New NZ Poets in Performance (2008)

Cover image: Sara Hughes / Cover design: Christine Hansen /
Text design: Katrina Duncan

New New Zealand Poets in Performance. Edited by Jack Ross. Poems selected by Jack Ross and Jan Kemp. ISBN 978 1 86940 4093. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008. xiv + 146 pp.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Anne Kennedy (b. 1959)
I was a feminist in the eighties
Cat Tales
Whenua (2)
Biography / Selected Bibliography

David Howard (b. 1959)
Talking Sideways
Social Studies
On the Eighth Day
Biography / Selected Bibliography

John Newton (b. 1959)
Lunch
Ferret trap
Inland
Opening the Book
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Serie (Cherie) Barford (b. 1960)
Plea to the Spanish Lady
God is near the Equator
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Jenny Bornholdt (b. 1960)
Rodnie and her bicycles
Bus stop
Weather
Then Murray came
Please, pay attention
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Jenny Powell-Chalmers (b. 1960)
Carnival of Chocolate
Linda
Lunch Box
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Gregory O’Brien (b. 1961)
Epithalamium, Wellington
It will be better then
Solomon singing
from Great Lake
There is only one
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Chris Price (b. 1962)
Ghastlily
The Origins of Science
Keeping ravens
Biography / Selected Bibliography

John Pule (b. 1962)
from Restless People
Ka hola
He
Liogi
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Jack Ross (b. 1962)
Except Once
A Woman Named Intrepid
Idyll
Disorder and Early Sorrow
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Andrew Johnston (b. 1963)
How to Talk
How to Walk
Les Baillessats
The Present
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Glenn Colquhoun (b. 1964)
from Whakapapa
She asked me if she took one pill for her heart …
Lost property
On the death of my grandmother
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Lynda Chanwai-Earle (b. 1965)
Details from a personal journal
Gasp
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Sonja Yelich (b. 1965)
narrow neck from the boat ramp
1YA
writing desk
whangaparaoa – on the sundeck
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Tusiata Avia (b. 1966)
My Dog
My First Time in Samoa
Wild Dogs Under My Skirt
Biography / Selected Bibliography

James Brown (b. 1966)
Loneliness
Soup From a Stone
The Crewe Cres Kids
The Day I Stopped Writing Poetry
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Anna Jackson (b. 1967)
The hen of tiredness
Takahe
On the road with Rose
In a minute
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Sarah Quigley (b. 1967)
New York Four
Restless
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Robert Sullivan (b. 1967)
Waka 46
V Honda Waka
Waka 70 i Matakitaki
Waka 62 A narrator’s note
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Emma Neale (b. 1969)
Spoken For
Jane Coleridge
You’re Telling Me
Confessional Poem
Caroline Helstone
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Kate Camp (b. 1972)
Postcard
Documentaries
Backroads
Water of the Sweet Life
Guests
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Tracey Slaughter (b. 1972)
anatomy of dancing with your future wife
biography day
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Nick Ascroft (b. 1973)
The Badder & the Better
All of the Other Ascrofts Are Dead
Cheap Present
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Kapka Kassabova (b. 1973)
Preparation for the big emptiness
One morning like a sleeper
My life in two parts
A city of pierced amphorae
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Thérèse Lloyd (b. 1974)
Forecast
One Hundred Hours
Scorpion Daughter
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Mark Pirie (b. 1974)
Good Looks
Making a Point
Progress
The Third Form
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Olivia Macassey (b. 1975)
Outhwaite Park
Outer Suburb
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Richard Reeve (b. 1976)
Dark Unloading: A Villanelle
Ranfurly
Victory Beach
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Track List

Variant Readings

Bibliography

Back cover

Samples:

Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive

Auckland University Press

The Imaginary Museum

Front flap: Blurb

From Anne Kennedy to Andrew Johnston, Jenny Bornholdt to Glenn Colquhoun, NEW NEW ZEALAND POETS IN PERFORMANCE celebrates the rich jangle of clashing ideas, voices and genders that combine to make contemporary culture. It collects the work of 28 young and mid-career poets - who came to prominence in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s - notable for their variety, their fresh approaches to poetic form and subject, and their distinctive but complementary voices. This book is a follow-up and companion to the bestselling Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance and Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance. Editors Jack Ross and Jan Kemp have selected and presented on two CDs material largely from the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, completed in 2004. There are more than two hours of poets reading their own work and the accompanying book prints the texts of the poems as they have been read. Selected bibliographies and short biographies for each poet are also included, as well as an appendix of variant readings.

New New Zealand Poets in Performance presents the work of 'poets determined to go their own way, wherever that may lead them', as Jack Ross writes in the preface. We're sure you'll enjoy the opportunity to savour their words and voices here.

Available:

Auckland University Press
The University Of Auckland
1-11 Short St.
Private Bag 92019
Auckland
New Zealand
aup@auckland.ac.nz

RRP: $NZ 45.00

Back flap: Author information

JACK R0SS is a writer and editor, based in Auckland. He has published three books of poems: City of Strange Brunettes (1998), Chantal's Book (2002) and To Terezín (2007); two novels: Nights with Giordano Bruno (2000) and The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (2006); and two books of short fiction. His other books include (with Graeme Lay) the anthology Golden Weather: North Shore Writers Past and Present (2004), and (with Tina Shaw) Myth of the 21st Century: An Anthology of New Fiction (2006). In 2007 he guest-edited Landfall 214.

JAN KEMP conceived and organised the collection of recordings in the New Zealand Poets in Performance series. She is director of both the Waiata (1974) and Aotearoa New Zealand (2004) Poetry Sound Archives. She was awarded an MNZM for services to literature in 2005. Dante's Heaven (Puriri Press, Auckland) was published In 2006. She now lives outside Frankfurt am Main. She is a member of PEN-Germany and the New Zealand Society of Authors and is presently preparing Voicetracks: Selected Poems, her ninth book.

ANNE KENNEDY
DAVID HOWARD
JOHN NEWTON
SERIE BARFORD
JENNY B0RNHOLDT
JENNY POWELL-CHALMERS
GREGORY O'BRIEN
CHRIS PRICE
JOHN PULE
JACK ROSS
ANDREW JOHNSTON
GLENN COLQUHOUN
LYNDA CHANWAI-EARLE
SONJA YELICH
TUSIATA AVIA
JAMES BROWN
ANNA JACKSON
SARAH QUIGLEY
ROBERT SULLIVAN
EMMA NEALE
KATE CAMP
TRACEY SLAUGHTER
NICK ASCROFT
KAPKA KASSABOVA
THERESE LLOYD
MARK PIRIE
OLIVIA MACASSEY
RICHARD REEVE

Reviews & Comments:

1. AUP, "New New Zealand Poets in Performance." forthcoming (24/6/08):
   

   
   The third in the Poets in Performance series, this book collects the work of a new generation of poets - from Anne Kennedy to Glenn Colquhoun, Jenny Bornholdt to Robert Sullivan - who came to prominence in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. These poets are notable for their variety, their distinctive voices and their fresh approaches to poetic form and subject. As in Classic and Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance, Ross and Kemp have selected and presented on two CDs material from the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, completed in 2004. There are more than two hours of poets reading their own work and the accompanying book prints the texts of the poems as they have been read. Selected bibliographies and short biographies for each poet and an appendix of variant readings are also included.



2. Jessica Le Bas, "The joy of rhythm and rhyme." Nelson Mail (16/7/08):
   

   
   Jack Ross and Jan Kemp have edited a series, New Zealand Poets in Performance, each year now since 2006 - first classic poets, then contemporary poets. This month sees the launch of another, New New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland University Press, $44.99), heralding new voices in the poetry scene.
   
   What makes this series attractive is that each book comes with two CDs of the poets reading a selection of their work. Now you can stay home, with your cognac and your fire roaring (heat pump doesn't seem to have the same poetic cadence, does it?), and listen to Allen Curnow reading The Skeleton of the Great Moa, or Denis Glover reading his quintessential Magpies.
   
   There's Baxter and Hunt in this series, C K Stead and O'Sullivan, to name a few good poets. In this latest collection, you can hear Glenn Colquhoun and Jenny Bornholdt. What better place to start sampling New Zealand Poetry?



