Category Archives: Research

Ruapehu on the radio this week

ruapehu viewKeep an ear tuned to Radio New Zealand this week to hear a story about the Ruapehu lahar risk communication test that English & Media Studies staff and students assisted with last week (see previous story at http://sites.massey.ac.nz/expressivearts/2014/08/26/ski-trip-yields-important-safety-communication-data/)

A shorter version of Alison Ballance’s story about the research project will play during ‘Afternoons’ at 3.30pm on Tuesday and a longer version will air during science and environment program ‘Our Changing World’ on Thursday 11 September after the 9pm news.

Podcasts will be available after the broadcasts – click this link to go to the RNZ story and links http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ourchangingworld/20140911

Book strikes right anti-colonial note

white vanishing coverA book by an English & Media Studies staff member has been described as “a powerful statement of anti-colonialism” by an international reviewer.
In a review just published in Ariel: A review of international English literature, Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley’s 2012 book White Vanishing is called “a valuable document within the arena of Australian cultural historiography”.
White Vanishing is a longitudinal critical survey of a prevalent trope within Australian culture, the ‘lost in the bush’ myth. The book argues for reading this mythology (popularised in movies such as Picnic at Hanging Rock) differently to literal or nationalistic interpretations, by focusing on its often overlooked racial, gendered and colonialist ideology.
The reviewer, Australian fiction writer Giulia Giuffrè, notes White Vanishing is “well researched and thorough in its survey of the literature in and about the topic,” containing “a great deal of useful material and thought-provoking arguments” as well as insights that are “perceptive and shaming”. It is also, Giuffrè notes, something of a “juggernaut”.
Dr Tilley, surprisingly, agrees with the latter criticism. “Absolutely, it’s a warship of a book – and in a way it had to be. It’s putting an argument that although not controversial within particular academic circles is not likely to be at all popular with many Australians. It’s suggesting that the common characterisation of Australian culture as favouring ‘fairness’ might be better understood in terms of fairness of skin than fairness in treating others. If you’re going to make a critique like that you need your evidence thoroughly marshalled. So my aim with the book was to put the supportability of the argument beyond doubt – and then elsewhere in other ways I can have the liberty of perhaps expressing it in more subtle terms.”
Dr Tilley also agreed that the book was inherently anti-colonial. “Absolutely the book has a political stance – everything is political, including academic research and, as I point out in the book, creative writing, film, theatre and media. My argument is that any kind of creative or discursive output is enhanced if it recognises its political stance consciously, rather than pretending neutrality.”
Dr Tilley said that, since the book’s publication, she had noticed some shifts in public understanding of the ‘lost in the bush myth’ in Australia. “There have now been some fantastic artistic and creative deconstructions of the myth, particularly in the theatre. Sisters Grimm’s The Sovereign Wife used parody to skewer the ‘lost in the bush myth’ in ways that were much more entertaining than my book – but culturally speaking, we need both forms of engagement with our mythology, the detailed deconstruction and the lampooning, and each contributes to the possibility and the interpretation of the other.”
White Vanishing is published by Rodopi and available at: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=CC+152

Post-script! Another review of White Vanishing (in the journal Critical Race and Whiteness Studies) has just been published and is available at: http://www.acrawsa.org.au/files/ejournalfiles/212Iyer20141.pdf  Reviewer Sumedha Iyer of The University of New South Wales says White Vanishing is “engaging and rigorous in its analysis, and does a great deal to fill the epistemological gap in disappearance mythology in Australian literature. Even for readers who are not au fait with literary textual analysis or whiteness theory, Tilley’s book makes it easy to trace the insidious and enduring inheritance of the white vanishing trope in terms of its origins in the oppressive function of colonialism.”

Research round-up – from ‘Harry’ to the Holocaust, EMS research is diverse and defining

harry

Oscar Kightley as Harry Anglesea in the 2013 TV3 crime drama ‘Harry’.

Six English & Media Studies researchers took advantage of the Winter teaching break to present their research at key international conferences from Oslo to Australia last month, on topics ranging from Facebook to forgiveness.

