Shadow Worlds (2024)

Landfall Review Online

Many In that Blue Room Believed, Heart and Soul

Andrew Paul Wood. Shadow Worlds: A History of the Occult and Esoteric in New Zealand. ISBN 978-1991016379. Auckland: Massey University Press, 2023. 426 pp. RRP $65.00.

Andrew Paul Wood: Shadow Worlds (2023)

The Blue Room: Being the Absorbing Story of the Development of Voice-to-Voice Communication in BROAD LIGHT with Souls who have Passed into THE GREAT BEYOND, by Clive Chapman (Auckland: Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd., 1927) … I first came across a reference to this curious book in D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless’s almost equally intriguingly titled Phone Calls from the Dead (1979). Shortly afterwards I managed to acquire a copy of it myself, and was privileged to read its long, literally “ghost-written” – by a reporter identified only as G. A. W. – account of “Uncle Clive” and his careful fostering of the clairvoyant abilities of his young niece Pearl.

The story came to an abrupt end in 1927, with the publication of Chapman & G. A. W.’s book, so I was delighted to find some supplementary details about the case in the chapter entitled “Bumps in the Night” in Andrew Paul Wood’s newly published history of the occult and esoteric in New Zealand. He records, for instance, a reference in Harry Price’s Fifty Years of Psychical Research (1939) to an incident “around 1930”, where:

William Henry Gowland (1879-1965), professor of anatomy at the University of Otago’s medical school, witnessed heavy tables levitate and a locked piano play itself.

As an Otago Daily Times reporter invited to an earlier séance said of the phenomena he saw: “If it was trickery it was damnable trickery, for there were many in that Blue Room who believed, heart and soul.”

This is perhaps the most useful feature of Wood’s book: its inclusiveness, and the fact that he’s followed up on so many intriguing details of early New Zealand occultism – as far as that’s possible in so tantalisingly ill-defined a field. Nor does he scruple to record the many occasions where the trail has run cold, and the rumours of the continued existence of some exiled order or malign coven cannot be substantiated one way or the other.

It's true that much of this data is not, in itself, particularly interesting or stimulating except to enthusiasts (or other Academic researchers). The list of changing addresses for the Dunedin Theosophical Lodge between 1914 and 2015 – recorded in detail on pp. 61-62 of the chapter devoted to this “Not-so-secret Doctrine” – is fairly typical of this aspect of Shadow Worlds. If in doubt, include it, appears to be the guiding principle – after all, it might be of use to someone – which led me to wonder, at times, if simply compiling an Encyclopaedia of New Zealand Esotericism might not have suited his (and our) purposes better?

Wood’s book is, after all, already grouped in large, roughly chronological grab-bag chapters around his basic themes: Theosophy, The Golden Dawn, Anthroposophy, Spiritualism, Witchcraft, and various others. Would further segmentation into discrete entries really have compromised it much?

Part of the problem is the very large scale – both chronological and conceptual – of the study Wood has undertaken. It’s true that he specifies in his preface:

I do not pretend this to be a comprehensive or exhaustive history of the subject – an undertaking of that sort would take many years of research and extend to multiple volumes. … What I hope this book will do is give a taste of the parallel universe of the unexpected, the strange, and the high weird that exists just beneath the New Zealand story you thought you knew.

Exhaustive, no, but certainly at times a little exhausting. It’s awe-inspiring just how much material Wood does manage to cover, especially given the necessity of giving potted histories of at least some of the major luminaries – Madam Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudolf Steiner – whose doctrines had such surprising offshoots here on the other side of the world.

The truth of the matter, I suppose, is that this book only really comes to life when it touches on something directly interesting to each individual reader. In my case, this was definitely his chapter on Spiritualism, “Bumps in the Night” – but devotees of Black Magic, Rosicrucianism, or Neopaganism are likely to be similarly engrossed by the sections on their pet topics.

In any case, it’s undoubtedly better to be grateful for what we have here than to carp about the various alternative ways in which it might have been arranged. Take, for example, the following 1870 letter from the northern gold fields, quoted from The Pleasant Creek News:

I saved a claim here at the Thames through a spirit communication. It had been neglected, and was liable to be jumped, when I was told by spirit writing that six men were coming at nine o’clock the next morning on the claim to jump the ground, with other particulars of their programme. It was there with the men that I got, just in the nick of time to save the claim. The jumpers came exactly at the time I was told they would do, and they saw at once that they were completely checkmated, and looked sheepishly disappointed and as white as ghosts when they saw we were too much and too strong to be bounced by them. You can see by this that I am a Spiritist.

There’s an individuality and expressiveness in this old news item which seems to open a door on a whole other world of experience – on, in fact, the “parallel universe of the unexpected, the strange, and the high weird that exists just beneath the New Zealand story you thought you knew” promised by Wood in his opening remarks.

Again and again, his book raises new questions about the precise nature of this secret history. What on earth was going on in Hawke’s Bay in the early to mid-twentieth century, for instance?

Wood starts off with an intriguing account of the “Havelock Work,” where, sometime around 1907-8, “a peculiar brew of Quakers, Theosophists, Anglicans and adherents of Radiant Living were developing a sympathetic climate” for esoteric enlightenment, with an organisation whose activities included:

Shakespeare and Dickens readings, carving, Morris dancing lessons and festivals, climaxing in the Old Village Fête of 1911 presided over by a pantomime King Arthur and his court.

Around 1912, Golden Dawn alumnus Robert Felkin brought his own peculiar blend of Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism and occultism to Havelock North, where he founded the grandly named Smaragdum Thalasses Temple of the Stella Matutina Order. (“Stella Matutina” is perhaps most famous for its connections with the poet W. B. Yeats, a member for over 20 years).

Some land was provided by local farmers for a temple building, completed in 1915, and known locally as “Whare Rā”. Felkin continued to run it till his death in 1926, when it was taken over by his widow Harriot. It would continue to act as a centre for local occult activities – including, latterly, black magic (or “Goetia”) – until the late 1970s.

Whare Rā was eventually sold to a Roman Catholic family, who thought they were merely getting a Chapman-Taylor-designed heritage house, unsealed the door to find the vault in their basement, and were so plagued by supernatural happenings that they had an exorcism performed.

If you find it surprising that such a mélange of magic, esoteric rituals and occultist teaching was permitted to flourish in so conservative an enclave, the explanation is not difficult to find: “most of the town’s leading personages were members of the Temple.”

Membership of Whare Rā is reputed to have included members of Parliament and two governors-general.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that “there was a weekend-long bonfire when the Temple was dissolved” in 1978. No doubt it included membership lists as well as the rest of their “documentation and paraphernalia.”

This is just one of the many fascinating stories recounted in Wood’s book. It’s true that I’m left with more questions than answers about Whare Rā’s influence on local culture in the Bay, but I don’t doubt his assiduity in hunting out data and clues from a notoriously cagy group of informants (and survivors).

