Notes on NZ Poetry: 5 (2012)

[Jacket 2]

In small press land:
Thoughts on booktables

Pania Press and Titus Books (Old Government House, Auckland, 29 August 2012)

The first thing that I do whenever I go to a poetry conference or symposium is to make a beeline for the booktable.

This is, admittedly, because I generally have a backpack full of my own wares which I’m hoping to flog off to the unwary, but my main motive is actually a strong desire to see what oddities and rarities the others have brought along.

Far more of us than would care to admit it have a cupboard full of old back-issues of magazines and boxes of books from defunct small presses who have gone belly-up. Who else is going to be interested in such things except other writers? Librarians? Antiquarian book collectors? Academics? Funnily enough, I never seem to see any of them putting their hands in their pockets on such occasions.

Here’s the booktable in the marae in for BLUFF 06: a poetry symposium in Southland (21-24 April 2006):

Here’s the booktable in the Technological University of Sydney for HOME & AWAY 2010: A Trans Tasman Poetry Symposium (31/8-3/9/10):

Here’s the booktable in Old Government House, Auckland for SHORT TAKES ON LONG POEMS: A Trans Tasman symposium at the University of Auckland (29-20/3/12):

Let’s face it: with certain (very honourable) exceptions, poetry doesn’t sell. Some of the poetry we love the most has qualities which almost guarantee a lack of market appeal, in fact. A simple survey of the books put out by the major publishers will therefore seldom be a reliable guide to what’s “really going on” in any country’s poetry scene. Hence my interest in small “my basement” presses, fly-by-night publishers, and erratically available imprints. What better place to find them than on such a table, with their authors and proprietors generally close to hand?

The poetry “mainstream” in New Zealand publishing consists, first of all, of the major University presses: AUP (Auckland), Victoria UP (Wellington), and Otago UP (Dunedin). Then come the occasional books issued by the New Zealand branches of publishers such as international giants Random House or Penguin Books, not to mention local specialist publishers such as Craig Potton (Nelson).

After that the picture becomes considerably more complicated.

There are the smaller independent publishers such as Cape Catley (Auckland), Steele Roberts (Wellington), Michael O’Leary’s ESAW [The Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop] (Kapiti Coast), Mark Pirie’s HeadworX (Wellington), and Titus Books (Kaipara), each of which have issued distinguished lists. A newer addition would be Helen Rickerby’s Seraph Books (Wellington).

There are also imprints associated with independent literary magazines: brief (Auckland), Catalyst (Christchurch), and (now) Hue & Cry (Wellington) are three that spring to mind.

After that, we come to what is to me – I must confess – the area of greatest interest: the artier, “fine-printing” presses, the ones whose every production is a conscious artistic statement. These books tend to be slimmer, pricier, and far, far more quirky.

Who am I talking about? Well, I guess the king of the hill would have to be the Holloway Press. Founded by Peter Simpson and Alan Loney at Auckland University in 1994, it continues to publish ornate and expensive poetry and art books. It’s a worthy successor to a grand tradition of such presses in New Zealand literary history: Alan Loney’s own Hawk Press, of course (together with its successors), or the Gormacks’ Nag’s Head Press.

Let’s see. There’s Brendan O’Brian’s Fernbank Studio; there’s Pania Press, the imprint run by my wife Bronwyn Lloyd (with occasional editorial input from me); till a few short months ago, there was Dean Havard’s Kilmog Books, a hugely productive and imaginative press based in Dunedin, which has been driven under by lack of official funding and (one must admit) by the apathy of local book-buyers.

That’s really the point of this piece, in fact. What small presses, as a rule, really lack is not quality – either in contents or design – it’s distribution. Networks of friends, loose alliances between the proprietors of like-minded presses, can make up for this to some extent, but in a retail climate which is now almost exclusively dominated by “sale or return” for the prodcuts of indie presses, most of us feel distinctly reluctant to trust our precious limited-edition books to the back shelf in some huge megastore.

So for the moment you’ll continue to see me running over to the booktable at any reasonably large poetry festival with a big wad of cash (a word to the wise: booktables seldom come equipped with eftpos or credit card facilities – if you’re serious about buying, come prepared).

And finally, intensest apologies to anyone I’ve inadvertently left off this list. If you’re a small poetry publisher, and you think you should have been mentioned, please do write to me and I’ll try and make up for my oversight in a future post.

 

(27/4/12)

Jacket2: Commentaries: 5 - In small press land
[Available at: https://jacket2.org/commentary/small-press-land]

[828 wds]


[Jack Ross: Notes on NZ Poetry (2012)]


•

Notes on NZ Poetry: 6 (2012)

[Jacket 2]

State-of-the-Nation poems:
Allen Curnow, “A Small Room with Large Windows” (1962)

"What you call a view" - Albany Coronation Hall (1911)

I think that we’ve had enough generalizations about various different types of New Zealand poetry for a bit. It’s time to descend to cases. But which poems should we talk about?

There’s not much point in doing a mini-anthology of my favourite contemporary poets. In any case, that’s something I’ve already been asked to do for Jacket2. It appeared last year as the feature “Look and look again: Twelve New Zealand Poets.”
Instead I thought it might make sense to concentrate on big-issue public poetry: those “state-of-the-nation” poems which poets more often find themselves writing by accident than actually sitting down to compose (or so I suspect, anyway).

Robert Lowell specialized in such poems: “For the Union Dead”, for example – or “Waking Early Sunday Morning.” It’s a form of engagé, ex cathedra discourse which many modern readers are understandably suspicious of, but when you reread those Lowell poems, or Derek Walcott’s superb sequence “The Schooner Flight,” or even Philip Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings,” it becomes clear that there are ways of avoiding pompous attitudinizing within this mini-genre.

I suppose that the whole thing began with those mid-nineteenth century / early twentieth-century “condition-of-England” novels: Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909), Forster’s Howards End (1910), to name just a few. These are books which quite consciously set out to diagnose the maladies of contemporary society – in the guise of fiction, but with the force of fact (their prototype and progenitor is Carlyle’s 1839 pamphlet on the "Condition of England Question" – or rather, as he himself put it, “on the poor, their rights and their wrongs”).

Joyce never wrote one – neither did Conrad. The First World War virtually wiped out the subgenre, I suspect (unless you like to see Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) as a kind of condition-of-England-in the-twentieth-century novel. That’s what it appears to aspire to in formal terms, at any rate …)

I’m turning fifty this year, and so it occurred to me that it might be interesting to see what New Zealand poets had had to say about our own place in the world in my birth-year, 1962.