3. Jennifer Little, "Poetry CDs an alternative to Talkback Radio." Massey News (16/7/08):
   

   
   Compact disc recordings in a new anthology of New Zealand's hottest new poets promise to engage a wide audience, including those who are not “poetry fiends”, says one of its co-editors Massey English lecturer Dr Jack Ross ...
   
   “A lot of people might want to try listening to the poems while they're in the car driving to work," Dr Ross says. "Instead of talkback radio, why not open up to some new ideas with a poem?”
   
   The book follows Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance and Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance and brings together 28 young to mid-career poets, including Anne Kennedy, Jenny Bornholdt, Glenn Colquhoun and Andrew Johnston, to celebrate “the rich jangle of clashing ideas, voices, genders that combine to make a living culture”, Dr Ross says in his introduction.



4. Peter Dornauf, "Tuning into Mid-career Poets." Waikato Times (2/8/08):
   

   
   This volume and CDs, along with the other two companions, will make a very useful, worthwhile addition to secondary and tertiary libraries as well as to the libraries of individual dedicated followers of lyrical fashion.



5. "New New Zealand Poets in Performance." Unity Books Spring Newsletter (20/8/08):
   

   
   A companion to classy, bestselling anthologies Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance and Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance, this new collection features 28 young and mid-career poets notable for variety, freshness, IQ and distinctiveness and presents material from the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive (includes 2 CDs).



6. Pat White, "A Delight for Poetry Lovers." Wairarapa Times (20/8/08):
   

   
   This volume brings to a close the most thorough survey of New Zealand poetry ever undertaken. Three volumes have been published with material gleaned from a comprehensive ctalogue of poets reading their work which has been stored as the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive ...
   
   The volume is attractively printed, with an easily used layout, all work is referenced and accompanied by biographical notes. Any reader of poetry will find this sequence of publications an essential reference, quite apart form a very satisfying access point to much that is best in New Zealand poets writing at their best.
   
   Without a doubt the monumental task Kemp and Ross set themselves must have grown to something more than they imagined possible. Now however, the results speak for themselves. We have a very valuable progress report on the state of poetry, for the delight of this country's poetry lovers, and the use of its students. as editors Kemp and Ross deserve the nation's thanks for a task completed well.



7. Margaret Christensen, "New New Zealand Poets in Performance." Wairarapa Times-Age (23/8/08):
   

   
   Editors Ross and Kemp here continue the excellent selections they have made, along with archival CDs, in the past few years. ... All together the collections mine work which gives an overview in both sight and
   sound of the topography of poetry in this country.
   ...
   All of the poets included have quite impressive track records of publication in this country and overseas. They have won many awards, which are handily documented at the end of each poet's selection - which is very useful for students of our literature, both now and later.
   ...
   Crises have obviously occurred in these lives but the reader can only guess at the triggering circumstances. That does not necessarily mean that the reader is left bewildered, just aware.



8. "New New Zealand Poets in Performance." Art News reviews (Spring 08) (27/8/08):
   

   
   There's no doubt that hearing poetry read aloud is a much more physical, dynamic and dramatic experience that brings the rhythm, tone and rhyme of the medium to the fore. In this multi-media publication, which includes two CDs of poets in performance mostly taken from the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, established in 2004 by poet Jan Kemp, the reader has the best of both worlds. the third in a series of 'New Zealand Poets in performance', this features the voices of 28 of New Zealand's young to mid-career poets, including Kate Camp, Anne Kennedy, Gregory O'Brien and James Brown, whose quirky, irreverent poem about seeing Elvis "just walking across the quad in no particular hurry" is a gem. Two hours of poets reading their work, accompanied by the text of each poem, makes this a treat for poetry lovers.



9. Trevor Reeves, "New New Zealand Poets in Performance." Southern Ocean Review (2008):
   

   
   164 pages of anthology again (third time) of the poets in performance, with two nice cd's to play with the actual poets reading their work. This time there are some South Island poets in there, including Richard Reeve who is making a big name for himself as an establishment poet. Also Jenny Powell-Chalmers writing about Dunedin (good on her) with 'Carnival of Chocolate'. Ideal for reading aloud, and she does read well. Even trivia like “Lunch Box' sounds good read. Nick Ascroft is in there too. New Zealand is bountifully supplied with bright new poets making their mark now. When you have nothing much to write about, you can make even the most mundane sound brilliantly exciting, as in 'The Badder & the Better'. I liked Anne Kennedy's poem: 'I was a feminist in the eighties', ending: “Then a lion came prowling out of the jungle / and ate the feminist all up”. David Howard writes competently and his work sounds good read out, quite entertaining in fact. James Brown is good…. entertaining stuff, especially 'Loneliness', about Elvis Presley. Unpretentious, funny, great. A full book of very competent practitioners of the poetic arts, and nice to listen to, too.



10. Sam Finnemore, "Books: New New Zealand Poets in Performance." Craccum 16 (2008):
    

    
    As with the last two instalments, Jack Ross and Jan Kemp have chosen smartly from the 2004 Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Archive, and there's so much to enjoy here: highlights include Robert Sullivan's remarkable 'Star Waka' poems; Anna Jackson's breathy delivery of razor sharp verse; John Pule, Tusiata Avia and James Brown. It's a useful chance to reassess certain poets too; Glenn Colquhoun, who I'd never particularly rated on the page since Playing God, comes across notably well both in the book and on CD.
    
    Both the book and the recordings come across as distinctly fresh and modern, and the editors have clearly achieved their goal; of creating a clear identity for each volume of the Poets in Performance trilogy. The combination of book and CD is effective as ever; iPod users can sift the audio around usefully while keeping the original discs safely nested inside the book itself, for this is going to be a book worth taking care of. New New Zealand Poets in Performance makes a solid end to Ross and Kemp's series, a smart package well-chosen from a huge range of material and likely to have enduring value as a poetic snapshot of the now. Highly recommended.



11. Richard Reeve, "Review of Jack Ross and Jan Kemp (eds), Classic, Contemporary and New New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006-8)." Poetry NZ 38 (2009): 101-6.
    

    
    Ross and Kemp’s editorial selection is eclectic, pragmatic and personal, with gems in all three books. ...
    
    As a unit, New Zealand Poets in Peformance does give a sense of the voice enshrined of different epochs and cultures and, importantly, the volumes illustrate continuity (as distinct from ‘progress’, which in poetry is no longer a permissible concept) in the passage from Brasch and Curnow to Olivia Macassey and Mark Pirie, with the artform surviving all critical prescriptions from all times, cheating attempts to pin it down. Hearing poets reading their work often changes one’s impression of the text. In several cases, what at first glance seem to be bad poems on the page are transformed by a poet’s voice into powerful, acutely realised poetic moments, while other poems that impress at first reading come across as flat and uninspired when delivered by the author. This exemplifies the enigma of what constitutes ‘voice’ in poetry: some well-loved, celebrated poets are dry performers of their work, yet few would say they don’t have a voice. To the editors’ lasting credit, their compilation presents many such faces of poetry, with surprises that warrant returning to again and again to savour. That, in the end, is the most anyone can ask for.



12. Helen Dennis, "Review of Chris Orsman, The Lakes of Mars (AUP, 2008); Sam Sampson, everything talks (AUP, 2008); Bob Orr, Calypso (AUP, 2008); Sonja Yelich Get Some (AUP, 2008); New New Zealand Poets in Performance, ed. Jack Ross & Jan Kemp (AUP, 2008); Richard Reeve, In Continents (AUP, 2008); Leonard Lambert, Skywire (Steele Roberts, 2008)." The Warwick Review (March 2009): 61-72 [66-67]:
    

    
    [Jack Ross & Jan Kemp (eds), New New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland University Press, 2008), ISBN 978-1-86940-409-3, 146 pp, NZ$44.95 (pb)]
    
    ... Both [Sonja] Yelich and Richard Reeve are featured in the compendious collection of New New Zealand Poets in Performance. The debate continues in poetry circles as to the necessity and point of poets performing their own work, with some declaring that if the poem works properly on the page, i.e. if the poet's craft is up to the job, then performance is totally unnecessary. On the other hand, others believe that the poetic text is somewhat like a musical score waiting to be interpreted and performed by the poet, who is thus both "composer" and "instrumentalist". I tend towards the latter view, depending on the type of poetry. Certainly New New Zealand Poets in Performance is a delightful introduction to a wide diversity of new New Zealand poetic voices, and given the differences between received English pronunciation in the UK and kiwi English, it is extremely useful to have the poets' own voices interpreting their works on two CDs here. Twenty-eight young and mid-career poets are represented, so it is impossible to give many name checks; but listen to the cumulative humour of the first poem, "I was a Feminist in the eighties" by Anne Kennedy, and I swear you'll be hooked!



