Manifestos

A selection from some of the write-ups which have appeared to date:

[26th February 2003]:

brief
the magazine formerly known as:
A Brief Description of the Whole World / ABDOTWW / description / ABdotWW / Ab.ww &c.

brief1, n. Pope's letter on matter of discipline to person or community (less formal than bull); (Law) summary of facts & law-points ofa case drawn up for counsel (hold ~ for, be retained as counsel for, argue in favour of); size of writing-paper, typewriter, etc.; instructions given to air crews etc.; watching-~, of barrister who watches case for client indirectly concerned; ~-case, small leather handbag; a ~, piece of employment for barrister, whence ~’LESS a. [ME & OF bref f. L breve dispatch, note, neut. of brevis short]
brief2, v.t. (Law) reduce (facts etc.) to a brief; Instruct (barrister) by brief, employ; Instruct (air crews etc.) with regard to raid etc. (~ing-room, where such instructions are given); Instruct thoroughly in advance. [f. prec.]
brief3, a & n. Of short duration; concise; be ~, speak shortly; in ~, in short; (pl., colloq.) shorts, women’s panties. Hence ~'LY2 adv., ~'NESS n. [ME & OF bref f. L brevis short]

… matter of discipline …

The facts: The magazine was founded in December 1995 by Alan Loney. Its format was simple: A4 sheets, copied exactly as their authors wrote them, stapled together, then distributed with bio notes and a cover.

… less formal than bull …

John Geraets took over as editor at the beginning of 1999. This initiated an immediate shift in names and styles. His first issue (12) was a re-issue of Leigh Davis’ 1983 book Willy’s Gazette. He devoted special numbers to Loney (17) and Aesthetics (20-21), and greatly increased the range and number of contributors.

… Of short duration; concise …

Jack Ross succeeded Geraets as editor in 2002. To date he's put out four issues (including #28: Smithymania, a special Kendrick Smithyman number), and an index of the first seven years of the magazine’s contents. There’s been some controversy (conducted both inside and outside brief correspondence columns) over his attempts to open up our pages to new contributors, but hopefully this is now dying down. Our latest project is an issue (#28: Spring 2003) devoted to the late Alan Brunton, poet, performer, playwright, and all-round cultural phenomenon.

As he sees it, brief’s mission is to provide an alternative to the somewhat monochrome fare of the other major New Zealand literary magazines. He prefers to print work which he suspects could not find a home in Landfall, Sport, JAAM, Takahe or any of the others. Not that I mean to disparage those magazines – I simply feel that there is a significant constituency of experimental and technically adventurous writers who don’t find full expression in them.

We specialise in page-works, articles/poems/stories, photomontages. As we reprint work exactly as it sent, so this enables our contributors to pay close attention to the design and layout of their pages. Otherwise, the look of the magazine remains the same: A4-size, perfect-bound, with bio-notes and a card cover.

The existing contributors (Loney’s original twenty, for example) can always feel confident of a welcome, but we also want to extend an open invitation to the disenfranchised to come on in ...

[Pander 9 (October 16, 1999) 14-16]:

A Brief Description of the Whole World:
A Review Symposium of the first twelve issues of this Journal of Experimental Writing, founded by Alan Loney in December 1995,
and thereafter issued by him (in stapled, xeroxed, A4 format) until
October 1998, when the editorship passed to John Geraets.

“Our criticism is littered with overviews – the year’s poetry, the year’s fiction, a review of seven magazines in one to two thousand words, five new books from a new press, or yet another anthology to tell us who’s in charge of canon building.”

- Alan Loney, ABDOTWW #8 (1997): 3

“It is in the zone of hyper-bowl that we will have to stand.”
– Jacques Derrida, Auckland Town Hall, 18th August 1999

* * *

Dear Jack,

You mentioned perhaps I might send some comments which you may be able to use in the retrospective review of Brief D. I did this the other night, but lost it, damn!, so v. briefly let me try again:

1. ABDOTWW looks to publish not simply material that is experimental, or material that is simply new, but material which is newly experimental.

2. Such work is intrinsically related to language, but is not necessarily “literary.”

3. The term “literary” is always retrospective. Novelty is not an interest.

4. Newly experimental is always to do with a self-questioning, although these questions are not necessarily ones that are asked. They address a reflexivity that may be strangely extended, extensive.

5. As well performing a special questioning, ABDOTWW questions its and its material’s performance.

6. Its “material” includes its contributors, subscribers and readers, and editor, as well as its physical properties.

7. ABDOTWW is not any one of these.

8. In all this there is subtlety involved, to be sure.

These tenets have nothing to do with, yet are contingent upon more mundane practicalities: all but special guest contributors must be also subscribers; material is accepted on an issue by issue basis, each issue having its own definition; the continuity may be in terms of regular contributors, or perhaps not, perhaps it may be in its restless unfolding; contributions, past issues, subscription requests and enquiries should be addressed to THE WRITERS GROUP, 11-20 POYNTON TCE, AK 1001.

