Junctures - The Journal for Thematic Dialogue

Lonie, Bridie

 79
REVIEWS
Mark B Hansen,
New Philosophy for New
Media
(Cambridge Massachusetts: Routledge,
2004)
By Bridie Lonie
New Philosophy for New Media is an
interdisciplinary study of the implications of
the idea that new technologies produce new
experiences. Written by an associate
professor of English at Princeton University, it
draws upon the work of theorists from virtually
all relevant disciplines as it explores media
which are video and/or digitally based: virtual
reality, computer games, immersive
installations and images which are produced
in digital rather than analog fashion and are
therefore qualitatively different. These have
been around for decades and practitioners
wince a little at the use of the term “new
media”. But, Lev Manovich, whose The
Language of New Media has become required
reading in this area, is chastised by Hansen
for the way his understanding of cinema is
passive, and for his subsequent use of cinema
as a model for understanding new media which
obscures the transformative nature of this
media.1
The suggestion that new media are trans-
formative immediately raises the issue of the
condition known as the “posthuman”.
A simplistic reading of this term suggests that
relations between humans and technology
spell the end of the apparently self-sufficient
condition or way of being we call, with much
ethical investment, “humanity”. Hansen fol-
lows N. Katherine Hayles, a key interdiscipli-
nary thinker, whose work bridges chemistry and
cultural theory.2  Hayles proposed that a bet-
ter understanding of the ways in which new
technologies affect human consciousness, life
and engagements with the world,  would be to
regard the phenomenon as “post-humanist”;
a change in emphasis rather than identity.2
An understanding of human experience as
essentially individualistic is replaced by a con-
cern with interaction. New media then become
ways of enabling, literally, new perspectives.
In order to explore these perspectives Hansen
uses artworks, because they are characterised
by “affect” or embodied emotional response.
Hansen’s argument, summarised in the
excellent foreword by Tim Lenoir, is that the
dystopic universes comprising of nothing more
than streams of data unmodified by human
interventions suggested by, in particular, Jay
David Bolter, Richard Grusin and Friedrich
Kittler do not take affect into consideration.
The subjective element implied by the artwork
counters the sense that new media are simply
about data entry.
Earlier theorists of new media considered it in
terms of its relation to a true/false apprehen-
sion of the world; how many degrees away from
an original experience was an image, for in-
stance; how “real” was the experience one
was having while watching it? Hansen’s stra-
tegic omission of Baudrillard’s position allows
him to side-step political issues such as the
global control of information. Instead, he con-
siders how new media produces experiences
that cannot occur naturally, in particular those
which deal with time and the unfolding of in-
formation. For instance, using the example of
artist Bill Viola’s high-speed filming and nor-
mal speed play-back of groups of characters,
Hansen argues that the information thus pre-
Reviews – Junctures, 3, Dec 2004
80
sented to the viewer produces sub-perceptu-
al experiences that engender “affective antic-
ipation”, which he characterises as “a particu-
lar perceptual experience mediated by the
process of non-conscious neural dynamics
from which the ‘now’ emerges continually and
perceptually.” (253)
He also writes of the way in which digital
imaging  can produce a representation of a
point of view which the viewer standing in front
of the image could never achieve. Here I feel
he does not take sufficient account of Renais-
sance and Baroque experiments with perspec-
tive: programmes that rotate the viewpoint of
the imaginary viewer as based on earlier ex-
periments with anamorphism. Also, there is a
slightly mechanistic element in his discussion
of affect though, evinced in his concern with
the significance of proprioception, and his con-
flation of duration with movement. These oc-
cur as he considers the re-evaluations of time
and consciousness proposed by Walter
Benjamin, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze.
Hansen’s premise is indicated in the following
discussion of the work of Derrick de Kerkhove:
(Interactive systems) teach us how we can
adapt ourselves...to new sensory syntheses,
new speeds and new perceptions.  And they
do so, specifically, by catalyzing those bod-
ily “senses”– proprioception, interoception,
affectivity – that allow us to orient ourselves
in the absence of fixed points or external