“Occult” and “Esoteric” are, after all, both rough synonyms for “hidden” – and exposing such knowledge to the bright light of day can be surprisingly difficult at times. Despite the fact that the shelves of libraries and second-hand bookshops are groaning with esoteric literature, its authors have a tendency to content themselves with hints and whispers rather than committing themselves to facts.

To conclude, It’s hard to imagine that anyone interested in this field will be able to get anywhere in future without a well-thumbed copy of Andrew Paul Wood’s Shadow Worlds. For myself, I’d like to end with a quote from The Blue Room, the book that started this particular quest for me:

29/3/2*. – At tea time a message came through, strong but broken, F.R. (? FLOWING ROBES), then COUNCIL OF MARS. Next, in answer to the question as to who was the sender of this strange message, I AM ERIN; THEA. While this message was being spelled out I felt a sensation as of a strong electric current passing over my head at the end of each sentence. I had never felt this before, and it gives rise to the thought that possibly Mars could open up communication with this planet by means of electric or magnetic currents controlled by our spirit friends beyond.
Why not?

Why not, indeed?

(13-25/9/23)

Landfall Review Online (2024).
[Available at: https://landfallreview.com/many-in-that-blue-room-believed-heart-and-soul/]

[1570 wds]


Landfall 1 (1947)


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Mike Johnson: Selected Poems (2023)

Mike Johnson: Selected Poems (2023)

Introduction
Mike Johnson: Selected Poems

Mike Johnson (1947- )

I want you to think about it, she said
I am, he said

it’s not helping, she said

These lines, from Mike Johnson’s eighth book of poems, Ladder without Rungs (2019), seem to me to provide an excellent point of entry to his poetry to date.

The major themes declared themselves as early as his first book, The Palanquin Ropes (1983), and have remained consistent throughout. There’s an interest in spareness, in the kind of short, pithy verses, we associate with Zen Buddhism or the Sufi poet Rumi. There’s also a strong sense of humour, as we can see in this abrupt and yet so-very-believable dialogue between a man and a woman.

The immense complexity of human relationships, social, sexual and everyday are at the heart of much of Mike’s best poetry. However, there’s an almost equal pull towards the empyrean: the cosmic mysteries of nature and the visible world, the beauty of the birds, trees and beaches which surround him in his longtime home-base, Waiheke Island.

Waiheke seems to act as a kind of analogue to Neruda’s Isla Negra for Mike. Its location, off the shores of New Zealand’s most populous city, Auckland, and yet its comparative isolation from the pressures of metropolitan life, have combined to make it an admirable microcosm for the type of writing he wants to do.

There’s a close social circle of family, neighbours and friends to chronicle – but there are also the follies of the tourists to marvel at – above all, though, there’s the sheer physical beauty of the place.

This is brilliantly expressed in the small book of short, three-line verses, Two Lines and a Garden, accompanied by drawings by Mike’s partner, Leila Lees, which he published in 2017:

after everything,
I still want to write love songs
and hear the tides of rain on the aluminium roof

or, perhaps even more appositely:

mountain, beach, and valley, sky and stone
these are conversations of our art
in the garden, snails come and go

Mike began his writing career as a poet, back in the early 1980s, before the success of his first novel Lear: The Shakespeare Company Plays Lear at Babylon in 1986 redefined him in the eyes of the majority of readers as a novelist first and foremost.

That’s never been how he sees it, though. Like many New Zealand writers, Mike can switch from one medium to the other with admirable ease. Reading back over the whole sweep of his published poetry, the 13 collections he’s published since 1983, any desire we might feel to pigeonhole him as a prose writer who also writes poetry seems impossible to sustain.

As you’ll see from the selections included below, Mike began as he meant to go on. There’s no excess wordage in a Mike Johnson poem: there is, however, a consolidation of themes and ideas from poem to poem. It’s as if the same ideas, about our smallness in face of the universe we inhabit, the need to steward our environment, and the imperative to feel empathy for the downtrodden and beleaguered, must be stated and restated in the hopes that they might, one day, actually be heard.

There’s no way that a selection such as this can replace the experience of reading his original books in their entirety. Only a collected poems could do that, but even then the physical beauty of so many of the books as artefacts – those illustrated by his partner, artist and writer Leila Lees, in particular – could not really be reproduced.

Those designs and layouts have grown more ambitious and more tactile over the years. The colourful geometric shapes of To Beatrice Where We Cross The Line (2014) have morphed into the wonderful flip book absurdities of his 2021 book of nonsense rhymes “for the young at heart,” Flippity Fluppity Flop, written in collaboration with the inimitable Daniela Gast.

It’s hard to argue that this represents a change or new development in his writing, though, when you look back on the strong physicality of such early books as From a Woman in Mt Eden Prison & Drawing Lessons (1984) and Standing Wave (1985), both printed by Warwick Jordan on his handpress at Hard Echo Press.

Both as a novelist and a poet, Mike has never really formed part of a group or a movement. He’s marched to his own drum, followed his own path. If, however, I were to look for analogues for his poetry, I think I’d probably start the search well outside New Zealand, with a writer such as Ursula K. Le Guin, who shares both his taste for Zen koans and his genre fluidity.

Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky.

These lines, included as a quote at the beginning of her Earthsea series, sound rather like Mike’s:

for the fish, no notion of rain
for the birds, no sharp stars
in the houses, no troubling gods

Much though I’ve always loved that short verse of Le Guin’s, I’m not sure that I wouldn’t give preference to Mike’s. I find fascinating his notion of a house without its ‘troubling’ household gods, whether you defne them in terms of the classical lares et penates or something closer to home.

There’s also something of other Eastward-leaning poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder there, too. And, of course, Pablo Neruda, as I mentioned above. Rather than pursuing the influence game further, though, suffice it to say that in forty years of writing Mike Johnson has built up a formidable corpus of poetry: abstract, intimate, politically engagée, environmental, romantic, narrative, humorous – not to mention translations and children’s verses.

I despair of doing justice to all these aspects of his work in this selection of 128 poems out of approximately 950. Nevertheless, I feel confident that there should be something here to fit every taste.

More to the point, though, I hope that this book will have the effect of directing readers back to its sources: those original collections – some aesthetic marvels, others more conventional slim volumes of verse – but all of them carefully considered and curated works of art.

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(5-12/12/22)

“Introduction.” In Mike Johson: Selected Poems. Waiheke, Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2023. 11-15.

