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his poetry introduced |
by Hugh Cook |
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Who is Hugh Cook? - his poetry and his aesthetic introduced |
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Section 141 Entry 0001. Date: Friday 22 April 2005.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Today I was moved to do a bit of self-promotion: to write a little public relations piece explaining my approach to poetry. The impulse to do this came from brushing up against an artefact from the living literary world while in hospital. As is explained below. In amongst the stacks of old magazines in the TV room just down the corridor from my ward in Auckland Hospital I found a copy of the American magazine "Poets & Writers," which I hadn't read before. This magazine includes profiles of writers, competition details, job advertisements, ads for writing courses and the particulars of various books which are on sale. Leafing through the magazine, I noticed a whole bunch of words which relate to the notion of positioning yourself, of staking out an aesthetic, of encapsulating your natural weedy lifeforce raggedness into a slickly varnished capsule with aerodynamic foils. Words which related to the business of positioning something (a poem, a poet, a writing course, a small press or whatever) in a context of expectations. Words, for example, like "meaningful, deeply moving, remarkable, spiritual, redefines, revelations, impact of culture and politics, spirit of inquiry and imagination, distinct voice and vision" and so forth. After reading through a bunch of this stuff (in the September/October 2004 issue), and paying particular attention to the ads, I became conscious of the fact that my own collection of online poems, encountered without introduction by a stranger, might quite possibly come across a chaotically random clutter of assorted stuff. So this morning I sat down to write a contextualizing introduction to my own work as a poet, a "Who is Hugh Cook?" file designed to give a stranger some kind of handle on what sort of poetry this is. My intention is to put a link to this "who is" file from each individual poem, so anyone who is browsing round the poems will have the opportunity to encounter this exercise in self-positioning. Way back when, I had ferocious ambitions for my poetry. And, even during the years when my writing life was dominated by the writing of novels, I was still working away on the poetry. Over the last two or three years, posting poems on my website has given me both a publishing outlet and an audience, and has encouraged me to fresh efforts. My poetry, then, has been coming to the fore, and one of the projected print on demand projects which I hope to bring to market in the next year or so is planned to be a collection of poems with the title "Arc of Light." Hence my effort, today's effort, to present myself to the world, to create a context of reception which is friendlier to the reader than the present jumble of stuff floating around in an unexplained vacuum. My message is that this stuff is not the bizarre detritus of an exploded mind but the controlled result of an aesthetic in action, an attempt to explore "the whole whirling rainbow of options: the unfettered expanse of the whole lawless kaleidoscope." That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. The "who is Hugh Cook?" self-introduction is as follows:- |
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Who is Hugh Cook? His poetry introduced His aesthetic explained
Hugh Cook is a writer born in Britain and educated in New Zealand. He has published poems, novels and short stories. He has taught English in Japan for seven years and has a Japanese wife and one child, a daughter.
Regarding poetry, Hugh says:- "My approach varies with the poem. Sometimes I'm aiming for lyric intensity, pushing against the boundaries of the visionary. At other times, my aim may be to grapple as directly as possible with reality, with the precise grittiness of the immediate moment of the living now. "There are also occasions on which I feel moved to exploit the sportive possibilities of language, exploring the potentials of linguistic extravagance for its own sake and pushing into the realms of rule-opposed dada poetry. "For me as a poet a major attraction of poetic form is its flexibility, its ability to embrace an endlessly diverse range of themes and situations. My ambition is toe expand the range of subject matter that I deal with rather than to limit it. In summary, then, my poetic ambition is to expand beyond the limits of what I have already done, without being constrained by artificial limits on what might constitute either appropriate subject matter or lawful technique. My ideal is freshness of vision: my own unique vision seen through my own unique lens. And vision may be beautiful or brutal, vulgar or sublime. Selectivity? I reject selectivity. Anything from the trash can or the art gallery is grist to my mill. I don't want to be restricted to a few bland monochrome flakes of reality. Rather, I want the whole whirling rainbow of options: the unfettered expanse of the whole lawless kaleidoscope." To Introduce the Poet's Work: "Sex Metal" - a serious war poem, rather angry. "Breastfeeding" - a poem of human experience written out of having a new baby in the house. "Out Fishing" - a very simple, direct poem aimed at communicating directly with experience. "The Death of Achilles" - a poem of the Trojan War, aiming, successfully or otherwise, to push toward the boundaries of the visionary. "Cryptic" - an exploratory piece experimenting with images, aiming to exploit juxtapositions which breach the boundaries of conventional reality without becoming incoherent. The intellect at play. |
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