13. Allan Phillipson, "Review of Jack Ross and Jan Kemp (eds), New New Zealand Poets in Performance, (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008), pp. 162 (plus two CDs), ISBN-13: 978-1-86940-409-3.” CNZS Bulletin of New Zealand Studies 2 (2009):
    

    
    I can remember seeing John Newton’s “Ferret Trap” (p. 13) for the first time in 1988, in Mark Williams’ Caxton Press Anthology: New Zealand Poetry 1972-1986. The poem gave me a sense of recognition and unease, the rural environment captured (“the chooks in the macrocarpas”) and twisted (“sheep’s heart jammed on a nail”). Twenty years later, hearing Newton’s South Island Gothic as I drive through the Devon countryside, I almost missed my turnoff as the sound took me back to my grandfather’s woolshed: the rusty rabbit traps, the nooses of bailing twine, the greasy creak of the gates. In his preface, Ross advises us to take these poems and “listen to them in the car” (p. xii), but I say no – the process is too distracting, too dangerous.
    
    This series has done an immense amount of good in preserving and disseminating the voices of our writers. The value of hearing poets read cannot be underestimated. From the clipped, almost British tones of Allen Curnow in volume one, to the ‘Mad Kiwi Ranter’ persona of David Eggleton in volume two, each of the recordings reflect and illuminate an aspect of our history. Ross stated that poets to come would have their own “virtual reality webcasts” (p. ix), and implied that this series would come to an end with volume three. I fervently hope that this is not the case, and that both the Poetry Sound Archive and its publications will continue.



14. Green, Paula, & Harry Ricketts. 99 Ways into NZ Poetry. A Vintage Book (Auckland: Random House New Zealand, 2010):
    

    
    As a follow-up to the impressive efforts of Jan Kemp, Jonathan Lamb and Alan Smythe to record as many major New Zealand poets as possible (1974), Kemp and Smythe decided to establish a more expansive archive of spoken poetry (2002). The final result, the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, is in the Special Collections at the University of Auckland and includes 171 poets. This comprehensive project allowed poets twenty minutes each and CD space for complementary material such as bibliographies and images. With a copy of the archive now deposited at the Alexander Turnbull Library, the significance of listening to poetry is made more tangible with access to the reading or performance of a considerable number of New Zealand poets now available. One offshoot of the archival project is a series of anthologies published by Auckland University Press that allow a poetry audience to both read and hear poems by key New Zealand poets. Edited by Kemp and Jack Ross, the anthologies are grouped in chronological clusters: Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance, Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance and New New Zealand Poets in Performance. One can hear the shift in the reading styles over generations, from the earlier tones of poets such as A R D Fairburn, R A K Mason, Charles Brasch and Allen Curnow (lofty, polite and rhapsodic) to the more conversational qualities (mellifluous, lyrical or downbeat) of contemporary poets as diverse as David Howard, Andrew Johnston, Mark Pirie, Sonja Yelich and Kate Camp. [Paula Green, 'Performing the Poem', pp.267-68].



15. Harvey Molloy, "Review of New New Zealand Poets in Performance Eds Jack Ross & Jan Kemp (Auckland University Press, 2008). RRP $45.00 ISBN 978 1 86940 409 3.” New Zealand Poetry Society Te Hunga Tito Ruri o Aotearoa (n.d.):
    

    
    I've greatly enjoyed the previous two books in this series, Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance and Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance. Each book in the series features two CDs of the poets reading their works. This means that you can, as I did, listen to the poems whilst you're driving around and then check out the printed poems in the book. Each book is attractively designed with an excellent cover - the cover of wild, fractal paisley designs from Sarah Hughes' Never Let Me Go shows the very good visual taste of the editors which has run through the series.
    
    I don't particular suffer from selection anxiety, so I'm looking for a good anthology with some enjoyable poems, rather than a clever introduction, and this selection from poets such as Jack Ross, James Brown, Kapka Kassabova, Mark Pirie, Olivia Macassey and Richard Reeve, delivers. The "New New Zealand poets" are the new already greying kids on the block and includes anyone who is 'young or mid-career' and born after 1959.
    
    I had a lot of fun listening blind to the CDs. I played them three times on the car stereo before I read the book. The poems seem to flow into one another, as if they were one great long poem spoken by different voices ...

•

Home & Away (2008)

Cover photograph & design: Kathryn Lee

Home & Away: Life Writing 3. Edited by Kathryn Lee & Jack Ross. ISBN 978-0-473-13539-3. Massey University: School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2008. ii + 156 pp.

Contents:

Kathryn Lee
Preface: Writer's Block

Jack Ross
Xmas

Hayley Baines
Changes
Rules and Taboos
Seven

Bianca Burger
Home

Rebekah Chambers
Nobody Knows
Nothing but Silence
Never Again
Like You
You Were There
Melting
Tiny Black Curls
Your Face
Remember?

Bruce Craig
“Beautiful Little Dolls,” the Policeman said …

Jane Gardiner
Gardening with Granny
24 June 1977

Rhiannon Horrell
Travelling in the Footsteps of Janet White …

Emma Jeffrey
A Bus Full of Pirates

Rachel Koch
Getting Lost in Costa Rica

Kathryn Lee
Culture Shock 101: Day One in Hsin Chu

Dana Maton
Goodbye
The McGintys
Relations

Tania Menzies
Trouble in Tirau

Lisa Simpson
My German Grandfather
Goodbye

Sophie Smith
Rules and Taboos

Gregory Wood
Into the Mist: Searching for the Lost Huia

Available:

Leanne Menzies
School Adminstrator
School of Social and Cultural Studies
Massey University
Private Bay 102 904
North Shore Mail Centre
Auckland

RRP: $NZ 10 (+ $2 postage & packing)

Reviews & Comments:

1. Jennifer Little. "New books reveal bold approach to writing life.” Massey News. [6/6/08]
   

   
   Contributor and co-editor Kathryn Lee says the publication is a testament to the courage of students who overcame fear and the inclination to procrastinate when faced with the blank page.
   
   “The lesson that I learned from this class [life writing] was a very simple one but one that needed to be learned. Stop worrying and start writing,” Ms Lee says in her preface.
   
   Home and Away co-editor, writer and English lecturer Dr Jack Ross says the diverse backgrounds of the contributors produced a huge variety of “amazing” stories.
   
   “Showcasing and polishing these pieces for others to read and learn from has been a great pleasure for me.”

•

EMO (2008)

Cover image: Emma Smith, "have I been pardoned yet?" (detail)

The R.E.M. [Random Excess Memory] Trilogy, 3:

EMO. A Novel by Jack Ross. ISBN 978-1-877441-07-3. Auckland: Titus Books, 2008. [vi] + 258 pp.

Contents:

EVA AVE

1. Eva Android
2. Dear E.
3. Family Album
4. February 6, 1935
5. The Cat
6. February 11, 1935
7. Strange Meeting
8. The Contract
9. February 15, 1935
10. First Night
11. Arrival
12. February 18, 1935
13. Searching
14. Work
15. March 11, 1935
16. The Vivisectionist
17. 1001 Nights
18. March 16, 1935
19. Beauty and the Beast
20. Dogs
21. Night Visit
22. April 1, 1935
23. Together Forever
24. The Excursion
25. April 29, 1935
26. Madness
27. The Hotel
28. May 10, 1935
29. Murder
30. But his hands were around my throat
31. Ten Days that Shook the World
32. The Trial
33. May 28, 1935
34. Last Day of a Condemned Man

MOONS OF MARS

1. Marlow
2. Welcome to my World
3. The Invitation
4. Welcome to my World (2)
5. Hysterical Blindness
6. Welcome to my World (3)
7. Luce
8. Dinner
9. Burmese Days
10. The Bargain
11. Backstory
12. Somnambulism
13. Chantage
14. The Investigation
15. Trois filles de leur mère
16. Club D
17. Glam Metal Detectives
18. Night Journey
19. Outside
20. Trilogies
21. Rumble Edge Line
22. Trilogies (2)
23. Life on Mars
24. Trilogies (3)
25. Hydrogen
26. King Candaules
27. Free Love
28. Helium
29. Confessions
30. Marriage
31. High
32. Terminus
33. The Great Stone Face
34. Doubts
35. Iris
36. Iris Recognition
37. Iris Out