[1039 wds]


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A Clearer View of the Hinterland (2023)

NZ Poetry Shelf

Poetry Shelf Favourite Poems:
A Clearer View of the Hinterland

Jack Ross: Leicester Kyle (2000)

A Clearer View of the Hinterland
Leicester at Millerton


Absence of rapids on Ngakawau stream.
Big Ditch and Little Ditch Creek – impious hand bisects the ‘D.’
Cobweb of raindrops in dragon sun.
“Down, down, down from the high Sierras ...”
Electrical storms: intensity of affect.
Fund-raising at the Fire Depot.
Grey & white kitten, black robin, and black fantail.
Huffing into an Atlas stove.
“If you can see the hills, it’s going to rain.”
Jack said: “A succession of inner landscapes.”
Kiwi peck through sphagnum moss.
Leicester said: “A community devoted to male play.”
Millerton speaks – A Cannabis Landslide.
Nature tips – gorse is choked by bush.
Other landrovers get one wave.
Proud grey donkey; manure in a sack.
Quarrelling over the Fire Service.
“Rain has a persistency of grades, much noted by the locals.”
Siren: “I’m always free on Wednesday nights.”
Twin side-logs set for smoke-alarms.
Utopia St, Calliope Rd.
Village hall stained with camouflage paint.
White-packaged videos, too frank a stare.
X of three rocks marks one rare tussock.
“You have to say: Great! Awesome! Choice!”
668 – Neighbour of the Beast.


[7-10/7/98]

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As a kid, I spent a good deal of time poring over the works of Edward Lear. I did like the limericks, but it was his illustrated alphabet poems that really tickled my fancy. This was my first – and to date only – attempt to compose one myself.

It records a visit I made in 1998, some 25 years ago now, to my friend the Rev. Leicester Kyle, who was living at the time in Millerton, a small bush-clad town on the West Coast of the South Island. Millerton is quite a mysterious place (or it was then) – very much off the grid. It was, however, the rather deadpan commentary on its inhabitants and traditions delivered by Leicester as we navigated its narrow roads in his bright red Land Rover which was the real prize for me.

I found myself jotting down some of his more quotable comments and thoughts, along with a few of my own observations, and ended up grouping them in this way to reduce the information overload I felt overtaking me at times.

Leicester himself was a fascinating character. He started off as a botanist, was then ordained as an Anglican priest, only to convert in his late fifties to a new faith: poetry. After his death in 2006, my friend David Howard and I collaborated on an online edition of his collected works which can still be consulted here.

The poem first appeared in a small magazine called Spin [#36 (2000): 51], which I was co-editing at the time. It was described in a review of the issue as “languid and oddly themed,” a tag I’ve always relished. I’ve often thought it could stand as an epitaph for most of my work.

Some ten years ago I used it as the title poem for my collection A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems & Sequences 1981-2014 (Wellington: HeadworX, 2014). The publisher, Mark Pirie, was kind enough to include it on his website as an incitement to purchase the book.

I still have a soft spot for it, I must admit. It brings back many memories of those times: of Leicester himself, of the wild West Coast, and the kindness of the people I met there. It makes me feel like jumping in the car right now and heading straight down to Buller and Karamea to try to locate some of the overgrown industrial sites and hidden green havens my friend revealed to me then.

I fear that it might have to be a journey through time as well as space, though. Much of the Buller Plateau has been devastated since then by strip mining.

•

Jack Ross’s most recent book is The Oceanic Feeling (2021). Last year he retired from his job teaching creative writing at Massey University to pursue his own writing fulltime. He lives with his wife, crafter and art-writer Bronwyn Lloyd, in sunny Mairangi Bay, and blogs at http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/.

Favourite Poems is a series where a poet picks a poem from their own backlist and writes a short note to accompany it.

Jack Ross: A Clearer View of the Hinterland (2014)

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(13-14/4/23)

'Poetry Shelf Favourite Poems: Jack Ross’s "A Clearer View of the Hinterland".' Ed. Paula Green. NZ Poetry Shelf: a poetry page with reviews, interviews, and other things.
[Available at: https://nzpoetryshelf.com/2023/05/03/poetry-shelf-favourite-poems-jack-rosss-a-clearer-view-of-the-hinterland/ (3/5/23)]

[624 wds]


Poetry Box: Paula Green


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The Frog Prince (2023)

Landfall Review Online

A Fool in Love

James Norcliffe. The Frog Prince. ISBN 978-0143775492. Vintage. Auckland: Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2022. 302 pp. RRP $36.00.

James Norcliffe: The Frog Prince (2022)

I suppose one reason I’m fascinated by Grimms’ Fairy Tales — or, rather, the Brothers Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales), very few of which are actually about fairies — is because it’s the first book I ever read from cover to cover in German. At the time, I felt it was a good choice because I was already (I thought) familiar with the formulaic language of most of the stories (Es war einmal: Once upon a time). As it turned out, though, the experience taught me something about the nature of translation, which I’ve not been able to forget since.

Even to someone with German as rudimentary as mine, the first thing that struck me was that the stories had so obviously been composed by different people. Much is made of the wholesale alterations made to the original folktales by the moralising Wilhelm (and to a lesser extent Jakob) Grimm. ‘Mothers’ become ‘stepmothers’, pregnancies and murders are elided out. Far more striking, I found, were the obvious differences in sentence structures, word choices, and the overall approach between the various narrators. And I don’t just mean the few stories printed in dialect; ‘The Fisherman and his Wife’ being the most famous example. Even the standardised German of the other tales shows unequivocal signs of these diverse voices.

But virtually all of this, I realised with a shock, was invisible in translation. It didn’t matter whether you were reading Edgar Taylor, Margaret Hunt, Ralph Manheim or Jack Zipes. In English, the stories all sounded much the same: stock fairy tales from the collective myth-kitty. In German, by contrast, they provided a little anthology of diverse idioms and cultures all lumped together under that blanket term Deutsch.

‘The Frog Prince’ is one of the most perplexing stories in the whole collection. And, since it’s usually placed at the beginning, it’s the first one most readers will encounter. Everyone’s familiar with the idea of kissing a frog so that he’ll turn into a handsome prince. It may come as a bit of a shock, then, that the princess in the original tale never does actually kiss her frog. Instead, she hurls him violently against a wall when he tries to hold her to her promise to let him sleep in her bed.

Nor, for that matter, is he a prince. The original title is Der Froschkönig oder der eiserne Heinrich (‘The Frog-king, or Iron Henry’). So, he’s actually a king. And what’s all this about Iron Henry? What’s his part in the story?

No, he’s not the same person as Eisern Hans (‘Iron John’), the protagonist of another one of the Grimms’ tales, though there are certain common features — the golden ball, the deep well — between the two narratives. That story was used as the central plank of Robert Bly’s notorious masculinity self-help book Iron John: A Book About Men. Iron Henry is a type of faithful servant whose love for his lost master is such that he’s had to enclose his heart with three iron bands to prevent it from bursting with sorrow.

One of the many virtues of poet James Norcliffe’s first adult novel — he’s already written a number of others for children and young people — is the original solution he offers to the puzzles posed by this very enigmatic story.