And there it was! “A Small Room with Large Windows,” the title poem in the Selected Poems published in that year by Allen Curnow, perhaps our most celebrated modern English-language poet. What’s more, he was around fifty himself when he wrote it, a little over halfway through his extremely long life (1911-2001), so it does seem ideal.

Obviously I can’t reprint the whole poem here for copyright reasons, but I’ll do my best to quote enough of it for you to see the poet’s drift. I have discussed it in class on a number of occasions. It forms part of a course we call “Auckland Writers in their region.”

The students (for the most part) don’t get it. It requires too much explanation. It’s too drily critical of the predominant modes of thought. “What if?” it asks:

What it would look like if really there were only
One point of the compass not known illusory,
All other quarters proving nothing but quaint
Obsolete expressions of true north

Rather a strange idea, this metaphor of the fixed, unmoving compass. What would it look like if there were only one fixed truth, awe-full and inexorable? “The unwinding abiding beam from birth / To death. What a plan!”

Well, yes, we do like everyone to agree with one another here: there’s not much room for healthy dissent in New Zealand society (even less, one presumes, in the 1950s):
One way to save space and a world of trouble.

That’s part one of this four-part poem. Part two goes on to describe a particular scene: the seascape visible (one presumes) out of the window of Curnow’s own house on the shores of Auckland Harbour, the “small room with large windows” of the title:

Seven ageing pine trees hide
Their heads in air but, planted on bare knees,
Supplicate wind and tide.

The pine-trees are trying to stand tall in the midst of some tidal mangroves, a landscape:

half earth, half heaven,
Half land, half water, what you call a view
Strung out between the windows and the tree trunks
Below sills a world moist with new making …

The pines, clearly symbolic of some “old order” of things, are (however) under threat:

a bad bitching squall
Thrashes the old pines, has them twitching
Root and branch, rumouring a Götterdãmmerung.

For the moment, though, they’re:

Comfortable
To creak in tune, comfortable to damn
Slime-suckled mangrove for its muddy truckling
With time and tide, knotted to the vein it leeches.

The mangroves live half in, half out of water, drawing sustenance from land and sea. Their “muddy truckling” may be parasitic, ignoble, but the Götterdãmmerung, the Twilight of the Gods, will most likely pass them by – above all, they’re survivors.

“In the interim,” in part three, we move back to the general:

how the children should be educated,
Pending a decision, a question much debated
In our island realms. It being …
Out of the question merely to recognize
The whole three hundred and sixty degrees

Naturally not. Recognizing the whole 360° of possibilities would never do! Provincial societies are, after all, distinguished by the fanatical zeal with which they try to enforce conformity, convinced (or trying to pretend that they’re convinced) of the transcendent merits of their own institutions. So

It is necessary to avail oneself of aids
Like the Bible or no Bible, free swimming tuition,
Art, sex, no sex and so on.

“Not to direct / So much as to normalize [my emphasis] personality, protect / From all hazards of climate, parentage, diet, / Whatever it is exists.” Curnow has put his finger on the fear that motivates such schemes of societal self-improvement, the need to guard against “whatever it is exists”

While, on the quiet,
it is understood there is a judgement preparing
Which finds the compass totally without bearing
And the present course correct beyond a doubt …

Part four returns us to the particular – again to the view (what we “call a view,” at any rate) out of those “large windows” in the “small room” of our "truckling" culture. They’re among the most famous lines he ever wrote:

A kingfisher’s naked arc alight
Upon a dead stick. In the mud
A scarlet geranium wild on a wet bank
A man stepping it out in the near distance
With a dog and a bag

Some wiseacre took it upon himself at the time to write a letter to the paper pointing out that Curnow was wrong about that “scarlet geranium wild on a wet bank.” He said that geraniums don’t grow in the wild, and that this was therefore a poeticism, not a factual possibility. Curnow wrote back to say that he was “rooted in the particular. From where I am sitting I can see a scarlet geranium growing wild on a wet bank.”

It may be unusual, he was saying, but it is exact: he was describing precisely what he saw (as he was in the rest of the poem, by implication). I don’t think that it would have troubled him unduly if you’d disputed his view of the dullness and conformity of the small room our “island realm” has confined itself to. Criticizing the accuracy of his description, though, was another matter. Facts, the essence of things, were to him paramount, perhaps because of the fanciful reputation of “poetry” as a form.

And finally, this geranium, that man with a dog and a bag, together with:

a gannet impacting
Explode a dozen diverse dullnesses
Like a burst of accurate fire.

It’s only through that precision of image that we can begin to make the best of our “large windows” here, cleansing our Blakean “doors of perception,” seeing things “as they are, infinite.”

There’s a lot going on in Curnow’s poem, as it moves expertly from general to particular in form, from satirical to celebratory in tone. It balances his usual preoccupation with the next world (he trained for the Anglican priesthood as a young man) with his addiction to precision and provable facts (instead he became a newspaper journalist).

This piece, this whole book, written in the middle of his journey, shows as much hope as it does disdain for the “way we live now” – we’re a little frightened, still, by the view out those windows. They are, after all, so terribly large, so potentially threatening to our head-in-the-sand, Ostrich (Moa?) culture.

There really is so little of interest in the “small room” we’ve confined ourselves to so far, though. Time to walk out of Plato’s cave – time to see the reality of what we’ve been debating so long in shadow form.

(6/5/12)

Jacket2: Commentaries: 6 - State-of-the-Nation poems: Allen Curnow
[Available at: https://jacket2.org/commentary/state-nation-poems]

[1489 wds]


[Jack Ross: Notes on NZ Poetry (2012)]


•

Notes on NZ Poetry: 7 (2012)

[Jacket 2]

State-of-the-Nation poems (2):
James K. Baxter, “Ode to Auckland” (1972)

"the song of Tangaroa on a thousand beaches" - Rangitoto from North Head

If the Allen Curnow poem I talked about in my latest post looks back on the fifties, that whole post-war “You’ve never had it so good” period, then it seems logical to go on to discuss further “state-of-the-nation” poems commenting successively on the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, and (finally) the twenty-tens.

This is the list I’ve come up with. Not all the dates fit perfectly, but at least it provides some sort of a coverage of styles, ideas, voices and views, over the last fifty years of New Zealand poetry. Each one of them will take a fair amount of contextualising and unpacking, but it’s the only way I can think of to give you a reasonable overview of where we’ve been and where (possibly) we might be going.

It’s not (I hasten to add) that I have a particular predilection for poetry’s oracular role, but I think I do see a certain necessity – at times – for a writer to assume the robes of Tribune of the People. In any case, they (we?) do, and it can be quite interesting to see just how they square this with other aspects of their artistic practice.