OVID IN OTHERWORLD

1. Ovidius Naso
2. Tristia 3.2
3. Video-consult
4. The Undead
5. Tristia 3.3
6. Blood-drive
7. Exul Ludens
8. Tristia 3.8
9. Drip-feed
10. Blinding
11. Tristia 3.10
12. Truth-telling
13. ovid v. divo
14. Tristia 3.12
15. Witch-finding
16. roma amor
17. Tristia 3.13
18. Hypno-slave
19. Ovids 3
20. Tristia 5.7
21. Fever-dreams
22. Ovid in the Third Reich
23. Tristia 5.10
24. Head-hunter
25. Six Memos for the Next Millennium
26. Tristia 5.12
27. Title-story
28. Lost Books of the Fasti
29. Epistulae 1.2
30. Poetry-reading
31. Sleep Threshold – Hypnagogia
32. Epistulae 4.7
33. Face-saving
34. Ovid Misunderstood
35. Epistulae 4.10
36. Scene-stealing
37. Suetonius: “Divus Augustus”
38. Epistulae 4.14
39. Fasti V: 421-44
40. Dream-catcher

Cover design: Brett Cross

Palimpsest Texts:

SCHEHERAZADE'S WEB:
The 1001 Nights and Comparative Literature

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1 - Malory and Scheherazade: A Study in Narrative Method
Chapter 2 - Europe, Christianity and the Crusades in the 1001 Nights
Chapter 3 - Voyage en Orient: The Victorian Traveller and the Arabian Nights
Chapter 4 - Parodies of the Nights in Nineteenth-century Literature
Chapter 5 - The Poetics of Stasis: Twentieth-century Readings of the Nights
Works Cited
Bibliography
Chronology
Concordance

JACK'S METAMORPHOSES:
Collage-Poems & Sequences (1997-2007)

Metamorphoses I: Chaos
Jack’s Metamorphoses
Metamorphoses II: The Crow
Evenings in the Blackout
Metamorphoses III: Semele
Dieting. I’m Hungry too
Metamorphoses IV: Daughters of Minyas
In the Cave of Henry James
Metamorphoses V: Arethusa
The Britney Suite
Metamorphoses VI: Marsyas
Ancestral Voices
Metamorphoses VII: Theseus
Anamorphoses
Metamorphoses VIII: Icarus
Love in Wartime
Metamorphoses IX: Iolaus
Postcards
Metamorphoses X: Pygmalion
Servants of the Wankh
Metamorphoses XI: Midas
Suburban Apocalypse
Metamorphoses XII: Rumour
Days Under Water
Metamorphoses XIII: Glaucus
Citizens of the People’s Republic of Freaktown
Metamorphoses XIV: Pomona
Muses
Metamorphoses XV: Hippolytus
Papyri
Notes on Sources

Publius Ovidius Naso:
TRISTIA, EPISTULAE EX PONTO & IBIS

Tristia
Book I
Book II
Book III
Book IV
Book V

Epistulae ex Ponto
Book I
Book II
Book III
Book IV

Ibis

Blurb:

In the third volume of his REM trilogy, after the urban inferno of Nights with Giordano Bruno (2000) and the purgatorial stasis of The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (2006), Jack Ross explores the closest thing to a paradise his cast of crazies can conceive of – let alone aspire to.

E M O

RANDOM EXCESS MEMORY

“ … I had a companion when I first came here, all those years ago. But we spent too long exploring our new world. When he tried to leave he shrivelled into dust. I found his body and buried him. Flint, he was called.”
“But ... why didn’t you shrivel into dust. If you followed him out.”
“He never drank the water or ate the weeds.”
“But ...”
Suddenly something clicked into place. She saw the milky mildness of his deep-set eyes as they actually were: a mask for thick, impenetrable cataracts of scar-tissue.
“Yes, I fed you on them. I’m sorry. I want you to stay with me and be my wife.”

EARTH
MARS
OTHERWORLD
... the book itself exists like a music of the spheres that runs along the tops of the pages, available only to a concentrated sense of hearing, but as real as fuck.

- Will Christie

Abstract:

"There’s an obsession with blindness, certainly – with ageing dictators and visionaries: Hitler, Ovid, Shahryar. What else can we say about the narrator of this book? He (or she) takes refuge in flights of fancy, posting pseudonymous entries on the web.

Later they’re printed out on the backs of any pages, used or scribbled on, that come to hand.

Each of the three stories explores a set of flawed relationship: Hitler and Eva, Marlow and Phil, Ovid and the wise-woman. …

Is it all an attempt to find the perfect partner, whether she be android clone, registered nurse, or girl-next-door? ..."

This book consists of a set of three online narratives: one devoted to Earth (EVA AVE), a futuristic story about a girl convinced that she’s the clone of Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun; one to Mars (Moons of Mars), the story of a violent sex-ring based under the pyramids of Mars; and one set in the Otherworld of a patient under psychoanalysis (Ovid in Otherworld), who believes that he’s the poet Ovid, in exile on the Black Sea. The titles of the stories make an anagram of the word EMO: a neo-gothic youth style, derived (allegedly) from the words “Excessively Emotional”. Before publication, I copied each story onto pages already “contaminated” by other texts: a critical book about the 1001 Nights, a set of poetry pageworks grouped around Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as the Latin text of Ovid’s exile letters. These can be seen (but not clearly read) through the print of the “over-story”.

Online Texts:

EMO (e-book, 2020)

Samples:

Jack's Metamorphoses

The Britney Suite

The Cat

Love in Wartime

Papyri

Publisher:

Titus Books
1416 Kaiaua Road
RD3
Pokeno 2473
Waikato
New Zealand
email: titus.books.akl@gmail.com
mobile: 027 865 3958
http://titus.co.nz/catalogue.xhtml

Available from:

Atuanui Press

RRP: $NZ 40.00

[Titus Book launch (l9/6/08)]

Reviews & Comments:

1. Jen Crawford, "Jack Ross's EMO: Launch speech at Alleluya cafe, Thursday 19th June." blue acres (24/6/08):
   

   
   ... this is a book which isn’t satisfied with being self-contained. It reaches beyond its own covers, beyond its author, inviting you into one of the great endangered pleasures of literature – which is the sense of its endlessness, the way one book can open another book for you, like a friend giving you a private gift; perhaps the key to a room you can now share – a room, of course, which would have many other doors.



2. Scott Hamilton, "Independent's Night." Scoop Review of Books (24/6/08):
   

   
   Like its predecessors, Nights with Giordano Bruno and The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis, Ross’ EMO is a sprawling, delightfully bewildering work. Ross sets several stories in motion, as he moves between Mars, Nazi Germany, and the dream-like version of Auckland’s North Shore that recurs almost obsessively in his writing. At the heart of EMO is the tale of a recently blinded writer and his servant, a very human android named Eva. The embittered writer tries to impose his will upon Eva, but she subtly resists his whims. The story of Eva and her faltering master has the simple power of a fable, and Ross finds parallels for it in the Arabian Nights, as well as in the relationship between Hitler and his secretary-cum-wife, Eva Braun ...
   
   Ross is a lapidarian scholar, fluent in half a dozen languages, but he is also a passionate fan of America’s Next Top Model, and his writing has always refused to distinguish between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. The very look of EMO mocks the conventions of both literature and academic scholarship - texts are artfully layered on its outsize pages, alongside photographs, cartoons, and cryptic diagrams. Ross’ prose is full of dirty jokes, as well as learned asides and sad observations. EMO could keep you busy for years on a desert island, but it can also entertain you during that hour between the end of Shortland St and the beginning of Desperate Housewives.



3. Bill Direen, "Review of EMO." Percutio 3 (2009): 82.
   

   
   My review copy measured in at 17.4 x 24.7 x 2.1 cm which, knowing Jack a little, might represent some mystical dimension of an alchemical age. The first impression is dramatic. Here we have a book uncharacteristically (for both the author and for Titus Books) large and boldly striking (with its blood-red sketch of a weary child's face); it also invites a biplanar approach. It is at once strident and muted. ... The impression is of a private studio, reflection of the writer's mind, scattered with his influences and cuttings which have appealed to him over the years, which have formed him.



