Teaching Late Curnow (2019)

JNZL 34.2: New Writing 1975-2000 (2016)

Teaching Late Curnow

Bream Bay from the Brynderwyns

Ways into the text


It can be quite a curious experience trying to teach classic New Zealand poems to local students. You tend to start off with an expectation of familiarity: not so much of knowledge of the work itself, as of at least some of its geographical and cultural background. I remember once hearing the late Kendrick Smithyman describe the experience of reading his early poem ‘Bream Bay’ — ‘What does a traveller see, looking north / from Brynderwen over the arc of Bream Bay’ — to an audience of Auckland University undergraduates.[1] They had absolutely no idea what he meant when he made a side-reference to the Marsden Point smelter having spoilt the view since he originally wrote it. He was therefore left with two alternatives: either he had to explain exactly what you do now see from the crest of the Brynderwyns when driving north, or else just let it go.

Choosing between those two alternatives—letting the poem speak for itself, or filling in each and every one of the references—does not get any easier over time. If you do explain them all, you can hear yourself gradually turning into the most dreaded of social types, the professional explainer. But then, by the same token, if you fail to explain them, you have to resign yourself to incomprehension: to your listeners missing a good deal of the point.

The situation becomes particularly difficult when you attempt to teach the poetry of Allen Curnow. When some pedant wrote in to the Listener to query the accuracy of the line ‘a scarlet geranium wild on a wet bank’ in Curnow’s classic poem ‘A Small Room with Large Windows’, claiming that the flower does not actually grow on wet banks, Curnow responded to the effect that: ‘irrespective of the customary behaviour of those plants in Wellington, there was, observable from the window of his house, “a scarlet geranium growing wild on a wet bank”’.[2] Furthermore, lest we be in any doubt as to where this observation took place, the new edition of his poems is careful to specify that ‘the location is the sitting room at 13 Herbert St., Takapuna’.[3] It is hard to imagine any poet giving more unequivocal directions about how to read their poems than that: Curnow has clearly cast himself as one of Marianne Moore’s ‘literalists of the imagination’, and his ‘imaginary gardens’ certainly appear to aspire to have real toads in them![4]

For the most part, however, Curnow survives for our students, as he does for the general reader, in the form of a few tags. People keep quoting these gnomic fragments, year after year, as if they were self-explanatory:

Not I, some child born in a marvellous year
Will learn the trick of standing upright here.
‘The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch’ (p. 99)

It was something different, something
Nobody counted on.
‘The Unhistoric Story’ (p. 56)

Simply by sailing in a new direction
You could enlarge the world.
‘Landfall in Unknown Seas’ (p. 95)

It is hard to think of another New Zealand poet, in fact — even Baxter or Tuwhare — who has gifted us with so many of these irreducible, teasing nuggets of wit.

Having had the rather unenviable experience of dragging successive classes through ‘A Small Room with Large Windows’ in our second-year Massey University Auckland Writers and Their Region course—What is a mangrove? ‘Why do they ‘truckle’? What is the exact point of the contrast between them and the ‘Seven ageing pine trees’? What are the ‘thousand diverse dullnesses’ that are being exploding by the exact details described at the end of the poem? etc. etc.—I have formed some rather anecdotal, but definitely experiential, ideas on the most effective ways to teach Curnow’s poetry—his later poetry, at any rate.

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Late and early Curnow


That is if ‘A Small Room with Large Windows’ can really be said to rank as late Curnow. Where does ‘late Curnow’ actually begin? In terms of our Auckland Writers and Their Region course, the earlier South Island Curnow is postulated to have been succeeded by the later, Auckland-based Curnow after his move up here in the 1950s. Of course, it would be just as easy to claim that the break should be dated later than that. The work collected in Continuum (1988) overlaps with the end of the 1974 Collected Poems, but one could certainly contend that a modernising shift both in diction and treatment of his overriding concerns can be observed in all of the books after Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects (1972).

In any case, so far as our students are concerned, the later the better seems to be the rule of thumb when it comes to Curnow. But is this simply a by-product of my own enthusiasm for that remarkable series of books collected in Continuum: An Incorrigible Music (1979), You Will Know When You Get There (1982), The Loop in Lone Kauri Road (1986)? Might the earlier poems work just as well for them if I concentrated the same intensity of attention on them?

It is, in the final analysis, impossible to say. This is (at best) qualitative rather than quantitative research: tendentious and unscientific, as all such enquiries tend to be, but still valid within certain limits of definition. My own greater enthusiasm for Curnow’s later work can certainly not be counted out as a factor in the choices I have made while teaching him. Nevertheless, the arc of his poetry from first to last towards ever greater specificity and precision might be seen to explain this increased accessibility in his work after the (at least partial) hiatus of the 1960s.