schema, or, in other words, through the
internal, intensive space of our affective
bodies. (195)
This space is achieved as our consciousness
operates through the space/time manifest in
the experience of, in this instance, new media
artworks and their ally, virtual reality:
[Fa]r from inaugurating a form of machinic
vision, VR is simply the most advanced
instance of such co-functioning: what it
facilitates is not a becoming-inhuman of
perception but instead a technical
extension of the (human) domain of
absolute subjectivity and of the (human)
capacity for affective self-intuition. (196)
Discussions around affect enable an under-
standing of relationships between emotions
and information, and are therefore of primary
concern for artists, art theorists and theorists
of consciousness. Hansen acknowledges the
more pragmatic science of neuro-anatomy
though a discussion of another interdiscipli-
nary thinker, the neuroscientist Francisco Vare-
la. Varela’s work on time-consciousness draws
on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and
contemporary advances in the neuro-anato-
my of consciousness. (252)  Again, Hansen
draws on Bergson’s understanding of the ways
in which consciousness is incommensurate
with scientific time, enlisting the notion of au-
topoiesis, an organising intelligence which
operates through the body but appears to ex-
tend it.
The stakes are high in this argument. For
Hansen, the conjunction of aesthetics and eth-
ics counters dystopic visions of the download-
ing of intelligence and its consequent augmen-
tation or loss via the postmodern sublime, the
ether of information theory. Instead, he pro-
vides a fascinating and rewarding exploration
of theories of consciousness and time which
uses new media as its stamping ground.
1 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media
(Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).
2 N Katharine Hayles, How We Became
Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature and Informatics (Chicago & London:
University of Chicago, 1999).
Bridie Lonie is the Head of Section for Theory
& History of Art at the School of Art, Otago
Polytechnic, Dunedin, New Zealand. She is a
writer, a practising artist and has completed a
masters project on theoretical frameworks for
Reviews – Junctures, 3, Dec 2004
 81
the art therapy encounter. Her recent book
entitled Marilynn Webb: Prints and Pastels
was published by the University of Otago Press
in 2002. Her interests have included
psychoanalysis, art therapy, feminist theory
and Medieval art. Currently she is continuing
her researching on art therapy and abstraction.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña,
Dangerous Border
Crossers: The Artist Talks
Back
(London: Routledge, 2000)
By Jane Venis
Born in Mexico City in 1955, performance
artist, writer and self-confessed Chicano
ambassador and provocateur, Guillermo
Gómez-Peña has spent 20 years negotiating
through and around the borders, cultures and
relationships of the United States and Mexico.
His book, Dangerous Border Crossers similarly
crosses and permeates many borders, cultural
and geographical.  Navigating the distances
between the cultures symbolised by the
political border and the plight of Chicano
bodies as  “wetbacks” is one of the central
concerns in his hugely creative body of work.
His practice encompasses the overlapping
territories of a myriad of media including
performance, installation, film, radio, robotics,
and cyber-performance.
The dissolving borders between new
technologies and traditional societies have
been addressed in many of Gómez-Peña’s
works over the last decade and is a recurring
theme in this book. He describes himself as a
“web back” which colourfully and succinctly
articulates his wish for a borderless society
which still embodies his origins.  This is one of
many examples of the hugely enjoyable way
in which he plays with language, in texts that
effortlessly traverse the terrain between
academic and colloquial voices.  His writing is
simultaneously theoretical and accessible,
rigorous and personal, and seamlessly woven
with English, Spanish, Spanglish and other
entertaining hybrid language forms of his own
making.
This is a very personal book packed with
insights into Gómez-Peña’s performance
practice during the nineties.  It is a loosely
structured collection of his writings in the form
of diary entries, poems, essays and texts.  This
is a book that can be dipped into with ease at
any point, yet each offering, whether it be
poem, essay, interview, or recollections of past
performances is packed with information,
humour and irony.
He discusses the motivations and intentions
behind the imagery and personas in his
performances, actions and collaborations,
