Leicester Kyle: Prophet without Honour (1999)

Pander 6/7 (March 1999)

Leicester H. Kyle
Prophet without Honour

Leicester Kyle

Are you the kind of reader who goes for the fattest, glossiest, most shameless paperback on the bestseller shelves? Or are you the sort who snoops through ratty old second-hand bookshops looking for the esoteric and elusive: the promise of the unknown masterpiece?

Ezra Pound chanced upon Andreas Divus’ Latin translation of the Odyssey on an bookstall in Paris; D. G. Rossetti found Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in a remainder bin in Charing Cross Road. If we wait long enough, eventually someone may pick up a copy of Leicester Kyle’s Heteropholis in the stacks of one of our larger public libraries (defenders of the obscure, God bless them), and be similarly transfixed by this strange work of the modern sensibility. Why wait, though?

Heteropholis is a complex, multi-faceted narrative poem, not predominantly lyric in inspiration – which at once condemns it in the eyes of most readers of contemporary poetry (the only sin more heinous being what Milton calls “the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing”). It concerns a fallen angel, who has descended to earth in the form of a small green native gecko (species: Heteropholis gemmeus). This gecko has been caught by an apartment-dwelling Aucklander, and makes observations on his habits, on the weather (a subject of particular concern to angels, who are used to looking down), and on sundry other matters. Some of the matter is lewd, some liturgical.[1] It is, nevertheless, a profoundly serious and, indeed, partially autobiographical work. No commercial New Zealand publisher will touch it with a barge-pole.

Leicester Kyle, like his lizard protagonist, has been caught. Poetry snared him late, after a long and successful career as an Anglican pastor. He had written short stories before that (notably for the Listener and the London Magazine), but his poems began to appear in New Zealand magazines midway through the nineties, and have now become almost inevitable features of any local publication. Like other late-flowering converts to poetry (Thomas Hardy, say, or Herman Melville), he is prolific, and could undoubtedly present us with a collection or two of lyrics which would take their place with the others so routinely reviewed in these pages.

Instead, he perversely insists on writing erudite, book-length works in an experimental mode (Zukovsky and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets are acknowledged influences). His shorter poems have tended to be wry, ironic reflections on modern New Zealand life, which explains their ready assimilation into the bland modernism-without-tears of our present literary milieu. The longer works, though, defy ready characterisation. They display a darker, more rebellious gift.

In order, we have Koroneho: Joyful News out of the New Found World (which has been appearing serially in Alan Loney’s journal A Brief Description of the Whole World from issue 6 onwards). A series of descriptions of – misidentified – native orchids compiled by the missionary and botanist William Colenso are here versified and complicated by Leicester into a work combining the scientific and literary vocabularies (a continuing preoccupation in his writing). This is perhaps the most austere and “difficult” of his works to date.

Next comes Options (1996-1997), available only through Leicester’s own Heteropholis Press (now removed from its former location in Mt. Eden to the wilds of Buller). This set of four poems examines, with a wickedly satirical eye, a series of religious and mystical vocations. We have Evagrius, the fourth century ascetic; Jeremy Taylor, the seventeenth-century Anglo-Catholic Jeremiah:

Always look for death.
Every day knock at the gate of the grave.
… Consider the tomb
At your triumph; the skeleton
At the revel; the bones
At the banquet …

(Leicester comments, perhaps tongue in cheek: “It was my intention to make better use of Taylor’s humour, but I found this oddly difficult to do. It is here, but unexpectedly dark”); Fran, a thirteenth-century Franciscan mendicant transported to contemporary Northland; and finally Maria, the celebrated nineteenth-century dancing prophetess of Kaikohe. The disjunction of cultures and epochs might seem extreme, but that’s how its author likes it.

As a whole, Options is a delightful and witty work which deserves a wider audience, and which might have great value as a corrective to the mouthings of the New Age prophets who surround us in these last days of the millennium.

State Houses (1997) is more personal, interweaving tragic family history with the history of the first state houses in the Christchurch suburb of Riccarton. Leicester explains that his “dream-like recollection” of childhood “is set against the ideology of which the state houses were part” (hence the Bauhaus epigraph, and the various diagrams and maps), but that “progress is provided by a ritual house-blessing, an alternative ideology, which moves the family group from room to room, part to part, of reality.” This is an intense and moving poem, whose total effect can perhaps be best summarised by repeating the quotation (from Lorine Niedecker’s correspondence with Louis Zukovsky) on the dedication page:

“Yes I know you’re moving – in a circle, backward with boxes –”

The “moving” pun is intentional.

Finally we come to A Voyge to New Zealand: the Log of Joseph Sowry, Translated and Made Better (1997). “Made better” is a description cribbed from Talmudic commentaries, but this is more ludic, a bit of fun. The author has taken a real nineteenth-century journal, and teased it into strange shapes on the page and in the imagination. It reads as an affectionate tribute to the spirit of our pioneers, a fin-de-siècle version of Curnow’s “Landfall in Unknown Seas.”

As I mentioned earlier, Leicester Kyle has moved from Auckland to the West Coast of the South Island, where he can scribble, observe, explore and botanise to his heart’s content. The samples I have seen of recent work (including sections of The Machinery of Pain: a new sequence on pain management, prompted by close personal experience) promise some extraordinary new directions. My own hope is to see, eventually, a single volume, a little like the Black Sparrow Press collection of Jack Spicer’s poetry books, which will showcase his work for a larger public.

Jack will have his heroes, you may say. Regular Pander readers have already observed me constructing “hagiographies” (Danny Butt’s word, Pander 3:6) of Kendrick Smithyman (1: 10-13) and Kathy Acker (5: 26-27). But saluting the unorthodox is a principal reason for this magazine to exist, it seems to me.

There is nothing inaccessible about Leicester’s mad, funny, eccentric verses, seen in their proper context, but perhaps they do sound like a barbaric yawp next to the anaemic pipings of our other bards.

Now pursuing truth
I make new moves
and am more business-like …

I must learn more

I’ll take to interstices

I’ll live in the wall that divides

I’ll watch with my bespectacled unblinking eye

I’ll see all sides

It’s a strange thought, but I’m uneasily aware that in this strange flowering of Leicester Kyle we may be seeing genius.

___________________________________________

Notes:

1 For an example of the former, see Pander 3: 19.

(8/7-14/11/98)

Pander 6/7 (1999): 21 & 23.
[Available at: The Imaginary Museum (26/6/06)]

[1148 wds]


Pander 6/7 (1999)


•

The Kassabova Phenomenon (1999)

Pander 6/7 (March 1999)

The Kassabova Phenomenon

Kapka Kassabova


Prologue

A bunch of us were in the London Bar one Friday (as is our semi-regular habit), laying down the law on literature – in the way of would-be Mallarmés everywhere – when the subject turned to Kapka Kassabova, whose latest book dismemberment had shortly before come wafting down the Pander mail-chute.

