Erena Shingade recently completed an MA thesis on the Zen Buddhist poetry of Richard von Sturmer. Her writing has been published in journals including Landfall, Minarets, Mimicry, Atlanta Review, Brief and Ka Mate Ka Ora, and she is working towards her first poetry collection. Her research is concerned with the intersection of the poetic and the religious. Erena has composed and performed music for the poetry of Richard von Sturmer, Lyn Hejinian, Wallace Stevens and others, and has worked as a teaching assistant for the University of Auckland.
Poem notes
‘Credit Control’, published in Atlanta Review, is reflective of my time working at Health Alliance, a government organisation that shares services across the district health boards. ‘Fast Moving Consumer Goods Therapy’ was published in the journal Mimicry and is an imitation of one of Sharon Mesmer's flarf poems. ‘The Poetics of Infinity Revisited’ (published in Brief) explores the compositional techniques of flarf and its attendant love for the preposterous. ‘Late at Night, River Voices and Mountain Forms’ (forthcoming with Vre Books) and ‘Screensavers’ (published by Blackmail Press) emerge from my studies of Zen Buddhist poetry, with the former following in the footsteps of American monk Philip Whalen, and the latter quoting from two anthologies of East Asian Buddhist poetry: Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown: Poems by Zen Monks of China edited by Charles Egan, and Man'yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves), an anthology of Japanese literature circa 759.
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