Or, rather, one of the characters in his book, a young woman named Cara, has written a historical novella that suggests an answer: ‘The Frog Prince’ was, in fact, a fiction created by the Heller sisters, Mathilde and Helga, to attract the attention of the pale, scholarly Jakob Grimm, whom Mathilde, the elder of the two girls, had fallen for.

The Frog King story, as we have it, however, (according to Cara) was re-edited by Jakob’s overprotective younger brother Wilhelm to convert the compassionate princess of the original into the petulant brat of the version we now read. He also, for good measure, added faithful Heinrich to the mix to symbolise his own role as a benign presence in Jakob’s life.

But that’s just the beginning of the twists and turns in James Norcliffe’s book. The main level of the narrative records the abortive love affair of two young language teachers, David and Cara, at an international school in Northern France. The enigmatic Cara, author of the novella I mentioned above, chapters of which we encounter piecemeal as we move through the narrative, has been conducting an affair with young New Zealander, David. When he finally asks her to marry him — in a graveyard, appropriately enough — she abruptly disappears:

What he had always admired as Cara’s non-judgemental nature, her refusal to gossip, he now understood as secrecy, inexplicable privacy. Of course she had joked about politicians, celebrities, but they, not being in her orbit, were not really people, only names. The closer people were to her, the less willing was she to express an opinion. These things, along with her hopes and fears, he realised he had been forced to infer. Everything was always veiled. What misguided audacity had possessed him that he had actually asked her to marry him? He didn’t know her at all.

The precise relationship between these two stories, Cara’s and David’s, unfolding side by side, is the real riddle that drives Norcliffe’s story. It’s clear all along that David is a frog of the first order: he commits virtually every tactical error a man can in pursuit of an elusive Fata Morgana. He is, by turns, jealous, possessive, self-pitying, angry, importunate and futile. He is, in short (like most of us), a fool in love.

Cara, by contrast, has been trained by her upbringing to reveal nothing that might come back to bite her. Her defences are virtually impregnable. And the moment she drops them to allow David back in, his subsequent antics serve only to vindicate her stance.

It doesn’t help that an earlier fling with the amoral art teacher Angus has left her deeply suspicious of all male motives.

So how do the various layers of Norcliffe’s fiction co-inhere (to borrow a term from Charles Williams)? The princess in the Fräulein Hellers’ concocted ‘The Frog Prince’ earns the love of her handsome prince by showing him a hint of compassion. But the petulant princess in Wilhelm’s doctored text earns marriage to her Frog King without ever deserving it. David loses his princess by asserting property rights in her child (which he wrongly assumes to be his own). Cara is left with both child and independence, but in the final pages of the book, dreams of being sucked back down into the swamp as a female frog.

There seems no obvious — or at any rate simple — message to be deduced from all this. ‘Relationships are difficult’ perhaps, or the ever popular ‘a girl needs to kiss a lot of frogs before she finds a handsome prince’.

I prefer to see it as a test of our ability as readers. If you remove or dilute the regional peculiarities of the Grimms’ so-called fairy tales — as most translators are forced to do — you’re left with a kind of Disneyfied soup. If, however, you read with such fine-grained details in mind, you may end up marvelling at the particularity of each of them. These are, after all, the particularities that make our own love stories such an endless source of puzzlement to us, as well as, hopefully, most of the time, more delight than pain.

As far as this particular slice of life is concerned, David has failed, and Cara succeeded. Mathilde Heller fails to make an impression on Jakob Grimm, and Wilhelm succeeds in keeping property rights in his brother. Without knowing what will come next in each of their stories, it will never be possible to guess who will come out as the winner and end up holding the glittering prize.

JACK ROSS is the author of four novels, four books of short fiction, and six poetry collections, most recently The Oceanic Feeling (2021). He was managing editor of Poetry New Zealand from 2014–2019 and has edited numerous other books, anthologies, and literary journals.

(19-31/1/23)

Landfall Review Online (2023).
[Available at: https://landfallreview.com/a-fool-in-love/]

[1324 wds]


Landfall 1 (1947)


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No ideas but in ... (2022)

[NZ Poetry Shelf]

Paula Green:
Poetry Shelf Paragraph Room 3: No ideas but in

No wars but in words

When I was at school, my friends and I used to have long philosophical arguments about whether or not it was possible to have a thought which wasn’t initially in words. I was a strong believer in the idea that a thought could precede the words which expressed it: that it often had to be translated – imperfectly – into words, after being conceived in musical or architectural or simply relational terms. Of course I couldn’t prove it, as our discussions were conducted entirely in words. We were also very concerned about the status of mathematics. Was it really a language? Did its axioms constitute words, or were they somehow superior to those slippery entities (as the budding scientists among us tended to argue)? Now that I’m older, my trust in words has not grown greater – but I think I love them more. In fact, “words are windows” was the first phrase that came to mind for this paragraph, until I realised it lacked a “no” and a “but”. Words are windows. They show us things. But they don’t do so clearly. And when you read – as I did in the online news today – that in Russia now you can “speculate freely and quite calmly on the prospects of nuclear war,” I’m again terrified at what treacherous little disease-laden free radicals words can be. I’d like to set against that the opening of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain … There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.” That is to say, choose your words wisely, or they may blow up in your face.

(24-25/5/22)

'Poetry Shelf Paragraph Room 3: No ideas but in.' Ed. Paula Green.
NZ Poetry Shelf: a poetry page with reviews, interviews, and other things.
[Available at: https://nzpoetryshelf.com/2022/06/03/poetry-shelf-paragraph-room-3-no-ideas-but-in/ (3/6/22)]

[294 wds]


Poetry Box: Paula Green


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Time in Poetry (2022)

[NZ Poetry Shelf]

Paula Green:
Poetry Shelf Paragraph Room 2

Time

I find it essential to be on time for everything (including the present assignment). If I’m invited anywhere, I count backwards to find the latest moment I can leave in order to be at my destination punctually. Occasionally I try to factor in a bit of fashionable lateness, but mostly in vain. Time in poetry, though, is a horse of a different colour. I wrote a poem while travelling in the Lake District with my family in 1981. The first two lines ran:

We built a man of slates, and after years,
revisited, the rock had grown a face.

I liked them, but I wasn’t really sure what they meant. Perhaps for that reason, what came next was less satisfactory – to me, and to others. The poem stayed with me, though, and fifteen or so years later I made a concerted attempt to complete it with some entirely new lines. And in that form it appeared in my first book, City of Strange Brunettes (1998), under the title “First Love.” But I didn’t entirely like that version either, so later on I had a go at changing the second stanza. Just now, in 2022, I had a look at the poem again and decided to change it back to the way it’d been in the book. Even as I read it, though, I can still hear the original 1981 version of the last four lines going round and round in my head. My point is not so much that the poem is still alive for me, after forty-odd years (though it is); rather, the thing that fascinates me is the number of different moments over those four decades that are somehow miraculously preserved in this one six-line poem. Writing a poem is the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to that Proustian idea of recovering lost time – not just as it was, but with the added patina of what has come in between then and now. It’s a snapshot of a buried past, but with the advantage that the people in the picture are still able to live and breathe. Going back to old poems to rewrite and reshape them is not so much about improving them as asserting their ongoing vitality – and, I suppose, my own.

