O’Connor & Mould: Working Voices (2004)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 29 (April 2004)

John O’Connor & Eric Mould, Working Voices. Auckland: Hallard Press, 2003. ISBN 0-86477-048-0. 102 pp. RRP $20.00.

John O’Connor & Eric Mould: Working Voices (2003)

I’m not convinced, I’m afraid. I do see the point of the undertaking (though it is, essentially, what Frank Sargeson was trying to do all those years ago: finding a voice for the voiceless), but unfortunately the results don’t live up to the ambitiousness of the experiment. Not for me, at any rate. Eric Mould’s farming vernacular poems seem painfully laboured: “I couldn’t watch it mate! / Even young Lou was in for a nip!” [40]. His other poems, though, the ones where he forgets the whole working-voices schtick and lets himself go, are fine: “Kotuku,” “Invitation,” “Snakes & ladders,” “Surface Effect” – a succession of precisely-delimited, beautifully-achieved effects. Wordiness is his besetting sin, though. The trimmer they become, the stronger the poems are.

John O’Connor’s experiments in public-bar anecdote don’t really work for me either. There are some flashes of insight in poems such as “Jazmin,” but when one compares these poems with the intense hellfire illumination of “The mechanical piano,” more growing-up-catholic-in-South-Christchurch poems to match the ones in A Particular Context, the contrast is just too damning. Almost every one of these childhood poems ticks like a Swiss watch: O’Connor at his very best. The “Six Sketches, I.M.” aren’t far behind them. Whether it was a good idea for two such diverse poets to publish together is another question – what’s certain is that this book includes a lot of excellent poems by each.

(1-2/04)

brief 29 (2004): 83.

[253 wds]

brief 29 (2004)


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Alistair Paterson: Summer on the Côte d’Azur (2004)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 29 (April 2004)

Alistair Paterson, Summer on the Côte d’Azur. Wellington: HeadworX, 2003. ISBN 0-473-098024-4. 80 pp. RRP $19.95.

Alistair Paterson: Summer on the Côte d’Azur (2003)

It’s strange that the word which kept coming to mind as I read these poems was “sweet.” I know that it’s become a disparaging term: a synonym for meretricious, saccharine, sentimental, but there’s a kind of luminous honesty and simplicity in the best of the poems included here which nevertheless seems to call for it. The blurb emphasises meetings with the famous, experiments in post-modernism, but what’s notable inside is the lack of weight Paterson ascribes to such transient phenomena. Howard Nemerov was “puzzled I was there (it showed though you tried to conceal it)” [13], and the poem’s emphasis swiftly shifts from a conversation about “what it was like to be famous – / & a well-paid poet in America” to the colours, the (imaginary) music, the luminous (I can’t avoid that word) nature of this peculiar memory. “Sharp, bright, particular” [38] – these are indeed the characteristics of Paterson’s small book. They perhaps show at their best in “Remarkable:”

remarkable
the way sparrows
preen themselves––

“… & remarkable / how the earth spins––” [43]. It is remarkable. The book is beautifully printed, also, and the very precise nature of font and layout help to emphasise this gem-like precision, these polished shards and facets of a poet’s mind.

(1-2/04)

brief 29 (2004): 83.

[225 wds]

brief 29 (2004)


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Mark Pirie: Dumber (2004)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 29 (April 2004)

Mark Pirie, Dumber (Poems). Wellington: Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2003. ISBN 1-86942-029-2. 64 pp. RRP $16.95.

Mark Pirie: Dumber (2003)

I’m extremely sympathetic to the idea of this book, at any rate as announced on the back cover blurb: “Mark Pirie’s new collection laments that our culture is getting ‘dumber’ and thus presents poems that are both parodic and purposely ‘dumb’.” I think that’s a gutsy plan. What’s more, I think it’s a plan that Pirie is well-equipped to carry out. He has the ability and (it seems) the will-power to do it. Dumbness is fascinating. It’s perhaps the topic in the world of Jackass, Survivor (and Shock & Awe). Unfortunately, I don’t really feel that he’s succeeded, and I suspect the main reason is haste. He’s now published six collections of poems and one of short stories in as many years, and that’s a pretty phenomenal rate of production for anyone, even a writer as energetic as Pirie (he’s also been running JAAM and building up a formidable contemporary poetry list through HeadworX in the same period – not to mention working fulltime). So no, I can’t give the present volume my vote of approval. The cover is clearly meant to recall one of those City Lights books of old: Howl, or Kaddish, or Lunch Poems, but this reads more like a group of odds and ends which have accumulated since the publication of his last. There’s some funny stuff in there, some lyrics as good as anything in his other books, but it fails to cohere. Longer pieces such as the dialogue “Love” seem to meander off after a promising beginning. In the end, I fear this was a wasted opportunity. That still leaves an essential job there to be done – by Mark, or someone similarly enterprising …

(1-2/04)

brief 29 (2004): 84.

[297 wds]

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John Pule, Tagata Kapakiloi (2004)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 29 (April 2004)

John Puhiatau Pule, Tagata Kapakiloi/Restless People. Auckland: Pohutukawa Press, 2004. ISBN 0-476-00230-3. 56 pp.

