"All tomorrow's poets" at the Time Out [of mind:-)] Bookshop Mt
Eden best Auckland living poetry Event ever - poetry addressed by poets to their friends & contemporaries in their familiar language no holds barred in a packed madly over-packed upper room of the shop -- but only on one day a year, Poetry Day? I mean that wd be dumb"
I wrote the next day still exhilirated by the the mass excitement of 'student' age bodies packing into in a small space for a poetry event to celebrate Poetry Day [wasn't it a week in NZ & still seems to be a month in USA] but why isn't poetry everyday way of working/thinking for those who write [& practice other arts too]? I'm only echoing what Charles Bernstein & others have been saying for a decade.
I mean what happened at Time Out was what happens with the game at Time On.
I am paying tribute here to Greg Kan & Stephen Toussaint who set it up & to the various energies of the readers beginning with the man Greg called the prophet Ross Brighton & rapidly followed by Ross Brighton, Kirsti Whalen, Craig Foltz, Isobel Cairns,
Zarah Butcher McGunnigle, Jessica Hansell, Gregory Kan, Steven Toussaint,
Alex Wild, Manon Revuelta
MCs Gregory & Steven
each poet will read their own work, and an inspirational poem -- by someone else they admire -- hence Ross reading the wonderful Alan Loney who in his 70s may yet to prove to be one of TOMORROW's poets, likewise Wystan Curnow whose poem from his Cancer Daybook [his illness of 1983] was read by Craig Foltz -- who sd he'd been a student of Rae Armantrout -- & I recalled Wystan read with her sometime when he was in the States & that's probably, i guess, when she got his book which she then shared with her students.
Long aside & reminiscence [in the creeley anecdotal manner follows] That was the time when Robert Creeley made his greatest impact on several NZ writers, 1980s & of course, continuing to the end of his life, our friend. Not only 'For Love" but 'Pieces' even more so made its mark in the midst of the association with the conceptual art of the late 60s & the 70s -- somewhen writing from the States Wystan wrote in a letter about meeting with Creeley in NYC and being takn by him to see Arakawa who invited them to contemmplate Nothing. Black Mountain of Charles Olson period was inspirational also I found out recently for Jim Allen in his teaching in the Sculpture Dept at Elam early 70s -- & late in Sydney also.
Creeley was supportive also at other times of Russell Haley & Murray Edmond & was aware of Michele Leggott's research on Zukofsky. Fo Loney, too, important as a writer, & Loney published the NZ section of "Hello" & later 'The Dogs of Auckland" with drawings by Max Gimlett - a project begun sitting on a couch in the Creeley's rented house at a fatewell party after his seminars at Auck Uni. I have some photos of the occasion [somewhere ?] taken by my friend the late Pam Honum.
I remember him appearing for a class in Auckland as a Yankee [?] in a long blue denim coat & later at Auckland Grammar reading [with Allen Curnow & Carl Stead?] with a cold caught in Hamilton & one piece, after the interval, was the 'Teeth' section from the then recent 'Presences' & he went straight into it in exactly the same everyday speech in his preliminary sentences - I really didn't know that that was how he read it, from the page -- there was no PennSound then -- tho I did get a copy of Chgarles Olson's recording on vinyl -- "I am the gold machine [chuckle]" -- begins again. Wystan and that quiet, hardly noticed poet, Rogr Horrocks studied for a time in Buffalo with Creeley.
I did a lunch-time reading there -- badly -- nervous with Creeley in the audience - Joan Retallack. & sat in on Charles Bernstein's seminar. I really wanted to give a lecture on Nicolas Poussin but nobody wanted that, sadly, & reading poetry came second for me at that time. But I did get to talk with Gerald Bucher who had written about Poussin in his book 'Le Testament poétique'- encountered Stephen Rodefer at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, where I was looking for the paintings that Colin McCahon might well have seen in 1958 -- & began hastily a conversation with Mark Wallace, so it was not all loss.
An event in Auckland like a Happening, where the audience was student age friends of the writers,many of them writing or doing various like things in their lives -- a sense of a new community building & a new enegy -- much needed in the face of the continuing blanket of fog laid down by the 'mainstream' [meaning those who cling to models of writing that never got much further than the 1890s + adding on a few devices from more nodern things] -- and the popularist version of poetry for the entirely imaginary 'people' who are oblivious to all the arts and regard all artists as pretentious wankers -- i.e. standup routines with the usual mother-in-law body function jokes of 12 year olds delivered wearing a funny hat so-called enertainment, exactly calculated to appeal to the funding of Creative NZ. Any conscious critical thinking and critical activity in the arts silenced thereby. This new generation won't stand for that -- I hope.
I notied that in that situation the more 'considered' work that wd work on the page was not compelling when read aloud -- isn't it the case that the new media will take over? -- the instant electronic communication devices getting round the expensive slow process of book & finely made magazines. In the 80s it was the photocopy stapled mag with cheap rates from a friendly educational institution for the photocopy. One well-known NYC poet sd they used to steal the photocopy. Appropriation. Even better.
Recent Comments