(27-28/4/22)

'Poetry Shelf Paragraph Room 2.' Ed. Paula Green.
NZ Poetry Shelf: a poetry page with reviews, interviews, and other things.
[Available at: https://nzpoetryshelf.com/2022/05/06/poetry-shelf-paragraph-room-2/ (6/5/22)]

[376 wds]


Poetry Box: Paula Green


•

Chocolate Weetbix (2022)

[NZ Poetry Shelf]

Paula Green:
Poetry Shelf Paragraphs: 25 Poets on Poetry

When we were kids, we had a bad habit of leaving the last couple of inches of cereal in the Weetbix package uneaten. No amount of persuasion would convince us that this unwholesome looking mess was as good as the perfectly formed biscuits we’d started off with. That is, until my father came up with the term chocolate weetbix. All of a sudden, we were competing to have a bowl of chocolate weetbix scraps rather than those boringly predictable rectangles. I’m still not sure why those two words made such a great difference to us – the mystique of chocolate transforms all it touches, I suppose. But it was more than that. It was my first experience, not so much of the power of advertising, as of the inherent magic of putting the right words in the right place. My father was a clever and eloquent man, but even he must have felt some slight disquiet at manipulating us with such ease. Since then, as a writer and a teacher, I’ve become increasingly aware of the extent to which one can transform other people’s experience of the world simply by describing it in a particular way. It’s a fearsome responsibility, and not to be taken lightly. This year, as so many of our assumptions about the society we live in crumble around us, I’m more conscious than ever of the power of poetry – ‘language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree’ – and its ability to affect reality. We can, quite literally, change lives with our words: but what is it, exactly, we want to say?

(6-7/4/22)

'Poetry Shelf Paragraphs: 25 Poets on Poetry.' Ed. Paula Green.
NZ Poetry Shelf: a poetry page with reviews, interviews, and other things.
[Available at: https://nzpoetryshelf.com/2022/04/14/poetry-shelf-paragraphs-25-poets-on-poetry/ (14/4/22)]

[265 wds]


Poetry Box: Paula Green


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The Little Ache (2022)

Tracey Slaughter, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2022 (March 2022)

Reviews:

Ian Wedde

Ian Wedde. The Little Ache – a German notebook. ISBN 978-177656-426-2. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2021. RRP $NZ30. 144 pp.

Ian Wedde: The Little Ache – a German notebook (2021)

The thing to ask about a burlesqued wink or a mock sheep raid is not what their ontological status is. It is the same as that of rocks on the one hand and dreams on the other – they are things of this world.

The quote comes from anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s famous essay ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.’ Or rather, it comes from the notes at the end of Ian Wedde’s latest volume of poems. In the poem itself, he includes only the last 16 words, which I’ve italicised. Wedde explains the passage as follows:

The term ‘thick description’ … became, Geertz wrote … ‘a position and a slogan I have been living with since.’ I have gone on reading and admiring these essays for many years and want to acknowledge that the concept of ‘thick description’ was my passport to the state of mind I hoped this book would occupy, where ghosts could be encountered in the everyday, material world, and in the phantom fragments of language which seemed to collate its meanings. [131]

There are, of course, other names for this state of mind: in a fictional context one might refer to it as ‘Magic Realism.’ But is that what Wedde means by his own methods of ‘thick description’? What exactly is it, for a start? Another of Wedde’s Geertz quotes may be helpful here:

Believing … that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. [133]

So, for example, in poem 51, Wedde sees Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet Ran, who died in Moscow in 1963, sitting at a German café in 2014, and carefully tabulating his reactions to:

the perfect pitch of exile
a tone found somewhere in the chord combining
the demonstrators over at Wienerstraße
the expostulations of his Turkish companions
and the voice of the German coffee commentator
on the café’s big screen
during the quarter-final
between German and France. [86-87]

Shades of Geertz’s famous example of the need to account for the difference between a twitch and a wink (“as anyone unfortunate enough to have had the first taken for the second knows”)! Geertz’s essay goes on to add a third actor who chooses to parody the others’ winks, and whose behaviour is therefore even more culturally layered and needful of interpretation than theirs.

Wedde, a New Zealander in temporary exile from his native land, and eagerly trying to discover tendrils of ancestry in Germany, imagines – or sees (need the apparition of a ghost always be taken as pure imagination?) – the author of the epic Human Landscapes from My Country carefully modulating his own way through all these various voices and layers of cultural entanglement.

On the surface, then, Wedde’s book – which might otherwise be taken as a simple amalgam of travel notes and genealogical jottings – is actually something far more ambitious: an attempt to decode of the levels of significance to be encountered by someone of his complex background in an already immensely overwritten cultural matrix.

He has certain advantages, mind you. Some of his not-too-distant ancestors were themselves poets – one had a few poems set to music by Brahms, another was famed as ‘the founder of Plattdüütsch dialect literature’ – so their works can be interrogated with this concept of distant kinship in mind. With these advantages, however, come risks:

it’s the ghost of a smile I see
when I read what Joseph Blos thought
of Johannes Wedde’s poems
which though ‘often very beautiful
didn’t sink in with the wider public
on account of the scholarly ballast
with which they were packed’. [45]

There’s a certain amount of ‘scholarly ballast’ in this Wedde book, too: 10 pages of notes and another 3 of acknowledgments. Personally I’m inclined to think that there should be more notes, not fewer – not all of the German tags and quotations, most of them admittedly explained in the context of the poems they adorn, are actually translated, let alone referenced. That may not be every reader’s view, however.

If there is a universal applicability to be sought in Ian Wedde’s complex web of encounters and experiences during his Berlin residency, I suppose that it comes by analogy rather than directly. Speaking personally, I find his struggles with communication in a strange land quite poignant, given my own halting German.

However, Wedde certainly gives as good as he gets to an arrogant librarian in poem 53:

Failing to find it in the loan stacks
I said to the narcissist of small differences
as he glared at this Ausländer
across his Ausgabeort barrier
Ich kann den Buch nicht finden
at which
having got it
he pushed the book against my chest
and jeered
Hier ist der Buch!

Books are das not der [89]

Given that this particular book – the second volume of Johannes Wedde’s Collected Works – had not been taken out for 111 years, he feels (not unreasonably) justified in unleashing the full force of his poetic fury against ‘the thick-browed bureaucratic Nationalismus’ of this ‘bored pedant.’

