Monday, February 8, 2010

NZ poetry alive and kicking

More good news concerning a 2009 Janet Frame laureate: poet Geoff Cochrane will at the 2010 NZ International Arts Festival launch a brand new book of poems: The Worm in the Tequila (Victoria University Press 2010).

The launch of the Geoff Cochrane volume will take place along with another eagerly awaited event: the launch of Bill Manhire's new work The Victims of Lightning.

Highly acclaimed poet Bill Manhire was of course the co-editor of Janet Frame's best-selling posthumous volume The Goose Bath (2006) which went on to win the Montana Poetry Prize for 2007.

This marvellous party will take place on the 11th of March at 6 pm at the Adam Art Gallery.

There's a third book to be launched that evening, and believe it or not, there's a Janet Frame connection with the third poet too: Kate Camp, who was a special guest last August at the Oamaru launch of the Friends of the Janet Frame House, will on the 11th of March be launching her fourth poetry collection.











3 comments:

cindy said...

Hi,

I don't know if you are aware of this but there is an interview with Frame on utube (in 3 parts)

I also wonder if you could add some of the groundbreaking critical works that have been done on Frame. I'm thinking of Mercer's "Janet Frame: Subversive Fiction" or Delrez's "Manifold Utopia"?

Cindy

Pamela Gordon said...

Hi Cindy, Thanks for this.

The interview with Frame is most likely just pirated from the NZ Onscreen web site. Best to watch the original clips at:
http://www.nzonscreen.com/collection/the-janet-frame-collection

The Janet Frame Literary Trust website does list some of the many academic authors who have written on Frame, including Delrez and Mercer - whose volumes are of course well regarded and widely known already in the academic community.

I recommend though that any serious Frame scholar should be searching out the brand new FRAMEWORKS volume (edited by Cronin & Drichel, published by Rodopi) which updates Frame scholarship and brings it into the 21st Century. Marc Delrez has written one of the essays.

My personal favourite recent academic book on Frame is by Maria Wikse, who delivers a devastating analysis of the patronising sexism of much of the pathologising biographical commentary on Frame.

But this blog is intended as a personal and an insider's view, not as a theorising academic exercise. The JFLT website does urgently need an update and I'll try to make sure that there's a full list of resource titles added to it, perhaps with annotations. When I can grab a moment from my much more important work of editing further unpublished Frame manuscripts ;-)

cindy said...

Hi,



I'll order Maria Wikse's book and read it with much interest. I didn't know that you actually read academic stuff. If ever you are interested, my very first article about Frame is going to be published soon in the journal of postcolonial writing. :-))


The interview on utube is not from nzonscreen. It's a radio interview, the one in which Frame says that the adaptable man is a triumph of survival. I had never heard her voice before and neither had Marc Delrez (he is my supervisor). A moving moment...