4. Richard Taylor, "Review of EMO." brief 39 (2010): 116-21.
   

   
   In terms of pure formal complexity, “visual beauty”, originality of form and intellection connected to a strong underlying ethic, EMO is a unique masterpiece of an innovative and original kind, rarely seen in NZ literature. Jack Ross has long had a very real and intense fascination with stories and tales: in particular science fiction, horror, fantasy, stories of Borges and others, along with other literature; and most prominently in EMO, the stories from 1001 Nights, and those of Ovid’s Metamophoses. Despite an extensive and sometimes disturbing use of sex, violence, Fantasy, Gothic, and of irony, it is an ultimately engrossing and enchanting tale, or a tale about writing or of writing magical tales. And whatever else it is, EMO is homage to Story, and the pure magic of The Tale.
   ...
   Are we then in some monstrous intellectual monument with no end – can this book not be read and enjoyed? Do we all have to read all works of literature and so on and read modern philosophy to enjoy or deal with this book? Do we have to wade through all these codes and complexities and cryptics? I must confess that this was my own doubt. But the main text’s story, or stories, makes up what is in itself a narrative of extraordinary adventures, and indeed the central section is set on Mars, involves intrigue, seduction, sado-masochism, drugs, murder, as well as codes. We are in a labyrinth, but it is compensated for by the very enchanting language that Ross uses, and the intensity of the many episodes in the book.



5. Brett Cross, "Power Relations and Sexual Manipulation: Review of EMO, by Jack Ross (Titus Books, 2008) $44.95." Landfall 219 - On Music (2010): 189-91.
   

   
   The poetry is one of the highlights of the book, simple and moving, contemporary yet mythical: here is Ross writing at his best. Ovid, too, is the other genuinely sympathetic character in EMO, 'bookending' nicely with Eva in the opening section.
   
   When an author tries to do so much in a book, experimenting radically with layout, story structure, plot, character and setting, there are bound to be certain things that excite and exasperate different readers. Most, though, should be won over by both the cryptic and engaging design, and by the unremitting atmosphere of gothic mystery.



6. Scott Hamilton, "Against all 'decent restraint': Jack Ross talks about EMO." Reading the Maps (5/2/11):
   

   
   I'm certainly pleased to be able to publish an interview with the venerable Jack Ross which has apparently proved too long for any of our local offline literary journals to host. The interview was conducted by Richard Taylor, a man with a longstanding and well-deserved reputation for digression, and moves through subjects as different and differently interesting as life on Mars, the future of the book, the last days of the Roman poet Ovid, the 'socio-sexual extremism' of Kathy Acker, Auckland's 1998 power blackout, and the political consequences of the suppression of emotion.
   
   As they chat, Jack and Richard return again and again to EMO, the large and strange novel Jack published in September 2008. Jack has a vast private library, which he has catalogued in disconcerting detail on a website named A Gentle Madness, and EMO, with its multiple layers of text, multiple plots, and slips between distant times and places, often seems like an attempt to fit a whole library between the covers of one volume. Precisely because of its improvisational, wide-ranging nature, Richard's chat with Jack makes a good introduction to the book. ...



7. Brett Cross, "Just gone up on mebooks ..." Titus Books (Facebook) (30/7/20):
   

   
   Just gone up on mebooks, three new ebooks: Marked Men by David Lyndon Brown, his only full-length novel, poetic, violent - an ode to Auckland's gay scene, told with real affection - also self-destructiveness and the lead protagonist's need for love; EMO by Jack Ross, which also tugs at the heart strings, expressing the vulnerability of the powerless, and how power relations are misused. A lot else too, including the moons of Mars, some poignant poetry and explicit sex; and Jen Crawford's collection of poetry Bad Appendix, controlled yet surreal, images that refer to things of concrete importance though you're never quite sure what they are - mebooks.co.nz/titus-books

Interview (abridged)
[edited by Bill Direen]:

EMO: A DIALOGUE
between Richard Taylor & Jack Ross

Richard: EMO – what does it mean and why is it the title?

Jack: Well, it’s a musical style – and a kind of lifestyle choice. “Emo” stands for “extremely emotional” (or so I’m told). It’s rather like the Goth style, only Goths tend to see Emos as very suburban and spurious. When I heard about it a few years ago, I thought it perfectly summed up what I was trying to do in this book – both the excessive emotionalism and the faint air of the spurious. After that, though, I started making up a whole series of puns as retrospective justifications: E/ Earth – M/ Mars – O / Otherworld; and E/ Eva – M/ Marlow – O/Ovid. That gave me my core cast. The mood preceded the material in this case.

Richard: Am I right in saying that EMO is quite different from the work of other writers today because you are yourself quite vigorously using the Internet and Blogs to allow the reader to follow the various "strands" of EMO?

Jack: The internet and the idea of hypertext and shifting plains of reference is certainly a gift to the aspiring labyrinth-builder. Joyce and Escher seem to have got along okay without it, but I guess for me the world-wide-web is a kind of democratisation of the impulse: everyone their own Borges, with a tithe of the effort.

As far as the death of the author goes, well, there is another Jack Ross – a hard-bitten desert-loving Reno detective in the works of a guy named Bernard Schopen (and actually, since EMO was published, yet another Jack Ross has surfaced: a Scottish crime-writer who wrote a book called Requiem) – so maybe I am dead after all, and just don’t know it … I deliberately fail to name the protagonist in all three books of the trilogy. Which makes sense to me because they’re all focussed on a central male figure undergoing some kind of extreme turmoil (they might all be versions of the same person, in fact). But actually all three books are by me, and I’m a male, resident in Auckland (where all three books are set), sharing many experiences with these central figures, etc. So of course they are all me. But then they’re not, either, because they’re fictionally-projected personages in mysterious mirror-worlds. These seem to me unavoidable accompaniments to the whole business of writing fiction. You could say that I was deconstructing fiction by undermining certain aspects of the projection – pointing out the paradox of pretending to be someone else when everyone knows it’s just you in a funny wig. But then Cervantes did all that in Don Quixote and it didn’t stop his characters seeming real – or believable, which isn’t quite the same thing.

I guess EMO takes this lack of verisimilitude pretty far. It’s hard for me to believe that many readers will be comfortable with such naked and perfunctory scaffolding I provide in various parts of the story. But then I’m not particularly interested in making people feel comfortable. You’ve got to go pretty far nowadays to wake them up at all – to break up the frozen sea within them, as Kafka said.

Richard: Do you think that there are too many “strands” or “themes” in EMO?

Jack: Well, there’s a lot of stuff in there, certainly. I make no apology about that. Too much is a value judgement every reader will have to make for themselves. I’d say there were too many plots and stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, myself – it’s not a particularly unified work. “Is EMO so overpacked as to be incoherent?” I guess you’re asking. I’m sure some readers will think so. But I suppose the readers I want are the ones who like to read into things – who don’t expect everything to present itself elegantly on the surface so they can move on to the next thing as rapidly as possible. Nobody’s obligated to dive into EMO. I hope, in fact, that only the people who get a kick out of that kind of thing do. It’s hard to see it seriously comparing with the Cantos or Finnegans Wake or Maximus or those other twentieth-century whales when it comes to being packed with material, though. Even Moby Dick or Tristram Shandy, for that matter.

Richard: [comment question] I don't see EMO as only a novel. In fact I don't see it fitting into any particular genre. I would say that EMO is multi-textual and involves (like Nights and The Imaginary Museum) many visual elements. It also connects to popular and high culture and so on.

Jack: I’d certainly concur with that. And again, I don’t claim any great originality there. It’s got a lot of competing generic elements (as do Kathy Acker’s “novels”). I chose the designation “novel” for it for various reasons, I guess:

1. because it sounds more approachable (and therefore salable) than calling it an “experimental text” or something like that.
2. because I’m in love with the idea of the novel form: a genre so debatable, so potentially all-inclusive that it can straddle bourgeois fiction, magic realism, Apuleius, traditional Chinese & Japanese forms, and virtually anything else you can throw at it. Where are its limits, in fact? We haven’t reached them yet.

Richard: Did you deliberately place the text that is “horizontal”, which I call the “subtext”, and which contains all the stories and other texts on your other Blogs etc, in such a way that it obscures the “main text”? This “slowing the reader” down, making the reader pay attention to the process of your writing?