Exile and displacement are subjects much on our minds at present. 2013-14, when most of these poems were written, seems now like a distant golden age, when free travel was still permitted (to holders of the right passports, that is), and the refugee crisis in Europe – though dire – was not yet catastrophic.

There are echoes of these things – the rise of extreme nationalism in Europe, for instance – in some of the poems, but it’s to Wedde’s credit that he hasn’t allowed second thoughts to distort the clear mirror of this particular experience.

This book appears 50 years after his first, Homage to Matisse (1971). What a career it’s been! Wedde has always been one of the most internationally focussed of New Zealand poets (witness his translations from Arabic poet Mahmoud Darwish, also published in the early 1970s).

There’s a (much-quoted) phrase in Anna Akhmatova’s Poem without a Hero: “the bitter air of exile.” Wedde knows better than to borrow such an expression for his own voluntary sojourn abroad, his own constituting merely a “little ache.” These letters from exile do, nevertheless, remind me of their distant prototypes, Ovid’s Sad Poems and Letters from Pontus, written from his own place of official banishment on the shores of the Black Sea to the centre of culture in Rome.

•

(1-3/8/21)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2022. ISBN 978-1-991151-11-7 (March 2022): 353-56.

[1104 wds]


Joanna Forsberg: Ian Wedde with Pete


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On Quitting the Academy (2022)

[poetry remake 2]

Sidedoor:

On Quitting the Academy

Recently I decided to take early retirement from my job teaching creative writing at Massey University.

Why? I’d spent thirty years in the tertiary sector, first five years as an English tutor at the University of Auckland, then ten years tutoring Academic Writing at Massey’s Auckland campus, then a further fifteen years there as a Lecturer (then Senior Lecturer) in Creative Writing.

I used to think that long stretch of time working as a tutor marked me out as a bit of a loser – in Academic terms, at any rate. After all, the real achievers tend to get appointed straight out of graduate school. But now I’m not so sure.

All those years of classroom teaching, going over the same curriculum again and again, definitely taught me more than any of the students. I learned patience, for one thing: trying endlessly to find inventive ways of getting through to particular individuals.

It also revealed to me just how much I enjoyed meeting new people in such a context: a situation where we were all working together towards a common goal, and where the students were encouraged to express and expand upon their own ideas as fully and clearly as they could.

That’s the advantage of concentrating on process rather than content. It wasn’t up to me to teach them facts or opinions: just how to channel their own body of knowledge and present it in an intellectually cogent way.

And, of course, it had the by-product of forcing me to learn the same lesson. Up to then, I’d written much like other Academics: footnotes, jargon, more-or-less futile (or fertile) digressions … all the usual hallmarks. For the first time, after teaching writing courses for a living, I was forced to acknowledge just how unreadable most of what I’d been churning out actually was.

The shift up to lecturer came at a cost. I still did some classroom teaching, but increasingly less and less. Instead, my energies went largely into course and curriculum design.

There were a couple of major events during this period at Massey. First of all, the umbrella school which had covered most of the Humanities disciplines on our Auckland campus was dissolved into a series of splinter groups, each one linked to its parent school at Palmerston North.

In the case of English, this meant that for the first time I had actual colleagues, other people specialising in the Creative Writing discipline. This was a huge plus, and I’m still grateful that it came when it did, so early in my career as a lecturer.

Secondly, a rather arbitrary vote was taken one day at senior level to restrict the number of courses which could be offered in any particular BA major. This struck English hard, as we had vastly more courses than were allowed for in the new curriculum.

The solution we finally came up with, after much debate, was to split the subject of English down the middle into an ‘English Studies’ major and a ‘Creative Writing’ major, accompanied by two minors in Theatre and Rhetoric studies.

This bureaucratically driven decision created an opportunity for the four permanent Creative Writing staff (one in Auckland, two in Palmerston North, and one in Wellington) to construct a whole new major in our own discipline.

Such opportunities are rare, and – while obviously a good deal of horse trading had to take place to get any personal initiatives past the group as a whole – it was an immensely fruitful time, as we made plans which would affect our teaching for years to come.

I ended up designing a new Advanced Fiction paper, while continuing to teach Travel Writing and introductory Creative Writing (Fiction and Poetry). It was really quite exciting, especially when combined with our growing graduate programme at Masters and Doctoral level.

•

So why did I give it all up?

I remember once, when I was in the middle of planning a series of publications based on the collections in the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, which I’d helped Jan Kemp and a number of others compile in the early 2000s, taking a walk on North Head with poet (and fellow academic) Michele Leggott.

She listened to my tale of woe about the increasing amounts of acrimony and discord involved in the project, then outlined her theory of the lustrum.

A lustrum is the period of five years preceding a census in Ancient Rome. Michele thought that that should be about the effective length of a creative project. Sometimes they have to be renewed for another five years, but it’s best to concentrate on the limits in everything.

I’ve thought of that conversation often: a certain amount of time spent translating Paul Celan; a certain amount of time working on New Zealand Science Fiction; a certain period of time spent editing Poetry New Zealand (after similar stints working on brief, the pander, Spin, and various other journals).

These projects worked well for me because they were bounded. I could happily lavish the whole of my energy on them because I knew that it wasn’t forever, that there was a solid substratum of day-to-day work on reading and writing poetry, fiction and essays, which would continue for me in any case.

Those core activities were sometimes compromised by the demands of these projects, but (by and large) shifting from one project to another has a way of helping you with both in the long run.

I suppose, in a nutshell, that was my reason for quitting Academia. I was no longer doing much of the face-to-face teaching which was my favourite part, and the fascinating work of curriculum design was now largely complete. Now it just remained to keep on teaching the same courses over and over again – with as many tweaks and rewrites as could be conveniently shoehorned into summer vacation.

If I’d aspired to move higher in the hierarchy, to shape the way the University and College themselves were going, it might have been different. But that is, I’m afraid, not my bliss. What I really like is to sit as I’m doing now, tapping away on a keyboard, and trying to get closer to that elusive meaning hovering behind each screen of words.

somehow never wrote something to go back to.[1]

That was Robert Lowell’s late verdict on his own body of work. Naturally I don’t agree with him. I keep going back to his certain of his poems and books again and again, but I can understand why he thought so.

The point is that he kept on writing. That last book of his, Day by Day, is one that grows on you. It evades the – in retrospect, shallower – rhetorical triumphs of much of his earlier work in favour of a deliberately downbeat, unresonant sadness.

Is it his best work? Who can say? You could almost make a rule that your best work is always the next one, the one still in prospect, because it hasn’t yet taken shape, because it still possesses so many possibilities, before being condemned into actual existence.

I’ll never regret spending so much time in Academia, but a whole pile of lustra have come and gone since I started there (especially if you count a decade of undergraduate and graduate study), and I find now that I want to change gear, lose that slightly absurd air of authority you’re forced to assume while teaching, in favour of sitting here alone with nothing solid to guide me.

It feels terrifying. That’s why I know it’s probably right.

