OUT HERE
i, xe, xir, their, ur (essa may ranapiri) However, in our introduction we’re going to use the word ‘queer’ for expediency and in keeping with its use in academic and critical texts. (Out Here) Perhaps we’re the same person, with no boundaries. Perhaps we flow through each other, stream through each other boundlessly and magnificently. (Fanny and Alexander, Ingrid Bergman)
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This piece looks at Out Here: An anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa (2021), before choosing five individual poets who seem to me to introduce a game-changing vitality in terms of the poetics of intimacy and ethnic comeuppance.
It is the brave enterprise of editors Chris Tse and Emma Barnes, their 69 contributors, and AUP that I especially admire. As with other recent literary anthologies that adopt a topical perspective, there is a necessary and unavoidable playoff between exploration of the issue at hand and the quality of its literary representation.[1] And so the question we will ask ourselves is what are the respective benefits and tradeoffs in bringing together ‘the queerest Parliament in the world’?
My residence inside an excoriated ‘cis / heterosexual / Eurocentric perspective’ excludes me from the 'queerest parliament' and arguably throws into question any qualifications I possess to validly comment.[2] Here, Tse and Barnes—suitably qualified as a youthful outsider pair—understandably overstate queer praxis and understate aesthetic achievement. Out Here, they aver, is ‘not a canon but an invitation’. It is this bridge between praxis and aesthetics that I wish to write about.
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Out Here intimates escape, exposure. In this attempt at a critical response, my inclination is to reverse the roles of the verb and accompanying nouns. What I reckon is most valuably brought into the open in this anthology is its robust exploration of relational intimacy, rather than an escape per se from the constraints of poetic thought. These writers extend a radical articulation of interpersonal exchange that had a first real shaking free as far back as the 1960s and 1970s in magazines like Freed and Broadsheet.[3] Newer Out Here writers, a majority of whom appear to be in their 20s and 30s, gather their life experiences, whether thwarted or liberating, to push the door wider open to explore, among other things: non-prescriptive sexgender self-identity; extreme disinhibition around accounts of libidinal practice; a pursuit of behavioural and relational plurality; non-self-censorship in individuation processes; and, more broadly, a revaluation of exclusive ethnic, ethical and intellectual categories and norms. That’s quite a formidable escape plan!
The energetic vehemence of the voices raised on behalf of intimate self-determination and sexgender adventurism is especially striking. Somewhat surprising, in this onslaught, it is worth noting a continued reliance in a majority of pieces in the anthology on 'I'-based egoic individuality, reinforced through use of conventional I-speaking personas in address to a familiar ‘you’, suggesting that subjectivist personhood continues to reside at the centre of this revisionary enterprise. Adhering to the lyric voice is something I will return to later.
For now, let me acknowledge the socio-cultural unleashing in terms of its brash content and outspokenness. By way of illustration, I give two excerpts, the first is an expository piece in which the narrator recounts their engagement in a sadomasochism clinic in Melbourne—
We all want to escape something: our mothers, our fathers, our small towns, our
old friends, our first lover or our last one, ourselves. One beautiful girl will say:
‘You just have to keep re-learning yourself, over and over again,’ which rides the
line of new-age self-discovery bullshit and total truth for me. I’m somewhere in
the middle of re-learning myself: as queer, as a domme. I’m as far from myself as
I thought I could go, something that does keep happening again and again….
At the end of the class, the mistress tells her slave he deserves a reward. He
fetches a small square stool, about forty centimetres high, with a hole in the
centre of it. He takes his pants down and lies down in the semi-circle of students.
He places the stool across his mid-section and pulls his cock and balls through
the hole. That hot, musky dick smell wafts across the room. We take turns standing
on the platform, letting it take our weight as we step on his chest, or his genitals,
with one foot.