John Pule: lithograph from Tagata Kapakiloi/Restless People (2004)

The book itself is certainly a thing of beauty. The sequence of poems which it contains begins with an expertly-reproduced lithoprint which is probably worth the price in itself. As for the poems, they seem to be constructed in layers: on the surface there’s a layer of literary allusion (Gogol, Huidobro, “Keats, Baudelaire, / Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, even a bit of Plath. / I knew every line to Ode to a Nightingale” [23]); below that comes a layer of cultural dispossession (“I grew up in an enlightened suburb, / in a house bearing a solitary rose” [14]); then one of finely-judged cultural admixture (“When she died I did not stay for the tangi. / I waved a taxi down. I kept staring at the id photo of the driver. / It read: expires 2003.” [29]); then one of passion and personal turmoil (“I pull my cock out of you / it’s been blessed with your / body / I love you / this may sound crazy” [37]); and below that, at the root of all, attempted fusion of the above:

Stability: a mountain in a painting
Desire: a chance to live with a tree
Ocean: my mother of hope and meditation
Song: a lighthouse as destination
Love: knowing water will suffice [45]

This is, primarily, love poetry, but it’s also culture poetry: not just the culture of John Pule’s native Niue against western – in this case Kiwi – values in general, but of the alienating world we all inhabit.

Time to give it a listen.

(1-2/04)

brief 29 (2004): 84.

[269 wds]

brief 29 (2004)


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R. A. K. Mason & Maurice Duggan (2004)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 29 (April 2004)

R. A. K. Mason, Four Short Stories 1931-35. With an Afterword by Rachel Barrowman. Auckland: The Holloway Press, 2003. ISBN 0-9582313-4-6. 43 pp. RRP $75 / Maurice Duggan, A Voice for the Minotaur: Selected Poems. Edited by Ian Richards. Auckland: The Holloway Press, 2001. ISBN 0-9582313-1-1. 53 pp. RRP $100.

R. A. K. Mason: Four Short Stories 1931-35 (2003)

It seems entirely typical of the Holloway Press that it should have issued a collection of poems by a celebrated writer of short stories, and then have followed that with a collection of short stories by a celebrated poet. Both books include contextualising information by their (respective) authors’ biographers; both have a (detachable) photograph as frontispiece; both are (expensive) lovingly produced objets d’art …

And are the results worth all that time and trouble (and your money?) Well, that’s an interesting question. I don’t think that either could be said to demand any substantial critical repositioning. Mason’s gifts were as clearly for poetry as Duggan’s were for prose. If one compares “Along Rideout Road that Summer” with, say, “Calypso” (“She sought in thronged sandals to match his stride” [14]), or “Dialogue after Midnight” (“She: But after this, what then? / After this night and springing day / What next?” … “He: No more of talk and tears, / I am sick of tears and talk.” [17]), one is still as struck by the intensely conventional sense of genre and language in the latter, as by the exuberant inventiveness of the former.

The same, unfortunately, proves to be true of Mason’s short stories. “The Meth Fiend” is a brilliant title, but the story reads more like pastiche Jack London than any kind of “tribute to Joyce.” “The Mountain of the Gods” is embarrassing doctrinaire tosh in the form of an Audenesque fable. “His End was Peace,” however, is a little more ambitious. Mason here has a coherent fictional objective: portraying a mind’s moment of breakdown. And, to be fair, he does it well. His prose is clear and expressive, the characterisation at least adequate. One might object that the same thing had been done better by Galsworthy in The Forsyte Saga (which is true), but that’s scarcely a criticism. The real problem is that the story’s too short – that it leads nowhere. It would make a good chapter in a novel, but by itself really has too little to say. Such a novel, if it existed, would (I suspect) resemble the work of H. G. Wells or Arnold Bennett more than that of Joyce or Conrad, but that’s probably no bad thing. The critical eclipse of the great Edwardian novelists has already endured far too long.

Mason’s fourth story, “Spring-time and the Sick-bed” is in many ways the best. In it, a man decides to go bush instead of staying to look after his invalid wife. It’s a simple idea (rather like Jack London’s classic “The Apostate,” in fact). Rachel Barrowman, in her short (but indispensable) Afterword, reveals that:

When he showed [it] to his friend Marie Gaudin …. she remarked, “I didn’t know you felt that way about your mother’, to which Mason replied, ‘I didn’t know you were so clever.’ [38]

It’s hard to believe that any great acuity was required. The story reminds me very strongly of the one written by an earnest henpecked creative writing student (played by Danny de Vito) in the Billy Crystal comedy Throw Momma from the Train. That story ran (from memory) something like:

He walked into the room. She was sitting at the table. The axe felt cold in his hand. He moved towards her. She looked up. The axe descended again and again and again and again …

‘There’s no suspense, no motivation … It’d be nice to at least know why he wants to kill her … It lacks pretty much everything that constitutes a story,” as Billy Crystal (playing the professor) remarks. Mason’s story is a bit more subtle than that, but not much – and that’s why I like it. I’d like to read more of the same sort, in fact: less ventroiloquising and more naked self-expression (it could scarcely be said to qualify as self-analysis).

It might be objected that it was a bad idea to interleaf the stories with facsimiles of various of Mason’s canonical poems (“On the Swag,” “Youth at the Dance,” and so on). It does have the effect of showing up the (comparative) clumsiness of the stories, but more importantly I think it shows the fundamental consistency of Mason’s work in both genres. If one had ever thought of Mason as any kind of a stylist or craftsman, this book has the effect of reminding us that it’s bitter honesty that actually constitutes his strength. The Throw Momma from the Train story is not likely to please many readers, or be commercially successful (or to be published, for that matter), but it is powerful, heartfelt writing. All those Mason poems about wanking and moaning and lusting after the unattainable were put together better than “Spring-time and the Sick-bed,” but not by much. He clearly had a knack for verse (and a more useful model, in A. E. Housman) which was stronger than his knack for prose, but I feel, nevertheless, that he could have become a novelist. All that rage and passion had to find an outlet somehow. I think he made the right choice in sticking to poetry, but this book does intimate an intriguing might-have-been: a New Zealand Jack London instead of our Kiwi Housman.

