Alan Brunton: Grooves of Glory (2005)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 32 (July 2005)

Alan Brunton. Grooves of Glory: Three Performance Texts. ISBN 0-9582225-5-X. Wellington: Bumper Books, 2004. RRP $24.99.

Alan Brunton performing Grooves of Glory (September 2001)

It’s fascinating to see, finally, a text of “Grooves of Glory,” the performance piece Alan Brunton was touring through Northern Europe when he died in 2002. I heard it in its earliest form as one of the “Bad Language” Readings organised by Wystan Curnow and Leigh Davis in the Auckland Art Gallery in 2001, and was immensely struck by the effectiveness of tumbling these poems and routines into and over each other in a kind of conceptual spindryer. The final three-person piece is, inevitably, a little less anarchic and way more organised, but it still has that lingering otherworldly atmosphere of Dreamville, “where each day was the memory of the day before” (p.88). Dreamville doubles, of course, with that other imaginary space, “the happening place in the place where the life of the spirit ends, Zee-land,” where “everything is strictly local” (p.80). As the poet so rightly remarks:

You need a bit of the mongrel if you want to participate in our community events. (p.80).

“Grooves of Glory” constantly teeters on the edge of making sense, yet never completely surrenders to the exigencies of autobiography or metaphysics. It has more of the romantic tension of a tango than the rigour of a treatise, and thus pairs up nicely with the dithyrambic “Zarathustra said” (also available on the Bumper CD Nietzsche / Zarathustra).

“Compostela – A Walk” appeared first in brief 25, but (though I say it who shouldn’t) appears to better advantage here, with a rather disturbing set of snapshots taken along the pilgrim route, not to mention Sally Rodwell’s illuminating introduction (a great addition to the utility of the book).

Can these three texts, however adroitly edited, however bolstered up with pictures and reminiscences, ever replace the atmosphere and spontaneity of an Alan Brunton performance? Clearly not. But then neither, really, can videotapes and CDs. In any case, that’s just sour grapes. Best to be grateful for what we have, and in the case of this book that’s something very considerable (and charming) indeed.

(15-21/5/05)

brief 32 (2005): 103.

[350 wds]

brief 32 (2005)


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Sue Fitchett: Palaver Lava Queen (2005)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 32 (July 2005)

Sue Fitchett. Palaver Lava Queen. ISBN 1-86940-326-6. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2004. RRP $24.99.

Sue Fitchett: Palaver Lava Queen (2004)

There’s a lot to be said for the idea of an eclectic, rambling, mock-heroic celebration of the city of Auckland. It’s true that it inevitably challenges comparison with William Carlos Williams’ time-section of a city through history, Paterson, but surely it’s always best to think big? A few alarm bells begin to ring, though, when one looks at the bibliography at the end of Palaver Lava Queen. What exactly is the connection between these lazy sun-soaked poems and (say) the works of Jacques Derrida? Or The Dark Sun: A Study of D. H. Lawrence, for that matter? (That reference, to do Sue Fitchett justice, is a bit more explicable – there’s a quote from Lawrence on p.26).

Now, I’ve got nothing against pretentiousness per se. A lot of people accuse me of it, too (it sometimes seems as if reading a book and wanting to talk about it were a capital crime in this country). I do, however, think that bibliography is a mistake. It sets up false expectations of a long poem engaging (at least in some way) with a few of the more interesting issues of modern poetics, only to founder on the reality of Fitchett’s actual strengths: she’s very adroit at evoking a kind of carnivalesque spirit-of-Auckland-during-the-HERO-parade … (see “Queen Auckland,” for instance [pp. 3-4] – or “Auckland: her risqué harbour, her seductive Gulf”[pp.24-25]).

It seems increasingly significant that Fitchett’s main character, Louise, is a real estate agent (“Auckland is location location location”[p.19]), because that’s the predominant tone behind the poems: selling the place, loading up the palate with every property-owner’s cliché in the book: “hot Mediterranean blue” [26], “the harbour’s sea breeze” [37], “pohutukawas on fire & blood needles on the beach” [75]. I’m not saying that that’s all the poems are – Louise isn’t necessarily being endorsed as a character by Fitchett – but it becomes harder and harder to see just exactly what she is saying as the poem goes on.

I guess it’s mainly because my Auckland is so much darker and more thwarted and needy than hers that I fail to feel much identification with Fitchett’s sunny (Waihekean) South-Seas paradise. In that sense, at least, her “mirror-glass city” metaphor is clearly bang-on. We see what we’ve trained ourselves to see. Who am I to say that Fitchett’s vision is any less valid than my own?

(15-21/5/05)

brief 32 (2005): 104.

[403 wds]

brief 32 (2005)


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Michael Harlow: Cassandra’s Daughter (2005)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 32 (July 2005)

Michael Harlow. Cassandra’s Daughter. ISBN 1-86940-332-0. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005. RRP $21.99.

Michael Harlow: Cassandra's Daughter (2005)

The things that are good here are the things that are always good in Michael Harlow’s poetry: the intricately hypnotic diction, the elegant evasions of what anyone else would think to say about some particular theme or character. The title-poem seems particularly strong in this respect. Who else would have thought to make Cassandra’s daughter, (“Cassy for short”): “in love with how / one word wants another / with astonishing ease” (p.2). The rest of us, I fear, would have concentrated (like W. B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan”) on “how last night / in her dreamtime a wooden horse / appeared.”