– John Geraets

* * *

Dear John,

Thanks for getting back to me about the Pander review. I’ve collected some views already, and am gradually working my way through the issues (in both senses).

There’s a rather missionary tone in some of the editorials which slightly grates on me, I must admit. I don’t really see being “non-referential” as either inherently wicked or inherently virtuous, I must admit. What appeals to me most is the ludic cleverness of so much of the work I read there.

The purpose of the review – or review-symposium – is to describe and celebrate more than critique, though. There’s too much there which would need to be dealt with in isolation, and I really just want to bring our readers’ attention to the existence of this submerged continent of innovative text-work.

I take your point about not particularly wishing to expand your market. I just think it would be nice if people who would like it got to know about it.

I did this the other night, but lost it, damn!, so v. briefly let me try again:

That, of course, makes me muse on the immense mana of the lost message. What brilliance must have been there! So only this skeletal residue remains ...

The term “literary” is always retrospective. Novelty is not an interest.

No, kinda twentieth-century, really, all that stuff about innovation and “newness,” isn’t it?

Newly experimental is always to do with a self-questioning, although these questions are not necessarily ones that are asked. They address a reflexivity that may be strangely extended, extensive.

I’d add including an implicit challenge to the reader’s ontology – though I quite understand that you might see this as a heretical return to something resembling the affective fallacy …

As well performing a special questioning, ABDOTWW questions its and its material’s performance.

I like this mystic apotheosising of your magazine, and the HLAH-like initials are fun, too.

In all this there is subtlety involved, to be sure.

To be sure – but “don’t rely on subtlety / frighten them or they won’t see” (Tim Rice: Jesus Christ, Superstar)

– Jack Ross

* * *

Alan Loney’s magazine, ABDOTWW, is contributed to by members of a writers’ group. This group, and the $20.00 p.a.sub, helps to keep in print a fairly wide range of talented N.Z. poets. They are not all of Loney or Wystan Curnow’s generation. Included are such relative newcomers as Tom Beard, Paula Green, and Mark Wills. While the writing styles are diverse, there is an emphasis on experimental, or original writing. Anyone wanting to see new developments – significant developments – in N.Z. writing should buy or subscribe to it.

Before anyone accuses me of bias, I must make it clear that I’m not a member of the group. I did ask Loney if he’d look at my long poem “Chains,” but he wouldn’t. So, in urging people to look at ABD, I’m not pushing my own barrow. Nor am I of any “school” or “camp”. I don’t know if I’m a Postmodernist because I don’t know (exactly) what the term means.

Not every issue was equally good, but there has always been (for me) interesting data in each issue. Loney’s editorials were always stimulating. Rarely, by contrast, do I find anything of comparable interest in the mainstream magazines. In fact, the only other magazine I would recommend in such terms is Salt, put out in Auckland by Scott Hamilton and Hamish Dewe. (Please note that I don’t support Scott’s letters of abuse – otherwise it’s a very exciting magazine).

If you’re bored with stuffy, bourgeois-liberal-humanist crap, take a peepers at ABDOTWW and Salt.

– Richard Taylor

* * *

A Brief Description exists to encourage the radical, fringe, exploratory, innovative in N.Z. Literature. Other journals may say they do, but when it comes to the point will only take the “received radical” – that which already has some degree of critical imprimatur. The bafflingly new, that which in no way conforms to the existing critical templates, has nowhere to go. One can try sending one’s work overseas but (speaking for myself) much of my work is so entirely N.Z. in content, depending so heavily on our history and cultural ironies, and so seemingly eccentric, that such moves have been only occasionally successful.

It is probably correct to say that none of our publishing firms are dedicated to the advance of N.Z. poetry. Their customary reply: “It’s good but it will not sell,” has the effect of keeping our poetry in a tame or domesticated state, and existing for the sake of the institution. At present, it is only A Brief Description that lets in new vigour from the wild. Many poets frequently published in the journal rarely appear elsewhere – writers such as Peter Crisp from Napier and Michael Radich, a New Zealander who lives in Japan. Others, such as Joanna Paul, Murray Edmond, Wystan Curnow, Alan Brunton, Tony Green, present work that might hardly be acceptable elsewhere. Such an openness is a great gift to a writer who has met with continual frustration from other publishers, and who is about to lose confidence.

The journal is now edited by John Geraets, and is supported by the Writers’ Group. Its list of subscribers is not large, but one would like to think its influence is profound.

– Leicester Kyle

* * *

Leigh Davis. Willy’s Gazette. Auckland: A Brief Description of the Whole World 12 (1999).

To appear in a different time and a different place is more than just to reappear: it is to happen again, fresh and self-brightening.

So John Geraets, taking over from Alan Loney, frames this dual reissue/issue 12 of ABDOTWW – which prompts the question: do we need it? Unfortunately, we do.

