I've chosen poets from several different places whose work I've read and liked for various reasons. There's no other way to choose really. Some of them have been my friends-in-poetry for some time now & some are newer to me. I see these poets as system-changers - each in a unique way. They are a diverse group. I was curious & excited to see what new work each of them would come up with.
Anselm Berrigan is from New York City in the USA. I've read several books by Anselm & always find his shrewd repertoire of playful language astonishing. Last year I read Anselm's long poem 'Notes from Irrelevance' (Wave Books) & its ease of movement & plethora of language-stimulants blew me away. I was very pleased when he accepted the invitation to participate in the dB series.
Korean-born Don Mee Choi lives & works in Seattle in Washington State in USA. I encountered her work initially via her translations of Korean poetry. I had become a fan of the Korean feminist poet Kim Hyesoon whose poetry Don Mee has worked tirelessly to present to the English language poetry realm. I read some of Don Mee's poems online and then noticed that she had published a full length collection called The Morning News Is Exciting. Don Mee's overtly political poetry was a revelation to read in this materialist and largely apolitical or depoliticised era. We had exchanged emails &, when I enquired, Don Mee willingly accepted the idea of making a book of her own with Vagabond.
Stephanie Christie lives in Hamilton in Aotearoa/New Zealand. I heard Stephanie present a clever, abstracted vocal performance with composer/musician Alex Taylor at the 'short takes on long poems' symposium at Auckland University in March 2012. Some time later, poet & scholar Tim Wright recommended her book Luce Cannon to me. She was writing as 'Will' Christie. The poems in that book subtly undermine convention - nothing in it is levelled by reason but everything is oddly reasonable. It had a kind of canny urban attitude. When the opportunity came up I decided to invite her to the deciBels project.
Toby Fitch is a Sydneysider who organises a monthly poetry reading at Sappho's Bookshop in Glebe. It has become THE place to go to hear contemporary poetry in Sydney. Toby's first book Rawshock was a series of almost-caligrammatical poems arranged in the shapes of Rorschach inkblots. They were meticulously composed. Toby also gave an illuminating presentation (on Rawshock) at the 'short takes on long poems' symposium in Auckland in 2012. His work in this series takes another turn. This time he applies his alterations in a response to a historical letter that has come to be regarded as the well-known Australian bushranger, Ned Kelly's manifesto.
Angela Gardner was born in & is still closely connected with Wales in the UK. She lives in Brisbane, Queensland. She is the founding editor of a diverse & fresh online journal foam:e. She also has a publishing imprint, lighttrappress. I first encountered Angela when we participated in a discussion list called 'poetry espresso'. She is a visual artist - a printmaker as well as a poet. I'd read her collections of poetry and have been particularly interested in the way her art practise intersects with her writing - the interconnections. It's a pleasure to include her new poems in this series.
Jaimie Gusman lives in Honolulu in Hawai'i where she works at a university. I had read Jaimie's chapbook One Petal Row in the Tinfish Press Retro series & corresponded with her when I was co-editor of Jacket online magazine. In her poems she offers explorations of 'possibility' - an enlivening pursuit. It was good news when she agreed to be part of this venture. For the deciBels series book Jaimie reimagines aspects of the life of the iconic modernist writer Gertrude Stein.
Rachel Loden has been a long term investigator of the faulty right wing of American politics. When I encountered Rachel's work it was heartening to read poetry that engaged with politics in a totally non-didactic manner. Her complex & clever poetry occupies a realm outside conventional or institutional influence. I knew when I invited Rachel to send some work that it would be somehow offbeat. She told me about a diary she had written as a teenager at a poetry conference attended by various major North American poets. Would we be interested in that? The answer is obvious. I am honoured to be involved in presenting her new work in the deciBels series. Rachel lives in Palo Alto, California in USA.
Susan M. Schultz lives in Kane'ohe on the island of O'ahu in Hawai'i. She has been writing on memory for many years. I have been following her writing & have been to seminars & symposiums where Susan has presented her engaging work. Her context is always a social one. She writes both critically & creatively. Her writing on memory & then on Alzheimer's disease (eventually 'documenting' her own involvement in her mother's experience when the disease overcame her) is important & often provocative. Susan's poetry has a dry wit that can be a useful quality when addressing adversity. Via her independent press, Tinfish, Susan introduced me to the poetry of Jaimie Gusman who I've mentioned above. I am very pleased to have another part of the 'Memory Cards' project included in this series.