Perhaps that’s what the book as a whole is about, also. At first sight it seems more of an instalment and less a finished thing than, say, Giotto’s Elephant (1991), his previous collection – despite having had (presumably) such a long gestation. Even the blurb seems to convey this uncertainty. “A series of lyric poems and prose-poems in which the ‘persistent imaginal’ goes in search of a language to articulate something of the curious and surreal strangeness of the everyday,” is hardly the most specific of formulae.

“A sudden blow: the great wings beating still / Above the staggering girl …” I wouldn’t trade that Yeats poem for anything. “A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead.” And yet, and yet, Harlow’s Cassy actually sounds like a small girl chatting to an elderly stranger: “Would you like to / hear me sing? I can almost dance, / too.” Yeats’s heroine, by contrast, seems a mere foil, a mask he uses to interrogate his own fantasies of power and sexual fulfilment.

It’s nice to have both, I guess. Perhaps the most encouraging thing about the lack of a clearly-focussed theme in Cassandra’s Daughter is that it implies that the persistent imaginal in still in quest of that elusive language of expression, which might lead us to hope for another instalment in the very near future. In the meantime, a lot of the poems here will shortly be as dog-eared as their counterparts in my battered old copy of Yeats’s Collected Poems.

(15-21/5/05)

brief 32 (2005): 105.

[376 wds]

brief 32 (2005)


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Anne Kennedy: The Time of the Giants (2005)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 32 (July 2005)

Anne Kennedy. The Time of the Giants. ISBN 1-86940-342-8. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005. RRP $27.99.

Anne Kennedy: The Time of the Giants (2005)

Anne Kennedy is very good at telling stories, especially odd stories which no-one else would think to tell. It seems very sensible of her to concentrate on this strength in her second book of poems from AUP (hard on the heels of last year’s Montana-award winning Sing-Song). There’s a lot here to like, but I’m afraid I’m still left with certain reservations. For a start, there’s the underlying sense of a message in the narrative itself: Moss, the teenage giantess must be true to herself (which means going off and mating with her own outsized kind), rather than scrunching herself up to appeal to a “small-minded” boyfriend. This seems a little too pat to me: the kind of creaking moral which writers of the fantastic do best to disavow (so much of the effectiveness of the Alice books comes from their refusal to preach, and its cruel parodies of those who do).

Then there’s the local colour in the narrative itself which, while undoubtedly well-exploited for dramatic edge, invites awkward questions. How, seriously, are we to imagine Kennedy’s heroine getting in and out of cars, through doors, into beds to have sex, etc. without her lover ever noticing that she’s a bit taller than he is? Oh, don’t be so literal-minded, I hear you say – surrender to the delightful fantasy … Fair enough, but all the All-Blacks-games-on-TV; actual-accounts-of-actual-films-they-go-to-see-and-how-they-got-in-and-out-of-the-auditorium details encourage me to be literal-minded. You can’t have it both ways. Either it’s a fairy tale (in which case I’d welcome less preaching and more of the ironic observation of people and their quirks which is one of Kennedy’s greatest strengths), or else it’s a documentary, in which case logical discrepancies in scene-setting suddenly begin to matter.

I’m sorry. I do think this is a fruitful direction for Anne Kennedy’s work to explore, but I don’t think The Time of the Giants is entirely there yet.

(15-21/5/05)

brief 32 (2005): 105.

[331 wds]

brief 32 (2005)


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Michele Leggott: Milk & Honey (2005)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 32 (July 2005)

Michele Leggott. Milk & Honey. ISBN 1-86940-334-7. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005. RRP $27.99.

Michele Leggott: Milk & Honey (2005)

My first impression of this book (once I’d got past James Fryer’s very cool cover: stark colours, hieratic tarot imagery, ceremonial theatrical profusion) was that it was nice to see so many old friends gathered together. A great deal of this work, including some pretty major pieces, has appeared in brief over the last few years. I was, however, a little disappointed that the “Cairo vessel” illustration we included in #29 (2004): p.6, had not been included. Turning to the elegy “I dreamed your book was written …” (included in brief 28 (2003): 103-4) I also missed the context given by our Brunton memorial issue: the Egyptian paraphernalia of his previously-unpublished short play “The Excursion:” Book of the Dead rhetoric and imagery.

That, then, was the second impression: maybe some of the pieces needed more back-up and explanation, of the type that their brief printings had been able to supply.

After that, I turned to and read the book through again: carefully, from beginning to end, instead of simply picking out the plums one by one, and began to see Michele’s design more clearly. The poems here are conceived on a large scale, and they’re very “poetic” poems indeed – Michele allows herself an enthusiastic rapturous diction which would be anathema to any card-carrying Modernist. Her interest, clearly, is in a poetry of transcendence, heady invocations of sex and romance, sun and sea and sand. Taken as a whole, I was astonished to find even cynical old me surrendering to it. The “I dreamed your book was written …” poem takes clearer shape as a joint Robin Hyde / Alan Brunton piece (the title, after all, comes from one of the poems included in Michele’s edition of Hyde’s Collected Poems), but also as a more general point of celebration on a kind of graph of the emotions charted by her book’s entire trajectory.

Longer than any of her previous collections, this one also strikes me as the most assured and relaxed. It’s hard to imagine her writing a better book than this, which might tempt us to hail it as a swansong. Actually, though, it leaves me keener than ever to see just what this poet will do next.

(15-21/5/05)

brief 32 (2005): 106

[382 wds]

brief 32 (2005)


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C. K. Stead: The Red Tram (2005)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 32 (July 2005)

C. K. Stead. The Red Tram. ISBN 1-86940-330-4. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2004. RRP $24.99.

C. K. Stead: The Red Tram (2004)

I remember, in my teens, spending a great deal of time combing through the poetry shelves in the school library looking for anything stimulating to my juvenile self-conceit (as head of the Library Committee, I always took care to arrogate the 800s to my personal care). I remember dutifully ploughing through Arnold, Pope, Spenser: the classics. Then discovering (with great joy, after initial reservations) Auden, Eliot, Yeats.