In conclusion, I guess this goes to show just how important it is to have the Holloway Press. Who else would have taken on these stories? Because, after all, they’re not all that good in a conventional sense. But that only serves to make them a better mirror of their creator’s mind. The Duggan book, it must be admitted, is both less revealing and requires less justification. Duggan’s poems are accomplished and (at times) moving. He clearly intended to issue them out in book form, which makes them far more guarded than Mason’s shadow-puppet stories. One can see the influence of Smithyman, in particular, in some of the more ambitious poems collected here: “Landscape with Figures” [12-13], say, or “In the Territory” [49], but the strongest are the simplest: the pain in his Sargeson poem “Calling on F. S. (1945)” [46] or the rather lovely “In Residence: Auckland 1974,” written as he lay dying in hospital:

We are an axis a pivot here
upon which the winds turn
boring up naked from the pole –
nor’easters peppery and moist. [46]

In short, they’re something of a gift.

Maurice Duggan: A Voice for the Minotaur (2001)

(1-2/04)

brief 29 (2004): 87-88

[1100 wds]

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Jill Chan: The Smell of Oranges (2003)

Raewyn Alexander, ed.: Magazine 1 [loaded with arts, fire and boodle] (November 2003)

Jill Chan, The Smell of Oranges, Wellington: Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2003. ISBN 1-86942-028-4. 64 pp. RRP $19.95

Jill Chan: The Smell of Oranges (2003)

One of the best things about editing a poetry magazine is the people you meet, albeit (much of the time) vicariously. Jill Chan intrigued me from the first. Her letters were terse and unforthcoming, the poems short and to-the-point, but with an almost disturbing perfection.

That was a few years ago now, and the poems have kept on appearing, growing ever more complex, but without losing that air of uncanny precision, of a carefully husbanded wound. It’s lovely to see them gathered in a book, confirming my original belief that here we have something quite extraordinary: a miniaturist whose art is on a grand scale, “not ever breaking at the pressure.”

(10/03)

Magazine 1 (2003): 76.

[130 wds]


Magazine 1 (2003)


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brief 28: Editorial (2003)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 28 (October 2003)

Editorial:
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

i.m. Alan Brunton (14 October 1946 – 27 June 2002)

New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre

Alan Brunton

Drama is two people talking. That’s how Red Mole began. And a few years later we did the desert, a show called The Excursion, shadows and masks on Second Avenue in New York. I took it from Flaubert’s letters from Egypt, and we projected Maxime du Camp’s photos …. And from The Excursion, I went into Moonshine, ‘thinketh she of Egypt, always Egypt’ and so on; the physics of the contraction and expansion of the heart. I guess it’s no wonder nobody got it.

– Alan Brunton, “Questions & Answers,” brief.19 (2001): 52-64 (62).

It seems to complete the circle somehow that we should be able to reproduce the text of The Excursion – albeit in a revised version – in this special issue of brief, twenty years after it was first performed (we’ve also put in some of those photos of Maxime du Camp’s, along with images of the original production from the Red Mole archives). If nobody got Moonshine when it came out, they’ll have less excuse after reading Martin Edmond’s magisterial “Lighting Out for the Territory.” (Richard Taylor also contributes an expansion of his Pander review – the one write-up it received at the time).

“Why do you continue to be involved in a magazine like brief? What do you think it contributes – or should contribute – and to whom?” continues John Geraets in the email interview quoted above. Alan’s reply seems even more pertinent and prescient now:

… maybe you’re asking why keep your magazine going. It’s a witness to faith, faith is a total thing. In the midst of all this sleaziness, corruption, theft, bankruptcy - you have to have that faith, that you’re engaged in something absolutely incorruptible. Because there’s no money in it. Brief opens onto an area that is parasite-free – how’s that? (60).

Keeping the faith – that is what it’s all about. In this case, our faith in the continuing life and value of Alan Brunton’s work.

Leonard Peltier, the Native-American Lakota activist framed by the FBI for murders he didn’t commit in the mid-seventies, used to close his letters with the phrase : “In the spirit of Crazy Horse.” Looking at Peter Matthiessen’s book on the case, I think of Brunton: that same crazed integrity, the almost barbaric sense of cultural richness and excess … I hope this issue will serve to make that spirit more accessible. Now, above all, when we need it most, when our idealists are dying off and a “tawdry cheapness” once more threatens to “outlive our days” (Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”).

I should really move on to my thank-yous, though. Again, to Alan Brunton’s literary executors: Martin Edmond, Michele Leggott, and Sally Rodwell. The first half of this issue is almost entirely their work. Archives were scoured in Wellington, texts collated in Auckland, and a constant stream of helpful comment came from New South Wales. Michele Leggott, in particular, provided the impetus without which this project could never have come into being.

There are other names listed in the acknowledgements section opposite. It would be invidious to try to thank all of them appropriately here, so instead I’ve chosen to provide a brief breakdown of the contents, with comments where they seem required.