---

Notes:

1. Robert Lowell, ‘Reading Myself.’ In Collected Poems. Ed. Frank Bidart & David Gewanter, with DeSales Harrison (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003): 591.

(23-27/2/22)

"Ghosting." Haunts (2023).
[Available at: https://afterlifecartographies.blogspot.com/2022/06/ghosting.html (18-24/3/22)]

[1266 wds]


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Skeleton Tracks (2022)

Michelle Elvy & Marco Sonzogni, ed.: Breach of All Size:
Small Stories on Ulysses, love and Venice (2022)

Skeleton Tracks

Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.

You know how it is when you’re in a strange city, especially if you don’t speak the language well? The books you brought with you dry up, and you become desperate for new reading material. You can usually find a book exchange of some sort in most hostels: French and German paperbacks, English potboilers – even some more serious books among them: Goethe’s Faust or (as in this case) Joyce’s Ulysses, left behind, no doubt, by travellers who’d repented of their self-improving zeal.

This time I was in Venice, on Giudecca. I’d just finished reading Snow Falling on Cedars, and was desperate to exchange it before leaving next morning to catch my train south. Ulysses it was.

Not just any copy of Ulysses, though – the one I’d picked up was a special ‘corrected’ version prepared by some German Professor called Hans Walter Gabler. He’d also included a long preface explaining how, by dint of comparing all the manuscript remnants, he’d managed to reconstruct parts of the book even its author had failed to comprehend.

In particular, in the Nighttown sequence, when the ghost of Stephen Dedalus’s mother appears and he asks her for that word, the ‘word known to all men’, Gabler had actually managed to find out what that word was, even though Joyce himself left it out. Not to keep you in suspense, the word turned out to be ‘love’.

Unfortunately for Gabler, the previous owner had included a few press cuttings denouncing the impudence of presuming to know better than a book’s author what it should and shouldn’t contain.

But that’s not what I want to talk about here. Even though I had doubts about reading Gabler’s rather than Joyce’s version, there’s not much else to do on long train journeys, so I did get a chance to study the book in some detail.

In particular, since this was clearly a student text, I was on the lookout for underlinings or marginal notes. There were none. What there were – in Chapter XV: Circe, the one I mentioned above – were little pinprick dots under some of the words. I’d read my fair share of prison-camp books, and I knew that during World War II people used to send coded messages like that.

I started to jot them down as I came to them. This was the result:

the gondola
wait my love
behind the stable
great light
still young

Make of that what you will.

Michelle Elvy & Marco Sonzogni, ed.: Breach of All Size (2022)

•

(18-19/11/21)

Breach of All Size: Small Stories on Ulysses, love and Venice. Ed. Michelle Elvy
& Marco Sonzogni. Wellington: The Cuba Press, 2022. 80-81.

[423 wds]


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77 Days (2021)

NZ Poetry Shelf

Poetry Shelf: Writings from lockdown
77 Days

Osip Braz: Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

When I was at high school my Russian teacher, Mr. Meijers, told us a Chekhov story, “The Bet.”

A rich man wagers a poor one he can’t spend five years in solitary confinement without going crazy. He can ask for books, or fancy food, or anything else he wants – but he’s not allowed to talk to anyone, or go outside his room.

I do remember wondering what all the fuss was about. A few years on your own, with books and entertainment of your choice – what could be wrong with that? In fact, after that, every time I bought a book I had that in the back of my mind – being stuck in my own room under house arrest.

As the years roll by, the man in the room studies languages and learns new skills; he leaves little notes asking for more textbooks. What he isn’t told is that his host has lost most of his money, and can no longer afford to settle the bet without going bankrupt.

The rich man lives in fear of his former friend.

The night before the five years are up, the man in the room escapes through a window, leaving no note behind. Perhaps he’s found out about the loss of his friend’s fortune, and decided to let him off out of pity. Perhaps all these years of enforced confinement have finally taken their toll.

Five years is an awfully long time – a scarcely conceivable weight of days. Until now, that is.

Our present lockdown, the fourth for Tāmaki Makaurau, began at midnight on Tuesday, 17th of August. As I write, at the beginning of November, only 77 days have actually gone by. But five years adds up to – give or take a leap year or so – 1824 days!

That’s almost 24 times what we’ve had to put up with so far.

And what have I done with this time?

I boxed up my father’s remaining books and carted them across the road for a church fundraiser.

I edited a webfestchrift for my friend Michele Leggott.

I wrote some posts on my blog.

I went on a diet: I’ve lost 20 kilos so far.

Oh, and I did take the trouble to look up that story. It turns out that it isn’t five years he has to spend in the room, it’s fifteen. Not 1824 days, but 5472. Not 24, but 71 times what we’ve just been through.

No doubt we’ll soon be back to normal. It hasn’t been five years – let alone fifteen – but you can’t really call it nothing, either.

•

(1-3/11/21)

'Poetry Shelf: Writings from lockdown.' Ed. Paula Green.
NZ Poetry Shelf: a poetry page with reviews, interviews, and other things.
[Available at: https://nzpoetryshelf.com/2021/11/12/poetry-shelf-writings-from-lockdown/ (12/11/21)]

[431 wds]


Poetry Box: Paula Green


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Listening to the Silence (2021)

Chris Gallavin: A Dance Together (2021)

Introduction:
Listening to the Silence

Prof. Chris Gallavin (2015)

Earlier this year, 2020, as the country prepared to go into lockdown against the COVID-19 pandemic – strange to think how quickly even this global cataclysm is bound to recede into memory – I read an interesting interview with Kiwi bard Sam Hunt.

“How do poets deal with such things?” asked the interviewer, Hunt’s longtime mate Colin Hogg.

“I’m a poet only when I’m writing a poem,” replied Hunt. “Otherwise I’m just hanging round, listening to the silence.”

Just hanging around, listening to the silence.

It’s hard to imagine a better definition of poetry than that.

Wordsworth called it “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and added that “it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” That’s pretty much the same thing, though, if you think about it.

I first met Chris Gallavin at a large Academic forum at Massey University, where both of us work. I guess I was struck at once by his larger-than-life ebullience and enthusiasm for every subject he touches: Law, University Administration, and – as it turned out – poetry.

I teach poetry there, at Massey (as well as trying to write it), and I have to admit that it was a little surprising to find so much fascination in him for something which can feel, at times, like a recondite art.

We cemented this acquaintance when he invited me to stay in his sleep-out during the 2017 Manawatu Writers’ Festival, which he co-hosted with other local writers at the Feilding Public Library. I saw then the massive library of New Zealand poetry he’d amassed over the years, jostling for space with long shelves of sober law books.

Given his druthers, he told me, he’d spend all day long in the sleep-out, reading poetry and wandering around the garden, like a T’ang dynasty sage.