(‘Where you find it: A beginner’s search for Melbourne’s queer kink scene’,
Samantha Byres)
—and the second is a striking poem, written by Pelenakeke Brown, who uses techno-poetic form to represent their sense of interwoven ethno-personal relationships. Indeed, the piece imitates a tapa cloth in the way language and pictorial imagination converge: ‘A Travelling Practice looks at Samoan concepts and ancestral knowledge held within the landscape and context of the contemporary keyboard… This work connects to my wider
multi-disciplinary practice as it explores the quiet intersection between race, disability, queerness, immigration, decolonization and aesthetic’ (‘Provocation’).[4]
These two enterprising, well-written pieces (both with strong non-New Zealand links) provide useful outer limits within which the other 67 contributions in the 367-page anthology are located and between which praxis operates.
Interestingly, aside from a small number of prose accounts and poems, contributions are predominantly conservative in their literary styles. This raises the same question touched on earlier about whether the queer enterprise is already pretty fully accommodated within the received history of literary convention, or whether a fuller redetermination of literary form is still in the offing? The space remains open. For now, queerness, a remarkable social opening, remains largely incidental to literary form. The following three excerpts are instances of writing that would find comfortable enough surroundings a half century ago in Freed or Broadsheet:
Girls just wanna have fun girls just wanna
be fatal eyeliner like slits in their skin
lipstick like bloodstains nails like claws
(‘Girls just wanna have fun’, Cadence Chung)
my first order of business in this poem
is to discuss how i want to stop writing
poems about boys:
it felt aimless and painful to be entered the last
my asshole is no odeum for a performance
churned forth from loneliness
(‘poems about boys’, Harold coutts)
it’s a cliché I know – I don’t care – it’s kind of genuine
it’s kind of the most honest I’ve ever been
look what’s become of me – I’ve lost my face
my hands my arms
my entire body
i’m losing my mind – maybe –
for a girl who doesn’t love me
(‘The River’, Sinead Overbye)
§
In ‘Your dead language’, filmmaker Rachel O’Neill has a protagonist state, ‘I’m interested in the boundaries in art where there is a risk of moral or ethical failure, and what part the boundaries of ethical risk play in the purpose of art’. With this statement I pivot towards my five poets (all featured in Out Here, and all-but-one 1990s-born, the exception being the single male of the group, our anthology’s co-editor, and Aotearoa-New Zealand's incumbent poet laureate): Hera Lindsay Bird, Ash Davida Jane, essa may ranapiri (Ngāti Wehi Wehi, Ngāti Raukawa-ki-te-Tonga, Te Arawa, Ngāti Pukeko, Ngāti Takatāpui), Tayi Tibble (Te Whānau-ā-Apanui/Ngāti Porou) and Chris Tse.[5]
Against safeguarding conformities, these writers unleash the energy of their lives. Poetry is their means to ransack societal ordinariness. Sublimation, rationality are not prized; rather, their focus is worldly, the logic poetic, and a tendency to profuseness is indicated in this selection of big-statement titles taken from Bird: ‘MIRROR TRAPS’, ‘WAYS OF MAKING LOVE’, ‘HAVING SEX IN A FIELD IN 2013’, ‘IF YOU ARE AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PHARAOH’, ‘CHILDREN ARE THE ORGASM OF THE WORLD’, ‘WILD GEESE BY MARY OLIVER BY HERA LINDSAY BIRD’, ‘THE EX-GIRLFRIENDS ARE BACK FROM THE WILDERNESS’, ‘LOVE COMES BACK’, ‘THE DAD JOKE IS OVER’, ‘EVERYTHING IS WRONG’, ‘HAVING ALREADY WALKED OUT OON EVERYONE I EVER SAID I LOVED’, ‘KEATS IS DEAD SO FUCK ME FROM BEHIND’. Taken together, they illustrate the ‘really long, ecstatic metaphor chain’ and brazen ‘freedom of tonal shift’ that Bird says characterise her poems.[6] In ‘Bisexuality’ she writes:
Everyone assumes you want to fuck them……….and they’re right
but you’re also bad girl, with a kinky….goodbye fetish
Always bursting into tears in the hotel lobby!