Was there anything of local interest there? Yes – Hone Tuwhare’s No Ordinary Sun. I didn’t really get him then, but one of his images, Yuri from Doctor Zhivago climbing on a mound at his father’s funeral, stays with me still. I’d unfortunately conceived an irrational aversion to Allen Curnow which took years to get over. He seemed jangling and artificial to me, Baxter clumsy and raw (until I read In Fires of No Return, that is, but that was a bit later). Who else was there? Nobody that I can recall – except C. K. Stead. There was a copy of Crossing the Bar. I don’t remember too much about the book now except for a single poem about Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. It seemed so powerfully sensual and hard-edged in diction that I immediately concluded he was the real thing. Smith’s Dream had not yet achieved its apotheosis as Sleeping Dogs, so it still seemed appropriate to think of Stead as, principally, a poet: a good poet, one of the few.

Thirty years later, that C K Stead who seemed so formed, so finished, so accomplished in his early books of verse and prose, continues to produce new work – work that (significantly) seems far more tentative and less sure of itself. His 1997 volume of selected poems, Straw into Gold, was arranged in decades, which had the unfortunate effect of making him sound like of a ventriloquist echoing the dominant styles of each era: Lowellesque Life Studies to Black Mountain to L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poetry. It also left out some of his best poems (I felt) in the interests of this evolutionary schema.

I wouldn’t really know how to type The Red Tram, his latest book of poems, which seems to me a good thing. Some of the pieces, such as the title poem, are nostalgic complaints about old age (somewhat premature? But then Eliot starting whinging about getting old while he was still in his forties). Others seem more like make-work assignments, such as the list of his colleagues at a writing symposium (“My Fellow writers at Eaglereach”). Luckily there’s a substantial number of poems which stay in the imagination: more strong versions from the Latin: “It’s the habit of love, Catullus, / not the fact of it / that burdens you still”; and the haunting: “The thing that doesn’t happen lives for ever,” from “Takapuna,” his elegy for Janet Frame.

As a book of poems, The Red Tram seems unlikely to do Stead’s reputation any harm – or (to be honest) much good. What we really need to do now is to reassess his poetry as a whole. I suspect there will prove to be more there than anyone guessed.

(15-21/5/05)

brief 32 (2005): 107.

[529 wds]

brief 32 (2005)


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John Caselberg & Lawrence Jones (2005)

Janet Wilson, ed.: WLWE: World Literature Written in English 40 (2) (2004)

‘Asclepius’. Poet Triumphant: The Life and Writings of R. A. K. Mason (1905-1971). Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2004. ISBN 1-877228-79-6 / Lawrence Jones. Picking up the Traces: The Making of a New Zealand Literary Culture 1932-1945. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-864-73-455-7.

Asclepius: Poet Triumphant (2004)

‘This is no time to be studying the tonal values of the minor works of T. E. Brown [sic]’

So R. A. K. Mason, in the editorial notes to Phoenix 3 (March 1933). In true thirties style, he continued, “It is the greatest hour in history.” Obviously the ‘sic’ was not included in Mason’s original editorial. I’ve supplied it from p.30 of Lawrence Jones’s recent history of the growth of New Zealand literary nationalism, Picking up the Traces.

Interestingly (unsurprisingly), ‘Asclepius’ quotes from the same classic passage on p.136 of his biography of Mason, Poet Triumphant. Only, after the mention of T. E. Brown, he supplies the footnote: “T. E. Brown (1830-97), author of Fo’c’sle Yarns, etc.”

It’s not a matter of great moment in itself, but that ‘sic’ nags at me. Why is it there? A quick check of the index to Lawrence Jones’ book gives us the following: “Browne, T. E.: 30.” Did he confuse the Victorian poetaster with the more celebrated Sir Thomas Browne? Does that explain the inconsistency? Did he assume that Mason couldn’t spell? I’m none the wiser, I’m afraid. (The spelling T. E. Brown is, by the way, correct).

Jones and ‘Asclepius’ (a pseudonym which does little to mask the real author of this new Mason biography, the poet John Caselberg – clearly identified in the copyright notes on p.324) are, after all, traversing much of the same territory. Perhaps, then, this trivial-seeming disparity is not so trivial after all. Perhaps it may help us to understand the two books better – or, at any rate, their author’s intentions.

Professor Lawrence Jones’ book comes from darkest Academia. From the moment we pick it up, sampling the battery of name-dropping, literary side-references, and local literary allusions on the very first page, we know who it is meant for: readers with a considerable knowledge of New Zealand writing of the 30s and 40s, readers (what is more) well acquainted with the arguments of such predecessors as Stuart Murray (Never a Soul at Home: New Zealand Literary Nationalism in the 1930s), Rachel Barrowman (A Popular Vision: Arts and the Left in New Zealand 1930-1950), Kai Jensen (Whole Men: The Masculine Tradition in New Zealand Literature), Bill Pearson’s ‘Fretful Sleepers’, not to mention the critical writings of Allen Curnow himself.