Kapka Kassabova, for those of you who haven’t heard, is ‘“something more than an immigrant poet” – she is an award-winning poet whose first book, All Roads lead to the Sea, won her a Montana award’ … to quote from the blurb in the Going West Literary Festival booklet. She’s also written a novel, Reconnaissance, due out later this year from Penguin, and now this second collection of poems. She is, originally, from Bulgaria.

It soon became clear that, regardless of the merit (or lack of it) in her poetry, what interested us most about her was the huge eagerness with which she’s been hailed and held up by the literary establishment here. Is it simply that we’re hankering after a Korzeniowski/Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov of our own, or is there something about her work itself which explains it?

You might not believe it, but the Pander is not in the business of character assassination. None of us have ever met Ms. Kassabova, nor can we detect in ourselves any particular ill-will against her, but the curious phenomenon of her rise to stardom does seem to say interesting things about our cultural standards. We therefore decided to attempt to treat the problem from all sides (as it were) by compiling a collective review-symposium both of her book and her place in New Zealand letters.

My Problem

Reading Kapka Kassabova’s book has made me formulate a rather tendentious theory about poetry. Poetry is interesting when it:

1. intelligently and adroitly manipulates levels of language;
2. discusses interesting subject-matter;
3. introduces us to an engaging personality.

Some poets can do all three, others only one, but if you don’t do any of them, then you’re in trouble.

Let me introduce a few out-of-context quotes from her book:

no irony intended (p.15)

… clearly
the script needs editing (p.10)

you have no sense of the absurd –
you’ve never lost anything (p.53)

For me, that about sums up the problem. Kassabova’s command of English idiom is certainly impressive, but it is inadequate to the technical problems she has set herself. She is accordingly restricted to a kind of “high poetic” dialect extremely attractive to people brought up on a diet of woolly romanticism (Fairburn, early Baxter et al.), but having nothing to do with Poundian insistence on the real rhythms of speech. Hence blatant clichés such as “I look at the face / its gratuitous beauty / ravaging …” (p.6). Hence also bizarre failures of tone such as “deaf and limbless for the same reason …” (p.2). (Perhaps she meant to say deaf and legless for the same reason …) So much for level one, the stock-in-trade of most of our best poets (Tuwhare, Smithyman, Allen Curnow among them).

As far as level two goes, the blurb on the back of her book is a good example of the way her mind works:

You are a body of phantom limbs, remembering a wholeness you never noticed. Dismemberment is what you end with.

On the evidence of her book, she loves this kind of airy abstraction. She resolutely eschews concrete details. The poem about her mother on page 27 begins as an exception to this rule, but soon modulates off into high metaphysical generalisations. Poets such as Michael Harlow (and, again, Smithyman) have succeeded in writing in this rather Rilkean mode here, but they had the advantage of a lifetime’s experience, and were careful to provide their ideas with a minute particularity of setting.

Level three is perhaps the most disappointing of all. Kapka Kassabova must have led an interesting life, and she clearly fascinates a lot of the journalists who write about her, but it’s surprising how little of this comes across in her poetry. I’m not looking for confessional revelations here – just a sense of the person addressing me. Not necessarily Raymond Carver (let alone Charles Bukowski), but just someone definite. From these poems (sans picture and blurb) I’d gather our author was female, young, occasionally in love, addicted to lofty poeticisms, and allergic to detail.

It’s a crude, blunt way of putting it, but this book should never have been published. Not, at any rate, in its present form. It’s doing no favours to Kassabova, who clearly must have a lot of determination and sticking power to have got so far since she arrived in this country. The real problem, though, is that it’s misleading for people who are already puzzled enough by this strange thing called poetry. They’re only too likely to think that this sort of stuff – humourless, self-absorbed, technically unadventurous while still looking “foreign” (“overseas experience”), vaguely lyrical and lovey-dovey and with lots of trees and flowers and ruins and moonlight – is poetry.

Shame, then, on Bill Manhire, who’s praised her “verbal excellence,” and “sustained thinking in a musical framework: the various relations of intelligence.” Have we been reading the same book? This is Elder-Statesman-of-NZ-Letters-speak. I don’t believe he means it for a second. He knows as well as the rest of us the difference between real poetry (like some of his), enlarging our sensibilities and our knowledge of the various worlds we inhabit, and ghastly lapses such as:

to be the nipple of pleasure
licked by the panting dogs of summer (p.44); or

… you became
the ultimate dwarf of death (p.29).

We have her own word for it that she wasn’t being ironic.

Summing Up

Kassabova, then, could be seen as a triumph of publicity over poetry: cynically promoted by people who understand the first, but have no real interest or belief in the second. She’s perfect for the part: young, foreign, gifted. Who cares if her writing is so clearly not (yet) up to the mark?

On a personal level, I’m sure we all hope that she will be able some day to live down all this excessive praise for mediocre work, but on the level of New Zealand culture as a whole, isn’t it about time we stopped looking for another wunderkind, and started to savour the subversive virtues of our own homegrown product?

(2/99)

Pander 6/7 (1999): 41-43.

[1064 wds]


Pander 6/7 (1999)


•

Alan Loney: Sidetracks (1999)

Pander 6/7 (March 1999)

Alan Loney. Sidetracks: Notebooks 1976-1991. Auckland: AUP, 1998. [vi] + 81pp.

Alan Loney: Sidetracks (1998)

Robert Creeley’s blurb:

Alan Loney’s work has always been at the cutting edge of New Zealand’s place in world literature.

Always? Like, even before it was written, kind of? Or is it that when you’re talking about cutting into (or out of) world literature, with your edge (as it were), that he was already there. All the time.

He is a poet of international stature, whose mastery has become a resource for us all.

What’s “international stature”? Is that when you’re really tall, or really short? Whatever it is, you do it in lots of countries at the same time. But it’s a resource. For all of us (other poets of international stature, that is) – oblique self-praise, when you break it down.

This book is a consummate instance of his compelling and well-earned authority.

Oh, it’s a consummate instance, is it? As opposed to a partial or temporary instance. But anyway, he’s earned it, right enough. It’s compelling – really.

Sorry for this sidetracking preamble. The problem is that I’m intensely sympathetic to Loney’s project of disintegrating, but I can feel him wanting to be approved of all the time, through it. The poems and fragments accordingly have a tendency to explain themselves, to resolve. Even where one doesn’t (“a fat kid / on a bike”), the next will:

tothe
joinhalves

At the reading at his launch (after an intensely embarrassing intro where we were primed with anecdotes about what a wonderful reader he was), the audience ooh’d and ah’d at particularly plangent lines. I’d have rather they screamed, or at the very least looked indignant.

This is playing it safe, alas. Everyone loves a fragment: it’s integral to the modernist aesthetic, after all.