We begin with a dossier of works grouped around the The Excursion, a play mixing the iconography of The Egyptian Book of the Dead with details from Flaubert’s 1849-50 tour:

• Michele Leggott introduces and contextualises the play
• Murray Edmond provides an extract from his thesis on NZ alternative theatre
• Sally Rodwell lends illustrations from the original production in New York
• We reprint Brunton’s poem “Their Diet Consists of Carrion,” written to explain to an obtuse local critic exactly what “Flaubert was doing there in the first place”

Moving on to poems, tributes and critical pieces:

• Lesley Kaiser and John Barnett give some background to their projected edition of the Gnostic poem “Know-So” (1994)
• Michael O’Leary, Mark Pirie, & Brunton’s executors provide materials on Bumper Books
• Chris Bourke has allowed us to use a hitherto unpublished interview, compiled at the time of the release of Big Smoke (2000)
• We reprint four early Brunton poems from Raucous, the official journal of Auckland University’s O’Rorke Hall of Residence (“One day, one hopes that people will read Raucous for something more than their own particular quote,” said the 1966 editors. Little did they know!)
• Martin Edmond & Richard Taylor elucidate Moonshine (1998)
• Peter Simpson & I try to do the same for Fq (2002)
• Scott H. & Claudia W. rap about Brunton’s counterculture roots
• Stephen Oliver & Mark Pirie give a context to Bumper’s Brian Bell Reader (2001)
• Steve Dean, Ron Riddell, Mark Young & Michele Leggott all contribute poems

Finally, we present the first fruits of Richard von Sturmer’s two months residency on Great Barrier Island as the holder of the inaugural brief writers award. Enjoy.

(27-28/9/03)

brief 28 (2003): 3-4.
[Available at: nzepc]

[841 wds]

brief 28 (2003)


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F**k you, Faerie Queene (2003)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 28 (October 2003)

F**k you, Faerie Queene

Alan Brunton, Fq. Wellington: Bumper Books, 2002. ISBN 0-9582225-4-1. 164 pp. RRP $35.

Red Mole: Stairway to the Stars

As I sat down to begin this review, the postman delivered a mail-sack with my long-anticipated copy of Kisari Mohan Ganguli’s 4-volume, 5,000-page, complete translation of the Mahbaharata (“As an epic it is the greatest – seven times as great as the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, and the grandest – animating the heart of India over two thousand years past and destined to lead humanity for thousands of years in future.”) Yeah, that’s the way – keep it subtle, guys: show, don’t tell – show, don’t tell:

The effort to conceive the mind that conceived it is itself a liberal education and a walk through its table of contents is more than a Sabbath day’s Journey.

So what’s that got to do with writing about this last work (“finalised for publication just before his death in Amsterdam, June 2002”) by Alan Brunton, “life’s supreme uranic poet, Overseer of the Scribes of the Great Records” (9)? I suppose, on the one hand, it seemed like a good omen: a Karmic intervention by the universe outside. On the other hand, it reminded me a bit of the rhetoric surrounding the release of this sequence of poems: “All the big questions are asked and all possible answers interrogated … Fq is funny, bleak, tender, savage, philosophical, prescient and crazy … It confirms his reputation as the most innovative, abundant and far-reaching poet of his time.” (Fq publicity handout, Oct 2002). Vyasa, Homer and Sappho rolled into one would have a hard time living up to that drum-roll!

That’s certainly what Douglas Barbour thought, anyway. In his recent Jacket review he said:

Could any volume by any contemporary poet truly do this? Brunton was clearly an important figure, especially among the fellow writers and performers with whom he did most of his life’s work. … But even within New Zealand, I am sure any number of people might put other names, even from Brunton’s generation or later, forward: say Bill Manhire, or Michele Leggott, for just a couple of examples. It’s an impossible call.

He concludes: “I can only offer my honest response to Fq. An interesting, sometimes delightful, often entertaining, occasionally provocative work, which also has many lacklustre moments, awkward, prosaic lines, confusing twists and turns.” Not, as they say, a rave. (I particularly like that “even within New Zealand” line: even in that distant barbarian province, nestled on the far edge of the Empire of Babel …)

Ian Wedde appears to entertain similar views. When, in his long piece “The poem as stretch limo” (in NZ Books (March 2003) 6-7), he finally gets around to talking about the poem, he summarizes as follows:

It’s been “a trip”: excessively virtuosic, simply moving, brilliantly theatrical, sad and hilarious … Even the title on the cover slips in and out of view – the “memory of an amnesia”. Unforgettable, taunting, addictive, like an image you have to remember, but only can when your mind is at full stretch, thin, almost transparent, just before sleep.

Huh? Wha’? “Thin, almost transparent, just before sleep.” … With praise like that, who needs criticism? Perhaps I shouldn’t have been amused, but I was, to find in that same issue of NZ Books an editorial by the late lamented Bill Sewell, on the subject of the “Clayton’s” poetry review (“The beer you have when you’re not having a beer,” for any of you too young to remember Jack Thompson slumped on a bar stool, salivating over a urinous pint of the unmentionable). The relevant rules, so it appears, are as follows:

• mention famous (preferably famously obscure) contemporary poets, gesturing vaguely towards the poet or poets under review [or, in this case, the “evolutionary psychologists”“ Judith Rich Harris, Steven Pinker and Geoffrey Miller, who have to jostle for space with Jonathan Franzen, John Searle and Plotinus in that long first section – roughly two thirds of Wedde’s review].
• Don’t attempt any sample analysis of the poetry.
• Don’t risk a judgement on the quality of the work [unless that bit I quoted above constitutes such a judgement: “Excessively virtuosic, simply moving …” in short, “a trip”].
• Whatever you do, don’t mention the “T” word; discussion of poetic technique makes everyone uncomfortable.