I’ve dated each poem according to its first book appearance, rather than date of composition (where that can be ascertained), as befits their status as “public poetry” (not, I’m sure, that all of these authors would agree with that definition of their work):

• [1950s:] Allen Curnow (1911-2001): “A Small Room with Large Windows.” In A Small Room with Large Windows: Selected Poems (1962)
• [1960s:] James K. Baxter (1926-1973): “Ode to Auckland.” In Ode to Auckland (1972)
• [1970s:] Cilla McQueen (1949- ): “Living Here.” In Homing In (1982)
• [1980s:] Ian Wedde (1946- ): “Barbary Coast.” In The Drummer (1993)
• [1990s:] Kendrick Smithyman (1922-1995): “If I Stepped Outside, in May ’93.” In Last Poems (2002)
• [2000s:] Michele Leggott (1956- ): “peri poietikes / about poetry.” In Mirabile Dictu (2009)

•

In many ways New Zealand poetry is still reeling from the impact of James K. Baxter. He occupies a position somewhat analogous to that of Robert Burns in Scottish literature (a comparison I suspect he would have relished): a towering genius who could never quite reconcile himself to the laws and manners of the rest of society.

He began as a teenage wunderkind, his early poems being included in the second edition of Allen Curnow’s epoch-making Book of New Zealand Verse (1945, rev. ed. 1951, final apotheosis as the Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse in 1960). He ended as a kind of social and religious revolutionary, having founded a commune at the tiny settlement of Jerusalem on the Whanganui River, where he wrote some of his very finest poetry – the Jerusalem Sonnets (1970), Jerusalem Daybook (1971) and Autumn Testament (1972).

“Ode to Auckland” dates to the period just after that, when the commune had been broken up (at least temporarily), and he was living at a bit of a loose end in our largest city, Auckland. The poem opens with scant ceremony:

Auckland, you great arsehole,
Some things I like about you
Some things I cannot like.

And what are some of these things he “cannot like”?

The sound of the opening and shutting of bankbooks.
The thudding of refrigerator doors,
The ripsaw voices of Glen Eden mothers yelling at their children,
The chugging noise of masturbation from the bedrooms of the bourgeoisie,
The voices of dead teachers droning in dead classrooms,
The TV voice of Mr Muldoon,
The farting noise of the trucks that grind their way down Queen Street
Has drowned forever the song of Tangaroa on a thousand beaches,
The sound of the wind among the green volcanoes,
And the whisper of the human heart.

New Zealand is one of those countries divided in two halves. Just as, in Australia, Sydney is locked in perpetual battle with Melbourne; in Scotland, Edinburgh with Glasgow; in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro with Sao Paulo; so in New Zealand, Auckland is thought to be a sink of iniquity and cosmopolitan pretension running roughshod over the solider values of the rest of New Zealand. It’s Heartland (which, strangely, seems somehow to include the other large cities, including our politician-&-bureaucrat-infested capital Wellington) against Auckland all the way.

Many have therefore taken comfort from these lines of Baxter’s (a native of the south of the South Island) and the way in which they lay the blame for our land’s ills squarely at Auckland’s door (“Mr. Muldoon,” by the way, was a particularly loathsome ex-Prime Minister of ours, who ruled the country in dictatorial fashion between 1975 and 1984).

Few of these casual readers of “Ode to Auckland” bother to read on:

Boredom is the essence of your death,
I would take a trip to another town
Except that the other towns resemble you exactly.

Oh. Okay. It seems that it isn’t just Auckland he’s talking about, then:

How can I live in a country where the towns are made like coffins
And the rich are eating the flesh of the poor
Without even knowing it?

It’s almost inconceivable now just how wicked the next four lines sounded at the time (I should know, having been ten years old at the time). You mean to say that you actually take drugs, Mr. Baxter?

Auckland, even when I am well stoned
On a tab of LSD or on Indian grass
You still look to me like an elephant’s arsehole
Surrounded with blue-black haemorrhoids.

Not a bad bit of impromptu word-painting there. Most of our towns are still surrounded by a scurf of garishly painted industrial warehouses and thinly described rubbish dumps to this day. It’s an angry poem, a disgusted poem, the poem of a man at the end of his tether (he was dead – mainly of exhaustion, it seems, though the official cause was a bad heart – within a few months of writing it).

This next bit didn’t exactly endear him to the local conservatives, either (you have to remember that the Vietnam war was still going on at the time: a constant drip-drip-drip of death on our television screens every night):

O Father Lenin, help us in our great need!
The people seem to enjoy building the pyramids.
Moses would get a mighty cold reception.
They’d kiss the arse of Pharaoh any day of the week

For a pat on the head and a dollar note.

Like “A Small Room with Large Windows,” I use this poem in class sometimes, too. Last time we discussed it, I remember that its last few lines were described by one of the younger students as “creepy”. I don’t know. You decide:

At another time in another place
Among the Ngati-Whatua
When they brought the dead child into the meeting house

She opened her eyes and smiled.

I guess my problem is that I can’t read them out loud without wanting to burst into tears. They seem to me among the most beautiful and moving words I’ve ever encountered.

“Ode to Auckland,” for all its satire and casual blasphemies, has the biggest heart of any New Zealand poem I know. Maybe we still have a chance of reviving “the song of Tangaroa on a thousand beaches, / The sound of the wind among the green volcanoes, / And the whisper of the human heart.”

(11/5/12)

Jacket2: Commentaries: 7 - State-of-the-Nation poems (2): James K. Baxter
[Available at: https://jacket2.org/commentary/state-nation-poems-2]

[1250 wds]


[Jack Ross: Notes on NZ Poetry (2012)]


•

Notes on NZ Poetry: 8 (2012)

[Jacket 2]

State-of-the-Nation poems (3):
Cilla McQueen, “Living Here” (1982)

Cilla McQueen in Auckland (March 29, 2012)

Time for a change of gear, I think. Curnow’s and Baxter’s poems seem designed to wrestle with the big questions, to provoke that “You must change your life” epiphany Rilke got from his Archaic Torso of Apollo. There’s a sense of mission about both of them as writers. They knew that whatever they said would be pored over and attended to, which can lead to a certain attitudinizing – what Chekhov referred to as living “on stilts.”

Not so our next poet. Chekhov said of his new type of theatre: “Let everything on the stage be just as complicated and at the same time just as simple as in life.” Cilla McQueen’s first book Homing In (1982) displayed the new sensibility beginning to appear in New Zealand poetry.

On the one hand, there’s clearly the influence of the women’s movement. Poems such as “Timepiece” show an intense consciousness of the value of the domestic and local, hitherto somewhat repressed in our writing (with the exception of Janet Frame’s fiction and the poems of Mary Stanley and other women poets, or – especially – short story writers).