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Ways to discuss a poet


It is, I think, true to say that some poets’ work is easier to discuss in tutorials than others. All of us trained in the strange art of sitting around and simply talking around a poem—using the basic techniques of New Criticism, but hopefully avoiding some of its conceptual pitfalls—would surely have to agree with this assertion.

I have always found Kendrick Smithyman an excellent poet to anatomise in group surroundings. It is tempting to attribute this to his own decades-long bondage to the tutorial system at Auckland University. His poems from this era include so many intriguing details, so many diverse points of entry—surely that has something to do with his own repeated talkfests about Auden, Eliot and Hardy in so many small classes (limited, as a rule, to 20-odd students)? But then, many other canonical New Zealand poets are similarly rewarding when dissected in company. James K. Baxter’s ‘East Coast Journey’, Charles Brasch’s ‘View of Rangitoto’, R. A. K. Mason’s ‘Strange Memories of Earth’, Robin Hyde’s ‘Houses by the Sea’ — all of these can be made to intrigue students with a little prompting,; or so I myself have found, at any rate. None of those writers (so far as I’m aware) served their time as English tutors.

In fact, some of the most halting and end-stopped discussions I have had are of one of the New Zealand poets I admire most: Hone Tuwhare. There seems to be some sort of inhibition in our students when it comes to analysing the shifting registers and tones of voice in Tuwhare’s poetry. It is not that his poems don’t retain their effectiveness when read out loud, but that is where it seems to end. When one tries to go deeper, a certain feeling of breaking a butterfly on the wheel seems to stymie further discussion.

What, then, of Allen Curnow? It is tempting to draw some connection with the fact that Curnow was upstairs lecturing on poetry whilst Smithyman was downstairs running workshops on it, when it comes to comparing the effect of their poems on students. Kendrick’s, though baffling at times, have less of a tendency to intimidate. ‘A Small Room with Large Windows’, by contrast, leaves far less room for imaginative reconstruction in the reader’s own voice.

In my own case, I have had the most success with Curnow’s poems from the 1970s and 1980s, with their clear focus on quotidian detail. His larger, eschatological concerns are still there, but they are more adroitly concealed beneath the surface of the poem. Take ‘A Dead Lamb’ (1972), for instance:

Never turn your back on the sea.
The mumble of the fall of time is continuous.

A billion billion broken waves deliver
a coloured glass globe at your feet, intact.

You say it is a Japanese fisherman's float.
It is a Japanese fisherman’s float. ...

There is standing room and much to be thankful for
in the present. Look, a dead lamb on the beach. (p. 161)

That poem is a teacher’s gift, whether at a lecture, a seminar or a tutorial. What better articulation of late twentieth-century linguistic philosophy could be found than in those lines: ‘You say it is a Japanese fisherman’s float. / It is a Japanese fisherman’s float’? Is the point that it is that because you say it’s that—or is it an assertion of the possibility of identity between signifier and signified? And then there’s that dead lamb … Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi: or just a dead lamb? The point is that the speculation is an interesting one—it’s one that everyone, Christian, Agnostic or Atheist, can express an opinion on. And is there a connection there with the danger of turning your back on the sea? Is the presence of that dead lamb a fact of the same order as the Japanese fisherman's float (I have one at home, which I have occasionally brought along to class and brandished at this point in the discussion)? That is to say, is it simply a complication to an otherwise idyllic scene—or is it metaphoric of some larger, metaphysical danger, more than that offered by the mere possibility of drowning?

The sparseness of the diction leaves room for such speculations: it is, finally, the arrangement of phenomena in such poems that gives rise to such speculations, rather than the more heavyhanded hints in the language of his previous work. That’s not to say that he became an entirely new poet in the 1970s and 80s. His concerns, by and large, remained the same—those anxious anticipations of the next world, and consequent inability to take the values of this world seriously—but now those values were more clearly bound up with the lifestyle and seascapes of his second home,: that West Coast bach above Karekare Beach, situated bang in the middle of the loop on Lone Kauri Road.

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You Will Know When You Get There


For a while it was possible to get instant product recognition for Karekare and even Lone Kauri Road simply by referring to Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano, but I am afraid that that has now become just one more high-culture footnote. West Coast beaches are still a good starting-point for most students, though (more so, at any rate, than the mangroves and salt flats of Shoal Bay).

The latest of his poems I teach is ‘The Game of Tag’, from Early Days Yet (1997). I use it when lecturing on poetic form in our first-year Creative Writing paper.

