When Ross Brighton moved to Auckland from Christchurch last year, he was just about clean-shaven. His beard is now the size of a Russian existentialist’s — a shapely handle of hair to stroke as he writes. The secondhand suits he wears complement the organized mess of a disheveled writer’s aesthetic. When the weather allows it he walks around barefoot. If it’s cold he covers his feet and puts on a dark brown woolen trench coat. His presence is unmistakably that of a poet.

But Brighton, 27, has found Auckland — New Zealand’s largest city, in the country’s North Island — conducive to more than just beard growing.

He fled Christchurch — in New Zealand’s South Island — at a breaking point. After bouts with mental illness and quarrels with the English department at Canterbury University, Auckland promised a new creative satisfaction for the experimental poet.

“I couldn’t really continue studying at Canterbury. I kind of fucked off various people in the department by being crazy and out-of-line and radical and they didn’t like it.”

Normally, the challenges of earning a master’s degree in creative writing are fairly predictable: there are limitless hours of overtime put into writing, revising, reading, critiquing and being critiqued.

For Brighton, whose poetry is mostly a collage of randomized words and sounds taken everywhere from Samuel Beckett to Wikipedia, the challenge was having people take him seriously: “I was sort of that token, weird avant-garde guy in Christchurch that everybody thought was nuts and didn’t really know what to do with, but there was a curiosity or something.”

Since coming to Auckland, Brighton has done several readings, had a book of his poetry printed by a Canadian press, and is currently working on publishing both emerging and established New Zealand writers with his independent press, called &then&then. He supports himself on scholarship money and what he makes from tutoring.

Not that Auckland is totally accustomed to what Brighton is doing.

At a University of Auckland reading in 2010 Brighton showed up wearing a dress and lipstick. Audience members expecting a nice evening of lyrical poetry instead got a long-haired man in drag reading nothing but isolated syllables off a handmade scroll.

“There’s something about being in drag and having a beer,” says Brighton. “It’s a dislocation I suppose. It’s a tension of disparate elements, like in my work. You’ll read ‘and of for the where’ and think, what do any of those words refer to?”

The dress wasn’t anything too fancy or risqué — a plain, charcoal-coloured number with a black waist belt.

Some of Brighton’s work is designed to represent and invoke madness or alternative thought patterns. He uses the psychiatric illness he has suffered for the past 10 years to inform his work.

“I’m really wary of the romanticization of mental illness, the main example being Sylvia Plath,” says Brighton. “The idea of the romantic, crazy writer is the most serious case of confirmation bias there is.”

When Brighton was 16, his best friend committed suicide.

“He was depressive and came from a really hardcore Catholic family — doesn’t really go together very well,” says Brighton. The post-traumatic stress from the incident triggered psychosis for Brighton, and he saw little green men march around his bedroom. When his parents found him locked in the wardrobe, hiding from the make-believe men, they decided to seek professional help.

Brighton, who also had a religious upbringing, was diagnosed with chronic major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress. He was in the hospital for three months and has been in and out of outpatient treatment ever since.

“It saved my life. I would have killed myself otherwise.”

Still, he has reservations about the mental health system. “They didn’t go about it in the best way, looking back,” he says. “A couple times there were several medications that I was put on which I really, really shouldn’t have been on. You read a lot of psychoanalytic stuff about madness and literature, but nobody mentions anything about suffering really. Or if they do it’s this kind of sublime, crypto-Christian martyrdom. A lot of the time it’s just really not that fun. It’s actually pretty shit and nobody really talks about that.”

Photo credit: Tim Page

Still, he finds himself attracted to the strange and the unknown. When he finds a piece of writing he likes, he reworks the words into a visual poem, like a sculpture made from the vocabulary of the original author.

In Beckett, Brighton took all the nouns out of a Samuel Beckett piece and randomized the remaining words. In Donne, he took a pen and scribbled over John Donne’s 17th century love poems, then rearranged all the words that avoided the black mark of the pen.

For his recently published Temporal Maze Denture, he took the words from a Wikipedia article about a prehistoric amphibian and fed it through a text randomization program. “It’s still my work,” Brighton says. “Their work is still out there, so I’m not destroying it completely. I think of it as an act of love. It’s a tribute, but there’s also a horrible violence to it as well.”

There was another reading in Titirangi — a wealthy West Auckland suburb — with a tape recorder full of sounds of him screaming and babbling. Brighton hung it from the microphone and tried to read over the top of it to create the effect of “different voices competing.”

“I made a baby cry and three people walked out. It was pretty awesome,” he notes.

To be fair, the crowd was not the typical audience Brighton was used to. “I had no idea what it was meant to be like,” he says. “And then I walked in, got myself a glass of wine, had a look around, and the crowd was like [affluent Auckland suburb] Devonport on a sunday afternoon. I thought, ‘fuck it’, and did my shit and took off pretty soon after that.”

At a reading for the Poetry Live sessions on K Rd Auckland, Brighton was cornered and lectured by an old man accusing him of elitism. The man told Brighton he was too academic and intellectual. What he was doing was not “real” poetry.

“He looked like an alcoholic Billy Connolly,” says Brighton. “I found it quite funny. I’m not telling him what he can and cannot do. Who’s the fucking elitist now?”

His poetry, so reliant on sounds, is now being paired with music. Organist and pianist Sean Scanlen has accompanied him on recent readings, along with four or five other musicians.

“Ross has written the poem I am setting to music by taking a text from John Donne and scribbling all over it,” says Scanlen. “He has then transcribed what’s left. It’s fantastic to hear him perform it. It’s meaningless garble, but he puts a lot of rhythm into it. Some people would say that’s music.”

Scanlen found a baroque music piece contemporary to Donne, took out a pen, and mimicked the Brighton scribble method all over the sheet music. “Strangely, while the meaning of the Donne poems were eradicated by this treatment, the musical fragments maintain quite a lot of their meaning,” says Scanlen. “I’m not too sure why this is, but it shows how different music and language are.”

If Brighton’s critics are right about him being too “academic” or “elitist,” it’s interesting to consider some of his favorite things: My Little Pony, Disney movies and country music. “I just like magic and stories and cartoons,” he says. “I like weird and unexpected stuff.”

His passion and energy to share the bizarre with others might just end up making it all the more accessible. For those who go searching for the original text behind each poem, they will probably come across something, to borrow Brighton’s favorite phrase, “fucking awesome.”

Every time Scanlen sees a reading, he knows he is in for something weird. “Everybody else generally reads conscientious poetry that uses beautifully crafted words to create elegant meanings,” he says. “And then you have Ross, who is willing to create his poetry in a bit of a different way. It’s fantastic and puts a smile on my face.”

Ross Brighton has poems forthcoming from BadRobotPoetry

“Conversation” by Ross Brighton, originally published at No Tell Motel

traits like “humour” and “personality”

a looseness of portent

definite: “this flavour”

ardent opinion of

“say, lets go boating”

where the horses

is squalid or squalor

a fence a dog a break-in

architectural morass high rising

the psychology of

“and one day at the beach”

it’s all grey skies, but no rain, thank god

and then outward like a mirror

an endeavour by degrees

were pouring it into the glass

attitude of “back to basics”

any but this especially

O fortunate one

a wooded hill a copse

“and oh but I never”

numbering downward into abstraction

was tired under trees

and chess, and the way the birds

after the show

but she said


 
 
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