Ann Vickery lives in Melbourne, Victoria. She has been encouraging the work of others in her scholarly, editorial & academic life for a long time now & she has also been writing critical literary history. Ann's incommensurable poetry deviates from convention in always unexpected ways. The work makes twists & détournements & keeps the reader on her toes at every turn. Over some years, I have heard Ann's presentations on diverse aspects of writing, often concerned deeply & crucially with the work & lives of writing women. I am exceedingly happy to be involved in presenting her first collection of poems in this series.
Maged Zaher is an Egyptian living & working in Seattle, Washington State in USA. I have been reading his work since he first sent me a poem for Jacket magazine where I was co-editor. Subsequently Maged & I collaborated on a book of poems and that experience endeared me to his particularly original slant on contemporary poetry and its usefulness to readers. His quotidian is a universal one. His questions are all-encompassing in the context of how to live (& live well) in this wrecked world.
Chris Edwards has typeset and designed the books. I wanted the series to look distinctive, fresh and kind of 'pop'. I talked to Michael Brennan about having small square format booklets and using text and colour rather than images for their covers. Michael and I met with Chris and gradually settled on a size and then it was up to Chris and myself to experiment with the design. Chris is a poet who also makes extraordinary collage works (both cut & paste and computerised). He is well known as the designer of books for various Australian publishers including Vagabond. His colour and text choices were tailored to suit each poet's content. It was sheer pleasure working with Chris - his meticulous and thoughtful process was absolutely invaluable to the project.
Visit the deciBels page.
]]>'Notes on the New Lyric'
While many of the formal elements, conventional lineations, and stylistic strategies of poetry have been abandoned in modern times, the voice persists as an identifying—and unifying—feature, which hews poetry to its origin as song. But how can this lyric be made new or, more appropriately, how can it be relevant to contemporary times assailed by social media, populist leaders, fake news, and alternative facts?
Perhaps, it would be productive to enter the mind of Philippine literature in English, After being a Spanish colony for more than three hundred years and an American one for forty, Philippine poetry in English only took flight in the 1920s. Its first ventures were orchestral in tone and emotion, the English still so new, it was more novelty than expression. According to Dr. Gemino Abad, one of the foremost poets and scholars of Philippine literature in English, there have been three major movements in Philippine Literature: the Romantic Movement from 1904-1940s, which espoused a romantic sensibility, poetic diction, and imagery; the New Critical Movement from the 1950s-1970s, which was imported from the Iowa Writers Workshop through the writing and scholarship of Edith and Edilberto Tiempo; and the Postmodernist/Post-colonial movement from the 1980s to the present. It is in the last movement that we find ourselves, in 2017—well-aware of the contributions of those who came before us, our post-colonial reality, and the role of English as both our second language and the apparatus of empire.
As we near its centenary, poetry in English has been redefined, readjusted, and recalibrated to our longing and contemporary context. Dr. Abad argues that we write not in, but from, English. If English colonized us, we have in turn colonized it. This is a discourse we share with the other Englishes of the world.
The issue of the use of English in poetry turns more complex, especially within the context of Filipino writers who live in countries where English is the dominant language: Paul Maravillas Jerusalem and Rodrigo dela Peña in Singapore; Jasmine Nikki Paredes in New York City; and Joy Anne Icayan, who was once based in London. For them, English is not a second language, but a primary one. It is less historical baggage than functional necessity. The poems they write in English are extensions of their daily negotiations with the countries they live, study, and work in. For the poets in this series writing in the Philippines, the language comes as choice and predilection (and, it can be argued, noble folly, given that Tagalog is the country’s primary language). The point is that they have written and will continue to write in English fully aware of the duplicity of the language in the local context, as both imperial apparatus and second language.
Seeing as there is a decided shift in one’s critical attitude towards English, one can only guess at the invention of a new lyric, a style foregrounded in voice and subjectivity, but one that also questions the tongue it speaks in.