As I write, in the London bar, a cackling goes up around me as of mad hyenas at feeding time – a realm beyond sight and sound. Why do I put that in? The Twilight Zone. I’m a little disappointed by the book, it’s true, but I can certainly appreciate why Alan Loney has shaken the dust of Auckland off his feet and left for Melbourne.

He’s tired of being regarded as a wild-eyed experimentalist for daring the mildest deviations from the party line: for reading (let alone imitating) the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets; even (at this late date) for entertaining Black Mountaineers. Robert Creeley was only trying to be nice when he wrote that little puff, which is why it’s naughty of me to break it down that way (as if he could care less). It does illustrate the paradox of the book under review, though.

Maybe we expected too much. Alan Loney has given enough. Since he came to Auckland in the early nineties, he’s set up a new printing press; edited an intensely interesting magazine, A Brief Description of the Whole World; and encouraged many, many writers – young and old – stultified by the orthodoxies of the poetry “scene.”

It’s time to stop looking to him, and look to ourselves instead. The pieces in this book are lovely. It’s a beautiful book. I’m going to be reading in it for quite some time. Once and for all it’s time to stop squabbling – wanting to radicalise or calm down the serene (or wild-eyed) Loney of our mind’s eye. Bon Voyage, Alan. Thanks for everything you’ve done for us – as you said at the launch, it’s time to look after number one. I hope it all works out.

(10/98)

Pander 6/7 (1999): 49.

[579 wds]


Pander 6/7 (1999)


•

e-mailing venus (1999)

Pander 6/7 (March 1999)

e-mailing venus: Translations of Poets from Sappho Onwards. Ed. Diana Harris and Anna Jackson. Auckland: Venus Press, 1998.

Sandro Botticelli: The Birth of Venus (1485-86)

You know how it is when you have a whip-round. One person’s got ten bucks, another fifty cents, Billy’s only got two buttons and an old lifesaver, but somehow it always adds up to enough to go and buy fish ‘n’ chips. There doesn’t seem a great deal of point in looking at this extremely eclectic set of poems / translations (the term is fairly loosely applied) by a bunch of people at Auckland University as a book, exactly, so I’ll just comment on a few of the more interesting contributions.

C. K. Stead is pretending to be Horace instead of Catullus for a change, and it’s quite a welcome one. These are nice, if slight.

Murray Edmond does his thing, well. The second of his two poems, a collaboration with his linguist son Jacob, is an interesting example of that old dilemma of echoing form or content. It seems to work as a poem, which is the only sane criterion.

Charlotte Craw is someone to watch. She clearly has a great deal of talent and ingenuity, but I have to confess that I think these three pieces disastrously wanky, consisting (as they do), of variations on various variations of Pound, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens. But she’s probably the real thing, for all that, if she can get over that kind of in-house stuff.

Anna Jackson’s “futurist translation of the inferno” is the most solid contribution, though I don’t see anything particularly “futurist” about it. I like the idea very much, and the babyish diction is deceptively complex. The trouble is that she doesn’t have a great deal to say except that there are a lot of “lustful gluttons” on Ponsonby road. Beside that, her categories of the naughty (somehow calling them the “damned” seems a little exaggerated) are spineless people, partygoers, stockbrokers, therapists, trouble-makers, bad parents, and finally “the artists who gave up painting, the poets / who were too busy teaching.” Yep, pretty bad, all right. The only trouble is that Dante was harrowing his own heart, whereas Anna is ticking off everyone else. Nice to get back to the family at the end, but it’s hard to believe she really means or believes it.

Paula Green insisted on the ugly font used for her poem, I’m told. Very much her usual, accomplished thing. The bit of Italian included en face doesn’t seem to have much to do with her poem, but it looks very attractive.

Robert Sullivan has contributed some poems from his forthcoming Star Waka (every poem’s got to have a reference to a star and/or a waka). There are also poems by Elizabeth Wilson and Diana Harris.

Whew, what a sarcastic bastard this reviewer is! Actually, I think the whole idea’s kind of cool, and I enjoyed reading through it. I felt a bit frustrated by a lack of drive in most of the pieces, but they’re all intelligent, and we can always do with more intelligence in the poetry scene. It’s a handsome book, and well worth reading, but it could have been much better if the contributors had treated as a bit less of a grab-bag, and a bit more of a homage to that goddess WHO RULES US ALL!

(30/3/99)

Pander 6/7 (1999): 53-54.

[556 wds]


Pander 6/7 (1999)


•

Spin 33: Editorial

Jack Ross, ed.: Spin 33 (March 1999)

Editorial

William Blake

As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent, the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb: his writings are the linen clothes folded up.

– William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793)

Sometimes looking a little cracked is the best response to interesting times, as Blake found at the turn of his century.

Some might see this Spin 33 (apparently a significant number – see above) as unduly weighted towards the dislocated and disjointed, but I’d prefer to see that as inclusiveness. After all, there are plenty of well-crafted lyrics in here as well. Something (I’d like to think) for everyone.

In the end, though, you have to be honest even to your own prejudices, which is why I’ve included some essays and comments on poetics at the end of the issue. I, personally, can see no advantage in living in a cul-de-sac, and thus I prefer that poetry which seems to me to be gesturing outwards. Call it “experimental” if you like – I have one rule of thumb. If someone says: “That could never be a poem,” that’s what your next poem should be.

(2/99)

Spin 33 (1999): 2.

[201 wds]

Spin 33 (1999)


•

Spin: Poetics (1999)

Jack Ross, ed.: Spin 33 (March 1999)

Poetics

Kathy Acker

The shit is a poet. She’s a poet because she tells everyone to go to hell.
– Kathy Acker

Jack is an idiot, so he needs an idiot’s guide. Some of the rest of you might benefit from it, too. Nor is he especially afraid of stating the obvious. Here goes, then:

Any genre of writing – political analysis, romantic novels, mathematical proofs, Ronald Reagan’s vomittings – as soon as its meaning is destroyed becomes literature.
– Kathy Acker

The three most-often-quoted Modernist mantras about the Art of Poetry [Greek: poïesis = “making”] are:

feel mad incurable wants for sex (symbols) you can’t have.
– Kathy Acker

1. “No ideas but in things” (William Carlos Williams).
2. “Nothing you couldn’t, in the stress of some emotion, actually say” (Ezra Pound).
3. “Great poetry can communicate before it is understood” (T. S. Eliot).

I’m not claiming any originality here. I’m just in love with the late Kathy Acker, which is why I keep on quoting from her. Why shouldn’t I? I’m not a Modernist. I like destroying meaning because meaning keeps me in my place. I want to create a universe where I get enough of everything. But it has to be convincing enough to fool me as well as you.

1. What’s a thing? Does it have to be physical? Is the number seven a thing, or an idea? “I refute it thus,” said Doctor Johnson of Berkeleyan Idealism, kicking a stone. Boswell pointed out that this was not logical. Sam was one ahead of him there, though. By worrying about the nature of a thing, you’re already worrying at what poetry is and should be.