On the other hand, there’s the fact of distance. Though her family moved to New Zealand when she was four years old, Cilla McQueen was born in Birmingham, which – rather bizarrely – still qualifies her as something of an outsider to local notions of nationality. The fact that she has mostly made her home in Dunedin (and, latterly, Bluff), also gives her a distinctly southern perspective on the idea of what it means to be “living here.” Homing In, then, is anything but a throwaway title:

Well you have to remember this place
is just one big city with 3 million people with
a little flock of sheep each so we’re all sort of
shepherds

How can I convey just how provocative an opening that is to Kiwi sensibilities? Sheep, for God’s sake! If you only knew how sick we are of hearing how many sheep there are in New Zealand, how disproportionate the ratio of sheep to people, etc. Until the Lord of the Rings came along, it was pretty much the only thing anyone could find to say about our strange little country.

That “well”, to start off with, is so deliberately conversational and informal, so clearly not a manifesto designed to be delivered “on stilts”. The use of the second person (“you have to remember”), too, couches all of what’s to come in the form of instructions to an out-of-towner, an outsider. That also qualifies as a direct affront to our taboos. Like most provincial societies, we’re thin-skinned and sensitive to criticism. What we particularly hate, though, is any kind of internal criticism directed towards the outside world – “keep it in the family” is practically our national motto.

we all know we’ll probably
be safe when the Indians finally come
down from the hills(comfortable to live
in the Safest Place in the World)
sheep being
very thick and made of wool and leather
being a very effective shield as ancient
soldiers would agree.

If you want to be cutesy about the sheep, that’s fine. We can probably tolerate that, under the circumstances. That next bit is getting a bit too close to the bone, though. “When the Indians finally come / down from the hills.” What is this, Fort Apache?

No family likes to wash its dirty linen in public, and Cilla McQueen’s poem shows, here, a disposition to do precisely that. The 1970s were a rather bitter time of awakening for New Zealand (as no doubt they were for the rest of the world). The “Angel in the House” was demanding vociferously to be taken seriously outside as well as inside the home – and the myth of New Zealand’s harmonious race relations was finally being laid to rest.

Our particular version of “Indians” – the Maoris – had indeed been dispossessed, and the pretence that sufficient restitution had already been made for the ills of the past, and that “colour-blindness” was the distinguishing characteristic of our society, was an increasingly untenable position. Cilla McQueen’s first husband, Ralph Hotere, probably the most distinguished Maori artist of his generation, collaborated with her on a number of highly politicized works at this stage of her career, so the sting in that crack about “the Safest Place in the World” is certainly intended to draw blood.

so after all we are lucky to have these
sheep in abundancethey might
have been hedgehogs -
Then we’d all be
used to hedgehogs and clothed in prickles
rather than fluff
and the little sheep would
come out sometimes at night under the moon
and we’d leave them saucers of milk
and feel sad
seeing them squashed on the road

There’s a certain air of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle about this part of the poem – so what if all those sheep had been hedgehogs? It’s not really quite as frivolous as it seems, though, when you conflate it with the Indians waiting in the hills. They’ve got to come down sometime, and when they do it won’t be to say hello …

Well anyway here we are with all this
cushioning in the biggest city in the world
its suburbs strung out in a long line
and the civic centre at the bottom of
Cook Straitsome of them Hill Suburbs
and some Flat Suburbs and some more prosperous
than others

That’s pretty much a reprise of Curnow’s critique of our blinkered lack of vision, supplemented by Baxter’s raw indignation at the longer-term effects of “Pig Island” (his name for NZ) complacency.

each in his woolly protection
so sometimes it’s difficult to see out
the eyeslet alone call to each other
which is the reason for the loneliness some
of us feel

More of us than one might expect, perhaps, feel this loneliness; but one does have to acknowledge the inhibition against simply calling out to each other – the fear of being conspicuous, of standing out in any way from the herd. The tall poppy syndrome, we call it – after that Ancient Greek dictator who walked through a field of flowers lopping off all the tallest stems, when asked to give a lesson on statecraft.

McQueen’s poem concludes with some remarks on “our particular relations / with the landscape,” which we:

lovelike an
old familiar lover who fits us
curve to curveand hate because it
knows us and knows our weakness

Hers is a poem which is unafraid to probe those weaknesses, identify those no-go areas. It treads on toes because the atmosphere here, buy the end of the 70s, had got so claustrophobic that one virtually had to provoke in order to be heard.

“Living Here,” then, is a “state-of-the-nation” poem insofar as it very clearly and deliberately sets out to provide a barometer reading on local conditions for an imagined audience of onlookers (“you have to remember”). In tone, it might seem a million miles away from the high vatic of James K. Baxter, or the theophanic of Allen Curnow. It’s nevertheless interesting to see how closely McQueen echoes the endings of both the earlier poems.

Curnow finishes on the image of a “gannet impacting” which explodes “a dozen diverse dullnesses / Like a burst of accurate fire” – a somewhat militaristic analogy for the “psychic cleansing” he requires of us.

Baxter moves away from the violence of that conclusion to the more ecumenical concept of a place, the meeting house, so holy that it can literally bring the dead back to life:

When they brought the dead child into the meeting house

She opened her eyes and smiled.

This rather sentimental notion of the indigenous culture as potential saviour of its own colonisers is not so much contradicted as nuanced by McQueen, whose own poem looks finally for comfort to:

any wrist-brush
cut of mind or touch of music,
lightning in the intimate weather of the soul.

So, while she too ends on an unequivocal “flash, a trumpet-crash” (as G. M. Hopkins put it), this time the image has been scaled down to inner weather – no more firing squads or Pentecostal Raptures.

(17/5/12)

Jacket2: Commentaries: 8 - State-of-the-Nation poems (3): Cilla McQueen
[Available at: https://jacket2.org/commentary/state-nation-poems-3]

[1373 wds]


[Jack Ross: Notes on NZ Poetry (2012)]


•

Notes on NZ Poetry: 9 (2012)

[Jacket 2]

There’s work yet for the living:
A Conversation with Hone Tuwhare

Hone Tuwhare: Mihi: Collected Poems (1987)

“Could you let the cat in?”

I turned. The cat (large, handsome, grey and white), was standing stretched against the glass of the French door, meowing in protest at the cold grey rain bucketing down outside.

The year was 1998. Gregory O’Brien’s exhibition Black Windows: Ralph Hotere’s Work with New Zealand Poets was touring the country, so there were quite a few out-of-towners up in Auckland. Somehow I’d wangled the job of interviewing iconic Maori poet Hone Tuwhare for the Sunday Star-Times, and I was pretty nervous about it.