We see intimations of this new lyric in deciBels, where contemporary Filipino poets employ vernacular and universal English in its various poetic iterations and forms—from the bravura of the short line to the courage of the long line, from formal unity to lyric exuberance. We see this also in the work of our guest contributor Yao Feng, whose masterful and spare lines have been translated from Portuguese and Chinese into English. Our encounters with English on the local level may have historical implications but on the universal level, they have only human ones.
The Editors of this series invite you to enter the world of Philippine poetry in English, in all its exuberance and inventiveness. As hosts to a welcome guest, there’s no need to dust your feet. Come in.
Mookie Lacuesta-Katigbak and Carlomar Arcangel DaoanaView the deciBels series 2 here.
]]>by Michelle Cahill
One of the most powerful essays that I read last year was Andy Butler’s ‘Safe White Spaces’, a radical critique of existing cultural spaces in Australia. Addressing the visual arts industry he writes:
Whiteness, in an Australian context, is the set of colonial values from Northern-Europe that were transplanted to Australia and have taken on a life of their own in this country. We can see it in the Melbourne arts community – there is an implicit racial hierarchy that is evident in the sheer absence of non-White people and their practices; an elevation of Western visual arts history above all else; a one-dimensional and ill-informed view of non-White experience, that nevertheless still determines how non-White people navigate the world and the spaces of the community; an idea that racism is an individual moral failing as opposed to a structural problem; and an inability to acknowledge the fact that we’re all implicated in a system of structural racism that favours Whiteness. As an arts worker, I see these dynamics play out near every day. (1)
Butler states that because ‘whiteness’ is the default we have to actively work against it, and do so not merely by representation but through our critical output. He also addresses the distribution of resources and the stark discrepancies privileging a northern European imaginary in the visual arts industry. The same biopolitics have applied to Australian poetry: we see cultural gatekeepers at the level of elite groups, in institutions and in organisations, not all of whom are ‘white’. So ‘whiteness’ as a term is vulnerable to being essentialised, misinterpreted and strategic, not to mention being offensive, and being liable to triggering polarised, and reactive neo-colonising responses, such as we observe in social media.
However, the slippage of terms will inevitably apply to these explorations, which are necessary provocations. As an author and literary magazine publisher in Australia, I can only speak from my own experience; that we need to talk about race as we need to talk about names; that the value of a poet’s work is largely transacted by their identity, whether that is visible or whether it is concealed.
The deciBels3 series of poets came about through an extended, intermittent exchange with Michael Brennan, a meeting of differences within an Australian poetic field. I recall Michael observing #interceptionality unfolding in the form of my social media posts about the intersections of race and poetry. For this engagement and energy, I am deeply grateful. As a community we can only begin to know and accept otherness through curiosity, a steadfast commitment to learning in all its forms, and the political instinct to bring about change, which is to say, an ethical impulse. Looking back now, there were several moments along the way when the project may have been abandoned, never to materialise. At every juncture, it was either Michael or myself who said to one another, via email correspondences: ‘Let’s reboot; we need to do this project. It needs to happen.’ And, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dimitra Harvey, whose support has been immeasurably beneficial and whose editing skills and knowledge of poetry, I knew I could rely upon.
So it is wonderful that we can celebrate the work of ten gifted poets whose cultures and languages, as much as they are inflected by an Australian belonging, trace to South Asia, to the Philippines, Greece, to the Jewish, Chilean and Taiwanese diasporas. Each of these poets is accomplished yet pressing against the limitations of their practise. Individually they are radicals, in the sense of breaking textual ground. They have applied language to new purpose and form as technê, by discerning thought, voice, tone and image.
In Anupama Pilbrow’s Body Poems, visceral processes craft a domestic space where ideas and values are playfully and radically reappraised. Cultural difference is not presented as something to simply consume, but as something which consumes. Culture’s organic body, which laughs and sweats and breathes, can be tactfully and humorously negotiated. Angela Serrano’s scatological poems pose penetrating philosophical questions about patriarchy, gender and sexuality. Else but a madness most discrete is a collection of bright cameos and bullets: it is tender, concise, funny, and a revelation. Ariel Raveros’ Commoning, exercises striking control of the dream logic. His Lacanian energies and voicing of psychosis, ‘the hum of all human existence,’ interrogate a decaying liberal ethos and class.