2. What can you actually say? Jack has said some pretty odd things in his time, in a variety of different tongues, and has earned himself some pretty funny looks. He’s even said “forsooth,” and (at least once): “Some, when the bagpipe sings i’ the nose, cannot contain their urine.” You do have to watch out what you say, though, if you want to be understood. If you say the wrong thing, sometimes people burst into tears. Maybe even when you say the right thing.


3. How can something communicate before it is understood? Can’t see it. It don’t make no sense. When Jack was younger he had a Russian teacher who credited this doctrine, and who accordingly read Goethe’s ballad “Der Erlkönig” out loud to the class, in German. There was a squeaky voice for the little boy and a growly voice for the rest – occasionally the word “farter” came up. And that was that.

I’m more interested in exterminating rational thought, the sleep of reason which breeds monsters, than in wit. Trying to be witty never made me any happier, and the only point of any poem I write/make is to find models which make happiness (however defined) – for me or others – more probable.

But is that really the point? Jack doesn’t claim to understand Wallace Stevens, but he thinks that “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” is a beautiful title, even though he doesn’t have the faintest idea what it means. Jack likes music, too, without having to have it explained to him.

There are 6 quotes in this essay, which should suggest to you the absence of a 7th.

Jack’s own axioms come down to a few words, therefore:

• Dislocate your sense of language.

If it isn’t unsettling, then it’s not really alive, not interesting. The complexities of existing inside language – that’s our subject-matter.


• Idea + idea = spark.

You can see the spark as an electrical connection, as an explosion, as a chemical reaction. The point is that it must be strong enough to cross the empty air between you and your other (reader/audience). Etheric projection, that’s what we have to achieve. It’s not really possible, of course, but people keep on doing it anyway.

As for larger implications, Jack has one more proposition to make up the three:


• All poets secretly believe themselves to have some conduit to forces beyond themselves.

There are 2 columns, which implies that everything worth saying is in the gap between them.

You can call it History, the Muse, God, Inspiration, but try writing poetry without it and see how far you get. It doesn’t excuse you any lapses, of course, but it means you’ve got to clean out your cloth ears and listen. “You must change your life,” as Rilke’s archaic Apollo urged (through the medium of Kendrick Smithyman).

I told you Jack wasn’t afraid of stating the obvious.

(2/99)

Spin 33 (1999): 58-59.
[Available at: Writers’ Web Zine (24/2/2000)].

[757 wds]

Spin 33 (1999)


•

Leicester Kyle: A Machinery for Pain (1999)

Jack Ross, ed.: Spin 33 (March 1999)

A Machinery for Pain, by Leicester Kyle, Heteropholis Press, Millerton, c/o Postal Agency, Ngakawau, Buller, $10, 44pp, Jan 1999.

Leicester Kyle: A Machinery for Pain (1999)

Dear Leicester,

I’ve read A Machinery for Pain through a few times now. The central body of it works very well, I think. A nicely ironised set of prescriptions. Personally I’d feel inclined to do something more complex with the formatting of the various herbal remedies – put them as footnotes or marginal notes, but it’s not really a big problem. The ending is quite lovely: invocation of the Neinei tree “whose sap is the sorrows of God.” Moving and effective.

My real proviso is with the first section, “The Pain.” This seems to me 1/ too long, and 2/ too indirect, to give the utterly desolate impression I take it you’re going for. I think it could be cut down to a page or two without great loss. As it is, it somewhat detracts from (by anticipating) the tone of the central – and most original – section.

I’m sure you’ll totally disagree (in fact, nobody ever does seem to agree with my readings of their poems, but never mind). You can get your revenge on some of my works when I get down there. We can get pissed on Miner’s Dark and try and kill each other, then have a weeping, maudlin reconciliation.

Love, Jack

(2/99)

Spin 33 (1999): 63.
[Available at: Leicester Kyle: Index (2011)]

[223 wds]

Spin 33 (1999)


•

Poetry Live (1998)

Sunday Star-Times (18/10/98)

It’s Standing Room Only for the Rekindling of Live Lines:
Poetry Live at the Alleluya Café

Alleluya Bar & Café

Some scream; others mumble. Some recite from memory; others cling to their little bundles of scribbled or typewritten pages. There’s only one microphone – one reader, or singer, or musician at a time – but anyone is free to use it. At most of the tables there are heads bent over, testing words, chewing pens, writing down those elusive few lines which will somehow come across.

The audience is as mixed as the performers. Some, a few, are there every week; others just drifted in off the street for a coffee, or because they were attracted by the din. The Alleluya is, after all, usually just another Karangahape Road café. “Poetry Live is three hours on Wednesday nights,” says Peter Hawkesby, the owner. “I’m here seven days a week.”

His café boasts one of the best views in Auckland. During the day, the gentle green of Myers Park predominates; as night falls, the Chinese-blue sceptre of the Sky tower looms up behind the high glass windows. And St. Kevin’s arcade, though a little dilapidated, is an Art Deco gem. It was built in the 1920s, and still has its original ornamented shop-fronts and plaster ceilings. In the 1950s it played host to the Beats; now, in the 1990s, it’s home to the moveable feast called Poetry Live.

Founded in 1979 by the performance poet David Mitchell, Poetry Live has been migrating ever since from venue to venue – a kind of Cook’s tour of the older Auckland pubs: the Globe, the Gluepot, the Albion, the Shakespeare, the Empire. Most New Zealand poets have read there at one time or another, in one or other of these incarnations. Is this the end of its wanderings? Almost certainly not.

Probably only one person, Tim Bush, has been coming all that time, though even he admits to missing “a year or two. This’ll be my eighteenth or nineteenth. It’s not absolutely every week, though. We do finish a bit before Christmas, and then break till the end of January.”

It’s slightly staggering to think of that many poetry evenings, over that length of time: not a thousand and one, but more like 9,000 nights of guest poets, musicians, and MCs (different each week), as well as all those readers (and hecklers!) from the floor.

“David Mitchell was clear on the rules: ‘Read your own. Anyone can read, so long as they read their own.’”

Tim goes on to say, “I’m not always the oldest – I’m 63. It’s all ages, though it’s true they’re mostly young. Over the years it’s got more political, loud, and relevant. We get students, balladeers with pamphlets to sell, ‘poet laureates’ from the suburbs … all sorts, really.”

Judy McNeil, who has been administering Poetry Live since 1995 – as well as producing its magazine (started by Briony Jagger in 1992 as Auckland Live, and now called Tongue in Your Ear) – insists that “the whole idea is to provide an accepting kind of audience who don’t sit in judgement, who aren’t there to be critical.”

It hasn’t always been like that, though. Robert Sullivan, guest poet on one of the nights I was there, says he found the old Albion “gloomy and intricate,” with an audience to match. “People got pushed away from the mike, and the crowd would throw things if they didn’t like you.”