Bill Sewell’s remedy was to “Be bold in approaching the poems; pussyfooting around is a waste of time.” Barbour, to do him credit, is bold; Wedde clearly wants to be kind to the memory of an old friend, but one can’t help feeling that he could have found more to say about the poetry if he’d felt any particular liking for it.

So, after all that, where do I stand on the matter? Well, I guess my first reaction was a little like Barbour’s. What collection of poems could possibly justify that build-up? After I’d read the first few of them (knowing I would have to review the book), I felt more like Wedde. How do I get out of this one? Can I just bullshit on about the subject of “obscurity” in general, with a few pertinent quotes, and get away with a pose of mandarin aloofness? But then I read more, and more, and then more again …

Barbour comments, towards the end of his piece: “I have to confess that there are many other books I would re-read before I came back to this one.” That’s, I think, where we differ most. I enjoyed the book hugely – once I’d actually sat down and started it. I more than enjoyed it – I loved it. I laughed, I cried. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that sounds like a dumb cliché, but I did. I laughed and cried. There’s a beautiful poem “Precious Stone,” clearly meant for the poet’s daughter Ruby, on p.97. I’d like to quote it in full, but maybe this will give you some idea of it (show, don’t tell):

… yes, arrive daughter somewhere
in sunshine rubio with the rapture of
expectation, live in your immensity
through the longest years – live them as
fired up as I am now, wordless in the
insomniac night of my bio-clock, at this
moment of worldly separation from

you

Sentimental? I think not. Sad, yes. Beautiful and clear, too, I think. Who wouldn’t like to receive a poem like that in the post? But wait, there’s more. Earlier in the same poem we get a similarly passionate recreation of the writer’s own past:

you will live in an era of new
proprioception, quatre étoiles, bright
locofocos over Ocean City, leaving me in
my old age growing up again in the fuzzy
town of my childhood where nothing was
original, not even our peccadillos, where I
promised with my hand stuck to a
tree by a knife I’d eat the wind all my life and
ramble from commune to commune as my blood

wept

onto stones like the ‘unrecapturable
nostalgia for nostalgia’ …

That was what got me, I guess. There was to be no “old age growing up again,” nothing but this moment, this souvenir of a youthful vow to “eat the wind all my life”‘ – a vow he manifestly upheld. And the neologisms – “proprioception,” [self-perception? An Olsonian coinage, Michele Leggott informs me] “locofocos” [foci of place? Loco folk-os?] – seem, in context, less allowable than necessary: the only way of invoking this intangible future. As necessary as those obtrusive letter-spacings, imparting a sense of duration and time to certain talismanic words: wept, you … I don’t know about you, I find that moving.

•

Is that all there is to it, though? A Villon-esque Last Will and Testament addressed to those he left behind? That may be how we (inevitably) read it, but that was not how it was intended. Fq was to be yet another instalment in his life’s work: a weighty one, to be sure, but to be interpreted in its own terms – a long poem with beginning, middle and end.

Perhaps the major problem with the publicity handout (which still seems to me entirely appropriate for its moment – just before the celebratory concerts in Wellington and Auckland – not to mention function – an upbeat overview designed to sell as many copies as possible), was that it encouraged a reading of Fq as an essentially manic and celebratory text: “existential vertigo is coefficient with loopy lyrics in the mind of Shoe …” That moment has passed, and I think it’s time to admit how dark, how difficult, how terrifying a poem this can be.

Given its subject-matter and parameters, I think it has to be like that. What, after all, does Fq stand for? On the one hand it is, as we were reminded by Peter Simpson in the NZ Herald (30/11/02, p.G7), a reference to Spenser’s Faerie Queene: another quest poem, originally planned to be complete in 12 books, but actually reaching only six-and-a-bit – one, moreover, whose eponymous heroine never actually appears (I think it’s also important to note Brunton’s awareness of Spenser’s well-documented tenure as a brutal colonialist official in Ireland). Say the two letters out loud, then, and you get “F**k you”: a salutation particularly appropriate to the despoilers he’s so often addressing – Lola InternationalTM: “an Inca death mask / fashioned from pure CaSO42H20 by unexplainable, even anomalous forces: / Goddess of Justice, the Law – cruel, eccentric” (16), most prominent among them.

Shoe writes – The crowd
glowed Undead
on a brick he buries
in the municipal garden
beneath the sterile moon ... (23)

Such echoes of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land (“unreal city … I had not thought death had undone so many”) must also surely be intentional. For the moment, however, that city (“London Athens Jerusalem”) appears to be called Christchurch. That’s not to imply there’s no humour there – Brunton’s poem is funny in a way Eliot’s “rhythmic grumble against life” could never be – but it’s an exceptionally bleak humour:

Pile-drivers pummel the earth in morning’s acrid
debacle: this is INTERNATIONAL
YEAR OF THE OLDER PERSON!
Why this? Why now? So many live
into the Third Age this is the oldest society
that ever existed.
…
How’s it come to this, that we live
though demented? What does the empty
house of tomorrow signify? The family
at the beach? Or a funeral? Mine?
All this yet to die? I keep
the curtains closed all day. I can’t see.
Too much sun. too much light. (143)

That’s beautifully put, I think – “Too much sun. Too much light.” – albeit, again, not precisely cheerful. It’s more the mood of Milton’s Samson Agonistes (“O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse ...”) than knockabout farce. Eliot said that the last speech Othello gives before killing himself sounds like a man “trying to cheer himself up.” One gathers, in context, that this is supposed to be a bad thing, but it’s a bit difficult to see why. I certainly read a lot of Fq in this light. It is, after all, a seasonal poem: in 12 parts (144 + 1 poems) approximating to the twelve months (really more like nine) of Brunton’s 1997 writer-in-residence-ship in Christchurch, and reflecting the Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter of our gumshoe poet’s moods. The wintriness of the “Funerary rites” above, then, is counteracted by the opening of section XII:

Green things overflow
with redemption, she opens her legs,
aiee! boat to immortality –
fair Diana in fresh sommer’s day! (147)

That’s the advantage of Brunton’s form, it seems to me. It’s flexible enough to allow him to include almost anything: any mood, any moment, any thought, and yet remain unified by the theme of exile: Bruton’s Tristia, if you like: his Epistulae ex Ponto [“ovilely, like exiled to the Pontus not New Brighton” (7)]. Like Ovid, Brunton wants to philosophize, construe the laws of the universe (one might, in this vein, describe Moonshine as his Metamorphoses, Romaunt of Glossa as his Fasti), but his centre is Amores, love poetry. Polly Pop, BIJOU – even the elusive Nadia Greatorex – enchant, delight, entice our hapless bard: his “system suffers exquisite duress” (22).

It’s tempting to go on quoting, revealing, expounding … Fq, it’s true, divides readers. It makes demands. Your view of poetry, what it’s for, what it can achieve, can never be the same once you’ve taken this book on board. How does Smithyman put it, in “An Ordinary Day Beyond Kaitaia”?

You must change
your life, Rilke’s archaic Apollo urged.

This poem demands no less of you. It’s inclusive, incisive, insightful, informative, infuriating by turns. Barbour and Wedde felt this and rejected it. Been there, done that, they said (in effect, at least) – Just one more hippie poet trying to redefine life, the universe and everything. We’ve heard it all before. And so they had, and so have all of us. George Moore, I’m told, had to draw his own aesthetic line in the sand at Debussy. Up to then he’d managed to keep up with each new artistic movement: Wagnerism, the Celtic revival, Impressionism, everything. But Debussy, Expressionism … no, that was simply too much. One has to draw the line somewhere, after all.

I’ve had to redraw my own line to admit Brunton. His relentlessly jaunty, allusive, pun-packed tone of voice does not automatically appeal, but I’ve found just reading him: not dipping into him here and there: really reading him has convinced me. This poem is the real thing. It needs to be read, enjoyed. I haven’t (I’m sure) worked out half of what half of it’s about, but it continues to fascinate me. So it will you if you give it half a chance.

In a sense I still sympathise with Barbour and Wedde’s reservations, but I think they’re wrong. If something this lively, complex, and precisely constructed isn’t great poetry, I no longer know what is.

•

In the year 1257, [the alchemist Nicholas Flamel] bought by chance an old book for two florins, which soon became his sole study. It was written with a steel instrument upon the bark of trees, and contained twenty-one, or as he himself always expressed it, three times seven leaves. The writing was very elegant and in the Latin language. Each seventh leaf contained a picture and no writing … It was purported to be written by no less a personage than “Abraham, patriarch, Jew, prince, philosopher, priest, Levite and astrologer” …

– Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)

Whether or not Nicholas Flamel succeeded in finding the Philosopher’s Stone with the help of his mysterious two-florin tome is open to debate. The title of the book I quote the story from gives at least one view on the matter. Personally, I find it harder to reject the fascination of the esoteric text. Alan Brunton has given us just such a book, tailored to the circumstances of immediately pre and post-millennial New Zealand, and for that I’m in his debt.

I’ve said to read it and see, but is that really practical? Do lines like: “The Thing puts down a great concrete foot and catches Shoe’s coat. He cuts himself free with nail scissors. / 3 slaters climb ladders, hired to repair the sky” (152) rule it out of court? The interesting thing with Brunton’s poetry is that, when read aloud, the difficulties mostly evaporate. So for a while that’s how I saw him: a “performance poet.” But now I’m positive those cadences are inherent in his work. You have to give it a chance, but his language, his circumstances, most of his references, are ours:

I thought there’d be fun and games, forests filled with
dames, walks beneath umbrellas of moon-shine,
infatuate elements all around me,
my ear-ring would draw enamelled fingers to my face,
each innocent remark containing a million suggestions,
women would shake out their hair and let defences
drop, saying ‘Your happiness is contagious!’,
others simply ‘Hold me!’ (138)

That was the dream, all right – to throw off the bounds of restraint; crash through the Kiwi norms (conformity, decorum,, compromise: as dominant in our tame literature as in our lives), that suburban dream of perfect amity: bereft of love, enthusiasm, excess; the well-mowed lawns, the rows of square state houses; no tangled, diabolic thickets of bush (except for “Tui Glens” and scenic tourist backdrops); the well-turned lyrics; the plangent vernacular social texts … the boredom of the whole thing demanded such a reaction:

Jesus, will anyone understand this?
there is one story only …
All he is saying is, The time
came and the Man didn’t show (13)

Maybe the time came and the man did show. The man we needed – the rough beast we’d all been waiting for. We didn’t notice, but that man was Alan Brunton.

(9/03)

brief 28 (2003): 116-22.
[Available at: nzepc]

[2795 wds]

brief 28 (2003)


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brief 27: Editorial (2003)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 27 (July 2003)

Editorial

I never get used to it – these resurrections
– Solaris, dir/writ. Steven Soderbergh (USA, 2003)

Season of the remakes
Ring
Solaris

The Gulf War
What happened to Gibarian?
Saddam?