I could expand the list, but I think you get the idea. This is an attempt at a comprehensive synthesis of a lot of earlier critical work, mainly (in recent years) of a revisionist turn. Insofar as I can detect a consistent point of view in Jones, it is a conservative one. Curnow’s canon-building may have displaced a few emphases, which have been largely corrected by subsequent interventions from Feminist and Marxist critics, but what we are left with is a rich tradition to savour and celebrate:

This study has tried to demonstrate that the Phoenix-Caxton writers were at the centre of a coherent, conscious, revolutionary literary movement … While the movement was scarcely the beginning of New Zealand literature, as its makers were fond of proclaiming, it did bring a profound change … a change that, whatever the movement’s blind spots, was clearly a change for the better. [426]

“Whatever the movement’s blind spots” (clannishness? misogyny? politics? lack of politics? one has to go back to Jensen, Murray and their predecessors to get a clear sense of them), “… the literary results were not just therapeutic, not just a necessary adolescent revolt”. Jones concludes by listing some classic works by Curnow, Fairburn, Glover and Sargeson, along with John Mulgan’s Man Alone and Robin Hyde’s Nor the Years Condemn. “The creation of them is the movement’s most lasting legacy.” [429].

It’s not that I disagree with this conclusion. It seems a very sensible one, in fact. It’s just that it’s taken so long to get there, through such a hedge of references and side-references, that one can’t help but expect more. For instance, I wouldn’t mind more convincing evidence to support this idea of a “coherent, conscious, revolutionary literary movement.” Simply using the words “the movement” a lot, and pointing out that all the writers knew each other, published in the same magazines, and used Lowry and Glover as printers doesn’t get us anywhere new. We knew that going in (or if we didn’t, we’re not likely to find out from this rather confusingly presented mass of data).

Jones’s book is clearly a useful one for students of the period (though the ‘T. E. Brown” mistake, which he attempts to father on Mason, reminds us not to trust him too unquestioningly on particulars). It conspicuously fails to put a full stop to the ongoing spirit of revisionism in New Zealand literary studies. Perhaps I’m wrong to attribute such an intention to him, but this book does read to me like an attempt to drown us in detail and thus get the last word in an ongoing debate. I fear a lot more remains to be said about the thirties before that can be achieved.

John Caselberg’s book, by contrast, comes from a much stranger and (to my mind) much more interesting place. It would be hard to justify calling it a good book, let alone a good biography, but it has considerable virtues all the same. Even the publisher’s blurb calls it a text “which … may be read as a companion volume” to Rachel Barrowman’s Montana award-winning biography Mason (2003), so it’s clearly not intended to rival her more comprehensive, dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s, Michael King-like performance.

Why read it at all, then? Well, for one thing, it’s interesting to see how much of Barrowman’s background research (in particular) came from her erstwhile collaborator, who laboured on the task for nearly thirty years. More to the point, though, Caselberg comes to praise Mason, not to bury him. The tone is unashamedly partisan throughout. What’s more, he means to prove his point – partly by eliding over or simply leaving out awkward biographical details of Mason’s mental illnesses, bouts of depression, and fits of pique, but also by a poet’s attention to precision, through close readings of his major texts.

At times this becomes tedious, it must be acknowledged. Caselberg goes through poem after poem explaining difficulties and spelling out references like the editor of a High School crib. He hits far more than he misses, though, and certainly succeeds in explaining some very familiar poems to me in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

I suppose the best thing about this book for me is the fact that it’s been written according to a theory of biography. Caselberg has studied the history of the genre, from Plutarch and Doctor Johnson to Leon Edel and Richard Ellmann, and it’s clear that his sympathy is with the earlier approach – a book composed to rules, selectively choosing data to justify its points. What he has written, in fact, is closer to a biographical essay than the more common contemporary thick-as-a-brick biographical tombstone.

It’s a beautifully-presented book (it’s nice to hear that Caselberg was able to see an advance copy on his deathbed, after all those years of travail and disappointment). The fact that he chose as his pseudonym the Greek god of medicine and healing gives us another clue to his intentions: Mason, to him, is not “the damaged, courageous man who lost his gift” (Bill Manhire’s blurb for Rachel Barrowman’s book), but rather a hero to be admired: a man of vision and social conscience as well as poetic talent. His point is, I think – and who can dispute it? – that we too have more important things to think about right now than the minor works of T. E. Brown (or T. E. Lawrence or T. S. Eliot, for that matter). Our complacent, self-satisfied world of liberal values is crumbling around us, and, as in the thirties, it’s time to take a stand.

One can’t but agree with Asclepius / Caselberg that the choices and dilemmas of a man such as R. A. K. Mason have become, once again, of more than simply Academic interest.

Lawrence Jones: Picking Up The Traces (2003)

(2004)

WLWE: World Literature in English (UK) 40 (2) (2004): 144-47.

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WLWE: World Literature Written in English 40 (2) (2004)


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To Terezín: Preface (2007)

Jack Ross: To Terezín (2007)

Preface

W. H. Auden: The Sea and the Mirror (1944 / 2003)

“Your irritation at the disunity is, justifiably or not, the effect I intend.”(Quoted in Mendelson, 2000, p. 230).

So W. H. Auden to one of the first critics of The Sea and the Mirror (1944), his wartime verse commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. More specifically, to criticism of the discordant moment in the poem when Caliban addresses the audience in the urbane, prosy accents of Henry James.

Despite the artifice of Caliban’s voice, he embodies everything that is not artifice. The id is one name for him; he identifies himself at one point as Eros, son of Venus; and Auden identified him … as the allegorical figure of ‘the Prick.’ (Mendelson, 2000, pp. 230-31).

So Edward Mendelson, the poet’s literary executor and most astute interpreter. Auden himself went on to explain: “Since Caliban is inarticulate, he has to borrow, from Ariel, the most artificial style possible.”