Briony Jagger, another guest poet, back after a long absence, agrees: “It was so smoky in the Albion that I had to go out every few minutes to breathe. The Shakespeare, on the other hand, had lounge chairs and sofas, and on a cold night there’d be a roaring fire to warm you up.” The audience at the Alleluya can get a bit thin in winter, but there’s generally someone at every table. “Some nights it’s standing room only,” puts in Judy.

“The other day we had a seventeen-year-old who came in for the first time, got inspired, and started to write on the spot. The next week he got up and read it,” this week’s MC, Annora Gollop, tells me. “It was good. Some of what we get is more therapy than poetry, admittedly, but people here are as tolerant of that as they are of a more literary style.”

Annora used to attend live poetry readings in Wellington. “There are the Poetry NZ readings for the really well-established poets, and then places like the Angus Inn in Upper Hutt which offer a mixture: pub poetry as well as the rest.” Other visitors from Christchurch, Dunedin, Nelson are anxious to tell me about the open mike venues in their own cities.

Even in Auckland, Poetry Live is not without competition. Over the years there have been numerous other places for live poetry, as well as workshop and performance groups. Just in the last month a rival has started up across the road: Friday nights at the Ron Riddell’s Live Poets’ Café. Most of the people I spoke to saw this as a healthy thing. They were happy to go to both.

“It can be a little forbidding at first, but there’s good will under the surface,” one young poet, Damian McGregor, confides to me. “I started coming at first because it didn’t cost me any money, but then I found I had a lot to learn from it.”

One thing is certain. As long as every table is full on Wednesday nights, as long as there’s a real need for a place that’s simply “creative: where people can just stand up and sing” – or recite – or shout – this long-running show is unlikely to close.

Poetry Live: 7.30-10.30, every Wednesday night, Alleluya Café, St. Kevin’s Arcade, Karangahape Road, Central Auckland.

(22/8-9/98)

Sunday Star-Times (October 18, 1998): F4.

[949 wds]


Sunday Star-Times (18/10/98)


•

Kathy Goes to Mexico (1998)

Pander 5 (Spring 1998)

Kathy Goes to Mexico:
In Memoriam Kathy Acker, d. 30/11/97.

Kathy Acker (1943-1997)

He who loves the white ones with red lips
must also kiss their feet

– Ahmad ibn Huseyn al-Muftī.

An American girl told me of a friend of hers who was writing a thesis on the English Civil War. One day some of his colleagues got into his files, and replaced the words Roundheads and Cavaliers with “shitheads” and “cocksuckers.” Next day he logged on to learn that “the cocksuckers were convinced of the divine right of kings,” and “the shitheads under Cromwell routed the cocksuckers at Naseby.” The damage was easy enough to reverse, but that momentary sense of shock, of dislocation must have been profound. That story has always reminded me, somehow, of Kathy Acker.

It was (I’m almost sure) November 1987, and I was snouting through the shelves of a little second-hand bookshop called Till’s, in Edinburgh. Seeing the title Blood and Guts in High School on the back of a big white Picador book, I took it down and began to leaf idly through. On page 30 there is a large, crude line-drawing of a cock, with the caption (in typed caps): TURN MY EYES INSANE. On page 46 the dream-maps begin, followed by Persian language-lessons, translations from Propertius and César Vallejo, ranting poems, Mallarméan prose texts … I was amazed, exhilarated – cagey. What was all this about? Was there anything of substance here, or just the thrill of unbridled experimentation? Page 110 read:

SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
sex is sweet

I wanted it to be true, I wanted this to be good – but I wasn’t convinced. One thing was certain: the possibility was worth two pounds.

You see (I hope), the connection with the cocksucker story. Was Kathy Acker simply scrawling obscenities over the spaces in other people’s texts (not that there’s anything wrong with that), or was there something more? Could she be that hoped-for visionary – that prophet of the scribbled palimpsest of our bodies we’d been waiting for so long? The one who could find words for the madness in our screwed-up heads?

The society in which I’m living is totally fucked-up. I don’t know what to do. I’m just one person and I’m not very good at anything. I don’t want to live in hell my whole life. If I knew how this society got so fucked-up, if we all knew, maybe we’d have a way of destroying hell. (Blood, 66)

I still don’t know the answer to these questions, but I have learned one thing. Kathy was a very serious writer. There was nothing frivolous or arbitrary in the excesses of her texts, “novels” or “essays” as might be. She was wild about not being free, and her indignation was her art.

•

When I speak of the aspiration towards the beautiful … I am not for a moment suggesting that art should shun the ‘dirt’ of the world. On the contrary! The artistic image is always a metonym, where one thing is substituted for another, the smaller for the greater. To tell of what is living, the artist uses something dead; to speak of the infinite, he shows the finite.

– Andrey Tarkovsky

I’m very staid compared with my students … No one ever told me you could walk around with a strap-on, having orgasms.

– Kathy Acker. (Sirius interview)

Who would have thought one could postulate a connection between Tarkovsky, cinematic sculptor in time, and Acker, wildest of the wild girls? Yet they seem very close to me. They’re both interested in joy, in the good life, in pleasure – they both express this through a preoccupation with pain. Kathy dedicated Empire of the Senseless to her tattooist; Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Andrey Rublyov contains scenes of torture and blinding so graphic they made its first audiences vomit and faint.

You know, everyone’s always talking about trauma and pain and how this society isn’t working, that we shouldn’t have racism and sexism, but we never talk in positive terms – like what joy would be, what it would be like to have a totally great existence. (Sirius interview)

•

RUS: I’m writing a piece … called “A User’s Guide to Trendy French Intellectuals” that thoroughly trashes all those people.
KA: You’re so dumb, man. They’re cool. (Sirius interview)

In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. When one reads her interviews Kathy sounds like the sole literate person in a generation of dunces. Patiently, calmly she reminds her interlocutors of the existence of the French language, of Catullus, of the Black Mountain poets. They interrupt with a pitiful babble of computer jargon and self-advertisement. Dumb.

I think that’s one of the things I loved about her most. She was so literary. She was an egghead like the rest of us, and yet: “One of my students had a piercing through her labia. And she told me about how when you ride on a motorcycle, the little bead on the ring acts like a vibrator. Her story turned me on so I did it. I got two” (Sirius interview). She was cool. She was our Lawrence of Arabia – with one hand translating Latin, with the other masturbating endlessly, mindlessly, in the watches of the night.

The one thing I’m determined not to do is wax literary critical about her “method,” her theories of composition. One of the other Academic cocksuckers can do that. “I do what I do,” said Kathy. “I don’t think about strategies. … I think it’s best to be as open as possible, and just do what you do, and let people make of it what they want.” (X interview). There are ironies in that, but that’s not what I want to talk about. It’s her ends that interest me.