He was staying with his friend (and biographer) Janet Hunt in Grey Lynn, one of the posher Auckland suburbs. There’d been a bit of a contretemps when I arrived, as they took me for a photographer rather than the interviewer, but we soon sorted that out.

The first thing I’d noticed was that he wouldn’t really answer questions. I tried to ask him about the various paintings Hotere had based on his poems. ““Every time he’s used something of mine the poems were written first,” Hone replied. “What Ralph has done with them is up to him. I can’t explain it for you.”

He was also quite deaf, and seemed to use this as a shield against foolish inquisitiveness. I worked out pretty quickly that one had to follow where he wanted the conversation to go, and that could be anywhere. “He’s one of our most political painters. I’ve always respected him for that.” That’s about as much as he would say on the subject of Hotere.

As the soaking wet cat came bustling in, he bent to give it a brief cuddle in passing.

“Do you have a cat of your own?” I asked.

“No,” he observed regretfully. “I’m away too much. From Kaka Point. It’s on the coast, as far south as you can get and still be in Otago. I feed the neighbour’s cats and dogs, though.”

“You must be like an uncle to them.”

This appeared to tickle his fancy. “Yes,” he chuckled, “double rations all around when Uncle Hone gets back.”

After a bit, I took out some books to show him, and that seemed to work rather better. He signed my copy of Mihi, his selected poems (with Hotere illustrations), and talked and read out some of the poems: the one on fellow poet – and fellow communist – R. A. K. Mason, for instance. He was interested to hear that I lived in the same place, Mairangi Bay, where he’d so often gone to visit Mason.

When he heard about the pollution problems we’d been having there, though, he was shocked. “You have to do something about it,” he said. “You can’t allow that to go on.” He showed a touching faith in my ability to effect change. Or perhaps it was that he wasn’t prepared to allow any slackness when it came to such assaults on the integrity of the land. The title poem of his first collection, No Ordinary Sun (1964) is, after all, about a palm tree poisoned by Atomic testing.

He seemed happy to talk on and on, and I tried to tape it all with my little dictaphone. It wasn’t till after I got home that I realised that it had stopped working about five minutes into out conversation, so all of that priceless detail was lost. Never mind. I do sometimes regret some of the readings he did for me that afternoon, though. He seemed to love sounding out the words.

Hone, who died in 2008, was definitely a political poet – one of the most radical in our history, in fact. It’s hard to know how he got away with it at times. He did have a kind of cuddly teddy-bear persona as loveable Uncle Hone which certainly fooled many people. I suppose as time went on it became less of an act and more a genuine part of his personality.

As a lone Maori poet among so many Europeans, as the one genuine leftist among so many conservatives, he certainly had a complex and difficult path to tread. The traces of it are all through his poems, which operate almost like linguistic cross-sections from hieratic to colloquial. He moved like a master through all the registers of English, from local NZld to the cadences of the King James Bible.

He can’t really be fitted neatly into my schema of “State-of-the-Nation poems.” To be honest, I think he would have thought the whole notion a little bit suss. I would like to quote from one of his poems, though: the elegy he wrote for that true original and good friend, Ron Mason:

Time has pulled up a chair, dashed
a stinging litre from a jug of wine.
My memory is a sluggard.

I reject your death, but can’t dismiss it.
For it was never an occasion for woman
sobs and keenings: your stoic-heart

would not permit it. And that calcium-covered
pump had become a sudden roadblock bringing
heavy traffic to a tearing halt.

Your granite-words remain.

I guess one might apply the same phrases to Hone’s own legacy: his poems, which are perhaps slightly less “austere fare” than Mason’s, “but nonetheless adequate for the / honest sustenance they give.”

Ad Dorotheum: She and I together found the poem
you’d left for her behind a photograph.

Lest you be a dead man’s
slave
Place a branch upon the
grave
Nor allow your term of
grief
To pass the fall of its
last leaf

‘Bloody Ron, making up to me,’ she said, quickly.
Too quickly.

Mason was a great Latinist, a profoundly learned man, who nevertheless worked most of his life as a labourer and landscape gardener – oh, and a radical unionist. Hone, too, was trained as a boiler-maker, and lived latterly between grants and residencies and jobs here and there up and down the country.

But Time impatient, creaks a chair. And from the
jug I pour sour wine to wash away the only land
I own, and that between the toes.

A red libation to your good memory, friend. There’s
work yet, for the living.

That “red libation” is exactly what it sounds. Mason visited China in the late 50s, and came back very impressed with what he’d seen. Hone, too, had pictures of Mao and Marx among the gallery of heroes on the wall of his little crib (South Island for “seaside cottage” – what we North Islanders would call a “bach”) at Kaka Point.

I think the real resonance of the poem lies in that last line and a half, though. I can’t say that I’ve done much to improve the pollution levels on Mairangi Bay beach (though it has got a bit better in the last ten years, I’m pleased to say). I still think about Hone every time I walk down there, though. “There’s work yet, for the living.”

As I left him that day, at the end of our long conversation, he pressed a bottle of wine on me. “For aroha,” he said. “A koha.”

The Maori word aroha translates as love, or amity; a koha is a gift, or an offering. He ended by asking me about my own writing, and told me I should send him my own first book of poems when it came out. I didn’t dare to, but wish now that I had.

I did send him my own gift a few weeks later, though, a copy of Mary Barnard’s version of Sappho, as he’d said he lacked a good translation of her poems. I met him in passing a couple of times after that (once when he was in Auckland for the launch of the CD of musical recordings of his poems), but we didn’t really have the chance to speak at any length.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget that rainy morning in Grey Lynn, though, the cosy kitchen table piled with magazines and books, Hone reading us out our horoscopes, Janet making us cups of tea, the cat meowing to be picked up, and that wonderful rich voice. A koha, for aroha.

 

(26/5/12)

Jacket2: Commentaries: 9 - Work yet for the living: Hone Tuwhare
[Available at: https://jacket2.org/commentary/there's-work-yet-living]

[1366 wds]


[Jack Ross: Notes on NZ Poetry (2012)]


•

Notes on NZ Poetry: 10 (2012)

[Jacket 2]

What's in the mags?:
brief 44 / 45 – Oceania (2012)

photograph by Scott Hamilton / cover design by Brett Cross

It’s not that easy to keep a literary magazine going in New Zealand. Longevity is, of course, not always the point of such projects. Sometimes a journal – Oriflamme (1939-42), Morepork (1979-80), AND (1983-85), the pander (1997-99) achieves its aims in a few issues, and can then be safely consigned to the library shelves – or the backrooms of secondhand bookshops.

More often, though, they fall by the wayside due to diminishing enthusiasm on the part of the editors, or (even more frequently) inability to sustain the crippling financial burden they so often represent.