In ‘undertone’, her talented fellow-poet Jane, has her speaker pose in mirror-effect in an abusive partner’s eyes, in a ‘fucktoy statuette’ portrayal:
You want me in your bed, and want me gone
A skirtlift in a hotel crossed with bone
The sheets are bleeding moonlight where you shone.
Jane’s same-rhyming tercets is one way she is able to evolve a sumptuous, self-described ‘internal poem logic’, freed from narrow syllogistic rigour. As Bird explains, ‘we feel like we’re outside of that normal stuff’. The stage on which these poets perform entails an emboldened, conspicuous choreography.
Certainly, they do fully occupy their poems, for better or worse. What elevates their work beyond most of their peers is an ability to transform what many might consider expressions of shocking societal miscreancy into captivating poetic utterances. Voice matters. Bird rolls out her declamatory, Ginsberg-like rambling chains, like strings of pearls where each bead is at once richly decorative and a tear of anguish. Likewise, Jane, Tibble, ranapiri and Tse utilise supple verse and prose forms that evoke a surprisingly nuanced tonal décor that somehow swivels between harsh fact and wistful make-believe. Just as Bird, in ‘Bisexuality’, alludes to C.S. Lewis’s ‘a rare sexual Narnia’, so does Tibble to ‘Charlie’s Angels’ and Kim Kardashian, so do others to various fairy tale, Māori and mythical figures, filtering literary erudition through what otherwise appear to be pressing instances of dysphoria, fearlessness, miasmic angst, loquacity, disgust and tenderness.
Situated behind this tumultuous loquaciousness is what I consider the key contribution of this group to the poetic world: the collapsing together of real persons and personas.[7] Essentially, the contention is that we are all no more than self-constructing constructions. And playfulness is a vital ingredient in this process. Take Tibble’s Poūkahangatus, a hybrid title that ‘phonetically mimick[s] “Pocahontas”’, so that the title incorporates te reo Māori roots ‘pou’ (pillar/pole) and ‘kaha’ (power/strength). Her ’Vampires versus Werewolves’ reminds me of occasional wolf references found in Tse and other Out Here writers. Meanwhile, ranapiri literally incorporates Virginia Woolf’s Orlando into the structure of their Ransack, a book that literally lives up to the promise of its title, derived from the Orlando epigraph, which ends: ’He wanted another landscape, and another tongue’. ranapiri’s parallel quest is to inhabit suitable bodily form and a matching renovated poetic language.
Their quest incorporates direct biographical reminiscences, pointedly in the 11-page text ‘Con-ception’, which details the poet’s gestation as embryo in parallel with the trials and tribulations passed through by their mother during the same period: ‘the amniotic fluid is the giant pool in comparison and movement barely touches / the edges of the mothersea’. Such rebirth stories extend figuratively. Traditional boundaries that were formerly taken to guide thought around gender and sexual identity issues are shown by these writers to be contrived and arbitrary. No longer upheld, they collapse into a fluidity of forms.
In these poems, self-formation takes place on the page-stage. The results are often impressive: in addition to her Orlando outtakes, ranipani references Barthes, Derrida, and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, the last-named another writer who reimagines early ‘biography’ as story-making. ranipani allows their own roiled playfulness of remembrance to obtrude, trashing the idea that gender is reducible to clusterings of chromosomal pairs:
My point being
my skin is no
distraction from myself.
Enby is a word she uses to distract me from all of this.
Mess of x’s and y’s.
My bones could make a wish if you broke them.
(‘enby’)
Along with Bird, several ranapiri poems lurch provocatively, entering swirling currents that suborn Māori and classic myth in new topologies of individual heroism:
He never made it ashore – spurned by Galatea
In the stripped back tarmac alleyways.
Got a tattoo for free from his friend.
It’s permanent, an e in the bubble-letter typography…
Phrygia’s lone deity Cybele hasn’t made it here.