There are, however, three names which simply must be mentioned. It wouldn’t be fair not to: Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, Jean Genet. Genet – the “Janey” of Blood and Guts – helped define the masochistic sex-victims of her novels (perhaps, had she lived, she might have provided us with an analogue to his last book, the beautiful Prisoner of Love). Burroughs (along with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets), bequeathed her the cut-ups and extreme textual discontinuities. Bataille, in her own words, “looked for models for people to have totally great existences” (Sirius interview). They shared a Messianic vision of a less deformed world. Oh, and there’s one more name: Antonin Artaud. I scarcely dare say anything at all about that divine madman. Kathy ended her essay on le récit by asking:

Do you want more? Many roads lead out of these texts. (“Suggested Reading List,” 1994)

But those are roads you’ve got to travel alone.

•

The trip to Mexico was surreal. We rented a big van and hired a nurse … The first time Kathy wanted to pee Judith suggested she pee outside, on the ground ... K loved this (of course). After she peed she wanted to sit in the sun, where she was squatting with just her shirt pulled up over her waist. Then dream-like she said, “the sun feels so good on my cunt!” And the nurse, still rather midwestern and proper, smiled and said “oooo girl!”

– Matias Viegener.

I am a sentimentalist, I admit that. I’m easily swayed by the cheapest of devices in fiction or up on the big screen. But something in her lover’s long account of Kathy’s lonely death in that mad Mexican cancer clinic, her veins pumped full of carrot juice, seems to go beyond literature into what’s real. Why the fuck did she have to die? “The sun feels so good on my cunt.” It wasn’t her time to go. It meant a lot to know that she was there, somewhere, ranting away: “we left the pirate girls to do what pirate girls do.” Pussy, King of the Pirates, her last book. As Richard Kadrey put it in his obituary: “all the critics who hated it can kiss my ass.”

Somebody told me nobody reads anymore, but I think nobody is anymore. Time has and is being reduced because the plants must spring up. I can see them now, tremendous white and red roses, or my cunt, and I want to do more than just see.

There’s a lot that’s moving in Eurydice in the Underworld, the novel she was working on when she died. And that is what we’re left with now: twelve novels, two books of essays, innumerable reviews, texts, interviews:

I always think of role playing as being something you’re not. I don’t role play like that probably ‘cos … I basically have no sense of who I am.

I was never ever interested in shocking people. People got shocked, but that was their business.

Sex to me is like hunger, and I am damn hungry most of the time.

These are good things to say, but other people could have said them. The Rosie X. interview I’m quoting from ends with something really obscene and shocking, though:

RX: You must be making a lot of money.
KA: Fuck I am not! Why do you think I am working so hard!

It’s not just about art, and sex, and identity, it’s about money – and that is the bottom line.

Finally, though, I’ve got to come back to poetry, which is where I came in, to those sublime versions of Propertius in Blood and Guts. I know she said “If there are to be poets now, they cannot be romantics … Catharsis, that is poetry, takes place physically” (Eurydice), but they read as beautifully to me now as they did then, ten years ago, as they always will:

Just like Ariadne’s just dead on the empty shore
‘Cause Theseus has abandoned her,
Just like Andromeda who’s just gotten away from a horrible green sea-monster
Sleeps on the sharp spikes of rocks,
Just like from endless drinking, drugs, and sex
a Bacchante drops dead on soft sweet grass:
so I see lightly breathing
Slave Trader …

and outside the night, night becomes everything.

Works Cited:

• Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. 1978. In Blood and Guts in High School, plus two. London: Picador, 1984. 5-165.
• Acker, Kathy. Kathy Goes to Haiti. 1978. In Young Lust. London: Pandora, 1989. 5-170.
• Acker, Kathy. Empire of the Senseless. London: Picador, 1988.
• Acker, Kathy. “Suggested Reading List for le récit.” U of Idaho. Sep. 1994.
  [http://acker.thehub.com.au/read.html]
• Acker, Kathy. Pussy, King of the Pirates. New York: Grove Press, 1996.
• Acker, Kathy. Eurydice in the Underworld. London: Arcadia Books, 1997.
• Ghanim, Mohammad ‘Abdah. “Yemeni Poetry from the Pre-Islamic Age to the Beginning of the Modern Era.” In Yemen: 3000 Years of Art and Civilisation in Arabia Felix, ed. Werner Daum. Innsbruch: Pinguin / Frankfurt: Umschau, 1987.
• Kadrey, Richard. “Black Tarantula: The Intense Life and Uncompromising Death of Renegade Writer Kathy Acker.” Salon, 3 Dec. 1997.
  [http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/1997/12/03media.html]
• Sirius, R. U. “Kathy Acker: Where Does She Get Off? An Interview.” Wired. c.1994. [http://www.altx.com/io/acker1.html]
• Tarkovsky, Andrey. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair. 1986. London: Faber, 1989.
• Viegener, Matias. “Matias Speaks.” 1997. [http://acker.thehub.com.au/matias.html]
• X, Rosie. “Pussy and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance; or, How to be a Pirate on-line and channel your energies so as to remember your dreams … Kathy Acker interviewed.” Geekgirl. 1995. [http://206.251.6.116/geekgirl/002manga/acker.html]

(8/98)

Pander 5 (1998): 26-27.

[1939 wds]


Pander 5 (1998)


•

Hotere: Out the Black Window (1998)

Pander 5 (Spring 1998)

Hotere: Out the Black Window. Ralph Hotere’s Work with New Zealand Poets, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki – a City Gallery, Wellington Touring Exhibition (July 4th to September 6th, 1998).

Greogry O'Brien: Hotere: Out the Black Window (1998)

Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land

The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s. This passage (chapter 2, verses 10-12) is one of the most beautiful aubades, dawn-songs, ever written – who knows when, or by whom? Ralph Hotere has included some of the words on a vast dark canvas in one of the far rooms of his travelling exhibition Out the Black Window. It seems as good a test case as any.

Test case for what? Well, at the poetry reading held at the Auckland Art Gallery on Saturday, August 1st, there seemed to be a consensus that we – audience and poets – liked the paintings, but didn’t have much to say beyond that bare fact. Ian Wedde read out his superb “Pathway to the Sea,” and talked about cooking feeds of mussels on the beach. Hotere has a dark sense of humour, he told us, and a way with silence.

Cilla McQueen, who was married to the painter for twelve years (until 1986), read a number of poems, including the text she compiled from Gulf War commentaries in Time and Newsweek for use in his Song of Solomon (1991):

sharpbreak revenge warpath gas bodybag bodybag loopgas blitz pin
cluster destroy tactical moth atomicflame mother of germbattles shift

the flowers appear on the earth

There are fourteen couplets, for the fourteen stations of the cross, each followed by a fragment from the original Song. What McQueen referred to as this “conscious un-language” of war was, she said, designed to contrast with its lyric beauty.

I wondered how much of the conception of the painting was hers, and how much his. The answer was almost entirely his – “cross-pollination, not collaboration.” She could not tell me where the Arabic text just visible at the bottom of the picture came from. (My Arabic teacher, Mr. Alan Dabaliz, tells me that it translates roughly as “Libyans Unite!” Copied, perhaps, from some news bulletin?)