delighting in what he describes as “adding
layers of contradiction or complexity to
traditional images until they implode resulting
in genetically engineered Mexacabilia.” (112)
His ultimate goal is to create  “…images that
create a disturbing sediment in the
consciousness of the spectator.” (112)
The hunger to create imagery and situations
whereby the audience is confronted and
cannot easily escape their own fears and
prejudices could result in a didactic tone.  What
saves Dangerous Border Crossers (and the
performances it details) from this fate is the
acerbic humour and sheer absurdity of many
of the persona and once again, the clever use
of language.
Reviews – Junctures, 3, Dec 2004
82
Gómez-Peña embraces his Chicano machis-
mo by employing a series of performance per-
sonas that question, highlight and try to per-
meate the borders between peoples, coun-
tries, art, languages and technologies.  He
embodies stereotypes and propels them to
absurd new levels with the intention of their
eventual dissolution.  The text is peopled by
such unforgettable performance personae as
Border Brujo, Superendo Ranchero, El Pre-
Industrial Cannibal, El Mad Mex, and a whole
raft of Mexterminator “ethno-cyborgs” creat-
ed by anonymous internet users and then
embodied by Gómez-Peña in subsequent
performances.  Below are the characteristics
for one of these cyborgs, El Mucho Macho,
listed as a pseudo-gaming character:
El Mexterminator (Homo Fronterizus:
ethno-cyborg #187) as seen on the super-
nintendo video game ‘killer instinct.’  Hab-
itat: The American borderlands.  Features:
illegal border crosser/ highly infectious/ ex-
tremely politicised/ unnecessarily violent
and hyper sexual/ speaks Spanglish only.
Indestructible! Multiple identities: Karateca,
marksman, stuntman, curio shop shaman,
Tex-mex rocker, drug and jalapeno pusher,
undercover activist.  Wanted by the INS, the
DEA, the FBI and the Smithsonian Institu-
tion.  Political project: To redefine the West
and invade the North.  (114)
The performance practice of Gómez-Peña has
led to many collaborations, most notably with
Roberto Sifuentes and Sara Shelton-Mann
(forming the nucleus of performance group
Pocha Nostra); and also with Coco Fusco and
Não Bustamante.  It is the practice with
Sifuentes and his alter ego ‘El Cyber- Vato’ that
forms the bulk of the discussion in this book.
The two Chicanos take to the road and traverse
the dangerous borders of small-town America.
This book chronicles the risks involved in
embodying stereotypes so successfully that
some audiences are unaware of the subtexts,
whilst others may react violently and
unpredictably.  These unpredictable and
sometimes violent reactions highlight the
essential concerns of Gómez-Peña’s practice:
migration, alienation and mistrust of aliens.
In one of several interviews collected in
Dangerous Border Crossers in the form of a
conversation between members of Pocha
Nostra, Sifuentes says of their work
It’s not autobiographical. We’re not per-
forming our authenticity as Chicanos; what
we’re doing is performing the multiplicity
of mythologies and perceptions of Mexi-
cans and Chicanos in the US.  Unfortunately,
some audiences don’t think of Chicanos
as ‘cultural thinkers’ or ‘conceptual Artists,’
so when I first began to portray ‘Vato’ (street
hipster) covered in tattoos, wearing bag-
gie clothes, and manipulating weapons,
many audience members and even some
journalists thought I was a Latino gang
member brought to town and put on dis-
play by Gómez-Peña. (170-171)
Although the performances are not
autobiographical, the personal nature of some
of the writing provides an insight into the
everyday experiences of the artist that fuel his
practice.  In the chapter “New World Border”,
for instance, he recalls being accompanied on
his travels by a blond blue-eyed child and being
apprehended and questioned by the Mexican
police on suspicion of kidnap. The child was in
fact his son.
Gómez-Peña has written a book that is politi-
cal, confronting and full of merciless uncom-
promising humour, but he also speaks gently
of the personal insecurities and uncertainties
that accompany him on his myriad border-
crossings. This is an excellent book which
seems not to have been extensively reviewed
yet.
Reviews – Junctures, 3, Dec 2004
 83
Jane Venis is a multi-media artist working in
sculpture, sound, video and performance.  She
is a part-time tutor in the Theory & History of Art
Section at Otago Polytechnic School of Art in
Dunedin, New Zealand and also lectures in
design fundamentals in the Department of
Information Technology.  She is currently a can-
didate in the Master of Fine Arts Programme at
the School of Art.
Reviews – Junctures, 3, Dec 2004