Our literature is littered with dazzling wrecks of magazines: Bravado, Evasion, Glottis, Printout, Quote Unquote, Spin, Starch – to name just a few of those which have come and gone over the last decade or so.

That’s definitely a reason to cherish those few literary journals we have which still publish poetry – some as their principal focus, others as one concern among many. The ones that I’m personally aware of (and I fear there may be substantial gaps in the list) are as follows:

• In Dunedin: Landfall – the oldest and most venerable of all NZ literary magazines, founded by Charles Brasch in 1947, and now published by Otago University Press.
• In Christchurch: the longrunning magazine Takahe, founded in the 1980s, & the stranger and more avant-garde journal Catalyst, discussed in my earlier post on sound poetry.
• In the capital, Wellington, there’s the eminent Sport, begun in the 1980s; the almost equally venerable JAAM, from the 1990s; & the comparative newcomer Hue & Cry. As well as these print journals, there’s the online periodical Turbine, and the Best NZ Poems site, both run out of Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters.
• In Auckland: there's Poetry NZ, our oldest and most prestigious purely poetry magazine (now in its 44th issue); the poetics journals Percutio and Ka Mate Ka Ora, discussed in my post on translation; the online journals Trout and Blackmail Press; and then, of course, there’s brief, the magazine formally known as A Brief Description of the Whole World, founded by Alan Loney in 1995, and still running 45 issues later.

It’s the latest brief, the themed double-issue 44-45: Oceania, I’d like to talk about here.

I guess the idea behind it is the strange propensity of New Zealanders – and Australasians in general – to forget that they live in the middle of the largest ocean on earth, and to ignore what we owe to the cultures scattered across that immense expanse of atolls and islands.

The editor of this issue, Scott Hamilton, is no stranger to literary controversy. His literary / political blog Reading the Maps has attracted over half a million hits since he started it in 2004, and is regularly cited as one of New Zealand’s most influential confluences of alternative opinion.

This immense double issue has all sorts of material in it: an exposition by Murray Edmond of his classic poem “Von Tempsky’s Dance,” an essay (by me) on the iconography of Antarctica, and a very dense piece (by film-maker Paul Janman) attempting to reconcile the Chinese I-Ching, or Book of Changes, with the philosophical system known as ’Atenisi realism.

And what’s ’Atenisi realism when it’s at home? Well, as I understand it, it’s an attempt to reconcile – or perhaps sidestep – the binary opposition of Platonic and Aristotelian approaches to nature in favour of a more Heraclitean approach. It was originated and espoused by the late Futa Helu, who founded the ’Atenisi (“Athens”) institute in Tonga, and who is the subject of Janman’s documentary Tongan Ark, soon to screen at the Auckland International Film Festival.

In his invitation to the launch party for the issue, Scott elaborates as follows:

As many of you will be aware, brief 44-45 features, amongst many other things, work from a number of Pasifika and palangi writers who have taught or studied at the 'Atenisi Institute, the private university founded in Tonga nearly fifty years ago by the classicist, opera singer, pro-democracy activist, and staunch advocate of intercultural exchange Futa Helu.

'Atenisi's legendary founder died in 2008, but his daughter Sisi'uno, who is the current Director of the Institute, and the American sociologist and novelist Michael Horowitz, who ran the Institute between 2008 and 2010 and has an extract from his new work of fiction in brief 44-45, will be flying from Nuku'alofa to Auckland for the launch.

Auckland-based members of the Helu family and former students of 'Atenisi will be performing a song and dance at the event, and some outtakes from Paul Janman's festival-bound feature-length documentary about 'Atenisi, Tongan Ark, will be screened on a wall.

To its fans, the ’Atenisi Institute offers a set of approaches to the study of world culture which avoid stereotypical divisions between “Western” and “Polynesian” thinking. To its critics, it’s a haven for disillusioned hippies and intellectual beachcombers trying to build yet another utopia in the South Seas. One thing’s for sure – it raises hackles.

Another motive for holding the launch party at the Onehunga Workingman's Club was, in fact, to use that as a locus for collecting books for the institute. As Scott goes on to say:

Because of the poverty of most of its students and its unpopularity with Tonga's ruling elite, 'Atenisi has always lacked resources. After talking with Sisi'uno about her struggle to replenish her institution's library, which stands in a small wooden building in the middle of a swamp, I suggested that supporters of brief might be interested in donating some books for the university at the launch on the May the 26th. With Sisi'uno's agreement, I made an appeal for donations of books in a post last week on my weblog. I'm pleased to be able to report that my post has prompted numerous pledges of books, some of them from people in distant parts of New Zealand who will be unable to attend the launch, but will be posting texts for us to pass on to Sisi'uno.

That’s one of the things I like most about Scott’s issue. It’s combative, engaged: located in time and space. It’s rather funny to think that despite having run for seventeen years, with so many eminent editors and contributors, brief still doesn’t figure in the New Zealand Book Council’s list of local literary magazines.

Perhaps they’d rather it would just go away. It shows no signs of doing so just yet, though, and with a 46th issue, edited by Auckland-based Art Historian Bronwyn Lloyd, coming up later in the year. If you’d like to contribute to that, or find out more about the magazine, look for details here.

(1/6/12)

Jacket2: Commentaries: 10 - What's in the mags? brief 44/45
[Available at: https://jacket2.org/commentary/whats-mags]

[1120 wds]


[Jack Ross: Notes on NZ Poetry (2012)]


•

Notes on NZ Poetry: 11 (2012)

[Jacket 2]

State-of-the-Nation poems (4):
Ian Wedde, “Barbary Coast” (1993)

Auckland Skyline - photograph: Michael Dean

1946 was a good year for poets. Along the fruits of that bumper crop were Alan Brunton, peripatetic troubadour and (co-) founder of radical theatre troupe Red Mole; Bill Manhire, Dean of the Wellington school and unquestioned Top Bard of the country; Sam Hunt, restless road warrior and heart-sore lyricist – and Ian Wedde, New Zealand Poet Laureate for 2011-13.

It’s Wedde [pronounced Wed-dee, not Wed, in case you were wondering] I’d like to talk about here. He’s far harder to characterize in a couple of gimcrack phrases than most other local poets. That’s if he really is a local poet. There’s always been something of an air of the largeness of outside in Wedde’s work from the very beginning.

He’s written six novels (most recently The Catastrophe, 2011) as well as fourteen books of poetry (to date), starting with Homage to Matisse in 1971 and continuing with Good Business in 2009. He’s also written essays, art catalogues, and – perhaps most famously – a combative and polemical introduction to his 1985 anthology The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (co-edited with Harvey McQueen).