Jack: Yes, that was one reason. A literal metaphor for the contextualising we all do when we try to make sense of one text in terms of another. Really, though, it was because I saw some letters written in the early nineteenth-century, around the Jane Austen era, where the writer had crossed the text – written first horizontally, then vertically, on the same piece of paper – with every confidence that their correspondent would make sense of it. That was done purely to conserve paper, of course (at a premium during the Napoleonic wars, I understand). But it just looked so fantastic – so impenetrable and mysterious. I immediately started to wonder how one could reproduce that effect in a printed book.

Why should one bother is I guess one valid question, but the answer must be because it enables you to literally incorporate many texts in one. There are, then, three books contained within the one book of EMO. There’s the principal text on top, the three novellas, but underneath that there’s a complete book of critical essays on the Thousand and One Nights (written by me, of course, but attributed in context to the main male character in the Eva Ave story – insofar as that isn’t me. I created him, and he wrote my book, so in a sense he is me, but of course he’s also fictionalised and gifted with a lot of ideas, opinions and character traits which I certainly hope aren’t true of me, since I find them quite abhorrent). As well as that there’s a book of 15 collage-poems (mostly published in brief magazine at various times) called Jack’s Metamorphoses, which includes a set of 15 short essays on the numerous English verse translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. So that’s three books in one: fiction, poetry and essays all bound into the one cover. But as well as that I include the Latin text of Ovid’s exile-letters from the Black Sea underneath the third section of the book, Ovid in Otherworld.

All of that is there. But of course there has to be a fictional justification for it in the world of the book itself as well. And that is basically that the (blind) almost-invisible protagonist of the whole narrative, who’s presumably dreaming up all these stories and printing them out, has accidentally started to use a set of pages which already had writing on them. He can’t see the effect, but we do. That’s also why the texts underneath are running backwards, in reverse to the flow of the top, “executive” narratives. That’s what would happened if you picked up a stack of Xeroxed pages and run it through a printer backwards.

Richard: The images, photos, symbols, diagrams and the font changes and alternations; together with trace of the subtext “behind” the main text make this book quiet visually and conceptually exciting for me. Apart from all else the very layout of the book has a kind of beauty.

Jack: I hope so. It took an awful long time to achieve some of those effects, I must say. I was on the edge of my seat till the very last minute to see how the printers would deal with that bleached-out subtext and deliberately boldened top-text. It had to be at least potentially readable to work …

Richard: You are quite interested in codes and symbols?

Jack: Yes, I guess that “being interested” in codes and symbols is putting it mildly. I’m a huge admirer of Poe’s work. The nineteenth-century French (Baudelaire and Mallarmé principal among them) were entirely correct in their assessment of his genius, in my opinion.

Richard: Is “Metamorphoses” the alternative name?

Jack: It can be if you want it to be. Strictly speaking, Jack’s Metamorphoses is the title of one of the underlying texts in the book, the collection of poems. Apuleius’s novel The Golden Ass is also called (in Latin) Metamorphoses, of course – and I guess you can see how much I’ve been influenced by it. It’s certainly in my top ten favourite books, if not my favourite of all. You can see it in this book as much as the more directly invoked Ovidian epic. So, yes, this book is the conclusion to a conversation about the idea of Metamorphosis or change conducted through all three parts of the trilogy, Bruno, Atlantis, and EMO. The titlepage of the first novel in the sequence includes a quote from an Italian book about Giordano Bruno, in fact:

II fine di tutto l’operazione è forse essenzialmente questo, modificarsi.
[The point of the whole operation is perhaps just this, in essence: self-transformation]

(15-16/9/09)

[Jen Crawford]

Complete Essay:
[reprinted by permission]

Jen Crawford. "Jack Ross's EMO." blue acres (24/6/08):

Many of you already know Jack Ross as a friend, as a teacher, as a prolific poet and fiction writer, an editor, critic, translator, publisher, blogger, and as a warm advocate for some of the more under-explored reaches of New Zealand literature. (I think the relevant epithet that turns up in EMO is “the Sheriff of Freaktown”). A number of us know that we’ve directly benefited from his work in those roles; I could say we all owe him something, because we’re recipients of the literature to which he so generously contributes his energies and talents – and without his work mapping and making that literature it would be considerably narrower.

Having said that, at first thought it seemed a little bit of a daunting prospect to introduce this book, EMO. There’s a passage in EMO where Jack describes one of his source texts, The Thousand and One Nights, as more of ‘a literature than a unified work’ – and this is also true of EMO itself. It’s more a library than a book. The book is one of a trilogy, the Random Excess Memory trilogy – yet it stands alone. Within EMO is another trilogy – the books of Eva, Mars and Ovid – or Earth, Mars and Otherworld – EMO. Behind this internal trilogy, ghosting through its pages is another set of texts – palimpsest texts – that include translations of Ovid and Sappho and Paul Celan, a comparative reading of the Thousand and One Nights, collections of Jack’s original poetry, and so on. One can also read these texts on a series of linked websites, which (as websites do), lead us on to other websites, just as the books within EMO lead us to other books, both internal and external to its pages.

In other words, this is a book which isn’t satisfied with being self-contained. It reaches beyond its own covers, beyond its author, inviting you into one of the great endangered pleasures of literature – which is the sense of its endlessness, the way one book can open another book for you, like a friend giving you a private gift; perhaps the key to a room you can now share – a room, of course, which would have many other doors.

So EMO, with its layered texts, gives us a visual realisation of the narrative manifold that is, to my knowledge, entirely unique (and I should just offer kudos at this point to both Jack and to Titus Press that this is so well realised: there’s no visual strain in reading this, which is quite a technical feat – there’s a lot of love and care gone into its production). The awareness of historical and characterological tensions that are created by these palimpsests is extraordinary. But I’m wary of making the book sound like something it’s not – it’s not a comfortable intellectual rehearsal of post-structuralist concepts.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that ‘Eva’, the protagonist of the first book, is an android clone of Eva Braun; that the middle book is a post-Sadean detective story set on Mars, that in the third book Ovid hallucinates his exile in Auckland and his vampiric enslavement at the hands of a succubus nurse.

So it’s a very moving book.

I’m quite serious about that. Jack quotes Borges writing about The Thousand and One Nights – ‘keep reading as the day declines and Scheherazade will tell you your own story’. For all the weird schlock-genre fun that EMO allows us to indulge in, it is very much about our own stories. It’s the most outlandish fiction, and the most unsettling fiction, because it won’t quite sit down and be fiction. Or it might be more accurate to say that it won’t quite sit down and let its readers – or its writer – be real. So however much I appreciate Jack Ross’s contributions to literature, I’m no longer entirely convinced that he’s not actually a three-dimensional simulacrum of a fictional Reno private eye. Having read the fragments of Eva Braun’s diary, which Jack includes here, and having read the heartbreaking letters of Eva Android to her lost sister, Eva Braun, I’m pretty sure I know some other members of the Eva clone-clan – in fact they are disturbingly familiar.

One comes away with a deep consciousness and a deep wariness of the way that people become stories and that stories recur: Beauty and the Beast; Scheherezade and Shahryar, the wives of Bluebeard, Eva and Adolf. But Eva, however quietly, insists: she is a clanswoman, not a clone. This is one of the great beauties of this book and of Jack’s work in general. Among the stories are so many of the generic horrors, generic pleasures, generic loves we live and dream – but the generic is never blindly presented as ‘the way things are’ – nor is it dismissed as meaningless repetition. The power of its unities is openly encountered; the insistent delicate variety of its individual manifestations, and of its metamorphoses, is uncovered.

So this is a serious book. It’s a book that suggests our stories – those we return to over and over, those we read in the dead of night, those we hide under the bed – especially those we hide under the bed – are not incidental. They’re not accidents, they’re not outdated, and they’re certainly not irrelevant to the more ‘serious’ matters of our human condition here and now. I want to read you a short passage from the Mars section, where two clinicians contemplate how to interpret a patient’s story:

“It was useful to get the whole story out of her, but all it can do now is confirm that she’s been living in a fantasy world for quite some time, and that parts of it still seem quite real to her.”

“Observe and treat accordingly then?”

“You’ve got it. I was like you once, you know. Keen to take up the cudgels for each new patient – trusting their stories, hunting down the corrupt officials and cops who’d victimised them. It doesn’t make you any friends, for one thing. Nor does it really help your patients, longterm. The trouble is their stories just aren’t plausible, in the final analysis. Either you believe we live on a knife-edge of sanity in a world of seething bestial indulgence and mass-murder, or else you accept that a few wounded souls have difficulties with the stress of modern life ...”