Unfortunately, because we should have paid more attention the first time round. Willy’s Gazette is just as luminous now, self-brightening, as it was when it first appeared in 1983. The fact that this book remains practically unknown attests to how much writing, of even the most mildly experimental nature, becomes marginalised in NZ literary culture. The possible charge that this is due to wilful obfuscation fails in light of the fact that the Gazette, and ABDOTWW in general, works towards an understanding of community. That this community seems small, hermetic, is the result of a general ignorance among readers of, and commentators on, NZ poetry. Community in writing does not depend upon lists of the author’s drinking buddies, nor upon generalised sermons on the nature of nationhood: it rests in allowing readers to co-operate within the space of the text.

Willy’s Gazette lays itself open, straddles the illusory divide between the traditional and the avant-garde. It is a series of sonnets, but only in that each poem has 14 lines. The Gazette is provisional, a tentative assaying of various fields: local, international, literary, artistic, formal, political. This sheer variety enables the Gazette to interrogate the local without indulging in a protectionist poetics, without defaulting to the ubiquitous paysage moralisé. The book is “implosive, paratactical,” it registers, gestures:

We editors and cartographers face that fact
daily maps age post-modern printing isn’t
miraculous predictive of political outcomes
borders stay where history last placed them

The Gazette acknowledges the impossibility of containment, while employing the infinity of gesture: closure, that raptorial illusion, is endlessly deferred.

That deferral determines my own. I defer talking about the text. I find myself circling it, swooping to raid some fleshy piece, only to find myself compelled to return – to get the whole thing. This is, of course, impossible. Is that a scary notion? It should be. Where’s that sense of communication I’m looking for, that community? Well, it’s around here someplace – you’ve just got to accept that the thing’s not static, not linear, it’s not a command: it’s just as mutable and unstable as the world itself. Communication is communion, a sharing. There’s a place for you in this text. Go play.

the cabbage tree claps
its swords over the setting sun
turning as if to say
mouth open, exclamatory
so armature you were ready
so gestetner, old and dizzy,
& your line so charcoal grey and endless

– Hamish Dewe

* * *

“Go play,” says Hamish. But what said Alan Loney, ABDOTWW’s onlie begetter? Here are extracts from various of his editorials:

I ever hope for words clear as these, on a sign on a lamp-post I saw last year – “Our cockatiel has flown away. We miss him” … a search for clarity among the literally unimaginable welter of words we live in, would be useful.

- “On Clarity” #1 (December 1995): p.3.

We want answers. The culture wants answers, the media wants answers, any answers, where all answers are all too equally valid. The ‘unexplained’ is then reserved for the strange, the weird, the spooky, the ‘paranormal’ …
In my own work, the sentence “Nothing like it exists everywhere” still haunts me, as an enigmatic unsolvable puzzle, several years after writing it.

- “Defamiliarizing the Familiars” #3 (June 1996): pp.3-4.

While I think that all information is privileged information, it’s hard to see that it’s necessary for information that is not readily available to stay hidden. One reason for the apparent ‘obscurity’ of some writing will be that it has not been spoken for …

- “Who do I write for?” #4 (November 1996): p.6.

[from a review of Tony Green’s NO PLACE TO GO printed by Tara McLeod:] … if Green mourns the loss of some of his line-endings, or if McLeod mourns the loss of options that would have been given by different types and papers, and if I myself mourn for the loss of the opportunity signalled by the term ‘collaboration’, then are we doing any more than what we’d do by being faced, as in this book we most concretely are, with the vagaries of reading that are inevitable when the work goes out ‘into the world’, with no place to go but into the hands of those who will read it.

- “A place to go” #6 (July 1997): p.6.

… one of the most interesting things I learned from my years as a psychiatric nurse and an orderly in a geriatric wing of a general hospital, was that very many people, even most perhaps, die without ever enjoying classical music, looking at fine art, or reading great literature, yet believed absolutely that they had lived a full life … This flies in the face of one of our most cherished assumptions about the quality of life …

- “What are poets for?” #7 (September 1997): p.3.

… there is only one Tradition, and everything whatsoever is in it, like it or not. But if everything is in this Tradition, what can being ‘marginal’ mean?
…. What is, for instance, ‘postmodern poetry’? By the mainstream it tends to be taken as a kind of ‘thing’, which one can have to deal with or not as one chooses. Postmodern poetry is then seen as a kind of poetry, a sort of style, as if it’s an option on the menu that we can click on or pass by, take it or leave it. But what if postmodernity is … the name of the condition in which we [as a culture] find ourselves?”

- “The Other Tradition” #8 (December 1997): pp.3-5.

“Those who specialise in generalist overviews that mention oppositional writing in passing lack the credibility that only published close readings can provide …” (#4 (1996): 6). Point taken, Alan. This rather scrappy collection of views and re/views is the result. One could hardly hope to consider so varied, so textually adventurous and visually challenging a body of work otherwise. What’s more, “reviews do not necessarily stimulate a lot of sales, but negative reviews almost always stop sales in their tracks.” (#7 (1997): 3). Perhaps it is invidious to single out one from so many examples, but how can I refrain from finishing by quoting this page of Lesley Kaiser / John Barnett’s (#6 (1997): 9)?

Stone is
more stony
than it used
to be

– Jack Ross