English

Review: Mark B Hansen, "New Philosophy for New Media" (Cambridge Massachusetts: Routledge, 2004)

Bishop, Cameron

Singing in the Wind: Beyond the Peace/War Dichotomy

Stocker, Mark

The Journal for Thematic Dialogue
unctures
14: peace
July 2011
Junctures is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives Works 3.0 New Zealand licence 
(cc-by-nc-nd), unless otherwise indicated. Copyright in all images remains with the artists, unless otherwise indicated.
 
MARk stOCkER 
Review: Art and Law Symposium, the Dunedin School of Art and the 
University of Otago, Faculty of Law, 29 October 2010
75Junctures 14, July 2011
MARK STOCKER
Review of Art and Law Symposium, 
the Dunedin School of Art and the 
University of Otago, Faculty of Law, 
29 October 2010
Following the success of the 2009 Symposium 
“Illustrating the Unseeable: Reconnecting Art 
and Science,” the Dunedin School of Art hosted 
“Art and Law” on 29 October 2010. Its organiser, 
Peter Stupples, declared that a prime aim of 
the symposium was to explore the tensions 
between the freedom of globalised appropriation 
– particularly via the Internet – and copyright 
restrictions, imposed to protect the rights and 
incomes of creators and owners of property. 
Another recurrent issue was the tension between 
the artist’s freedom of expression and the right 
of an institution to show it – or not – as the case 
may be. Thus the two ‘c-words’, copyright and 
censorship, monopolised much of the content and 
certainly the open discussions. The symposium 
functioned admirably as an arena for an informed 
and sometimes impassioned exchange of opinions 
between artists, art educators, curators, historians 
and theorists, and legal scholars and practitioners. 
It certainly got me thinking about my own life 
choices. When I was a student in Britain some thirty 
years ago, it was very much a case of C. P. Snow’s 
entrenched “two cultures.”1  You either studied Art 
(in my case Art History) or you studied Law. Rarely 
if ever did the twain meet. And during my eighteen 
years at the University of Canterbury, I don’t believe 
that a single Fine Arts student enrolled for Legal 
Systems, and nor were they encouraged to do so 
by the Marxist head of school! In a post-modern, 
interdisciplinary world, this kind of intellectual 
ring fencing looks increasingly absurd and the 
symposium made it all the more evident.
Proceedings kicked off with three historically 
grounded papers, delivered by Mark Stocker, Leoni 
Schmidt and Olivia Crisp respectively. Each of them 
brought about fascinating but unplanned synergies 
with what followed. A theme in Mark Stocker’s 
paper on Bertram Mackennal’s monumental 
effigies of Lord and Lady Curzon (1907-13) was 
later revisited by Oliver Watts when he explored 
the “efficacy of the image that commands and 
authorises.” Issues of authenticity in relation to the 
The agreement between Lord Curzon and Bertram Mackennal 
relating to the Curzon monument in All Saints’ Church, Kedleston, 
England (1908).
Curzon Monument, All Saints’ Church, Kedleston, England (1908).
76 Junctures 14, July 2011
infamous Jan Vermeer faker Han van Meegeren, 
the theme of Leoni Schmidt’s paper, were echoed 
in Mark Williams’s exposition of the R v Liberto 
judgement (2008), which had involved the faking 
of Aboriginal artist Rover Thomas’s paintings. In 
turn, Crisp’s overview of the Republic of Austria v 
Altmann (2004) reminded us that the law could 
be (ab)used by the State as an oppressive tool 
for the expropriation of Jewish-owned property, in 
this instance an exquisite Secessionist portrait by 
Gustav Klimt. Totalitarianism reared its unsightly 
head again in the Soviet Union in 1929, when 
the Council of People’s Commissars suppressed 
photography by amateurs in public places. As 
Erika Wolf later explained, the original intention 
of such photography had been to celebrate the 
nobler ideals of the 1917 Revolution, but Stalinism 
brutally put paid to that.