Wedde’s was the first substantial anthology to sample poetry beyond the monoglot field of New Zealand Verse in English, the first real attempt to represent the growing cultural complexity of our society in the 1970s and 80s. That’s not the extent of his innovations in this groundbreaking volume, but that will give you some idea of where he started from.

For the next entry in our state-of-the-nation poems, then, the one looking back over the mind-blowing (in retrospect) culture shock of the 1980s in New Zealand – the age of Privatisation, neo-liberalism; the end of ANZUS, our defense treaty with Australia and the US (as a result of our anti-nuclear stance); the beginnings of mass migration to New Zealand from East Asia and the Pacific rim – I offer Ian Wedde’s poem “Barbary Coast” (available, in full, here), from his 1993 volume The Drummer:

When the people emerge from the water
who can tell if it’s brine or tears
that streams from them, purple sea
or the bruises of their long immersion?

They seem to weep for the dreams they had
which now the light slices into buildings
of blinding concrete along the Corniche.
Is it music or news the dark windows utter?

Who are these people emerging from the water? Boat-people fleeing the dark realities of Pol Pot and Suharto? Europeans awaking from their long Pacific swoom? Whoever they are:

The diners are cheap and the food is bad
but you’d sail a long way to find anything
as convenient. Pretty soon, sailor boy,
you’ll lose your bearings on language.

Why “Barbary Coast,” in the first place? A pirate port, does he mean? Some kind of Freetown, the local equivalent to Burroughs’ Interzone / Tangiers? Or Kororareka, hellhole of the Pacific = the shores of North Africa, lair of the Barbary corsairs?

That crack about the diners being cheap and the food bad certainly rings true enough. Was that not the universal cry through the land through the late 80s? “At least there are more restaurants and the coffee’s better; at least the whole city doesn’t close at 5 on Fridays and open again at nine on Monday morning? Surely that’s worth a few tears, a few more bodies in the gutter?”

What’s that he says about losing “your bearings on language”, though?

Takes more than one nice green kawakawa
leaf, chewed, to freshen the mouth
that’s kissed the wooden lips of the figurehead
above history’s cut-water

That’s certainly true. We can redefine ourselves all we want, go out whoring after the Queen of the Night, but these harbour waters are brackish, slimed with the flotsam and jetsam of the past.

Trailing blood across the moon’s wake
the ship bore out of Boka Bay.

Trailing sharks, she sailed
for Port Destruction. In Saint Van le Mar,
Jamaica, Bligh’s breadfruit trees grew tall.
In Callao on the coast of Peru

geraniums bloomed like sores
against whitewashed walls.
The dock tarts’ parrots jabbering
cut-rates in six tongues.

Where’s Boka Bay? A port on the Adriatic, in the tiny country of Montenegro. It’s a long haul from there to Jamaica, but not quite so long as Bligh's trip from Tahiti, where the breadfruit grow, to the West Indies, where they can be used to feed slaves.
Boca is also Spanish for “mouth” – Italian bocca, French bouche, Latin bucca, Portuguese and Catalan boca (both). It’s the safe haven of the mouth that this barque of language seems to be leaving from, bound for all points west, across the ocean:

‘I would tell you if I could - if I could
remember, I would tell you.
All around us the horizons
are turning air into water

and I can’t remember
where the silence ended and speech began,
where vision ended and tears began.
All our promises vanish into thin air.

So says the “voyager”, as his “briny eyes / flood with chimerical horizons”:

What I remember are the beaches of that city
whose golden children dance
on broken glass. I remember cold beer
trickling between her breasts as she drank.

But my paper money burned
when she touched it. The ship
clanked up to its bower, the glass towers
of the city burned back there in the sunset glow.’

There’s a great passage in Alan Brunton’s last long poem Fq (shorthand for Faerie Queene -- or does it, rather, stand for F**k you?), published posthumously in 2002, where he talks of the future he foresees for his daughter Ruby, the “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

Is that where Wedde’s poem is going at this point? From the very outset of his poetic career he seems to have shared his friend’s need to “eat the wind … and ramble” – his second book, way back in 1973, was the Selected Poems of Mahmoud Darwish, translated from the Arabic with Fawwaz Tuqan – even before those groundbreaking longer works Pathway to the Sea and Earthly – Sonnets to Carlos.

Cool star foundering in the west.
Coast the dusty colour of lions.
The story navigates by vectors
whose only connection is the story.

The story is told in words
whose only language is the story.
All night the fo’c’s’le lamp smokes above the words.
All day the sun counts the hours of the story.

It’s all very fine. Like all of us lost in the impenetrable seas of poststructuralist 80s – “no context / nothing outside the text” – the story was “told in words / whose only language is the story.” Heady stuff, to be sure – nothing to guide us but narrative logic, nothing but language flexing itself.

But then:

Heave of dark water where something
else turns -- the castaway’s tongue
clappers like a mission bell.
Unheard his end, and the story’s.

Raconteurs in smoky dives
recall his phosphorescent arm
waving in the ship’s wake.
Almost gaily. The ship sailed on.

That castaway makes the poem, I guess.

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

I fear we were all a bit beguiled by those “glass towers” of the city, the “beaches of that city / whose golden children dance / on broken glass” in that headiest, most hedonistic of times: Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, as much as Eliot’s own “unreal cities” from The Waste Land.

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

Another avatar springs to mind, though, Cowper’s own “Castaway,” set in the Atlantic Ocean during a storm, who “bitter felt it still to die / Deserted, and his friends so nigh.” In the end, though, the poet has little mercy on him:

We perish'd, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm'd in deeper gulphs than he.

Like Eliot’s, Ian Wedde’s is a poem about history – or possibly the end of history. He sees the beguiling gleam of that will-o’-the-wisp in the distance, that “Cool star foundering in the west. / Coast the dusty colour of lions,” but also sees that it’s an illusion. Raconteurs may tell the tale of your “phosphorescent arm / waving in the ship’s wake” but time, tide. language and history wait for no man:

The ship sailed on.

(8/6/12)

Jacket2: Commentaries: 11 - State-of-the-Nation poems (4): Ian Wedde
[Available at: https://jacket2.org/commentary/state-nation-poems-4]

[1435 wds]


[Jack Ross: Notes on NZ Poetry (2012)]


•

Notes on NZ Poetry: 12 (2012)

[Jacket 2]

State-of-the-Nation poems (5):
Kendrick Smithyman, “If I Stepped Outside, in May ’93” (2002)

Study, typewriter, banana palms - photograph: Margaret Edgcumbe (1996)

My good friend and fellow-poet David Howard writes in to question my use of the epithet “unquestioned Top Bard” for Bill Manhire in my previous post. He also comments that “we weren't 'all' lost in the postmodern forest of the 1980s” …

I did wonder (as I said in my reply to him) if anyone would react to my canonisation of Manhire:

I can't say I think Top Bard an enviable job, but it does seem to me to have passed from Rex Fairburn to Allen Curnow in the 50s, and thence to Bill Manhire in the 2000s -- I'm speaking of influence and cultural dominance, you understand, not necessarily poetic merit ...