Gallavin’s poetic heroes are all on display in this, his first full-length collection:

And we listened to Sam ....
'Hunt' you finished the
Sentence before I could
Say we all need heroes,
Even if some like fathers
Are a bit broken-down

as he puts it in “Milla,” the second of two heartfelt poems addressed to his daughter.

James K. Baxter puts in a somewhat subdued appearance, too:

I was caught today
Reading a book of Baxter
Quietly on a sofa, where I sat
Tempted to lay my grey flecked head.

‘That looks like an old man's book’
Said with a smile.
I did not know what to say
Save a breathed and lonely,
‘Yes, I suppose it is’.

As a poet, Gallavin has many strengths. I admire the vernacular love poems he addresses to his first Ford Cortina (‘My First Love’) and his local fish n chip shop. There’s a genuine passion for New Zealand scenery and weather on display here, too.

The temptation – as always – is to continue to quote examples, but I don’t want to keep you from the body of his book any longer, so I think I’ll have to content myself with only one of these, a Bashō-like evocation of the charms of winter:

I stand at the window
Cloaked, first cold coat,
A cocoon of clouds,
In this my new winter.

Good luck, then, to Chris Gallavin in all his new ventures, poetic and otherwise!

•

---

Works cited:

Colin Hogg, “Sam Hunt: We’ll be wiser, weaker folk.” Newsroom (7/4/20): [Available at: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2020/04/07/1117315/sam-hunt-well-come-out-weaker-and-wiser?fbclid=IwAR3aEk5mMEb5gRYEy9BwU6U9MRYIsH7U8sLcmh0moUFiNrXETX-FpiGRG0c].

•


(19-20/7/20)

“Introduction: Listening to the Silence.” In Chris Gallavin: A Dance Together. Feilding: Prow Publishing, 2021.

[559 wds]


•

A Memorial Brass (2021)

brief

Obituary:
A Memorial Brass: i.m. Ted Jenner (1946-2021)

Scott Hamilton: Ted Jenner (2011)

Ted Jenner was a friend of mine. I guess one of the things I appreciated most about Ted was his unfailing cheerfulness and unflappability even when things appeared to be going very, very wrong indeed. Perhaps it was his long years working as a Classics lecturer in Malawi that accustomed him to sudden emergencies, or perhaps it was the hand-to-mouth nature of his life as a writer and teacher in New Zealand, but I never saw him at a loss for a wise and witty thing to say.

I had heard that he was ill, and even in hospital, but I'm sorry to say that the news of his death from cancer in the early hours of Friday morning still came as a shock. He wore his years lightly. He was one of that group of baby-boomer New Zealand poets, all born in 1946, at the close of World War II – Sam Hunt, Bill Manhire, Ian Wedde prominent among them – who've been so influential on our literature.

Much though I always enjoyed chatting to Ted – he was a marvellously learned man, a trained classicist with an expertise in Ancient Greek – I suppose it would be true to say that most of my knowledge of him came through his books. The below is probably not a complete list, but it includes all the titles I myself own:

1. A Memorial Brass. Eastbourne, Wellington: Hawk Press, 1980.
2. Dedications. Auckland: Omphalos Press, 1991.
3. The Love-Songs of Ibykos: 22 Fragments. Images by John Reynolds. Auckland: Holloway Press, 1997.
4. Sappho Triptych. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2007.
5. Writers in Residence and Other Captive Fauna. Auckland: Titus Books, 2009.
6. [Ed.] brief the fortieth (July 2010). Auckland: Titus Books, 2010.
7. The Gold Leaves (Being an Account and Translation from the Ancient Greek of the 'So-Called' Orphic Tablets). Pokeno: Atuanui Press, 2014.
8. ‘Complete Gold Leaves: Transcriptions of Sixteen Ancient Greek Gold Lamellae. Compiled with English Translations.’ In Bill Direen, ed. Percutio 10: A Special Issue devoted to two projects by Classicist and poet Edward Jenner. Dunedin: Percutio Publications, 2016.
9. The Arrow that Missed. Lyttelton: Cold Hub Press, 2017.

Looking back, I seem to have written quite a lot about Ted's work over the years:

• There's a brief introduction to it here: ‘Hooked on Classics.’ The Imaginary Museum (3/11/09). http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/2009/11/hooked-on-classics.html.
• Then there's my review-essay of his book Writers in Residence, ‘Troubling Our Sleep: Ted Jenner’s Postmodern Classicism,” in Ka Mate Ka Ora #8 (September 2009): 46-66. http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko/08/ka_mate08_ross.asp.
• And, more recently, there's my review of The Arrow that Missed in Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2018 (March 2018): 308-10. https://jackrossopinions.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-arrow-that-missed-2018.html.

I'm not sure that there's any need to repeat all that here. In any case, it’s readily available online. Suffice it to say that for me, Ted Jenner combined the twin virtues of precise, scrupulous scholarship with an equally strong taste for experimental fiction and poetry – not that I think he saw much difference between the two genres – and the way he wrote, there really wasn't.

I recall being quite concerned when I heard that Ted was planning to review my chapbook Papyri: Love poems & fragments from Sappho & elsewhere (2007) for brief 36. Knowing no Greek, I’d adapted my versions from a literal French translation I’d picked up in a second-hand shop. I knew that he himself, adept at ancient Greek, had done his own translations in the beautiful small-press Sappho Triptych.

It came as a huge surprise when he praised my book. I suppose a true scholar has far less need to be picky and pedantic than those with a half-knowledge of the field. In any case, it certainly showed the breadth of his sympathies with unusual takes on the classics!

I’ve borrowed the title for this piece from his first collection, A Memorial Brass, exquisitely printed by Alan Loney at the Hawk Press in 1980. It seems best to conclude with some more of Ted's own words, taken from the title poem in that book:

My dear, they call us bourgeois
But it was essentially

A bourgeois thing to do –
An image of conjugal

Faith – to cross the hands over chest
And breast and stand on

The goblin pups, a monumental
Brass patent

For the bloodstream-fevers.
I remember it was cold

That May with added expense, upkeep
of allotment, and late

Spring blooms falling fierce as
Snow on the gale-lashed

Oats. Very soon a priest mumbled eight
Sacrificia patriarchae nostri

Above us. Commenting now on the
Canon of his mass, I

Like to think it was
Easy in Abraham's time –

Knowledge and fear were deliberate
Then, total, without cover; but

As for us, we lie awake
Until the sleeping's over.

My profoundest condolences to Ted's wife, Vasalua. If he were here I'm sure he could find the perfect words to thank her for making the last years of his life perhaps the happiest of all.

As for me, I'd like to say once more Ave atque vale: Hail and farewell, to one of the finest scholars and poets I've ever known. Perhaps we'll meet again some day, when the sleeping's over.

•


(8-13/7/21)

brief 57, ed. Olivia Macassey (Pokeno: Titus Books, tba)

[857 wds]


•