For other poets in the series thinking is collateral, never incidental to lyricism. Sumudu Samarawickrama’s Utter the Thing speaks to the violence of oppression with incantatory syntax, repetitions and tender, subversive strokes. In contrast, Anna Jacobson’s surreal narratives riff on memory, desire and destiny with stylised, Mozartian grace in The Last Postman. The train carriage becomes a framing device for her beguiling stories, echoing exile, survival and post-memory as in ‘Letter 7: To the girl with the graphics tablet in carriage 8’:
This crease here from wartime:
a photograph folded away in haste.
This mark here from a soldier
caressing the photo each night as if touching
his lover’s skin. Your job is to erase
these paper bruises
as though they were never there.
Jessie Tu’s supple tones and melodic variations on the carnal and the domestic shatter cultural stereotypes, challenging exoticised gender representations of Asian Australia. Gender violence and coercion, the objectification that women are imperiled by, is reframed, and reversed through language:
But today, it was hard kissing that boy -
that German boy.
He had such a sharp landscape of prickly
beard around his mouth -
his cheeks,
his neck,
I liked when he slid his tongue inside my mouth
which I tried to open wider
for him to go in deeper, but
it’s hard to kiss with a split in the corner of your mouth.
In contemporary Australian poetry we rarely encounter a poetics that attends to homoerotic subjectivity from the uncomfortable position of shared erasure and material suffering. Ramon Loyola’s The Measure of Skin nurtures the elemental strangeness of the other. This is not a settler perspective; Loyola addresses First Nations Australia in a poem such as ‘Fullas’:
the same ancient blood as mine,
my ancestors from another land,
the same history of broken men.
And if we need to dexterously unmesh the colonial binaries of our tropes, a poet like Eleanor Jackson supplies us with streetwise, anarchic poems which honour the quotidian in her debut, A Leaving: ‘I try not to ruin the act of being alive/ by thinking I should do something with it.’
Two collections are notable for their imagery. Misbah Khokhar’s Rooftops in Karachi vividly inhabits the ruins, houses, temples, moods and markets of a post-imperial, post-partition city, skirting mesmerizingly at the edges of colonial transgressions with illumination and precision. ‘Misbah Khokhar spins a bright new compass over fragmented, improvised worlds… with what James Baldwin called ‘perception at the pitch of passion’’ writes academic and critic, Lucy Van. Like Anupama Pilbrow’s Body Poems and Sumudu Samarawickrama’s Utter the Thing, Rooftops in Karachi builds on a remarkably varied cohort of South Asian Australian poets finding a place at last in the canon. There have undoubtedly been barriers for darker-skinned Asians embedded in this nation’s legal and cultural structure. Why? Because that what is expected of colonisation; racial hierarchies have been reified and undisputed. The White Australian settler narrative has appropriated and spoken for those it has othered, revitalizing and renewing its own tropes by diminishing or positioning us. This aesthetic discrimination is embedded as an accepted standard in entrenched Orientalist expansions by the West, extending beyond literature to art.
Not least as final praise, I would like to mention my co-editor. This series finds a painterly imagist in the poet, Dimitra Harvey. A Fistful of Hail with its considered pace and intense repetitions is resonant with syncretic traditions. From the Australian bush to the Greek archipelago, her lyric accretions are dramatic in their scenes and luminous, like oil, mixing darkness and light.
But an introduction such as this, which covers much ground, serves merely to hold the afterimage of these collections. They ask to be read and to be re-read. I would like to thank the poets for contributing to this marvellous series and to congratulate them. I am delighted to have been tasked with editing deciBels3. My heartfelt gratitude to Michael Brennan for all his dedication; and for the striking cover designs he has chosen. Australian literature needs these voices and narratives, urgently, not as ‘migrant’ or ‘mobilising’ or ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’ tokens; nor as potent figures for our times, but as unforgettable, radical, distinctive and gifted Australian poets.
Michelle Cahill’s collection of short stories Letter to Pessoa won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing. She won the Val Vallis Award and was highly commended in the 2017 Forward Prize for best poem. Her most recent poetry collection is The Herring Lass.
]]>