Dr Brian McDonnell presented a paper to the New Zealand Studies Association’s “Across the Pacific” conference in Oslo. The theme of the conference was New Zealand and the Pacific, and Dr McDonnell presented on “Harry: New Zealand’s First Polynesian-centred Television Crime Drama”. His talk analysed the TV show Harry, directed by Chris Dudman and broadcast as 6 1-hour episodes by TV3 in 2013. It featured Oscar Kightley as the eponymous Harry Anglesea, a tough detective with the Major Crimes Unit in South Auckland, as well as Sam Neill as Major Crimes Unit boss Jim ‘Stocks’ Stockton.  Dr McDonnell spoke about the genre links between this show and well-known overseas examples, such as Cracker, Prime Suspect, Luther, Forbrydelsen (Danish: The Killing), The Wire, Wallander and Underbelly. He explored the genesis of Harry, especially the role of its creator and producer Steve O’Meagher, and how it broke new ground by having a Samoan protagonist.

Dr Sy Taffel presented a paper called Antisocial|Asocial|Associations: Mapping the Social in Social Media to the Australia and New Zealand Communication Association conference in Melbourne. The paper, which is being published in the peer reviewed conference proceedings, argued that media have always been social structures, so queried what’s new and different about the types of social connection made by social media? Dr Taffel used a unique combination of political economy, software studies and actor network theory approaches to answer this question, and argued that each approach reveals overlapping ways in which social media commodify and monetise social ties such as community and friendship. A particular focus was on Facebook, which famously claims in numerous marketing materials to be making the Web more ‘social’. Dr Taffel challenged the assumed meaning of the ‘social’ in ‘social media’, exploring existing definitions of the terms alongside the range of online content the term is understood to refer to.

Dr Allen Meek presented a paper to the ‘Future of Past: Representing the Holocaust, Genocide and Mass Trauma in the 21st Century’ Conference in Melbourne. The title of the paper was “Media, Trauma and Biopolitics”. Dr Meek argued that modern biopolitics, which attempts to control society at the level of biological life, provides an important perspective for understanding trauma as a model for extreme historical events. He explored the idea that while the Holocaust is commonly understood as a trauma for modern society, this can stop us from being able to see Nazi racial politics as an extreme version of something intrinsic to modern forms of power.

Dr Kim Worthington presented a paper at the Australasian Association of Literature ‘Literature and Affect’ Conference in Melbourne entitled “Confronting a forgotten past: Shame, guilt and blame in Jaspreet Singh’s Helium”. In interpreting Singh’s haunting 2013 novel, Dr Worthington’s paper engaged with the philosophical work of Paul Ricouer, whom she argued understands remembering and forgetting as not simply involuntary processes, but as ones that are often consciously willed and manipulated for political purposes. Her paper explored the complex relationships between memory and forgetting and the emotions of shame, guilt and blame. “Inevitably,” Dr Worthington said, “this also involves questions about the (im)possibility of reconciliation and forgiveness in both personal and national contexts.” The paper argued that what is needed for forgiveness and healing in dealing with historial trauma is more than a rational assessment of past (inherited) crimes: an emotional confrontation is also necessary, and Singh’s work suggests literature can provide this.

Dr Kevin Glynn presented a co-authored paper at the Institute of Australian Geographers/NZ Geographical Society Joint Conference held in Melbourne. Written with Julie Cupples of the University of Edinburgh, the paper was entitled ‘Reframing Indigeneity: The Difference an Indigenous Broadcaster Makes.’ It explored two incidents: police “terror raids” on Tuhoe in Te Urewera in 2007, and controversies over public pronouncements by Air New Zealand in 2013 about a company policy that prohibits employment of people with ta moko. Using these case studies to look at the differences between mainstream and Maori Television Service coverage, the paper argued that both events revealed contestation between competing visions of national identity, belonging and participation. While mainstream media trafficked heavily in racialised discourses of terror and securitisation in relation to the Urewera raids, Maori Television coverage drew upon grassroots counterdiscourses and counterknowledges that depicted the situation in the Ureweras very differently. By the time of the Air New Zealand controversy, Maori Television had developed around itself an active participatory culture of digitally engaged audiences making avid use of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The paper explored the forms of indigenous citizenship active within this new media environment to assess the contribution an indigenous broadcaster can make to challenging the epistemic violence inflicted through colonisation upon indigenous ways of knowing and being.