(‘No Ulysses’)
or, alternatively, self-disclosures of disarmingly fraught tenderness:
u apply
silver nail polish
to my nails
the smell telling me
i could not bite them
(‘the sparkle in ur eyes versus my dysphoria’)
The poets tear open their own physical and emotional skins in order to contend with what is revealed, whether flauntingly or else in self-protection. Tibble, in a prose sequence that shares the volume’s title, humorously subtitled ‘An Essay about Indigenous Hair Dos and Don’ts’, nimbly manoeuvres through an excruciating rite-of-passage endured by a young Māori woman. Racial and sexual oppression coalesce:
In a hotel room, a man runs his hands through your hair like a surveyor. He is
surprised when he asks you if it’s dyed. Groans when he tells you that he has
never seen hair that black before. But what he really means is skin, what he
really means is you’ve been a bad bad girl, what he really means is I don’t
typically fuck with minority races but I still want to fuck you. He touches you in
a place that makes you wish your hair was a crown of snakes [medusa], but it’s
not enough to make you leave. Your mouth is a perpetual O that looks like a yes
please and never a no. Representation is important.
(‘Starless Nights in Wellington’)
The entire paragraph is quoted because it demonstrates the alacrity of this writer, who manages to sound at once strangely vulnerable and totally scathing. The extent of forced intimacy is emphasised through the passage’s detaching the nameless protagonists into ‘you’ and ‘he’ pronouns, further intensified through forensic deployment of diction (‘typically’, ‘minority races’, ‘perpetual’), which only accentuates the offhand idiomatic tut-tutting of ‘bad bad girl’. As if she brought it on herself! The closing sentence, ‘Representation is important’, is cunning, because while it encourages us to roll quickly into philosophical speculation, it also lays bare all pretence in romance’s self-serving rationalisations.
Indeed, ‘Representation’ betrays language’s inherent failing, or at least its inadequacy. There is no solution, unless escape serves mimetically, and then only temporarily. Or, perhaps, it is in the tone of bitter resolve that we recognise in Tibble’s speaker—indeed, in all of these speakers? Other Tibble poems, ‘Hoki Mai’ and ‘LBD’, similarly confront sexual shamelessness comingled with a ‘shame too thick to choke down / I want to dissolve / into night / it fits / tight and acidic / like a womb’.
Not dissimilarly, Tse self-presents at the intersection of ethnicity and sexuality. From his early ‘Sing Joe’ sequence (AUP New Poets 4, 2011), about his Chinese ancestry and growing up in Wellington, through to his third standalone volume Super model minority (2022), he demonstrates a by now familiar candour and fearlessness:
My most memorable one night stands have been white men
so I can attest to the good
some of them contribute to the world. I let them think
they were in charge as they claimed
my mouth and my body for their own histories.
(‘Mike & / Karl & / Duncan & / Martin’)
The reason poems like this succeed goes beyond their overt ethnogayism, freshening as that may be. Rather, it is the poet’s ability to activate corresponding stylistic flourishes in this and other poems. ‘Memorable’, ‘attest to the good’, ‘contribute to the world’ and ‘in charge’ are philanthropic phrases that Tse attributes to his sexual partners as self-serving, empty jargon. The charge in meaning is more deadly because the phrases swerve away from what they appear to mean. Belying the same charge is Tse’s own restraint in tone, established through the persona’s ‘most memorable’ recollection, rendering him the more endearing while objectifying the other protagonists as ‘they’, who intrude on his intimacy, ransacking his body for personal and cultural gain. His ‘most memorable one night / stands’ stands in sharp contrast to the rapaciousness of ‘their / own histories’, white and exploitative. The fact that four male names (‘they’?) are listed in the title, adds to the indictment, again without rancour, because the tone is airy and self-knowing: he is party to their party, in a regress of fateful intimacies.