Eva Braun’s presence in this book doesn’t really allow us to accept the second alternative as all there is to it. How we handle the possibility of the first alternative is, of course, a perennial problem. But EMO reminds us – shocks us – into a new consciousness that we are not without means, not without tools, not without a language for understanding and engaging with the full substance of our world, if we choose to acknowledge it. Because we have our stories, and our stories are talking to us.

•

Orange Roughy (2008)

Cover image: Graham Fletcher

Orange Roughy: Poems & Stories for Tazey. ISBN 978-0-473-13179-1. Edited by Bronwyn Lloyd & Jack Ross. Auckland: Pania Press, 2008. [ii] + 74 pp.

Contents:

Thérèse Lloyd / Orange Roughy

Martin Edmond / The View from Number Four

Bernadette Hall / Four Poems:

Jacaranda
A Very Short Story About Flying
In Vitro
St Declan’s Stone

Michele Leggott / Three Poems:

haukapua
te rau aroha
tapu te ranga

Bronwyn Lloyd / Two Stories:

Some Traditions
It goes like this Gordon

Thérèse Lloyd / Four Poems:

Takaka
Makara
The Eternals
We’re All Here Alive

Bill Manhire / The Secret Wife

Emma Neale / Confessional Poem

Susannah Poole / The Movie House

Tessa Rain / Three Songs:

Dargaville Museum
Dirt Poems
Town for You

Richard Reeve / Four Poems:

Sally’s Dream
The Baptism of Guthrum
Doubtful
Ode to Joy

Jack Ross / Out Being Alienated

Tracey Slaughter / How To Leave Your Family

Michael Steven / Three Poems:

Sainthood
Clerk
Event(s)

Damien Wilkins / Vancouver

Michele Leggott / from hello and goodbye

Graham Fletcher / 9 Pageworks

Samples:

Pania Press

The Imaginary Museum

Blurb:

“Better than a sausage sizzle in front of the Warehouse”
– Damien Wilkins

It’s not always that easy for a young writer to make ends meet, especially when she’s far away from home. When we heard that our beloved Thérèse (Tazey to her friends), in Iowa on the 2007-8 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship, was having difficulty paying the bills, we weren’t (unfortunately) able just to write her out a cheque.

Instead we came up with this idea. Why not mobilise all of Tazey’s friends and writing mentors throughout both islands, and ask them to contribute to this little festschrift / anthology?

The response has been fantastic! The book we’ve put together includes unpublished or uncollected work from many of New Zealand’s foremost writers, as well as a stunning set of pageworks by artist Graham Fletcher.

Thanks, then, to all of the contributors, and to everyone who buys the book.. Since all of us have donated our time and work for free, you can feel confident that every penny of the money will be going to a very worthy cause.

– Jack Ross & Bronwyn Lloyd.

Reviews & Comments:

1. Raewyn Alexander. Magazine (2008):
   

   
   The book, Orange Roughy, named after one of Lloyd's poems, is beautifully produced as a limited edition with a hand-painted cover. The stories and poems would intrigue many people. My editor bought three copies, with two for presents later on in the year. They're already in their own decorated envelope and well worth the $25-.

•

Exhibitions & Catalogues

[Fallen Empire (2012)]

Contents:

1. Deadmans Block: Catalogue for Emma Smith's Pop-up Exhibition, New Lynn Community Centre, Active Recreation Hall, 18 April, 2026 (Auckland: Salt & Greyboy Press, 2026).
2. Poetry and Place: Catalogue for the Poetry and Place Exhibition, Belconnen Art Centre, 25 August – 17 September 2017. ISBN 978-1-74088-460-0. (Canberra: University of Canberra, 2017).
3. Korero: Poetry / Art Collaboration with Kirsty Black. Curated by Siobhan Harvey & Melissa Elliot (13 July - 2 August, 2012). (Howick: Uxbridge Creative Centre, 2012).
4. Fallen Empire: Museum of True History in Collaboration with Karl Chitham and Jack Ross (20 June – 21 July 2012). (Dunedin: Blue Oyster Art Project Space, 2012).
5. Lugosi’s Children, Curated by Bronwyn Lloyd (27 August – 1 October 2011). (Auckland: Objectspace, 2011) 2-3.
6. One Brown Box: A Storybook Exhibition for Children, by Bronwyn Lloyd & Karl Chitham (6 November – 18 December 2010). ISBN-13: 978-0-9582811-8-8 (Auckland: Objectspace, 2010) 27-37.
7. Len Castle. Mountain to the Sea: Ceramics / Poetry / Photographs. Ed. Tanya Wilkinson (Napier: Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery, 2008) 33.

•

[2026]: Deadmans Block: Catalogue for Emma Smith's Pop-up Exhibition, New Lynn Community Centre, Active Recreation Hall, 18 April, 2026 (Auckland: Salt & Greyboy Press, 2026).

Reading Cold Mountain in interesting times (24-26/1/2026)

Samples:

Emma Smith: Dead Man’s Block (18/4/2026)

•

[2017]: [2012]: Dianne Firth, Poetry and Place: Catalogue for the Poetry and Place Exhibition, Belconnen Art Centre, 25 August – 17 September 2017. Textile Works by Dianne Firth, based on works by Canberra poets Jen Webb, Merlinda Bobis, Paul Hetherington, Subhash Jaireth, Penelope Layland, Paul Munden, Jen Crawford and Wiradjuri poet Jeanine Leane; and, from overseas, poems by Pamela Beasant (Scotland), Katharine Coles (US), Philip Gross (UK), Alvin Pang (Singapore) and Jack Ross and Elizabeth Smither (NZ). ISBN 978-1-74088-460-0. Canberra: University of Canberra, 2017. 10:

Canberra Tales

Samples:

Oz Quilt Network

Papyri

Pinterest

the ART MUSEum

The Imaginary Museum

Dianne Firth: Canberra Tales (Jack Ross)

Reviews & Comments:

1. Helen Musa, "Arts / Dianne’s inspiration takes a lot of poetic licence." Canberra City News (August 30, 2017):
   

   
   

   
   
   Dianne Firth’s large-format, textile interpretation of Scottish poet Pamela Beasant’s work “Canberra”

   
   
   THE annual “Poetry on the Move” summit is one of the jewels in the crown of the University of Canberra, but last year’s event has led to a unique exhibition celebrating the beauty of our city.
   
   It’s been a good year for former UC professor and textile artist Dianne Firth, who was honoured with an Order of Australia Medal (OAM) in the Queen’s Birthday awards and now her show, “Poetry and Place”, is at the Belconnen Arts Centre.
   
   Inspired by her love of Canberra’s landscape and by contact with poets at the university’s Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, Firth invited poets from Australia and overseas who were in town for the summit to write about the beauty of our environment.
   
   Some of them got carried away and came up with many poems. One British poet declined, Canberra was too far from the hedgerows of England.
   
   

   
   
   Wiradjuri poet Jeanine Leane’s “Kamberra a Hundred Years On” as seen by textile artist Dianne Firth

   
   
   Firth, in turn, undertook to create large-format textile artworks titled according to the poems, using quilting, embroidery and dyeing techniques. She completed 14 in all.
   
   “I wanted equal numbers of Australian and overseas poets that would fit the gallery space,” she tells “CityNews”.
   
   “It had to hang together as a coherent piece.”
   
   From Canberra, she had words by Jen Webb, Merlinda Bobis, Paul Hetherington, Subhash Jaireth, Penelope Layland, Paul Munden, Jen Crawford and Wiradjuri poet Jeanine Leane. From overseas were poems by Pamela Beasant (Scotland), Katharine Coles (US), Philip Gross (UK), Alvin Pang (Singapore) and Jack Ross and Elizabeth Smither (NZ).
   
   After retiring as a professor of landscape architecture in 2013, Firth joined the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, where there are lots of poets.
   
   “It was exposure to different ways of dealing with creativity … architects work with industrial designers and have different ways of looking at the world,” she says.
   
   “In seminars as people would read their poetry, I’d be ‘getting’ mood and colour and forms and shapes – their poems had a visual effect on me.”
   