Dr Philip Steer presented a sole-authored conference paper at the ‘Prosaic Imaginary: Novels and the Everyday, 1750-2000’ conference hosted by the Novel Studies research cluster at the University of Sydney. Entitled “Strategic Banality: The Work of the Prosaic in Novels of Early Settlement,” Dr Steer’s paper explored the generic instability of the early colonial Australian novel, specifically its tendency to veer from narrating the vicissitudes of settler life to detailing agricultural production and other concerns more commonly associated with political economy. He argued that the strategic assertion of colonial banality across a range of registers functioned to assert the Britishness of Australian settlement. That is, if the colony’s suitability for the British subject was most immediately conveyed through the portrayal of characters’ achievement of a settled, rural lifestyle, this was complemented at a societal level by the statistical assertion of the colonial capacity for steady, regular economic production. Paradoxically, therefore, asserting the prosaic nature of settlement can be seen as one of the most audacious and wide-ranging strategies of the colonial novel.

Essay key component of Walters Prize shortlisted artwork

good oil

Image from Maddie Leach’s collaborative artwork, ‘If you find the good oil let us know’

A creative essay by School of English & Media Studies senior lecturer Dr Ingrid Horrocks is currently featuring as part of the Walters Prize exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery.

The essay forms a key part of Maddie Leach’s collaborative conceptual art project ‘if you find the good oil let us know’, which is a finalist in this year’s Walters Prize, New Zealand’s premier contemporary art award.  All four finalists are on display at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki until 12 October 2014.

The $50,000 Walters Prize, named after the late New Zealand artist Gordon Walters, is awarded for an outstanding work of contemporary New Zealand art produced and exhibited during the past two years. The prize aims to make contemporary art a more widely recognised and debated feature of our cultural life.

Dr Horrocks’ work of critical-creative prose  is the closing piece in the publication, ‘if you find the good oil let us know’, which is the culmination of Maddie Leach’s 2012 Govett-Brewster Aotearoa New Zealand Artist in Residence project of the same name. The project as a whole unfolds an imaginative narrative of whales, cement, art works, scientists, seafarers, migrations, and oil companies via a community of letter-writers and readers.

Dr Horrocks’s contribution works both as part of the artwork, and as the single critical response to the work as a whole. It also involves a recorded performance of her work, which serves as the audio narrative of the project in its next incarnation online in association with the Walters Prize exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery.

Maddie Leach is a senior lecturer and postgraduate coordinator for fine arts, in Massey University’s Whiti o Rehua – The School of Art at Wellington.

Link: http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/whats-on/news/finalists-announced-for-the-walters-prize-2014-new-zealand%E2%80%99s-premier-contemporary-art-prize

Link: http://maddieleach.net http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/media/6032904/twp2014_catalogue.pdf

 

Ski trip yields important safety communication data

Mount Ngauruhoe

Fieldwork with a view – Mt Ngauruhoe from the slopes of Mt Ruapehu

Staff and students from the School of English & Media Studies enjoyed the stunning view from their ‘office’ yesterday as they undertook fieldwork on Mt Ruapehu.
Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley and Bachelor of Communication students Oscar Mein and Eden Cowley helped collect data about people’s behaviour during a lahar warning test run by GNS Science and the Department of Conservation.
The fieldwork is part of a research collaboration investigating ways to optimise safety communication at the skifields that includes English & Media Studies staff and students and Massey’s Joint Centre for Disaster Research. Some of the issues for mountain users include lahar warnings, avalanche risk and general mountain safety.
“The agencies in the front line of mountain safety such as GNS Science and Department of Conservation have been working together for many years and have very good data about the risks and about public behaviour,” Dr Tilley said. “As we saw at the lahar warning test yesterday, though, it’s still the case that not every mountain user knows what to do. When the siren sounds, people need to immediately get out of the valley floor and climb to higher ground – some do, others do only when other public-minded bystanders call out to them repeatedly or a ski patroller moves them, and some remain where they are, hypothetically in the path of a massive fast-flowing gush of boiling water, sediment and boulders.”
“The next step in the research is to identify the missing link between someone knowing about a risk and responding appropriately. We also need to know more about those mountain users who genuinely aren’t aware of the risks or how to mitigate them.”
“That’s where communication staff and students can make a big contribution. We’ll be bringing a humanistic or people-centred approach to understanding the communication processes. Some of our students will have the opportunity to extend the research with funded postgraduate study, living on the mountain next ski season and conducting ethnographic and focus group research to identify communication patterns and norms, and make recommendations about how, when and where to create the most effective safety messaging.”
Dr Tilley said understanding ‘mountain culture’ could be the key to unlocking the right communication tactics. “Groups of people who share an interest and affinity, such as for family ski trips, snowboarding weekends or climbing expeditions, create and define their own group culture. They establish behaviours, thoughts, and norms that define their identity as a member of the group.
“Effective communication occurs when the identity that a message assigns to a person matches the identity she or he wants to claim in a situation – so to target a particular group, you have to have very good research about how they construct their identity as a group and what notions of identity are appealing.”
“Creativity also has a big role to play. As well as documenting the culture and its communication, our students will need to make innovative and creative recommendations about practical ways to communicate that produce a positive sense of identity that includes being knowledgeable and proactive about safety.”
Yesterday’s lahar warning test research project activity was recorded by Alison Ballance, producer and presenter of Radio New Zealand’s weekly science and environment programme Our Changing World. Alison’s story on the project will be aired on RNZ in the next week: go to http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ourchangingworld/20140911 for the story and the podcast.
Links to more information:

