Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature #11/thyla11f-ptcd
AUSTRALIAN POETRY BOOK REVIEWS
Papertiger #03 Edited by Paul Hardacre and B. R. Dionysius
(Papertiger Media, West End, QLD, Australia, 2003, ISSN: 1445-1980, $10.00)
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If you've ever wondered, either as poet, or as reader, how multimedia might be used to expand the reaches and meaning of poetry, Papertiger's New World Poetry series is an excellent way of stimulating your imagination. New World Poetry is cited as the first professional CD-Rom poetry publication in Australia, and is groundbreaking in the scope of its works. The poets are global, and speak in a variety of accents and languages, and the media includes video, audio and Flash poems, visual/textual art, interviews, and essays in an easy to use, interactive and aesthetically pleasing format. |
The one downside of this media is that it compels you to scan; to move forward in search of more cute pictures that move and easy visual experiences, while the poetry itself begs you to take more time; to re-read and absorb, slowly letting the meaning unfold. It works best if you don't take it in too fast, but rather commit yourself to a single aspect of the CD at a time, or even a single poet, playing and replaying it until the total and deeper meaning comes through the initial impression.
New World Poetry #03 contains 140 poems and 75 poets. As editor Paul Hardacre indicates in his Editorial, it is a balanced blend of well known poets (and some, like Anne Waldman, are so well known that they are almost legend), and poets relatively unknown. The format is cute enough to attract children to your computer monitor, and features pussycats and people with moveable heads, catchy background music and a neon interface.
In addition to the editorial and credits, there are two main sections, Features and New Poetry. The Features section presents an in-depth look at well known poets Gig Ryan and Ted Nielson, including biography, an interview, and a fairly detailed selection of poetry from the total body of publication as well as some new work. Ryan's latest, 'The Last Spring', presents four stanzas of image-rich work around the death by cancer of what is probably the speaker's mother. Ryan subtly and powerfully weaves a contrast between the life that continues through the death scene. This is a complex poem which demands re-reading as it combines the natural world, and the unnatural pastiness of a hospital scene:
Drugs dissuade her as she hoovers the streets
in broken day's enforced idleness
that music snipped like wings
and her mauve assistant
You sympathetically die
as the sky's navy river tips
over the car-light stars
These sections allow the reader to get a thorough feel of the featured poet-background and a personal perspective, along with a good sampling of their work. There is also a USA snapshot section, guest edited by Michael Rothenberg. This contains a very wide sample of works from a large number of poets working throughout the USA, including a very interesting audio piece from well-known one time beat poet Anne Waldman, involving a kind of Ginsburg-styled harmonium song. There are such a range of different voices here that it is impossible to summarise, and the poems are political, personal, evocative or experimental in kind, exploring a wide range of experience. One which stands out is Ira Cohen's "for vali"
Sky above, sky below
Firmament calls to
firmament
& I to myself adazzle
and alone."
The New Poetry section is further broken down into Text, Audio, Video, Flash, Photo and Essay. The textual poetry is varied, and is mostly incomprehensible, putting form before meaning, such as David Fujino's "Country Rode", which is nothing more than dots and dashes, or Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's "Mutext" a series which is reminiscent of those spam messages which seem to contain randomly generated words in an utterly meaningless sequence. There is also the humorous, like Paul A Skec's clever "Schrodinger's Car: A Fraktel Faerie Tail": "our car-a black hole ov electricity/a fine example ov quantum mechanics/kaos theory/each time you get into it (the car, not the theory) you don't know whether -/ it will start or just sit there ~/ lifeless". Only one or two of these poems seem to have a deeper purpose than merely challenging our perceptions of what a poem is, or trying to shock, or perhaps only one, John Tranter's "Benzedrine:"
You will be that charm whom I abandon
wake up in poverty and then, in disgust, return to,
upon my tongue the spittle of insulin.
In contrast to the text area, the audio section is full of intricate poems, and poets who read well. You click on a poem, and then click on audio to hear the poem read. Johanna Featherstone's "Tokyo Metro" is read in Japanese, and makes an interesting contrast to the written English translation, almost creating the atmosphere it evokes:
Everyone dreams between
stops on these overpopulated
trains -- silent as
chopsticks on rice.
Some, like Jayne Fenton-Keane's "Ophelia Becoming Moon", Alicia Sometimes' "Crime Wave", or Ian McBryde's "Chelmo Villanelle" also use special sound effects, original music, and a reading that is a performance and artistic medium in itself. McBryde's has a definite Robbie Robertson feel about it (it reminds me of "Somewhere Down that Crazy River" in particular), and is an evocative reading of an equally evocative poem:
Sirened awake each fresh relentless day,
her nerve returns; she steps up to the queue;
She helps the new ones off the filthy train
and reassures them, indicates the gates
At its best, this poetry crosses the line into a full auditory experience which uses a range of sensory tools to impact on the reader, and it is clear that the artists who created these pieces are used to performance and make good use of the aural addition to expand the range of their work.
The video shows brief films which rely more on visuals than on the words. Although as pieces it is interesting to see what artists do, the poetry in this instance takes a back seat to the images we watch, and in some instances, such as Alicia Sometimes's harsh "Emily Plays a Boy", it is hard to focus on the words when the visuals are so unpleasant. None of the visual imagery is particularly meaningful or moving, so they have interest value only. The Flash is rather more clever, working much more specifically with words and sound, and allowing the reader to participate in the process through use of the mouse, moving into the text and changing the scene. Though in nearly every instance, it is impossible to get a total feel of the piece, these are lighthearted, fun, and do unusual things with their visuals and language. My children certainly liked the funky tongue-in-cheek feel of David Prater's "Dubbo Boy," and the playfulness of Jason Nelson's work is worth a look, although "This will be the end of you" is (intentionally I suspect) tortuous in both sound and appearance.
The photo section is Coral Hull's "The Straight Road Inland" montage and shows off Hull's ability to convey the richness of the Australian outback using words and images, alliteration and onomatopoeia in a way that conveys sound as well as space: "the land sings upwards, scrubby and deep after rain". Each photo is like a haiku - a brief moment of peace in the midst of activity. The CD also offers an essay by Liam Ferney "In defence of contemporary Australian poetry", which is a thought provoking critique of Patrick McCauley's article in the Weekend Australian "Winners are losers in the poet's war". McCauley looks at a number of poets, some, like Gig Ryan, whose work is contained within the CD, and justifies the variety of ways in which they make meaning. It is a well written cap to the rest of this CD which may be patchy in parts, as any anthology will be, but which, overall, presents a fascinating look at the way in which words can be played with, distorted and pulled back together to create meaning in new ways. There is much material on this CD-Rom, and readers/viewers/co-poem makers will get tremendous value for their $10.
(Reviewed by Magdalena Ball, June 2006)
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Thylazine No.11 (June, 2006) | |