The most natural style for talking about the horrors of Nazi oppression during the Second World War has come to be the clipped, gnomic phrases of Paul Celan or Nellie Sachs – both camp survivors who managed thus to refute Adorno’s famous dictum that “writing lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

Whatever the possibilities for Celan and Sachs, it seems (to say the least) rather presumptuous to attempt to walk in their footsteps so many decades later.

•

When I first went to Prague, at the end of 2004, I certainly had in mind the possibility of writing something about it. I didn’t feel exactly committed to the idea, as there’s a certain danger in visiting countries merely to write about them. I was, however, keen to remain open to the possibilities of the place.

My subject declared itself pretty early on in the inability of (at least some) of my hosts to understand my motives in wanting to visit Theresienstadt. This led me to question why it had become so important to me to go there, and (especially) what I hoped to find there to justify the effort. It was so difficult for me to find answers to their questions that I realised I had inadvertently struck a personal nerve.

What I had in mind, at that early stage, was an essay discussing that visit as well as my feelings about the “holocaust industry” (so-called). I’d been very impressed by the quality of the Montana Estate essay series edited by Lloyd Jones and published by Four Winds Press, and my intention was to discipline my observations into something which could be shrunk into that small compass.

The notes for the essay soon began to take the form of short verses, though – a process I found myself unable (or unwilling) to resist. The essay turned into of a commentary on these verses.

This raised its own problems of genre-labelling. Both of the poetry publishers I approached with the completed ms. complained that their readers would find it difficult to categorise. One, in fact, reproached me with a lack of boldness in insisting on justifying myself in prose rather than simply letting the poems speak for themselves.
She may well have been right. In any case, I’m left with my own version of Auden’s defence to justify the rather unusual and unclassifiable form of this book. Rightly or wrongly, it was my intention to emphasise the discontinuity between the two sections. What I want most to say is concealed in the gap between them.

Readers, so far, have tended to prefer the swift movement of the verses in Part One, and to feel a little bewildered by the rather Jamesian periphrases of the essay sections of Part Two. The fact that the poems do sound so “natural” should give you pause, though, especially when you consider their subject matter.

It’s fatally easy for writers to subdue recalcitrant material technically without ever engaging, or getting their readers to engage, with its more jagged and irreconcilable aspects.

My book, the only “Prague novel” (see below, p. 45) I’ll ever write, now finds its place in a series of monographs published by the School of Social and Cultural Studies where I work – a school which includes Anthropology, English, History, Linguistics, Māori, Media Studies, Politics, Sociology, Social Work and Social Policy among its areas of expertise. This seems to me a pleasing symmetry.

My problem was to write “naturally” and approachably about one of the most unnatural acts of modern times – without a distinct personal axe to grind and with full awareness of my temerity in doing so. If the result seems smooth, seamless and entirely self-justifying then I will have failed. My interest is more in the questions I raise than in the answers I’ve attempted to provide.

References:

Mendelson, E. (2000). Later Auden. 1999. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

(3/07)

To Terezín. Travelogue by Jack Ross, with an Afterword by Martin Edmond. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132. ii + 90 pp (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 5-6.

[786 wds]


Jack Ross: To Terezín (2007)


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Keith Westwater, Tongues of Ash (2011)

Keith Westwater: Tongues of Ash (2011)

There's a no-nonsense specificity about Keith Westwater's poems, a refusal to privilege the smooth over the roughnesses of human experience. He provides a chart of his significant spaces - literally as well as figuratively: the book begins with an annotated map of New Zealand, with Wellington as a special insert - which has room for romantic and family love, weather, landscapes, rocks and history.

(13/4/11)

Keith Westwater, Tongues of Ash (Brisbane: Interactive Press, 2011): back-cover blurb.

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Keith Westwater: Tongues of Ash (2011)


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Takahe 2004 Poetry Competition (2004)

Takahe 53 (December 2004)

Takahe 2004 Poetry Competition Report

Pathologist's Slab

There were 377 entries in this year’s competition. From these, I selected 22 which stood out for various reasons. I winnowed this group down to a shortlist of eight, all (I felt) excellent of their kind. Then the really difficult decisions began.

I have finally decided to award the first prize to “The Pathologist’s Report” by Sue Heggie of Christchurch, and the second prize to “Ars aquatica” by Tim Upperton of Palmerston North. I took a long time deciding which order these two should go in. “Ars aquatica” is a beautifully written poem, a singing poem, in the form of a loose sonnet, which artfully contrasts the trout’s way of living in its own watery environment with (I presume) our own ways of living above water:

How it never takes the straight way.
How it makes wavering look like sureness.

“The Pathologist’s Report”, on the other hand, deploys an almost clumsy force to achieve its end: forcing us to acknowledge the speaker’s grief, forcing us to comprehend it, almost re-live it:

Lying here on the slab, stitched from the navel to the chaps,
they’ve done your hair all wrong.

It’s a shocking and horrifically gloomy subject: a young wife and mother having to identify her dead husband / lover’s body, but it’s carried off with a kind of deadpan grace. I was struck at first reading by how little it strives for effect: how true it all seems. Not effortlessly true, not at all with the fluid grace of “Ars aquatica” – one can see the author continually groping for new ways of coming at her feelings, at the intensity of her pain:

I’m going home now
betraying you by leaving. Now you know how it feels.
It’s cold here and you won’t speak to me.