Jenny Harper’s lively paper was the first to 
raise questions of both copyright and, explored 
by her in more detail, censorship.2 As a public art 
gallery director, she noted the more conservative 
and cautious exhibition policies of such institutions 
over the past twenty years. Since the 1998 Virgin 
in a condom furore (also mentioned by Adam de 
Hamel), the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa 
Tongarewa has tellingly not shown a single group 
contemporary art exhibition. Harper explained how 
she very recently made an executive decision to 
exclude from exhibition a video where eroticism 
shaded into pornography and which she would find 
hard to convincingly defend as ‘art.’ Peter Shand’s 
finely nuanced paper then addressed questions of 
copyright. Is it about Lockean natural law? Or about 
outputs? While in earlier centuries the materiality 
of the object under copyright was not in question, 
today the distinction between thinking and making 
is not nearly so neat. In a runaway world, legal 
provision for copyright lags far behind the pace of 
change. Shand noted, for instance, how the law 
made no provision for the status of collage until 
1988.
Oliver Watts drew on an eclectic iconographic 
mix – from the All Blacks to Australian coinage 
designs to Andy Warhol – to explore the sovereign 
image, in whose name laws are made. As he wittily 
asked, has Warhol usurped the role of Queen 
Elizabeth II? In Lucian Freud’s portrait of her, 
the pearls of her crown transmute into majestic, 
painterly impasto. In the jointly presented paper 
of George Petelin and lawyer-turned-artist Lynden 
Stone, the question of copyright resurfaced. 
Originally justified by natural rights, the revolution 
in digital technology means that copyright law 
today is predicated far more on utilitarian and 
economic precepts. Stone examined Petelin’s 
digital appropriations of a (perfectly innocuous) 
Bill Henson photograph in relation to the law and 
how these might be interpreted in the unlikely event 
of objections from Henson. Are they in breach of 
copyright or do they represent Petelin’s avant-
garde reinvention of Henson’s imagery? Do they 
constitute a parody and a satire or, as I suggested, 
a tribute?
Giovanni di Lieto’s paper asked a set of 
important questions about whether the current 
ease of copying and distribution requires more 
or less stringent intellectual property laws. If the 
former are applied, would this stifle creativity? Is 
international trade law in danger of becoming a 
blunt instrument, upsetting the delicate balance 
between artists, publishers and public? While 
deploring the video and audio piracy of China, 
which di Lieto nobly boycotted while he lived there, 
he raised the almost equally hideous prospect 
of international trade policy creating a culture of 
micro-payments not only for our favourite iTunes but 
for all information. “What constitutes an author?” 
he asked,  “and who is the owner of the rights?”
Ngarino Ellis used a Māori heitiki carving as 
a highly effective title slide image to demand: 
“Halt! Who goes there?” Her paper examined 
inter-tribal plunder during the Musket Wars of 
Aotearoa New Zealand and how, with the process 
of colonisation, a new set of thieves subsequently 
entered the field, ranging from the common soldier 
to the museum curator. That said, the alleged 
“confiscation” which Ellis mentioned in relation 
to the famous meetinghouse Te Hau-ki Turanga 
by this author’s ancestor, J. C. Richmond, was 
qualitatively different from that of Māori lands. 
Not only was the artefact purchased, but it can be 
argued that its survival was ensured by its removal 
to the National Museum in Wellington. The parallel 
with Lord Elgin, in the short term at least the 
preserver rather than plunderer of the Parthenon 
marbles, could not but occur to me. Jane Raffan’s 
densely packed paper examined Australian law and 
indigenous rights, and how Aboriginal artists from 