The Naturalist Book Launch

Friday 15th August saw the launch of a Massey University creative writing senior lecturer Thom Conroy’s novel the Naturalist at Palmerston North City Library, with over 150 people in attendance. The book launch featured a reading from Dr Conroy, and introductions from the Head of the School of English and Media Studies Joe Grixti and well known poet Helen Lehndorf. The book is currently at number two on the New Zealand fiction bestseller list.

The Naturalist tells the tale of Dr Ernst Dieffenbach – a liberal-minded, free-spirited 19th century German physican, geologist and naturalist who studied New Zealand’s wildlife, plants and people, was fluent in Māori and considered all races to be equal – was a man ahead of his time.

His views seem more in line with contemporary thinking on issues such as race relations and democracy, which is partly what fascinated Dr Thom Conroy. The result is his first, just-published novel The Naturalist (Penguin Random House Books).

Dr Conroy says he was struck by what he read about Dieffenbach while researching natural history for another project. He felt the German deserved more attention in light of his colourful personality and experiences at the onset of New Zealand’s colonisation.

Expelled from Germany for supporting a subversive pro-democracy revolutionary student movement and for duelling, Dieffenbach wound up in London and was appointed as naturalist aboard the controversial 1839 expedition of the Tory.

His ship mates included Colonel William and his nephew Jerningham Wakefield of the New Zealand Company, who were off to buy land from Māori for British settlers without the consent of the Crown. Charles Heaphy, artist and draughstman for the New Zealand Company, was aboard too.

Dieffenbach had strong views on colonisation, which clashed with orthodox views at the time and made for heated debate during the gruelling three-month voyage. Also on board was Nahiti, a young Māori returning home from London having left New Zealand on a whaling ship. His friendship with the German naturalist confirmed Dieffenbach’s conviction that humans were equal, whatever their skin colour.

While he may be known to a few historians through his two volume narrative Travels in New Zealand, Dr Conroy says Dieffenbach has been overlooked. “The more I read about him, the more I felt he needed to be rescued from the margins of history.”

He includes a striking quote at the opening of the book from the second volume of Dieffenbach’s Travels in New Zealand: “I am of the opinion that man, in his desires, passions, and intellectual faculties, is the same, whatever be the colour of his skin; that mankind forms a great whole, in which the different races are the radii from a common centre; and that the differences which we observe are due to particular circumstances which have developed certain qualities of body and mind.”

Such views were unusually enlightened for his time, and in contrast to those of the theory of evolution founder Charles Darwin, who makes a cameo appearance in the novel. He believed Māori were of a “lower order”.

The novel focuses on Dieffenbach’s 18-month stay in New Zealand, weaving a compelling narrative around his discoveries, explorations – he was the first European to ascend Mt Taranaki – and encounters with land, nature and people. The story vividly evokes the extraodinary pioneering sea voyage into unknown territory, and spans the Northern and Southern hemispheres to encompass his personal life and love interests in Germany, London and New Zealand.