hot pink red orange yellow green turquoise indigo violet
sex life healing sunlight nature magic serenity spirit
In other poems, Tse extrapolates the same ethnogay threads. ‘謝—I’m sorry I’m Chris Tse’ says one title in mock self-abnegation, while another speaks of ‘Identity theft for the end of the world’; and in ‘The Magician—Notes on distraction’ (more magic!) he blithely alleges that ‘no one trusts a gaysian / with a Kiwi accent and a creative writing degree’. Another title bears the sardonic, self-mocking long-winded line: ‘Abandoned acceptance speech for outstanding achievement by a Chinese New Zealander in the field of excellence’. Everything occurs in a panoply of voices. ‘A flag’ commemorates the original LGBT flag designed by Gilbert Baker in the late 1970s, the eight colours of which provide motifs for the eight thematically corresponding poems in part 2.[8] It’s an exercise in awareness-raising that extends beyond Tse’s pages.
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In sum, these five and their fellow Out Here poets bring to poetry a sharpened sensitivity to issues involving sexuality and gender, alongside an unapologetic advocacy of diversity in all its colours. This is welcome. Moreover, just as striking is their introduction of a greater vibrancy—even clamouring—in self-portrayal in local poetry. Sums up Bird, ‘You might think this book is ironic / But to me, it is deeply sentimental’ (‘Write a Book’). In the sky there are few gods, but on earth there are bodies aplenty for us to care about.
Notes
[1] Compare regular poetic excellence publications like the IIML/VUP Best New Zealand Poems series to the more recent burgeoning of anthologies that tailor poetic quality to the demands of theme. A striking recent example is Paula Green’s Wild Honey (2019) which gathers the produce of some 200 women poets into a women’s house of poetry. Other recent anthologies include topics of climate action (No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, AUP, 2022), regionalism (Ngā Ripo Wai: Swirling Waters. A Kerikeri Anthology, Pavlova Press, 2021), not to mention an anthology of protest action against the National Library’s plan for mass disposal of printed books (The Ultimate Reader of Love for the Printed Book, 2021, Phantom Billstickers).
[2] A cisgender heterosexual pakeha male, son of Dutch immigrants, I am a 68-year-old father of six and grandfather of seven (to date), who is in a long-term satisfying (second) marriage relationship of a quarter century duration, but who has also endured longstanding difficulties around intimacy and sexual behaviour in their own sexual development, an ongoing process. Is this a disqualification? Or are any terms of engagement brought to such a conversation fraught and contestable at the outset?
[3] Older or recently deceased writers lay the platform: ‘Peter Wells, Heather McPherson, Hinemoana Baker, Renee, Witi Ihimaera, Ngahuia te Awekotuku, Paula Boock and others had success through the 1970s to 2000s’ (10). There is a distinctive difference in stridency of tone and explicit content between these and younger contributors.
[4] The biographical note reads: ‘Pelenakeke Brown is an interdisciplinary, Samoan/Pakeha, disabled artist born in Aotearoa. Her work explores the intersections of disability and Samoan cultural concepts…’ (279).
[5] Acknowledgements in Out Here biographical notes include 27 to Victoria University Press, 6 to the International Institute of Modern Letters, 15 to Auckland University Press and 9 to AUP. The books I reference include: Hera Lindsay Bird, Hera Lyndsay Bird, (VUP: Wellington, 2016; Penguin, 2017); Ash Davida Jane, How to Live With Mammals (VUP: Wellington, 2021); Tayi Tibble, Poūkahangatus (VUP: Wellington, 2018); essa may ranapiri, ransack (VUP: Wellington, 2019); Chris Tse, Super model minority (AUP: Auckland, 2022).
[6] https://theculturetrip.com/pacific/new-zealand/articles/hera-lindsay-bird-on-metaphors-love-poems-and-stewart-lee/ <visited 5 December 2022>. The societal quotation following is taken from the same interview.
[7] See my essay on Anna Jackson’s Pasture and Flock in remake6-8. She is harbinger to the persona coalescing into indeterminacy mode.
[8] The Note for ‘part two’ explains: ‘each of the poems in this sequence takes its inspiration from the meanings attributed to the eight colours of the original flag’.
remake8 