Gregory O’Brien’s exhibition catalogue claims that the “oily black inks” of the painting “evoke the oil slicks” of burning Kuwait, the “trails of dots … become tracer fire in the night sky,” and the “horizontal panels of white and black denote the desert landscape.” Perhaps so.

My problem is with this easy sense of an equation. Song of Solomon = beauty; Time Magazine = warspeak. The black is the oil; the fourteen numbers Christ’s passion; the white is the desert. I have no objections to didacticism in itself, but I want to know if what I’m looking at is an anti-war poster, or a work of lasting complexity. It’s a question of genre. The Gulf War’s been over for seven years now. Is Hotere’s work, then, so time-bound?

The poets are little help here. They (naturally enough) trust Hotere to handle the visual side, while he trusts them to handle the verbal. Does the juxtaposition of these two media: an already-written poem by Bill Manhire, or Cilla McQueen, or Hone Tuwhare, or Ian Wedde, with the unpainterly surfaces of Hotere’s scraps of metal, or canvas, or paper, work as the catalyst for an artistic fusion reaction? Or are we being sentimental to think so?

Nigra sum, sed formosa, filiae Ierusalem
I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem …
Look not upon me, because I am black,
Because the sun hath looked upon me:

The original Song of Solomon is not really so simple a work as analyses of the painting would make it appear. It is, it’s true, a marriage song, conveyed through a series of voices: The “dark but comely” Shulamite, her Beloved, the Choruses of her brothers and the daughters of Jerusalem. It’s a love poem, but it’s also about pain and misunderstanding. The Shulamite wanders through the city at night till “The watchmen … found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me.”

I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
If ye find my beloved, that ye tell him,
That I am sick of love …

The second time I visited the exhibition there were groups of sixth and seventh form girls seated in front of the paintings, scribbling industriously in their bursary notebooks – a frame, a few lines, some words of text: “O Africa,” “Rain,” “Wulf.”

What do the words mean to them? Anything? Or do they take them on trust, like the rest of our incomprehensible charades of endlessly-deferred meaning? I fear I may be looking for a sense of closure unattainable in art or life, but I find it hard to assent to smug readings of these paintings of Hotere’s as mere proof of his being on the “right” side in a series of recent controversies. Song of Solomon may have been inspired by the Gulf War, but it seems to me as much about the complexities of love between two people as the jagged confrontation of two cultures: “Jealousy is as cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.”

The last part of this strangest, most modern of poems assures us that:

Many waters cannot quench love,
Neither can the floods drown it

But what does it mean by that bitter coda: “If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned”? That there are limits even to love?

If the poem matches the painting in complexity of levels, does that justify both? Is the fact that both are about light and dark, love and betrayal some kind of criterion of merit? – Libyans Unite! – Perhaps so. Perhaps that’s as close as I’ll get to an answer. It is, as I say, a kind of test case.

I’m going to be taking a lot more things on trust from now on.

(7/98)

Pander 5 (1998): 32-33.

[1037 wds]


Pander 5 (1998)


•

Lars von Trier & Guy Maddin (1998)

Pander 5 (Spring 1998)

Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight, directed by Noam Gonick (Canada, 1997) / Tranceformer: A Portrait of Lars von Trier, directed by Stig Björkman (Sweden, 1997).

Stig Björkman, dir.: Tranceformer (1997)

In the Hans Andersen story “The Snow Queen,” the little boy Kay is hit in the eye with a shard of ice which deprives all he sees of truth, meaning, emotion. “I have a troll shard,” explains Lars von Trier, in Stig Björkman’s bio-pic about the man whom this year’s Film Festival programme proudly proclaims “the great Dane.”

Guy Maddin, the Canadian director of such offbeat efforts as Careful (1992), and this year’s Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, has a rare spinal affliction. This has the effect of making him feel ghostly hands touching him all over, continually but unpredictably. “I consult them on camera angles,” he confides to us halfway through Noam Gonick’s scratchy 16 mm. documentary. “Sometimes they press me on the chest as if to say ‘stop here.’”

Maddin’s story is eccentric, to match his personality. It is also (presumably) true. He could stop the feather-light touching with the right medication, but that would make him too sleepy to work, so he prefers to strike a modus vivendi with his ghost-collaborators.

Von Trier’s story, like his name, is a fiction (he was born plain Lars Trier). The troll-shard is – of course – no more than a metaphor. Interestingly, he appears to have an obsession with truth and lies. “Everything you’ve ever heard about me, everything that’s ever been written about me, is a lie,” is the first comment he makes on camera. Later he assures us: “I never lie.” “It’s true, he never lies,” confirms his long-time producer. “I tell 400 lies a day.” How do you live without telling lies? Well, it’s a little like Brecht’s Der gute Mensch von Sezuan – you hire somebody else to do the lying for you.

And my point is …? Well, Guy Maddin’s film Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is, unfortunately, well-intentioned but indubitable crap. Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom II, another instalment in his mad miniseries about a Copenhagen hospital, is very irritating, but just as indubitably good.

Can I be so categorical about it? Don’t I just mean that I like Lars von Trier and dislike Guy Maddin? Alas, not so. Guy Maddin and his Winnipeg buddies are just the kind of shiftless slackers who instinctively appeal to me. I love his camera style – the crazy over-the-top ‘twenties pastiche (close-ups of hysterical wide-eyed white faces, blatantly cardboard sets, screamingly artificial montage) of the German Expressionist Careful, Eisensteinian Archangel (1988), and, well … sui generis Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1986). They deserve to be masterpieces for sheer oddball craziness.

And yet, there’s something in them that doesn’t quite work. They’re terribly wordy. They look beautiful, but the characters talk on and on, boringly and pretentiously. What’s more, his films are basically pointless. The pastiche of silent film styles is used, for the most part, for clumsy sight-gags. Like its predecessors, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is about unrequited love and jealousy. But it’s really about its French symbolist sets, soft-focus images and Romantic archetypes (the statue of Venus, the flooded bedchamber, the magic mirror). The actors stumble about aimlessly “acting” in whatever artificial style seems best to match the inane dialogue. Guy Maddin should be the cinematographer for some other director of genius, or design opera sets for Mozart’s Zauberflöte or Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. He doesn’t have the first idea about narrative.