It sounds more as if it’s been chiselled out of the writer’s flesh than written down on paper. This, to me, is the real thing. “Ars aquatica” (disappointing title, by the way – surely something more in keeping with the elegant swiftness of the poem could have been found?) is fluent and skilful: in its own way it rings equally true, but in the end I had to give my preference to the sheer originality, force and daring of “The Pathologist’s Report”. It takes guts to lay yourself as bare as that. I don’t think I (or any other reader) will forget it in a hurry.

It was almost equally tough to select two runners-up from the six remaining poems. These six were: “The third granddaughter” by Jan Hutchison, a charming (and disturbing) family meditation; “Belsen / Beslan” by Alice Hooton; “Moon” by Helen Bascand, a dislocated yet precise picture of “lunacy”; “The Rehearsal” by Michael Harlow, a complex interwoven prose meditation; “ur-text: a creative writing exercise” by Simon Perris, almost the only successful “exam-format” poem I’ve ever read; and “Mount Eden Prison” by David Fraundorfer. I’d really like to quote long sections from each of them, but I suppose I’d better get on and say that the two runners up I settled on were “Belsen / Beslan” and “Mount Eden Prison”. Luckily I don’t have to choose between them and can enjoy (if that’s the right word – appreciate might be better) both. I particularly liked the way in which sexual obsession was woven into the latter poem, without a hint of fake prurience.

As far as the rest of the entries goes, I felt there was a lack of joy in far too many of them. If this is the barometer of the nation’s soul just now, then I think we’re right to tremble: so much bile, so much angst, so much railing against old age! New Zealand remains (it appears) a landscape with too few lovers.

Of course I like darkness too – or, rather, I see it as only too appropriate too much of the time. I have, after all, chosen two prison poems and a dead body poem among my top four. What I don’t like is what I would describe as an unhelpful, almost forced harping on about how miserable things are. Maybe they are, but it’s defeatist and pointless to give in to such thoughts.

The four poems I have chosen are, I believe, all victory poems: they’re about facing the worst but trying your best. I think of those two little children in the dark wood, or the woman beside that slab in the morgue, or our strange tortured friend in Mt Eden, and I salute their courage. They help me to keep believing in the possibilities of human beings.

(15/11/04)

Takahe 53 (2004): 2.

[956 wds]


Takahe 53 (2004)


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brief 31: Editorial (2004)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 31 - Kultur (November 2004)

Editorial:
brief goes political …

Deborah Manning & Ahmed Zaoui (2007)

It is not just that the government's case is so ludicrously thin. After Iraq, it is difficult to take any government seriously that builds its case on secret intelligence. But Clark's government has gone way beyond this. It is attacking, in effect, some of the cornerstones of democratic civilisation. It appealed against the Court of Appeal's unanimous ruling that Zaoui's human rights should be taken into account during the review of his security status. In doing so, the government joins the ranks of the barbarians. …

So the Sunday Star-Times (Editorial – 17 October 2004). It seems we’re all on the same page at last. I watched that TV documentary (Enemy of the State: broadcast on Wednesday 13 October on TV1), and I must say that the noble faces of Ahmed Zaoui’s family and friends, pleading for his life while steadfastly refusing to blame New Zealand for its pusillanimity, made a strong impression on me. They were moving because they made no attempt to be. I’ve also read the recently published book on the case (I Almost Forgot About the Moon: The Disinformation Camapaign against Ahmed Zaoui, by Selwyn Manning, Yasmine Ryan and Katie Small (Multimedia Investments, September, 2004): RRP $NZ15). I can’t claim to have been any great mover in the cause otherwise. I read at Riemke Ensing’s Amnesty event, and have attended a few meetings: Riemke herself, Deborah Manning and a host of others take the prize there. However, I did go to visit Mr. Zaoui in prison last month in order to discuss his inclusion in this issue of brief, and he struck me as about a million miles removed from a terrorist.

How nice he is, or whether or not I consider him to be innocent (which in fact I do) isn’t the point, of course. The point is that if he cannot be proved to be guilty, and can be shown to be a legitimate refugee, then he should be set free. Isn’t that what Habeus Corpus and all those other little conventions that constitute the rule of law mean? I’m afraid that when I look at Ahmed Zaoui, I see myself – in some not-too-impossibly-distant future where believing in the things I believe in, publishing artefacts like the magazine you hold in your hands, associating with the kind of degenerates who write for a magazine like this, are all considered crimes. They probably are already. What’s more, I see myself in some jail cell unable to find out anything about the nature of the secret evidence that motivated my incarceration. (I was going to write “caused my conviction” – but then I remembered that people don’t have to be tried or convicted in order to be imprisoned nowadays). Wasn’t that what the storming of the Bastille was about? Imprisonment on secret evidence? Who dares prate on nowadays about the Nazis or the Gulag archipelago when we have Guantanamo Bay to wince at?

So, yes, I’m sorry – brief has gone political. I’m certainly not requiring you to agree with me on these matters, but I don’t think it’s healthy to ignore them even in so rarefied a publication as this. Literature should lead by example, sure – churning out propaganda is not quite what I had in mind. But one notable feature of the Zaoui case has been how powerful the Arts can be in moving people to act.

It’s fair enough to be concerned about Zaoui’s admitted convictions for terrorism, and his alleged links with Al Quaeda and the Algerian GIA. There are strong reasons for disputing both, but let’s say you think he should be kept inside for safety’s sake. Just what kind of imprisonment are we talking here? Fresh air, walks in the yard, cultivating your own flower garden? No, we’re talking ten and a half months of solitary confinement at Paremoremo. After that, transfer to the Auckland Remand centre. Martin Edmond has sent me some interesting notes about the outfit that runs that place:

The Labour Government recently announced it would not renew the licence of the only privately run prison now operating in this country, Auckland Central Remand Prison. Interestingly, there were some protests at this decision, because the prison in question has a reputation for sensitivity to cultural issues involving prisoners. This is perhaps surprising, because elsewhere in the world, subsidiaries of the GEO Group (Global Expertise in Outsourcing), as Wackenhut Corrections was recently renamed, have an appalling reputation.