Bush II
There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear

There are no answers
only choices
I can tell you

what is happening
but I don’t know
if that’ll tell you

what is happening

Solaris (2003)

Dear Jack,
I’ve just beaten my way through the bush to Tryphena. I’m in a valley on the way to Rosalie Bay. Everything’s fine. Establishing a writing, walking and sitting schedule.
Will keep in touch,
Richard

It gave me immense pleasure to select Richard von Sturmer as the inaugural holder of the brief writers’ award. He’s on Great Barrier even now. I’ve admired his work for a long time, so it ‘s extra-nice to be able to contribute some space and time for him to pursue it. That’s on the plus side of the ledger.

On the minus side, we seem to be living in a world where aggressive war has shifted from a war-crime to a duty. It seems particularly curious to divorce “terrorism” from the conditions which give it birth, and treat it instead like some kind of pathological condition …

I suppose I should stop perpetually looking for the beam in my neighbour’s eye, though. Another interesting piece of correspondence in the last couple of months has been a pamphlet by F. W. Nielsen Wright, entitled “A Comparison of JAAM and Brief as the Two Leading Literary Magazines of Aotearoa since 1995.” The implicit compliment in the title is soon undermined by such statements as: “Brief has always been the showcase for what must be the most insignificant group of writers in Aotearoa … wedded to dogmatic theories about writing, in some cases for forty years now.”

Some of us go so far as “espouse dadaism”, or at the very least “a very mechanical concept of intertextuality.” It’s hard to see precisely what point Wright has to make about the two journals, since he’s appeared in both. He is, however, clearly far more sympathetic to JAAM: “the leading Aotearoa literary magazine throughout its time … particularly strong in reviews and interviews.”

The essay was apparently prompted by the 48-page brief index we issued earlier this year (“the smartest looking publication the Writers Group has put out, no doubt in the interests of making a good presentation for their magazine and for themselves”), which perhaps accounts for its concentration on impressive-sounding statistics:

… of the 301 poets who appeared in ten standard anthologies of Aotearoa since 1990, 24 of them also appear in Brief (or just on 8%). That is to say, 25.26% of Brief contributors appear in the 10 anthologies.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, no fewer than 62 (or 20.6%) of those anthologised appeared in JAAM: “(Note the proportionality 8% v 20.6%)”. When it comes to publishing books of poetry – since 1990 – 24 brief-contributors contrast with 73 JAAM-contributors). But then brief 1-26 only printed 95 people, against JAAM 1-19’s 350.

While there’s a certain fascination in all this – mainly in contemplating what a horrendous number of writers there are in NZ (“500 plus poets … have published books of poetry in Aotearoa since 1990”) – one can’t help feeling, at the same time, that it’s a little misguided. Of all the criteria to apply to a literary magazine, how many people it prints is surely the least informative. (Mea culpa, though: I can see how my rather tongue-in-cheek preface to the index could lend itself to this kind of thinking).

Just for the record, though – my criteria for the material I accept or reject for brief are more-or-less as follows:

1. merit as a piece of writing: it must display skill or (at least) serious intentions
2. interest to brief readers (insofar as I can forecast their tastes and proclivities)
3. unlikelihood of appearing in any other NZ literary magazines, either for reasons of taste, or length, or style, or ideology

Number 3 is the most unusual provision, and therefore the one most worth stressing. In general, I feel that unless a piece must appear here, it shouldn’t appear here. Readers will have to judge this issue’s “new faces” for themselves, but you can rest assured that they were included on their own merits, and not in order to up my inclusion statistics in some future index of NZ’s literary gatekeepers.

(12-13/6/03)

brief 27 (2003): 3-4.

[751 wds]

brief 27 (2003)


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Leicester Kyle: Five Anzac Liturgies (2003)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 27 (July 2003)

Leicester Kyle, Five Anzac Liturgies. Drawings by Philip Trusttum. Auckland: Polygraphia Ltd., 2003. ISBN 1-877332-08-9. 53 pp. RRP $22.50 [+$2 p&p].

Leicester Kyle: Five Anzac Liturgies (2003)

The production of this new book by Leicester Kyle deserves attention, before we get to the poems themselves. It’s A4-sized, with a glossy white stapled cardboard cover, and printed in (I’d guess) ten-point type. The illustrations are of particular interest. They’re photographs of the original Trusttum pieces, incorporating pieces of the wall behind (complete with power-points and skirting boards), often cutting off the head or foot of the panel, and generally not in perfect focus. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this is meant to tell us something.

“El-cheapo,” is one reaction, of course. But, as brief readers, surely we’ve been trained to go deeper than that? The Trusttum drawings are accompanied by small road-maps of each town by Leicester himself, complete with spidery handwriting and carefully ruled lines. There’s something tactile and comfortable about the whole thing, in fact. This is not an art book, though it may be a work of art. It’s not for coffee tables but coffee mornings – to be handed round and read from at the kaffeeklatsch, over buttered scones and Leamingtons.

The subject is, after all, Anzac day – New Zealand’s equivalent to the Mexican Day of the Dead – and Leicester gets his teeth deep into the significance of this iconic event for each of the five small Canterbury plains communities (Hawarden, Waikari, Rotherham, Culverden, Waiau) he memorialises. Each section repeats the same pattern: an initial invocation, more intimate characterisation of one of the inhabitant, a liturgical speech-and-response, a description of their memorial (“The Shrine,” “Lest we Forget” “In Loving Memory Of” …), and finally an address to the townspeople (“To the People of Hawarden say” …)

Does this sound too mechanical? Five parts, each made up of five sections, about five towns? Or is it intended to function like the five taxi-rides in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth? Repetitiveness can be disarming, enabling one to stop concentrating on it and listen instead …

Your small straight roads …
end where the river flows
and the great wind blows
on the forest rows
when the dust-storms fly.