American-born Pennsylvanian Dr Conroy, who has lived in New Zealand for nine years, drew on extensive historical records and research for the book, inventing scenes and additional minor characters to bring the German’s remarkable personality and story to life.

He hopes his fictional rendition of Dieffenbach’s story will have wide appeal – especially to those intrigued by influential yet marginalised historical figures who provide fresh clues to the tangents and nuances of New Zealand’s colonial history.

Balancing the tension between fact and fiction to produce a compelling and authentic story was one of the main creative challenges of the book, which he completed after more than 30 drafts, he says.

But such literary challenges have a positive spin-off. Discussing them enlivens his creative writing classes and supervision of Master of Creative Writing students. “When I’m sitting in a class or workshop discussing work with students, we’re there as people, as writers. We understand what we each are going through and can learn from each other.”

Dr Conroy’s short fiction has appeared in various journals in the US and New Zealand, including Landfall, Sport, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Kenyon Review. He has won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction and his writing has been recognised by Best American Short Stories 2012 as well as the Sunday Star-Times Short Fiction Competition.

He and his School of English and Media Studies colleague Dr Tina Dahlberg, who publishes under the name of Tina Makereti and also teaches creative writing papers at Massey’s Manawatū campus, are two of only only three new literary fiction writers in New Zealand to be published by Penguin Random House Books this year. Dr Dahlberg’s novel Where the Rekohu Bone Sings, was published in March. </P.

Cinephile: Simon Sigley

transnat_film_culture

Transnational Film Culture in New Zealand is a niche publication, written because its author loves film.  Film was the most important medium of the 20th century, Simon Sigley says, “a protean cultural phenomenon with huge industrial and aesthetic ramifications”, and he is fascinated by its changing cultural status in his native New Zealand, the more so because for around a decade he lived in a country where film has always been given its intellectual due: France.  A film viewed in the cinema, the environment for which it was crafted – is special. Nothing, says Sigley, compares with that visceral, embodied experience of cinema, that moment when lights dim, the chatter stops, the sound swells and the movie begins.

See more at: http://definingnz.com/cinephile/#sthash.JavN9hOg.dpuf

 

Loops + Splices Symposium: Changing Media Technologies, August 1st

LoopsSplices Programme Final

All scholars and practitioners interested in film and media are welcome to attend the Loops and Splices symposium on changing media technologies on Friday 1 August at Victoria University of Wellington.

The symposium has been organised by Media Studies lecturers Radha O’Meara and Alex Bevan with colleagues from Victoria University.  It will feature a keynote presentation by Professor Ian Christie from University of London’s Birkbeck College on the history of 3D in photography and film, as well as presentations by Massey Media Studies lecturers Kevin Glynn, Sy Taffel and Allen Meek.

http://www.victoria.ac.nz/fhss/about/events/symposium-loops-and-splices-changing-media-technologies

Attendance is free, but attendees should register by emailing Kathleen Kuehn before the end of July:
Kathleen.Kuehn@vuw.ac.nz

Symposium Programme 

Schedule: 1 August 2014 Hunter Council Chamber, Hunter Building, Victoria University of  Wellington

9.30-10.30am       OpeningPlenary

Chair:MiriamRoss

ProfessorIanChristie(BirkbeckCollege)

“Denying depth: uncovering the hidden history of 3D in photography and film”

10.45-12.15          PanelOne:Archaeologies,Bodies,NewTechnologies

Chair:KathleenKuehn

AllanCameron(Auckland),“Facing the Glitch: Abstraction, Abjection,and the DigitalFace”

JulieCupples(Edinburgh)andKevinGlynn(Massey),“Technologies of Indigeneity: Māori Television and Convergence Culture”

MaxSchleser(Massey),“A Decade of Mobile Moving-Image Practice”

SyTaffel(Massey),“Arch/Ecologies of E-Waste”

1.30-3.00pm         PanelTwo:AmateurPracticesandEverydayLife

Chair:RadhaO’Meara

RosinaHickman(Victoria),“A pastora lparadise?: Landscap eand early amateur filmmaking in New Zealand”

O. RipekaMercier(Victoria),“Screen(ed) Culture in the 48 Hour Film Competition”

MinetteHillyer(Victoria),“Formulas for the Interior: Homemovies, television and the practice of real life in public”