George Wackenhut is a former FBI agent who made a career out of surveillance of political dissidents; by 1966 he maintained files on over four million people. Today, the GEO Group runs a global network (55 countries) of prisons, refugee detention camps, suburban shopping centres, banks, nuclear power plants, missile bases, 20 US embassies and, in the US, hires out its prisoners as unpaid labour for other companies.

(information from http://www.resistance.org.au/resources_corp_3.shtml)

Martin acknowledges that some of these details may be out-of-date, but they hardly sound like the sort of people we’d like to see tweaking the NZ prison system, do they? He continues:

Wackenhut’s antipodean arm, Australasian Correctional Management, which operates Auckland Central Remand Centre, used to run all six of Australia’s detention centres, as well as the six Australian prisons which it continues to operate; it was recently reported to have received a contract from the Australian Government to set up and operate three more refugee camps, though this hasn’t been confirmed. It also operates private prisons in South Africa, the United Kingdom and across the United States as well. All of these facilities make substantial profits.

ACM no doubt tried exceedingly hard to impress the NZ Government with the way in which it runs the ACRC, because it wants to operate more prisons here. It seems a good move to keep organisations like ACM out of this country, which already has a comparatively high rate of imprisonment: simply because incarceration, for whatever reason, of human beings for the purposes of making money is an obscenity. The fact that Helen Clark’s government, like John Howard’s, maintains a token presence in Iraq; that it continues to detain Algerian refugee Ahmed Zaoui; and will not, out of electoral timidity, take a clear stand on the racism of the resurgent National Party, is slightly offset by its decision to say goodbye to ACM.

NB The renaming of Wackenhut as GEO Corp. seems part of a ploy to disguise the extent of its activities. Go to http://www.wcc-corrections.com/index.html for their corporate profile.

That was originally going to be the subject of this editorial, by the way – the terrible dangers of resurgent racism, as embodied in that Don Brash speech at Orewa which caused National’s unprecedented surge in the polls. I even downloaded the speech to talk about it clause by clause. It all seems a bit overtaken by events now, though. Strange all this difference should be / ‘Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee … The brutish and cynical opportunism of Labour has rather taken my breath away. I used to be an admirer of Helen Clark. Hell-Clark I’m forced to call her now. To hear her going on about New Zealand’s human rights record to people overseas makes me want to puke.

So what’s to be done? Is Collin the Animal going to come to our rescue? Is Jimmy Stewart going to stand up in the Senate and turn our darkness into day? (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, for those of you who missed that one). Well, maybe not, but perhaps we can learn something from that sort of tosh even so: Better to die on your feet than live on your knees! “Get up, stand up … Stand up for your rights!” Maybe we can’t change the world, but there’s absolutely no excuse for standing by while people are being imprisoned, indefinitely, without trial, in cruel and inhumane conditions, in our own back yard. It makes me sick.

There’s no profit in exaggeration, admittedly. It may be harder and harder to tell the difference between the goodies and the baddies, but there still is a (slight) difference between legitimate governments and terrorists. “What difference?” I hear you protest … The governments we see around us today are (if anything) more violent, intransigent, bloodthirsty, cynical, opportunistic and downright evil than their opponents. Not that those opponents are any great shakes either (witness the gunmen in that Russian school siege – people, to be sure, brutalised by a thousand acts of official oppression in their own towns and villages, but still brutal and intransigent thugs). The sole difference I can see is that we still have the right to stand up and denounce the things our governments do. Or even if we no longer exactly have the right (after that spate of insane homeland defence legislation sneaked through in most Western countries – including our own – after 9/11), at least we have the precedent of people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela … hell, Malcolm X. Right now we need a few more people like that: people who will not sit down and shut up, people who will not take a statesmanlike view, people who are not realistic about politics, people who are not cynical, world-weary, compassion-fatigued, and all the other pathetic excuses we use for not doing what we know to be right.

Do as you would be done by – Love your neighbour as yourself – We must love one another or die … what else have we got in the long run? Trying to imprison, or kill, or simply ignore all those we’ve done wrong to is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind. If I use enough clichés will you begin to understand what I’m on about? Who am I to preach, lazy and venal as I am? But I’m not afraid to call it the way I see it, even so.

(Friday, October 22nd, 2004)

brief 31 (2004): 3-6.

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brief 31 (2004)


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brief 30: Editorial (2004)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 30 - Kunst (November 2004)

Editorial:
WARUM die KUNST?

Why do Nazis
get all the best lines?
ARBEIT MACHT FREI

Satan hath made thee mighty glib
• When I hear the word
CULTURE

I reach for my revolver
• I came here to chew gum
& kick ass

& I’m … plumb out of gum
• We had to destroy the village
to save it

Shock and Awe

Gulf War II (2004)

“.. for the more experimental or highbrow
you’d turn to Landfall and Sport
or, farther out, Brief.”
– Harry Ricketts, “Poetry is on the menu.” NZ Listener (July 3, 2004) 60.

Warum die Kunst? Why Art?