   

   
   
   Textile artist Dianne Firth’s interpretation of local poet Subhash Jaireth’s “Ngambri (Black Mountain) Walking with Kobayashi Issa’s Snail”

   
   
   So when 2016’s “Poetry on the Move” came up, she talked to convener Paul Munden and head of research Jen Webb about the possibility of working through different media in response to the landscape in Canberra.
   
   “As a landscape architect I see Canberra in a particular way, so I wanted to try to help other artists see Canberra.”
   
   A long-time researcher, she headed to the National Library to read poetry about Canberra and found herself absorbed in some written by Judith Wright years ago where the birds were tweeting and the mist was rising over the valley.
   
   “But I wanted to shift the focus. This is a city of design, and even Walter Burley Griffin responded to its visual and physical attributes – I told them that.
   
   “I said to the visitors: ‘You’ve come to Canberra to visit, how did you experience nature?’ I left it with them.”
   
   She was dumbstruck when one poet responded: “I don’t think I like this city very much,” explaining that he preferred hedgerows, gnarly trees and the patina of age.
   
   “He was not able to see the landscape in the way I have been trained to.”
   
   An expert in non-figurative design, she was astonished to find that the poems, when they came in, were full of people, so it was an artistic challenge to her to find “the emotional sweep that dictates colour and form and line.”
   
   Some were clear.
   

   Canberra, so pale and open wide
   gardens groomed and architecture cool,

   wrote Beasant, in marked contrast to Jaireth’s encounter with Black Mountain:
   

   It’s no Mt. Fuji the mind scoffs but my body ignores the gibe

   Or the celebration in Leane’s:
   

   Beneath this century of concrete circles/ancient eternal archives hold/ Stories, Songs, Dance, History.

   Some poems hit her between the eyes, but with others, she had to go away and sleep on them to get a visual form translatable into textiles.
   
   Firth notes that in poetry there is a tradition of writing about artworks – Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” comes to mind – but she wanted to turn the concept back to front, to look at other ways of seeing the landscape of Canberra.
   
   “Poetry and Place”, Belconnen Arts Centre, until September 17.



2. Stephen R. Randall, "Poetry and Place - Dianne Firth @ Belconnen Arts Centre." stephenrrandall (August 29, 2017):
   
   

   This exhibition has integrated fine Canberra focused artworks of Dianne Firth with matching poetry that illustrates and illuminates both Canberra and the artworks Ms Firth has created. The artworks are layered with fabric built on netting and many of them are views of the Canberra landscape seen through the trees that are all over our landscape.
   
   Below are some samples of the art, the poems and the gallery sheet and prices.
   
   

   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

•


Korero (2012)

[2012]: Korero: Poetry / Art Collaboration with Kirsty Black. Curated by Siobhan Harvey & Melissa Elliot (13 July - 2 August, 2012). (Howick: Uxbridge Creative Centre, 2012):

Except Once

Kirsty Black: Except Once (2012)

Samples:

Kirsty Black Studio

The Imaginary Museum

Uxbridge Creative Centre

Reviews & Comments:

1. NZ Herald Events:
   

   When:

   • Thu 12 Jul, 6:30pm – 8:30pm
   • Fri 13 Jul, 9:00am – 4:00pm
   • Sat 14 Jul, 9:30am – 2:00pm
   • Mon 16 Jul, 9:00am – 4:00pm
   • Tue 17 Jul, 9:00am – 4:00pm
   • View all sessions

   Where:

   Uxbridge Creative Centre, 35 Uxbridge Rd, Howick Show map

   Restrictions:

   All Ages

   Tickets:

   • Free Admission

   Website:

   www.uxbridge.org.nz

   
   
   This collaborative exhibition illustrates a fusion between visual art and poetry. 20 artists from various disciplines, select from 20 carefully chosen poems on the theme of conversation, to use as inspiration for their artwork.
   
   The artists in the exhibition include Ingrid Anderson, Lisa Benson, Kirsty Black, Chris Dennis, Sue Dick, Matt Moriarty, Dom Morrison, Emily Pauling, Clinton Philips, Kirsten Pleitner, Ramon Robertson, Mark Russell, Kate Sellar, Brendon Sellar, Shona Tawhiao, Emma Topping, Wayne Trow, Jana Wood and Nicola Wright.
   
   The poets include Peter Bland, Albert Wendt, Riemke Ensing, Bernard Gadd, Sarah Broom, Robert Sullivan, Nicholas Reid, Jo Emeney, Sonja Yelich, Vivienne Plumb, Paula Green, Sue Reidy, Charles Hadfield, Jack Ross, Gus Simonovic, Maris O’Rourke and Siobhan Harvey.
   
   This exhibition is in memory of local poet Bernard Gadd. His son David Gadd, will award $1,000 to the best piece of art. Join us on opening night for a mulled wine and a vibrant and energetic evening of visual art and poetry readings.

•

[2012]: Fallen Empire: Maui in the Underworld, Kupe & the Fountain of Youth, Hatupatu & the Nile-monster: Three Play-Fragments from the Literary Remains of The Society of Inner Light. Attributed to Bertolt Wegener. Edited with an introduction by Jack Ross. Museum of True History in Collaboration with Karl Chitham and Jack Ross (20 June – 21 July 2012). Dunedin: Blue Oyster Art Project Space, 2012. 1-46:

Maui in the Underworld

Kupe & the Fountain of Youth

Hatupatu & the Nile-monster:

Three Play-Fragments
from the literary remains of
The Society of Inner Light

Attributed to
Bertolt Wegener

Edited with an introduction
by Jack Ross

Samples:

Blue Oyster Art Project Space (1):
Karl Chitham & Dr Jack Ross, Fallen Empire (20/6-21/7/12)
Blue Oyster Art Project Space (2):
Chris Hargreaves, Serenity (20/6-21/7/12)
Blue Oyster Art Project Space (3):
Caroline McQuarrie, Artifact (20/6-21/7/12)

Works & Days

•

[2011]: Lugosi’s Children, Curated by Bronwyn Lloyd (27 August – 1 October 2011). (Auckland: Objectspace, 2011) 2-3:

Foreword

Samples:

Mosehouse Studio (21/8/11)

Mosehouse Studio (11/9/11)

Objectspace

The Imaginary Museum (16/8/11)

The Imaginary Museum (22/9/11)

Online Text:

Objectspace

•

[2010]: One Brown Box: A Storybook Exhibition for Children, by Bronwyn Lloyd & Karl Chitham (6 November – 18 December 2010). ISBN-13: 978-0-9582811-8-8 (Auckland: Objectspace, 2010) 27-37:

A Short History of Fairytales

Samples:

Mosehouse Studio

Objectspace

The Imaginary Museum (27/10/10)

The Imaginary Museum (5/11/10)

The Imaginary Museum (19/11/10)

One Brown Box (2010)

Reviews & Comments:

1. Graeme Beattie, "One Brown Box: A Storybook Exhibition for Children,” by Bronwyn Lloyd and Karl Chitham. Beattie's Book Blog (November 3, 2010):
   

   
   In this exhibition, designed primarily for children, Bronwyn Lloyd and Karl Chitham treat the humble brown box as a plain structure with unlimited imaginative potential while at the same time bringing together two of their primary enthusiasms: making up stories and making objects from paper and cardboard.
   
   One Brown Box is made up of adaptations of five classic children’s stories including The Princess and the Pea, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, and Hansel and Gretel, each told from the perspective of overlooked, minor and absent characters from the original tales, illustrated with large and small models made entirely from boxes and paper.



2. "One Brown Box: A Storybook Exhibition for Children,” by Bronwyn Lloyd and Karl Chitham. The Big Idea (November 23, 2010):
   

   
   The exhibition of adapted tales is supplemented by a huge ‘I Spy’ game with objects galore and a display of folktales and fairytales from the collection of writer and bibliophile, Jack Ross, who has compiled a short history of the fairytale genre detailing the fascinating origins of these stories that are now so familiar to us.



3. Matt Blomeley, "Objective lessons: A Review of the 2010 Objectspace Programme. Objectspace (December 16, 2010):
   

   
   One Brown Box: a storybook exhibition for children was a unique and charming exhibition that closed out the 2010 calendar, centred on fairy tales and the creative possibilities inherent within the humble and ubiquitous brown cardboard box.

•

[2008]: Len Castle. Mountain to the Sea: Ceramics / Poetry / Photographs. Ed. Tanya Wilkinson (Napier: Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery, 2008) 33:

Volcanic Glass

Samples:

South Pacific Books

The Imaginary Museum

•