DamionSturm(Waikato),“Smashing and bashing as affective commodity-spectacle? Televisual technologies in the Australian T20 Cricket Big Bash League”

3.15-4.45pm         PanelThree:MediaLoops,AestheticHistories

Chair:MichelleMenzies

AllenMeek(Massey),“Testimony and the chronophotographic gesture”

MichaelDaubs(Victoria),“What’s New is Past: Flash Animation and Cartoon History”

KirstenMoanaThompson(Victoria),“’Now Isn’t Simply Now’: A Single Man and the Color Image”

LeonGurevitch(Victoria),“Cinema Designed: Visual Effects Software and the Emergence of Design”

4.45D5.15pm         ClosingPlenaryPanel

Chair:KirstenThompson

Ian Christie and OrganizingCommittee

The symposium committee would like to thank

Adam Art Gallery, New Zealand Film Archive, School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington, School of English and Media Studies at Massey University, and the Visual Culture Group of Victoria for generously supporting the Loops+Splices symposium.

 

Symposium Organising Committee

ProfessorKirstenThompson:Kirsten.Thompson@vuw.ac.nz DrMiriamRoss:Miriam.Ross@vuw.ac.nz

DrKathleenKuehn:Kathleen.Kuehn@vuw.ac.nz DrAlexBevan:A.L.Bevan@massey.ac.nz

DrRadhaO’Meara:R.OMeara@massey.ac.nz MichelleMenzies:michelle.menzies@gmail.com

Ian Christie (Birkbeck College,University of London)

Denying depth:uncovering the hidden history of 3D in photography and film

If stereoscopy has been a more significant and continuous presence in modern imaging media than is conventionally recognised, why has it been consistently marginalised by photographic and film historians? After its huge popularity in the second half of the 19th century, there were expectations that stereo moving pictures would follow. Yet even after practical display systems emerged in the 1930s, resistance has continued,often fuelled by a mixture of economic and psycho-aesthetic justification.What’s the problem?

Ian Christie is Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a curator and broadcaster. He wrote and co-produced a BBC TV series The Last Machine, presented by Terry Gilliam, in 1994; and  the  exhibitions  he  has   worked   on   include Eisenstein:   His   Life   and Art (1988), Spellbound:ArtandFilm (1996) and Modernism:Designing a New World (2006). A Fellow of the British Academy and Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University in 2006, with a lecture series entitled ‘Cinema Has Not yet Been Invented’, he is especially interested in mediaecology and archaeology, and in audiences-the subject of his most recent book.

Symposium Web Page

Twitter #vicloops

Hard-hitting or controversial work welcome in Poetry NZ

[Jack+Ross+(2002).jpg]Jack Ross, new editor of Poetry NZ, will be featured on Radio NZ National this Sunday. Jack is being interviewed by Justin Gregory about his plans for Poetry NZ on “Standing Room Only”, this Sunday (8/6). The programme starts at 12:40 pm. Jack said he will be talking with Justin about his plans to keep the journal at the cutting edge and encourage ground-breaking, even controversial, work. “As the new managing editor of Poetry NZ, I’d like to keep up a sense of excitement in the magazine. My predecessor, Alistair Paterson, was careful to maintain a youth-focus — both with the poets he featured and the work he included. I’d like to be as open as he was to new styles and new poetic approaches. Nor do I have any problem at all with including hard-hitting or controversial work. “Louis Johnson, who founded the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook in the 1950s, refused to withdraw some poems which the funding agencies objected to in the early sixties, and instead paid for the last volume of his yearbook himself! It’s that kind of courage I’d like to emulate. I don’t want there to be anything predictable about what people can expect when they open a copy of Poetry NZ. As the poet Alan Brunton once put it: “Keep the surprise alive!’ “The School of English and Media Studies at Massey University has been generous with a publishing subvention, and I hope that in future this journal can fold into our programme in numerous ways: perhaps principally by providing some of our graduate students with an internship in the world of practical magazine publishing.” Jack himself has published four poetry collections: City of Strange Brunettes (1998), Chantal’s Book (2002), To Terezín (2007) and Celanie (2012).

