Browsing by Author "Ross J"

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    Editorial: A Live Tradition
    (Massey University Press, 10/01/2018) Ross J; Ross, J
    An introduction to the life and work of Alistair Paterson, our featured poet in this issue
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    ‘Like a Japanese Christmas Card’: Line in Poetry and Art
    (University of Canberra: Centre for Creative & Cultural Research, 12/06/2018) Ross J; Bullock, O
    A line can be seen in two ways: as a break or a harmony. In poetry, this manifests as the contrast between a stop and an invitation to continuance: a heroic couplet or the enjambments of blank verse. A series of analogies are made here between the aural and visual arts – from sources such as a 1998 interview with New Zealand poet Graham Lindsay, William Hogarth’s 1753 treatise The Analysis of Beauty, and Louise Bourgeois’s ‘Arch of Hysteria’ (1993), as well as my own novel Nights with Giordano Bruno (2000) – to understand better the implications of these two ways of characterising a line. On the one hand, there is the static predictability of a safe tradition, on the other, the danger of the ‘flame of fire’ which Hogarth maintains to be the best way to imagine his own serpentine ‘line of beauty.’ While both aspects are undoubtedly necessary, it is argued that the preference must always be given – for all its dangers and the certainty of pain it brings with us – to (in Freudian terms) the Pleasure Principle over the obsessive-compulsive stasis of his Death Principle.
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    The Lonesome Death of Bridget Furey, or: Pessoa Down Under
    (The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre, 12/11/2019) Edmond M; Leggott M; Ross J; Edmund, M
    It is arguable that Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), Portugal’s most celebrated modern poet and writer – also a dedicated Anglophile, who published his first four books (of a lifetime total of five) in English rather than his native Portuguese – has had even more influence on English-speaking prose-writers than on poets. This is certainly the case in New Zealand and Australia, where a number of essayists and fictionistas have taken inspiration from Pessoa’s concept of the heteronym, or alternate identity (of which he clocked up a lifetime total of at least 81 – including pseudonyms; autonyms; orthonyms; characters; semi, para, pre, proto and full heteronyms), and more specifically from his posthumous Book of Disquiet, available now in numerous overlapping translations, each (allegedly) more ‘complete’ and ‘definitive’ than the last. Writers such as Martin Edmond (Ghost Who Writes, 2004), Bridget Furey (‘Brag Art’, 1997), Michele Leggott (Journey to Portugal, 2007), Gerard Murnane (The Plains, 1982), Mark Young (Genji Monogatari, 2010), and numerous others have conducted literary experiments here in antipodean alteriority, many of them under the same astrological and occultist promptings as Pessoa himself. In this paper I hope to offer a brief account of the slippery overlapping realm of ‘truth / fiction’ many of these works appear to aspire to inhabit.