I adore going to the movies on Queen Street. In the Force Entertainment Centre, with its huge blank Imax screen, we’ve made ourselves a little hell on earth – chrome-plated, labyrinthine, full of clumsy and inappropriate décor: space-rocket lifts, marbled-glass walkways, plastic vomit-coloured tentacles clinging to the walls …

Everything’s on sale there: fast food in the foodcourt, entertainment on the screens and games machines, books and mags and cds and dvds in Borders, clothes in Tommy-gun … I feel alienated by it and excited by it at the same time. Even now, after years of wandering around there, I can still get lost. I suppose that’s why I like it.

Or, rather, that’s why it seems so appropriate to me.

I’d just been to see that documentary The Corporation when I started to jot these lines down in my notebook. Corporations, it appears, are defined as legal beings under the fourteenth amendment to the US constitution. Not only are they alive, they have all the rights of humans and citizens. The fact that they’re (potentially) immortal doesn’t alter this one jot – in law, at any rate.

But what sort of human beings are they? Psychopaths, we’re told: without remorse, without a sense of guilt, ferociously acquisitive and aggressive … the film plugs its central metaphor remorselessly and persuasively.

Why Art, then? What’s the point, when the planet’s so urgently threatened by forces of destruction? Why not politics, activism, street theatre, propaganda, instead? Why not give up this vain pursuit of the aesthetic phenomenon (memorably defined by Jorge Luis Borges as “a revelation which does not occur”)?

I suppose one answer is the way I felt when I watched, in the film, the forces of solidarity at work in Bolivia, resisting the privatisation of the water supply. There they all were, men, women and children, united in a common cause, gathering in great numbers in the central square, cheering the leader’s words, suffering under the batons of the oppressor … It was moving, inspiring, effective even (ultimately, at any rate).

But what I was looking at was that man with the megaphone at the front of the crowd. Somehow there’s always someone with a megaphone leading the chant, and there’s an inner ring around them who are in the know – they’re the ones who planned the whole event, handed out the leaflets, got the show on the road. They’re too busy to talk to you, of course, but they’re tireless in the cause. We need them to be there – no doubt about that. The “spontaneous demonstration” is a bit of a mythical beast, I’m afraid.

But what if you don’t want to cheer and wave your arms up and down? What if you have reservations, scruples, delicate adjustments you’d like to make to the programme? The crowd-beast is no more responsive to such matters than the corporations it opposes. They’re worthy adversaries, in fact – mirror-images, one might say.

Why Art, then? Because Art is individual. Because it’s the voice of the awkward squad who won’t keep in step. Because it rakes up inconvenient facts that don’t fit the collective solution. Because it’s forced to see both sides of the question. Because it acts hastily and takes long views. Because it will listen to anyone – coward, hero, liberal, reactionary – any time. Because it’s got room for Céline as well as Camus, Pound as well as Henry James, Britney as well as Bob Dylan.

When it comes to getting people out of jail or changing laws, Art’s not generally much use (the examples most frequently cited: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Jungle, The Grapes of Wrath – are exceptions that prove the rule: different shades on the spectrum between propaganda and literature). Art is more about learning to be human than achieving partial ends.

So, all in all, I’m not ashamed of wasting my time on our arty little magazine. Whether what’s printed in it is any good, or has any effect on those who read it, is much more to the point. All I can say is that it’s encouraging to be told we’re “farther out” than all the others.

I’ve tried to find a place for the best of the myriad contributions which have come in over the past six months; I’ve tried to review (or at least notice) most of the books which have come down the mail-chute; I’ve tried to keep my eyes on the prize and my nose to the grindstone … but it is a long time since issue #29, you know (some of you have been kind enough to remind me of the fact). Profuse apologies for any omissions, then – it wasn’t a carefully meditated insult directed specifically at you, however probable that may seem in your darker moments.

Mexicans call the Pacific a warm place that has no memory (or so says Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption). Sounds like bliss. Sounds like a myth. Those of you who think we still need memories, read on …

(31/10-1/11/04)

brief 30 (2004): 3-4.

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brief 30 (2004)


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Murray Edmond: Fool Moon (2004)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 30 - Kunst (November 2004)

Murray Edmond, Fool Moon. Photographs by Joanna Forsberg. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2004. ISBN 1-86940-316-9. 72 pp. RRP $27.99.

Murray Edmond: Fool Moon (2004)

It’s inspiring to read a book of poems as intensely thought-through and considered as this one. My first, superficial overview fastened mainly on Joanna Forsberg’s pictures, beautifully acute and strange – it’s still hard for me to believe the first was taken at Paekakariki: it looks so unequivocally a scene of Eastern European industrial decay. As I read the poems more carefully, though, I began to see the kinship between text and pictures: the curiously simple yet somehow linguistically alienated diction of the verse matching perfectly these fresh views of a horribly and insistently quotidian local reality:

it is not hard to leave when there is nothing left
carrying the lost picture which you do not want
the person who was is not and so everything else has escaped [8]

“Elegy for Mama” doesn’t really sound like a New Zealand poem – nor does it sound imitative of an Eastern European one. In form it recalls Eliot’s Ash Wednesday, but it doesn’t really sound like that either. It sounds like Murray Edmond, in fact. As if he’d founded his own linguistic state between – irreconcilable? – homelands. Another interesting case is the “Ballad of the Penguin,” built up (according to the notes), out of lines chosen arbitrarily from a NZ Verse anthology. It seemed a very effective poem as I was reading through. Only after I’d discovered its provenance did any disjointedness appear in the cold spare lines. This book seems like a breakthrough to me. The intelligence so liberally on display in earlier work has finally succeeded in constructing its own world, or perhaps it’s just that I’ve finally managed to see it.

(4/11/04)

brief 30 (2004): 109.

[290 wds]

brief 30 (2004)


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