papertiger #03, edited by Paul Hardacre and B. R. Dionysius.  CDROM.  papertiger media.  ISSN 1445-1980.

Reviewed by Patricia Prime

The CDROM papertiger #03 is a complete magazine on disk and is an acquired taste.  The CDROM is entitled papertiger: new world poetry #03 and comes from the capable hands of Australian poets Paul Hardacre and Brett Dionysius.  The cover depicts a howling tiger surrounded by lush vegetation.  So this is supposed to be luscious, vibrant, shocking, authentic visions by Australian and other poets?  The CDROM doesn’t let us down; it has all these things and more.

Themed around rural and urban Australia, and elsewhere, this disk is a compendium of editorial, video poems, audio poems, flash poems, new poems from a variety of Australian poets, a photo poem by Carol Hull and an essay, and is aimed at capturing moments and issues that illuminate the fragile state of society.  The new world poetry section contains over 140 poems from Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK and the USA.  You won’t be comfortable reading Liam Ferney’s essay entitled “A Storm in a Column: In defence of contemporary Australian poetry”, a violent call to arm ourselves against literary critics if ever there was one.  Elsewhere the pieces on this disk place humanity against the planet’s raw backdrop – as in the excellent poem by John Tranter “Benzadrine” (from “The Malley Variations”),

I have been bitter with you, I have

waited in dreams and invented

the twenty-five thousand comrades

who came to resurrect the tubercular utterance

from the fading vomiting wave . . .

or explain its mysteries, as in the photo poem by Carol Hull.  Here, too, are things to worry about.  Too depressing?  It’s galvanising, actually.  And in the papertiger tradition offers first-class writing, exceptional reportage, brain food.

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As a book lover, I find it hard to read poems on the computer screen.  Hearing how a poet reads his or her own work can be a revealing and rewarding experience, but the poems in the first section on the disk are visual, accompanied by an aimless jangle of sound.  Music can accompany poetry very effectively, but I felt in this case it would be better without it.  If I could alter anything on the disk, it would be the lack of introduction to the poems and the music that accompanies them, and I was better able to concentrate on the poems with the music turned off.  The sound was very different on the audio poems and the voices of poets reading their own work was revealing and added greatly to the overall perception of the poems.

The titles of some of the poems on the disk are intriguing, from M. T. Cronin’s “pot plant”, Jill Jones’ “heat in a room” to Peter Minter’s “wallpaper codecil”.  I liked the tone of the poems very much and also felt that the disk benefited from the humour and irony of some of the poems and that this served the disk well.

The audio section includes work from Elini Zisimatos Auerbach, Joshua Auerbach, Johanna Featherstone, Jayne-Fenton-Keane, Ian McBryde and Alicia Sometimes.  Jayne Fenton-Keane’s poem “ophelia becoming moon” is a wonderful “soundscape” of words that is delightfully performed by the poet:

You write poems that grow under water.  That are sixteen kilometres round.

That taste of drowning.  You bite off the sky.  Trace its secrets, so that mystery orbits around knowing.  Satellite dish of drowning.

Video poems include work by Aras Ozgun, Alicia Sometimes, Alan Sondheim, Komninos, Gerard Wozek and Mary Russell.

Flash animated poems are by Jason Nelson, David Prater, James Stuart and Jeff Winke.  Winke’s haiku slide easily up and down the screen forming word pictures, moments in time, captured visually

her lush lips

part to a gentle snore

airport wait

The 12-part photo poem “the straight road inland” by Coral Hull I found a little disappointing as it was hard to read some of the blue print against dark backgrounds, although her poems and photos are as startlingly revealing as ever:

drink water from rock.  granite sand pools.

boulders split into onions.  deep outback rain.

warm rain from hundreds of miles of heat.

we come from many hundreds of miles

to the boulders. slip into warm granite pools and drink

The essay by Liam Ferney, “A Storm in a Column: In defence of contemporary Australian poetry”, is a reply to an article written by Patrick McCauley in The Weekend Australian on 25.1.03.  Ferney remarks:

McCauley’s ire with contemporary poetry stems from what he proclaims to be a lack of narrative/linguistic coherence which would allow the reader to understand exactly what it is the poet is trying to tell them.

This CDROM sums up Hardacre’s and Dionysius’ skills as both poets and recording artists, and is indicative of the quality as a whole.  It is about sound and vision, and is also about listening, hearing, and the imagination.  I liked the vision behind the disk as a recording and felt that it was a good addition to any collection of recordings.