Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
'Time is worn into beaks': Robyn Maree Pickens
Robyn Maree Pickens is a PhD candidate at the University of Otago, Dunedin, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her writing has appeared in Art + Australia Online, Turbine|Kapohau, The Pantograph Punch, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Art New Zealand, Art News, The Physics Room Annual, Enjoy Gallery’s Occasional Journal, and exhibition catalogues. Currently she is an art reviewer for the Otago Daily Times, and was Blue Oyster Art Project Space’s 2016 summer writer-in-residence on Quarantine Island Kamau Taurua.
Her output directs an ecocritical gaze, building its power from clausal fragments that frequently feel like complete sentences yet push and pull against settlement. Observations are quickly situated; discomforted by their larger implications, they remain critically thought-through. Her work is sharp yet layered, folding over and inward like an origami sculpture: Donna Haraway (the tension between “affinity” and “identity”), patterning and its relation to access, the nonhuman operation of time and its linguistic mimesis — these all ensure a strong formal architecture despite Pickens’s shifting eye. Her work is an exciting arrival and departure for Aotearoa/New Zealand poetry.
Robyn Maree Pickens is a PhD candidate at the University of Otago, Dunedin, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her writing has appeared in Art + Australia Online, Turbine|Kapohau, The Pantograph Punch, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Art New Zealand, Art News, The Physics Room Annual, Enjoy Gallery’s Occasional Journal, and exhibition catalogues. Currently she is an art reviewer for the Otago Daily Times, and was Blue Oyster Art Project Space’s 2016 summer writer-in-residence on Quarantine Island Kamau Taurua.