And as for those thickets, I guess I was thinking more of Academics than poets (the principal audience for the website). Again, meant to be a bit teasing ...

So I think I’d stand by the description. It doesn’t equate with saying that Bill Manhire is the best poet in the country (though I myself would certainly put him among the very best) – such value judgments are too fickle to depend on. What I am saying is that he’s overwhelmingly the most important in terms of “culture-power.”

What I am rather more embarrassed by is the fact that I appear to have misdated Ian Wedde’s “Barbary Coast” – while it was indeed included in his 1993 book The Drummer, it was actually reprinted there from an earlier volume, Tendering (1988). Never mind. It’s clearly a poem about the 1980s, which was the reason for including it in the first place.

In any case, this oversight gives me an excuse to do a bit more fancy footwork with the dates. When meditating the 1990s, I remembered this piece, by the late great Kendrick Smithyman, our Kaipara Cavafy, our Northcote Neruda (seen here in a photograph by Kenneth Quinn)… Kendrick died in 1995, and this, one of his very last poems, was written in 1993.

It wasn’t actually collected in bookform till Last Poems (2002), though, so I’ve decided to use that as an excuse for including it in my stepladder of poems. After all, I ended up putting in two poems from the 1970s, Baxter’s and Tuwhare’s, so why not two poems about the 1980s, that most feral of decades in New Zealand’s recent history, when the wolves were living on wind in the streets of the city (Que les loups se vivent de vent – Villon), and our fat insular people suddenly felt the icy breath of the outside world?

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages, and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

So said A. E. Housman, in his “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries,” which has always struck me as one of the wisest and most insightful of all poems about the First World War.

Everything seemed to be for sale in those days. We’d elected, in 1984, what we fondly thought would be another vaguely socialist, vaguely centrist Labour government, only to realize with a shock that the Monetarists had invaded the temple – that these ideologues of the New Right were quite prepared to entertain the notion of no government at all.

Sector after sector fell to their ruthless cost-cutters, one at a time, and the cries of pain rose up on all sides …

Until 1987, that is, when the bubble burst, the Stock Market crash, worse in New Zealand than most other places because virtually anyone could play in our deregulated market, regardless of capital reserves or any financially prudent controls whatsoever.

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled ...

Who am I speaking of? Who “held the sky suspended … / And saved the sum of things for pay”? I guess it was us, really. No heroics, nothing but everyday business, really, but it was our artists, our teachers, our mothers, our family-men, who kept things moving along while the Richard Prebbles and Roger Douglases and other donkeys screeched their nonsense from the Beehive.

Kendrick’s poem comes from the depths of suburbia, but his eschewal of the grand gesture, his quiet acceptance of the small beauties of the everyday are what makes it (for me, at any rate) a perpetual joy:

If I stepped outside there would be no light to surprise
my body making demands.
Without given notice rain surprises, rain tilts headlong
into fall, past rata, past silvery gum, oleander, Norfolk pine,
a few minutes filling spaces which may wait on apology;
they want light at the moment.

One notes the adroit blending of the language of the marketplace (“making demands,” “without given notice”) with the noble names of trees, native and introduced species alike: “rata … silvery gum, oleander, Norfolk pine.”
The poem now shifts gears, moves closer to the heart of its author / protagonist:

I crouch in my cave
under the house, basement solitary. Anachronist,
on the look out:

Not an anarchist (“I am an Antichrist / I am an Anar-chyst” as the Sex Pistols so memorably warbled), but an anachronist: someone out of his time.

That description of Kendrick's cave of making is only too accurate, actually. I spent many hours down in that basement, with his wife Margaret Edgcumbe’s permission, looking through the immense series of boxfiles which constituted his life-work (they’re now in Special Collections in the Auckland University Library).

it cannot be like this downtown in the city.
Mirrorglass towers squinting all ways into themselves
discover they are heartless, at best coldhearted,
never forthright, only arrogant. Darkness at noon.

My God, how they raped and pillaged our city in the deregulated 80s! It was like the unleashing of the Jacquerie, or the Sans-culottes of the French Revolution. What had been a pleasant – if not particularly distinguished – colonial city became a nightmare of building sites and mirror facades.

Why this mania for reflection where there had been none? Why did they all resort to mirrorglass as the architectural dernier cri? Were they conscious of their own poisonous vapidity, their lack of substance? Did they realize that any memorable images would have to be lent from elsewhere? We literally had to link hands in front of it to save the Civic Theatre from the wrecking ball. A cunning developer managed to gazump everyone and tear down His Majesty’s Theatre during a long weekend – then promptly went bust and left a huge pit where a treasure had been.

Who will expect a veil of a temple to be rent,
the money makers driven out? Showers lacking any winds
to play at motives
give up and go away. We simply guess at what happens
between one investment opportunity and its others
as their murk, pulsing, stands brightened.

Kendrick knows that we can’t expect a Deus ex Machina to save us from the consequences of our own folly every time. Christ drove out the moneylenders in order to teach us how to do the same. We haven’t learnt our lesson sufficiently well to expect a repetition.

Market reports are broadcast, stocks look good
for those with a knowledgeable eye. Nothing goes
visibly traded between pine, lemon and silver dollar.
When I go outside light flows, pure enterprise.

“Nothing goes / visibly traded” – but an exchange is taking place nevertheless: light, water, soil combining into life and energy.

The poem’s rebuke is most telling because it’s not pompous. Kendrick was never afraid of a pun, and he doesn’t see them as detracting from a heartfelt message. The “pure enterprise” of photosynthesis just is more impressive and more interesting than that pathetic crawling heap of traders “yelling like beasts on the floor of the Bourse” (as W. H. Auden put it in his elegy for W. B. Yeats).

That we’ve allowed them free rein is our shame. The trees refute their dark dogmas without even trying. How can it be that twenty years on we’ve allowed the whole madness to happen again? Do we never learn?

Apparently not. Hence the continuing need for one of the very last poems that Kendrick Smithyman, one of the enduring masters of New Zealand poetry, ever wrote.

(15/6/12)

Jacket2: Commentaries: 12 - State-of-the-Nation poems (5): Kendrick Smithyman
[Available at: https://jacket2.org/commentary/state-nation-poems-5]

[1413 wds]


[Jack Ross: Notes on NZ Poetry (2012)]


•