remote communities struggled to have such rights 
77Junctures 14, July 2011
and interests in traditional communal imagery 
acknowledged. A picture of two steps forward, one 
step back, emerged.
Authenticity and value formed the themes of 
Mark Williams’s paper, which cited two Australian 
landmark judgements, R v Liberto, mentioned 
above, and Blackman & Dickerson v Gant (2010). 
In the latter, the artists Charles Blackman and 
Robert Dickerson took successful legal action 
against the gallery owner and proprietor Peter 
Gant, demanding his removal of fake works ‘by’ 
them from circulation. Williams then went on to 
examine wider issues of connoisseurship applied 
to two small paintings attributed to George Stubbs, 
which spectacularly impacted on their resale 
value, as well as mentioning the importance of 
provenance. Economy with the truth of provenance 
has surfaced in a recent auction sale of a historic 
Maori carving, which had been de-accessioned in 
shady circumstances from a British collection. This 
author, and a handful of others, knew about this 
and sought vainly to halt the sale. At the time of 
writing, the case is a highly sensitive one, and the 
Art Newspaper has only just been tipped off. The 
temptation on my part to share the story with the 
symposium audience was strong, but necessarily 
had to be resisted!
Artist and advocate Bronwyn Holloway-Smith’s 
paper examined the differences in copyright law 
between ‘fair use’ (as applied in New Zealand) 
and ‘fair dealing’ (in the United States), with 
the latter providing greater scope for creative 
freedom. Her comments were reported in the 
Otago Daily Times on the following day.3 Following 
the poignant imagery of Erika Wolf’s paper on 
amateur worker photography in the Soviet Union, 
Dorothee Pauli addressed “The Art of Protest.”4 In 
what was probably the least overtly legalistic and 
most graphically powerful of all the presentations, 
Pauli focussed on printmakers’ imagery of crimes 
against humanity. Using satire by artists from 
James Gillray to Oscar Munoz, she reminded us 
– as if this should be necessary – that we need 
the rule of law to uphold human rights and in 
particular freedom of expression. The imagery of 
contemporary New Zealand printmaker Michael 
Reed – at once technically clever and politically 
impassioned – was effectively deployed. Pauli’s 
paper nicely dovetailed with that of Kim and 
Zoe Economides, who examined duality in the 
hegemony of art and law. The latter can be a 
double-edged sword, a repressive controlling force 
but also a protective one. Using his daughter’s 
photographs, Kim Economides explored the 
educative and potentially civilising agency of 
photography to recast court buildings as centres 
where the law is out there to help you. Economides 
may risk accusations of naïve idealism, not to 
mention obliviousness to the manipulability of 
photography. Yet as a legal ethics specialist – 
and the recently appointed Director of the Legal 
Issues Centre at the University of Otago – it is 
surely his duty to canvass these possibilities. 
Adam de Hamel’s paper on art and offensive 
material proved a fittingly entertaining, debating-
society conclusion to the formal proceedings, 
provoking a member of the audience to challenge 
his interpretation of Robert Mapplethorpe’s 
photographs. An animated discussion on issues 
of censorship ensued, with Peter Shand wittily 
mooting a ‘yuk’ versus ‘harm’ dichotomy.
The Art and Law Symposium crammed an 
awful lot into a vibrant day. It might not have 
changed anyone’s minds, but I hope that it opened 
some. It made me wish that I had enjoyed the 
privilege, available to Australasian students, of 
studying Art History and Law concurrently. 
1 C. P. Snow. The Two Cultures (Cambridge: University 
Press, 1960).
2 See Jenny Harper, “Art is Not Above the Law” in this issue.
3 John Gibb, “Artists Afraid Rights Going” Otago Daily Times, 
30 October 2009, 7.
4 See Dorothee Pauli, “Picturing Peace” in this issue.


