as new grass
   • India - early 20th Century and other Tales



[Bio: Jen Crawford]


3. Jen Crawford:
   
   
   
   • promontories
   • The Black Valley



[Bio: Scott Hamilton]


4. Scott Hamilton:
   
   
   
   • Elegy for a survivor of the war on Afghanistan
   • Walking to the Dendroglyphs on Christmas Eve (a dream)



[Bio: Leicester Kyle]


5. Leicester Kyle:
   
   
   
   • Happy Valley: A Lament for a landscape about to be mined (3 pp.) [31/10/03]
   • I Like It When The Sun Doesn’t Shine [12/9/03]



[Bio: Aleksandra Lane]


6. Aleksandra Lane:
   
   
   
   • Card games
   • Three cheers for liberation
   • Easter



[Bio: Thérèse Lloyd]


7. Thérèse Lloyd:
   
   
   
   • The Nail I
   • We’re All Here Buried
   • Takaka



[Bio: Richard Reeve]


8. Richard Reeve:
   
   
   
   • Uptake
   • Meeting in a Field
   • Croak



[Bio: Michael Steven]


9. Michael Steven:
   
   
   
   • Dunedin Fives

     o The Octagon
     o Raven Books
     o Spring Broadcast
     o The Excelsior Cafe
     o Meridian
     o Le Punk
     o Dented Moon

   • Elegy



[Bio: Apirana Taylor]


10. Apirana Taylor:
    
    
    
    • fighting with words
    • dame Margot on the line
    • rat a tat tat



[Bio: Richard Taylor]


11. Richard Taylor:
    
    
    
    • In the Silence Museum

      o again)
      o again) (2)
      o again) (3a)
      o again) (4)




[Bio: Richard von Sturmer]


12. Richard Von Sturmer:
    
    
    
    • Book of Equanimity Verses

      o 58.
      o 59.
      o 60.
      o 61,
      o 62.
      o 63.





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[Bio: Jack Ross]


13. Jack Ross:
    
    
    
    • Look and look again: Twelve New Zealand poets




[Bio: Emma Smith]


14. Emma Smith

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So obviously I think that each of these poets has something interesting to say to us right now. Check them out and see if you agree. It's an idiosyncratic selection, no doubt, but not one that I've put together without thinking about it quite a lot: a kind of personal anti-canon, perhaps - but one that's intended to intrigue you rather than provoke your wrath.

The "Jackette" pun was Jen Crawford's, in the first place, but it does seem rather appropriate to what I've tried to do here, so I've gratefully adopted it ... Enjoy.

Emma Smith:
"Hecate"
[mixed media on paper]
(2010)]