The interview can be found at:

http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/standing-room-only/audio/2598858/poetry-new-zealand

Massey editor for new-look Poetry NZ

Jack Ross, Massey editor for new-look Poetry NZ

Dr Jack Ross on an earlier cover of Poetry NZ

Dr Jack Ross on an earlier cover of Poetry NZ

Watching an Al Jazeera television item about a young Arab poet spraypainting words of protest on a wall somewhere on the West Bank struck a chord with Massey University English senior lecturer Dr Jack Ross.

In his new role as managing editor of the country’s longest-running poetry journal, Poetry New Zealand, he hopes to infuse something of the spirit and energy of that far-flung poet in future issues of his new literary baby.

In the spirit of his predecessors at the helm of the periodical, he intends to keep it youth-oriented, politically engaged, experimental, and culturally diverse – all necessary attributes for an international journal of poetry and poetics.

Ross – a poet, editor and critic who teaches fiction, poetry, and travel writing in the School of English and Media Studies at the Albany campus – replaces distinguished poet, anthologist, fiction-writer, critic and retiring editor Alistair Paterson, who held the role for 21 years.

From this year, Poetry New Zealand will be edited and published by Massey’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences. An agreement was signed by its head of the School of English and Media Studies, Associate Professor Joe Grixti, Poetry New Zealand’s former managing editor Paterson, and production manager John Denny, for the future housing of the magazine by the university.

The journal originated in 1951 when poet Louis Johnson began publishing his annual New Zealand Poetry Yearbook. Johnson’s series stopped in 1964, but a bi-annual version re-christened as Poetry New Zealand was revived by Frank McKay in the 1970s and early 80s with a total of six issues, each with a different guest editor. It began appearing twice yearly under Oz Kraus at the end of the 1980s, initially with a series of guest editors and then with Paterson at the helm.

Currently working on his first issue, the 49th in the series, which is due out in October this year, Ross says the journal will continue to feature work primarily by established local and some overseas poets, as well as commentary and reviews. Pivotal to attracting and fostering a new generation of poets is his wish to showcase emerging – and inevitably challenging – poetic trends, voices and styles.

“There will still be a featured poet in each issue – but we’ll have to wait and see who’s been chosen to inaugurate the new yearbook version. It may be surprising to some!” he says. “Poetry New Zealand is for readers and poets who crave stimulation and real challenges from encountering experimental work that’s not always immediately accessible,” he adds.

He’s keen on the idea of including some foreign language poetry in translation by overseas-based or migrant writers living here.

Cosmetic and technological changes are afoot too. The feature poet’s portrait as the cover will be replaced with fresh new artwork. Contributers can also submit their work electronically for the first time. And instead of two issues per year there’ll be an annual edition with roughly twice the number of pages.

The changes will not only open up new directions for readers and writers, but an opportunity for graduate students studying creative writing and communication at Massey to become involved in editing, design and layout through internships.

“It [Poetry New Zealand] will help complement the link between teaching and doing your own work. It’s good for students to see that while you are at university, even in arts and literature you can be learning in a pragmatic way. These are real world skills.”

Ross, who was featured in Poetry New Zealand’s Issue 22 in 2001 and guest-edited Issue 38 in 2009, has a wealth of experience in writing, editing and teaching poetry. He shares his poetic interests via a highly stimulating literary blog, The Imaginary Museum.

No stranger to experimenting with genre, as in City of Strange Brunettes (1998), Chantal’s Book (2002), and To Terezin (2007), as well as in foreign languages with Celanie, (which he translated from German – via French – into English), he also co-edited the trilogy of audio and text anthologies Classic, Contemporary and New NZ Poets in Performance (AUP, 2006-8).

While he acknowledges editing Poetry New Zealand is a time-consuming labour of love fitted around a busy teaching and PhD supervision schedule, he will be supported by an advisory board including Massey academics, poets and editors Dr Thom Conroy, Dr Ingrid Horrocks and Associate Professor Bryan Walpert; along with poet and academic Dr Jen Crawford; publisher and printer John Denny; poet and 2013 Burns Fellow David Howard; poet and editor Alistair Paterson ONZM; and poet and academic Dr Tracey Slaughter.

Ross says his ultimate aim is to make Poetry New Zealand as relevant and rivetting to a new generation of readers and writers as the most powerful films, novels and digital content. Like the graffitied words of that young Arab poet.