Lars von Trier is obviously a bastard. There are some very funny scenes in Björkman’s film where irritated collaborators tease or insult him (Emily Watson of Breaking the Waves pokes her tongue out at him). His barely suppressed fury at these failures to obey recalls the antics of the ghastly Swedish surgeon in The Kingdom (“Danske Scum!”). He has a bushel of phobias and tics. And do his films have any more in the way of an ostensible subject than Guy Maddin’s? Well, no, not on the face of it. Europa (distributed here as Zentropa, 1991) is about a young American who chooses to become a train conductor in Germany just after the Second World War; Breaking the Waves (1996) implies that boundless female self-sacrifice can achieve miraculous cures; The Kingdom (1994-97) is a mishmash of ghosts, demons, visions, and bureaucratic inefficiency. None of these scenarios (except perhaps the last) has much connection with reality …

And yet the raw intensity of these works is something impossible to convey in print. The literally “hypnotic” opening of Zentropa, as the voice of Max von Sydow counts us down into the German night, remains one of the most powerful cinematic experiences of my life. It compelled total belief. Breaking the Waves drove me almost mad with seasickness and sentiment. The Kingdom makes one, by turns, scream with laughter, gag with nausea, cry with frustration. It’s maddening, insane, endless. Something about it puts it up with those works (Hamlet, Gawain and the Green Knight) which should be failures by almost any reasonable standard – except for the unfortunate fact that they happen to be works of genius.

Tranceformer ends with the story of a UFO which the young Lars allegedly saw while riding along in the family SAAB (“It was like a skate. Do you know what a skate looks like? It’s a large, flat fish.”) The exasperated interviewer asks, finally, if anyone else in the car saw it. “No,” replies Lars triumphantly, “So it could be a complete lie!”

Learn to lie, Guy. Unfortunately, in this business (as in so many others), nice guys finish last.

Noam Gonick, dir.: Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (1997)

(7/98)

Pander 5 (1998): 34-35.

[931 wds]


Pander 5 (1998)


•

Talking about Kendrick Smithyman (1998)

Scott Hamilton & Hamish Dewe, ed.: Salt 6 (August 1998)

Talking about Kendrick Smithyman

Robert Cross: Kendrick Smithyman (1922-1995)

Dramatis Personae:
RT – Richard Taylor
JR – Jack Ross
SH – S Hamilton

RT – I found Gregory O’Brien’s essay on Smithyman, the one that won that prize in Landfall, pretty disappointing…

JR – It doesn’t help you at all. I mean, I really want someone to help me to read Atua Wera – it’s this huge poem and it’s very complex – and O’Brien doesn’t give me any help. He doesn’t actually say anything useful about Atua Wera. He spends most of the essay talking about himself. He doesn’t even seem to have read the book.

RT – The other writing on Smithy should be better known. No-one’s read enough about the old bugger. I haven’t read enough. Maybe Jack’s read enough. Maybe Jack’s read everything, Scott?

JR – There’s only a small body of criticism …

RT – More people need to read him, first. And they have to read him in interesting ways. He needs a proper fan club…

JR – The book I want to put together would juxtapose poems by Smithyman and photographs of Northland landscapes. I want to emphasise the regionalist aspect of his work, I guess. It’s not the only aspect I’m interested in, but it’s an aspect I identify with especially strongly.

SH – I don’t see it as being that useful. Smithyman was a pretty well read guy, he was a very self conscious poet, and the decisions he made regarding the style, the vocabulary, the content of his poems – these are very important. These are what interest me. Smithyman is constantly making formal and conceptual decisions. Everything he writes is, at least obliquely, about poetics, and about the role of poetry and poets.

JR – I’m not trying to say my reading of Smithyman is the only one. Many are valid.

SH – … it seems to me that too many people use that line as a way of dodging justifying the actual decisions that they make regarding the presentation of a readings. I mean, I agree with you, I believe in a plurality of reading, a number of perspectives etc. etc., but, because of the functional aspect of literary criticism or Art History or Music Theory or Sociology or whatever, you end up, inevitably, privileging some reading over other readings. If you go up to give a one hour lecture on Kendrick Smithyman to 300 first year English students, you don’t have the time or the resources to talk about, say, Smithyman as a crusty old regionalist, and Smithyman as a sophisticated satirist, and Smithyman as New Zealand’s foremost proto-postmodernist and Smithyman as a travel poet, and Smithyman as a Empsonian brainteaser, the composer of marvellous crossword puzzle clues, and so on. I mean all of these models of Smithyman have been presented, quite convincingly I think, in essays and reviews. So which Smithyman are you going to choose? Some readings are just not going to be practical. It’s not just a question of time: you can’t hope to explain Smithyman’s use of unusual rhyme schemes or metrical patterns to 18 year olds who don’t know what a sonnet is. You end up having to privilege one reading over another. I’m not criticising the making of these choices, I just think that they should be defensible.

RT – I like the way everyone disagrees. Someone should put together a book of essays on Smithyman; every writer could take a different tack. There’s plenty of room for everyone… You know his poetry’s very rich, richer than probably any other New Zealander’s poetry. He’s a cunning old bastard. He’s a fox. There are layers and layers …

JR – But you see I distrust the view of literary history you seem to hold. You seem to have this ‘golden arrow’ view of things – you seem to think that everything’s evolving towards perfection and that a poem, for instance, should be analysed in terms of the role it plays in this evolution.

SH – I don’t hold that view at all.

RT – I don’t agree with that either …

JR – I think that a poem should be seen on its own terms, not in terms of its place in some literary evolution. I don’t believe in literary evolution.

SH – You’re simplifying things …

JR – I think Smithyman is always talking about something. He is interested in things. I think one of his main themes is the isolation of New Zealand, and the strange status someone like himself has, living at the margins of Western culture …

RT – I’m not sure …

JR – … and I think he comes to terms with that fact, and he often uses landscape, the landscape of the northern part of the North Island, to get this theme across.

SH – Well, Curnow called New Zealand a “hard homeland for poets”. Poets don’t have the well-defined role that they have in other societies, and I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. But I think these early guys – Curnow and R A K Mason and so on, and the second generation, Smithyman’s generation, felt very self-conscious about writing poetry. They needed some sort of justification. So Curnow embraced nationalism, became, in his early works, a sort of town crier. Mason and Baxter looked for a justification in political and religious life. To some extent, I think, they thought that the validity of their work rested on the validity of their beliefs. I think that Smithyman also felt the need to justify his poems, as well as a need to differentiate himself from people like Curnow and Baxter. I think that he fell back on a certain idea of poetry. I mean Smithyman created a persona for himself as an outsider, an erudite and detached observer, and a sort of crossword puzzler cum oracle cum public bar raconteur – and that’s where the notorious alleged obscurity of his work comes from. Oracles aren’t clear, you know? So I think that Smithyman’s obscurity is strategic – I mean he’s only obscure in a certain context. He’s obscure when he’s squeezed between Mason and Baxter in an anthology of New Zealand verse.

JR – I disagree. In fact, I couldn’t disagree with you more. I think Smithyman is obscure because of the complexity of his thinking. In fact, it’s better to call him a complex poet than an obscure poet.

RT – There is no obscurity …

(11/97)

Salt 6 (1998): 24-26.
[As “Poetics: Homages to Kendrick Smithyman (A Long Essay And A Short Talk).” Salt 6 online (9/99)]

[1040 wds]


Salt 6 (1998)


•