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BECAUSE GOD WAS ILL / Because god was will
With his introductory note to the first issue of Landfall (March 1947), founding editor Charles Brasch worried that the arts ‘have been made to appear unreal, a decoration on the surface of life, which may be of use in whiling away a few leisure hours, but is scarcely worth the attention of those engaged in the serious business of mankind’. Nearly eighty years later it still does not occur to many of us that art arrived shortly after mankind discovered fire, that it predates agriculture let alone capitalism, that art must therefore be more central to becoming and to being human than many more ‘practical’ activities.
In the human body our heart beats on the left, I believe it is the same with the body politic (although the fervour of anarcho-syndicalists is similar to atrial fibrillation, and Sino-Soviet bureaucratic collectivism resembles artherosclerosis). Art for art’s sake feels to me like a betrayal of art, an impossibility. Imagination feeds and is fed by empathy, which both steadies and quickens us. Language can act as a kind of drumbeat that lets us step out of our house in time with our neighbours, however the most travelled poetry goes far beyond the often false binaries of agitprop; it is not about uniformity (even when it uses metre) but distinction.
Poetry distinguishes, it utilises ideas but it is not a belief system. There are poets with opposed social and religious views who manage to see beyond, otherwise we would not read them more than once. Ideally the work is wiser than the person. However authenticity is generated internally not externally; it is not conferred by a workshop or a critic or a party leader. Like a spider, you spin out of yourself and your web is supported by the tree of knowledge. This is a solitary occupation.
david howard pazin / croatia
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Ask me about my practice
I have been watching those videos where people remove huge rocks from their gardens. They always start the same way: there is a large and annoying rock, an obstacle, and the decision is made to dig it up. How big could it be? Well, we find out that rocks can be truly significant in size – this is why these videos are worth watching, after all. A time-lapse reveals more and more of the bald head of the rock emerging. Heavy machinery is brought in. Engines and swivel joints strain. A digger looks like it might tip over! The incredulous homeowner laughs as if to say what can you do, huh. What everyone thought might be a rock the size of an air fryer turns out to be as big as a Volvo. Now there is a hole you could bury a family in. The operation cost thousands. The voiceover is all about seeing the funny side of it. Maybe it would have been better to leave the rock where it was. You have to know when to stop, but how can you know when to stop?
erik kennedy ōtautahi / christchurch
o
Rejected abstracts
this paper offers the following provocations: can a poem decarbonise ecology? how is ecopoetics entwined with a preset petropresent and a future solar solidarity? how do we describe the entanglements between the petronaut and a poetics of doing? what kind of carbon-neutral technology is language?
this article imagines a pedagogy of expulsion and a poetics of reanimation that collectively propel the classroom from stasis to kinetic learning.
my contribution to your field guide engages with Mad ecopoetic methodologies – the nonlinear assemblages of strange, multivocal, nonconforming, relational, and more-than-human practices of creative-critical scholarship – to destablise authoritarian regimes of knowledge production and pedagogy.
this essay examines an ecopoetic pedagogy as a speculative Madness that insists on mess and process. the flex of eco-Madness, I argue, winds intellectual drifts with citationality and textual collage to build novel forms of kinship in the classroom.
I propose a series of poems that evaluates poetry’s political investments, joyful speculations, and slow attentions.
this paper argues that the explosion of mid-century transportation infrastructures expanded literary communities. oil – in other words – made postwar poetry possible. petromobilities produced opportunities for Modernist poets in particular, such as William Carlos Williams, who readily participated in speaking circuits with the advancement of interstate highways. petrol, I argue, wedded combustible energy to the powerful forces governing poetic imagination.
my creative essay will address the following questions: does oil have sentience? does a poem have sentience? do molecules have sentience? do sentences have sentience? does sentience have sentences? my spurious answers will attempt to approximate emily dickinson’s observations that ‘nature is what we know / yet have no art to say’.
orchid tierney howard / ohio
o
Before and After the New Year
Before: Cafe Tran, Onehunga Mall
As a woman with a Pomeranian passes by, an old man strokes his white beard.
A man in an orange hi-visibility vest, while talking on his mobile phone, stubs out his cigarette on the trunk of a sycamore tree.
Two teenage girls stand in front of an ATM and make out they’re playing a video game.
The leaves rustle above the pedestrian crossing, which no one has crossed in the last five minutes.
Then an old woman on a mobility scooter crosses, wearing a woolen hat the colour of a peeled lychee.
A number of cyclists pass, demonstrating their forward momentum, in contrast to the car drivers, who appear to be reclining in their armchairs.
The wind brings me the beep-beep-beep-beep of a man entering his pin into the ATM.
After: Mr. Ts, Onehunga Mall
Blue sky above . . . and one drop of water falling from the cafe awning (the last drop after a night of heavy rain?).
A bald man in a yellow car comes to a stop at the empty pedestrian crossing and I wonder if he can see ghosts.
A truck advertising ‘Prime Meats’ idles loudly in its parking space, causing a three-year-old girl to stand up on her chair and repeat loudly, ‘Why is it here?’
A man passes by with the bottom button of his Pasifika shirt undone, exposing his navel, which makes me think that we all come into this world with umbilical cords.
The parking sign and its pole, casting a shadow on the footpath, could be a new form of sundial, but nobody pays any attention.
For some reason I think ‘stretch limo’, and lo, a minute later, a stretch limo drives by… then I think ‘elephant’, but no elephant appears.
A local wag calls out, ‘Are you writing another book then?’, and smiling with teeth clenched I say to myself, ‘Yes, and you’re not in it’.
richard von sturmer onehunga / tāmaki makaurau
o
When I write (a despair in progress)
The statement that it is not possible to write poetry after Auschwitz does not hold absolutely, but it is certain that after Auschwitz, because Auschwitz was possible and remains possible for the foreseeable future, lighthearted art is no longer conceivable.
– Theodor W. Adorno, 1967, ‘Is art lighthearted?’)
The ur-impulse behind poetry is the same, I still believe, as that behind carving initials on the trunk of a tree, or daubing ochre on a cave wall. Behind the search for rhymes both dark and delightful, for expressions of the sacred and the profane, is the wish to assert and share one’s existence, to say: I am here. I was here and I saw this tree, heard the water’s murmur, saw the moon full as the face of a god. And I want you to know what I saw so that you who also see it may look at it anew, grow aware of my fellow existence, and so become renewed.
The existence of poetry needs no treatise to justify its existence – poetry is. And yet I cannot help but think: What is it worth? What is all of this highest form in which human thought can be expressed, what is all this poetry, these assertions of existence, what is it all worth if, in its appeals to the heart and the mind, in its appeals to the very being of those who also exist, in this its ancient, sacred keening, what is it all worth if it cannot give even a moment’s pause to the masters of the ongoing slaughter of the innocents we witness every day? I am here; I see the horror. I too feel the helplessness. And what I see and feel I want to share with you so that you too may see it: the horror and the helplessness. The slaughter. The destruction of earth. The deepening of our paralysis.
What does it matter that we are capable of the sublime and the sacred? What does it matter that I can assert my existence, that I can share my meagre testimony?
rustum kozain maungatapere