Review of "Art and Law Symposium", the Dunedin School of Art and the University of Otago, Faculty of Law, 29 October 2010

Harper, Jenny

Art is Not Above the Law

Review of  HotHouse Symposium, the Launch of the National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA), Utzon Room, Sydeny Opera House, Sydney, Australia, July 20-21 2010

Pannett, Mandy

Mandy PanneTT
PaSSeRIne:  a Quartet
(Dictionary – bird of a group, including all songbirds, with feet adapted for perching)
1
His was a loaded shadow-bag and he as small
as a seabird louse. Outside the frost was waiting 
on the grass. No letters fell on this or other days.
All the same to me, he whispered, memories 
are too costly when they’re few. Behind the glass 
the sky was white as bone. A storm of dreams 
began its swirl inside his winter head.
2
The apples on this tree, she thought, are sour. Even wasps 
ignore their scent. There was a wooden gate just here 
with a broken hinge, where the boys would climb and kick their feet. 
That gate was fit for burning, even then. Every garden in the street 
was neat and trim though overrun with produce – 
fresh green spinach, new potatoes – I can almost smell the earth – 
and strawberries as well – the boys would eat them up 
before the rest of us could pick them – cram them in, their faces 
stained with red. She was glad she had re-visited her home; 
wondered why nostalgia felt like pain.
109Pannett – PASSERINE – Junctures, 12, Jun 2009
POeM
3
He had been reading the poems of Catullus and felt he had sunk to a low frame of mind. What 
a strange expression he thought: a low frame – like a porthole or knee-high window where 
someone would crouch and make himself small in order to see – a secret attic, a recusant’s 
chapel behind a false wall, a hay-loft offering him dust in his nostrils and scratching of mites 
on his skin.
It must be the sparrow, he decided, spinning him into these nook-like spots – Lesbia’s 
sparrow, her darling pet, as Catullus had longed for the girl to be his. O factum male ... O evil 
deed the poet wrote when the poor bird died and he was further than ever from achieving 
his love. Passer, passerine ... the very words were elegiac. A songbird that had sung, now 
silenced. An image devised by a long-dead Roman, fluttering down the years to perch on a 
new window frame.
4
Rome was constricted in hot August sun,
streets hard and glittery, old fountains dry.  
She longed for a courtyard shaded with trees,
a sleepy old dog and jug of white wine. 
Told of the death of a man she had known 
she read Keats’ last letter and thought about love –  
thought about being unloved. Climbing up steps 
to a darkened cathedral, she dreamed Botticelli himself 
might appear, light candles for angels and her.
Mandy Pannett, originally from London, now lives in West Sussex where she is a 
creative writing tutor. She also supports several local writing groups and runs an Arts 
Cafe. Her first poetry collection, Boy’s Story, was issued, with original music, as a CD. 
Two further collections have been published by Oversteps Books – Bee Purple and 
Frost Hollow. Her work has been widely published in small press magazines and online 
and some of her work is currently being translated into German and Romanian. She 
is currently working on a new collection and on a novel.
110 Pannett – PASSERINE – Junctures, 12, Jun 2009


"PASSERINE: A Quartet"

Roberts, Kim

73
POEM
Roberts – The Shipwreck – Junctures, 10, Jun 2008
KIM ROBERTS
The Shipwreck
Kim Roberts is the author of two books of poetry, The Kimnama (Vrzhu Press, 2007), 
and The Wishbone Galaxy (WWPH, 1994).  Her individual poems have been published 
in such journals as Southwest Review, Ohio Review, Malahat Review, No Tell Motel, 
and New Letters, and she has received writers’ residency grants from eleven artist 
colonies (most recently the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center in Nebraska).  She edits 
the online journal, Beltway Poetry Quarterly (http://www.beltwaypoetry.com), and co-
edits the Delaware Poetry Review (http://www.depoetry.com).
Painted in 1850, part of a retrospective of the works of J M W Turner  
exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
In Turner’s painting The Shipwreck 
everything leans and moans,
even the glowering clouds. 
Three small wooden craft
are flung from the drowning ship. 
The striped cap of the sailor at the tiller
looks like exposed ribs,  
while in the other life boats
men drape agonized atop one another  
and waves hoist
their hummocks of foam. 
The young genius, the painter,
lingers lovingly, reaching 
over each violent wrench of water.
The Shipwreck is his first large-scale oil, 
his palettes and knives and brushes reaching,
desperate, through a vortex of small men 
centered on their unfolding disaster,
two dozen hopeless figures 
hemmed in by a dense black sky.


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