Then all is quiet as eternity.

Such deceptively simple lyrics alternate with more “daring” passages of internal monologue, echoes of the Anglican prayer-book, of Eliot’s Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets, of botanical and geological manuals (“Eschscholzia on the rocks and apple trees”). This makes it a difficult work to characterise overall. I should perhaps close, then, by acknowledging the ambition inherent in Leicester’s scheme. He wants to reach a “non-poetry-reading” audience, in language they’ll understand and appreciate, without compromising his own standards of precise articulation. This work may offer a way forward for others as well.

(6/03)

brief 27 (2003): 98.
[Available at: Leicester Kyle: Index (2011)]

[459 wds]

brief 27 (2003)


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Sugu Pillay: The Chandrasekhar Limit (2003)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 27 (July 2003)

Sugu Pillay, The Chandrasekhar Limit and other stories. Auckland: The Writers Group, 2002. ISBN 0-473-08731-6. 151 pp. RRP $29.

Sugu Pillay: The Chandrasekhar Limit (2002)

Like V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri and the millionth other, Vasuki Maharaj had come to London to live the writer’s life [“Heretic Loka”]

“That is, the secret writer’s life” (57), the passage continues. It would seem an appropriate beginning for a discussion of Sugu Pillay’s intricately-constructed, intensely self-conscious fables of identity in a post-colonial, post-post-modern world. Does the passage imply that the writer wishes to be seen in the same terms as those icons of Western possession of the Other? Is Vasuki Maharaj a mask for Sugu Pillay, Indian writer in Aotearoa, first-cousin-once-removed to London?

The story immediately belies this notion by the unexpected density of its prose (I first wrote “pose,” and that would seem a point worth making also):

It was obvious that to enter the game of difference and differAnce, one must be released from bondage to the myth of sameness. To risk the caterpillar’s touch and metamorphose into a blue enamel butterfly and in the process the lilac wisteria of memory turns into art? (57)

The invocation of Derridean différance is weighed against the near-Georgian “lilac wisteria of memory.” There’s something odd about the syntax, too. Is “turns” meant to function as a verb or a noun? The punctuation would seem to admit either possibility, thus committing itself to neither. “A postmodernist is an unpalatable writer who eats at the table of another,” grumbles Tom Muribellum, one of Vasuki’s colleagues in the “Physiology department.” “All stories are thieved. Lord Ganesha approves” (63) is her reply.

“The rest was just needlework” (59). This extraordinary complex of conversations, literary investigations, and surgical operations (on sheep, mostly) culminates in the literal arrival of a deus (or should one say diabolus?) ex machina: Ravana, the demon kidnapper from the Ramayana:

Centering Vasuki with his rhynchocephalian eye, Ravana said, ‘He iwi kotahi tatou.’ He then invited Vasuki to enter his left toe. Recognising the pushpavahanam as her rightful turangawaewae, Vasuki gladly jumped thresholds and entered the puzzling space of nga tapuwae. And away they flew to Heretic Loka where only the brave dwell and thrive. Who was afraid of the textual toe? (70)

In his introduction to The Vintage Book of Indian Writing (1947-1997), Salman Rushdie refers to the phenomenon of “Rushdie-itis:’ a dazzling, multi-layered prose which rejects the possibility of simple or understated effects. Even by Rushdie’s standards, though, this passage would seem problematic. Without a knowledge of Maaori, Sanskrit, and modern post-structuralism, the points Pillay is making here are not so much obscure as inaccessible.

Nor is it an isolated example – in this story or any of the eight others. They all hinge on a bewildering multi-cultural barrage of references. Characters from mythology interact with Bollywood lovers, stereotyped politicians and academics, and “realistic” slice-of-life characters. Their language is as complex and typographically bewildering as a Derridean treatise (Glas, for instance), and yet the centre of this web of significations (note the American spelling in the passage quoted above) is always poetry. A Mallarméan poetry of allusion, to be sure, but no less intensely felt for that:

love and its survival
love and survival
love survival
love
lo
(62)

Is that, finally, what saves these stories from themselves? This sense of a reality behind the dazzle, “beyond all this fiddle” (Marianne Moore)?

Sugu Pillay is not anxious to be owned. She doesn’t want to win a Nobel prize for careful adherence to Western ideas of the anti-self, the Other: the familiarised exotic (The Mystic Masseur, The Famished Road – even, dare one admit it? Midnight’s Children). It is true that that is also the subject of these books: how to “succeed” (in the Western literary sense) while rejecting assimilation. Naipaul, Okri, and Rushdie have all faced the same dilemma and tried to write their way out from under it. What degree of success each of them has achieved is (or should be) a daily topic of debate among us. (Perhaps The Satanic Verses is the most magnificently Quixotic of all such attempts to date – no Nobel for Salman, or not as yet …)

Sugu Pillay’s answer is uncompromising in a different way. The “secrecy” mentioned in the first quote above should alert us to the existence of a series of Hermetic barriers within her stories. She invites knee-jerk rejection, derision, incomprehension by the very way she writes. And yet, perhaps hard words are needed when easy answers have failed. Sugu Pillay is not blind to the complexity of her historical and cultural moment. She refuses to let her readers be blind, either. If you listen, there’s much to hear. (There are some rattling good yarns concealed in here, too).

(6/03)

brief 27 (2003): 99-100.

[790 wds]

brief 27 (2003)


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