Seven thigh-thick
hamstring-high posts,

embedded two
metres and cemented

in, where the side
of the road burst

into bird space,
tree-toppling all

that plunging way
down. A clean-cut

horizon shapes
daylight. A gap. (p.301)

Do the students like it, or get it? It is hard to be sure. Certainly, there is not quite the same quick response they give to those wonderfully lucid Continuum poems. But it is fun to talk about it, to take them up Lone Kauri Rd, every precipitous twist and turn of it etched into clipped, claustrophobic couplets, and to watch the aging poet trying so hard to form a bond with his alter-ego, ‘my spray-gun-toting rival’, the AFRIKA POET tagger, who:

Gave

Death the fingers.
Shook the dreadlocks

from his eyes, for
his best shot.

‘Does it date?’ asked E. M. Forster anxiously of Christopher Isherwood, after allowing the latter to read the then unpublished manuscript of Maurice, his novel of forbidden love, abandoned by him some time in the Edwardian era. ‘Yes’, replied Isherwood, ‘but why shouldn’t it date?’ (Moskowitz 2018).[5] These ‘dreadlock’ lines of Curnow’s have dated also. They may sound a little dismissive, even a little patronising at first glance. But if you persevere with the poem, try to enter into its author’s world as he climbs the long slope, hypnotised by the signs of vehicular mayhem combined with the tagger’s obscurely allusive words, you begin to realise just how much he has conflated the two, how small the distance he maintains from this ‘rival’:

Where have they all
gone, with CICERO

BEASTIE and me
and which of us

leads the way down
post and plank not-

withstanding, car-
apaced in Korean

steel, to be wrapped
round a bole two

hundred years thick,
two hundred feet

below? One wild
wheelie and we’re off.

There’s been a car crash. That much is obvious. The heavily reinforced posts guarding one of the many precipitous corners on this most treacherous of roads were not sufficient to save whoever side-swiped them so disastrously, sometime since:

Rain-forest soon
repairs its ruins.

Dead men’s dental
records and cellphones

tell no lies. Rust
finishes the job

(almost). One chip
of red Perspex

under a stone
in the stream was

his (whose?) tail-light.

The tagger, ‘AFRIKA POET,’ came subsequently, adding his words to the ‘hefty planks’ mounted across the gap, and then again on the subsequent bends. Then he, too (the poet conjectures) signed off with ‘skid marks in the gravel.’

This kinship between the two, poet and tagger, both insisting on giving ‘death the fingers’—on murmuring ‘name upon name, / As a mother names her child’, as Yeats puts it in ‘Easter, 1916’[6]—on somehow finding some way to record the prior presence of those who trod this road before them, is profound, albeit still a little teasing:

A-F-R-I-K-A P-O-E-T

writes, and I quote
THANKS FOR THE TAG.

These two writers, the tagger of ’93 and the poet born in 1911, will never quite see eye to eye, but—in the end—they have a lot more in common than one might think. Both are engaged in fighting off death and oblivion with powerful incantations.

Certainly, many of the allusions and attitudes in Allen Curnow’s works have dated, and will continue to date—even in the poems of this later, reinvented self. But so what? There’s something deeply satisfying about those last two books of his, Early Days Yet and The Bells of Saint Babel’s—those final attempts to screw his own idiolect just a couple of turns tighter.

‘The Game of Tag’ remains one of my favourites among his later poems because the effort he makes to bridge the gap between then and now is so great, and yet the wry smile implicit behind the lines makes it clear how little faith he puts in success. However strong the words, death will still come for us all: but one can greet it on one’s feet or on one’s knees.

It may not be quite saving the best for last, but it seems to me considerably closer to it than any other New Zealand poet I know of has achieved so far.

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Notes:

1. Kendrick Smithyman, Selected Poems, ed. Peter Simpson (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1989), p. 25.

2. C. K. Stead, ‘Allen Curnow: Poet of the Real’, in Kin of Place: Essays on 20 New Zealand Writers (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002), p. 129.

3. Allen Curnow, Collected Poems, ed. Elizabeth Caffin and Terry Sturm (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017), p. 362.

4. Marianne Moore, The Poems of Marianne Moore, ed. Grace Schulman (London: Faber, 2003), p. 135.

5. Hannah Moskowitz, ‘Review of A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster, by Wendy Moffatt’, Queerly reads https://www.queerlyreads.com/home/2018/11/15/a-great-unrecorded-history-a-new-life-of-em-forster> [accessed 14 December 2018].

6. W. B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1973), p. 394.

JNZL: Journal of New Zealand Literature

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(18-24/9/17; 8/10/18; 13-14/12/18)

JNZL [Journal of New Zealand Literature] 37.2: Remembering Curnow. Edited by Alex Calder. (Wellington: Victoria University, 2019): 92-102.

[2701 wds]


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The Lonesome Death of Bridget Furey (2019)

Murray Edmond, ed.: Ka Mate Ka Ora


The Lonesome Death of Bridget Furey
or: Pessoa Down Under

Bridget Furey

The Dead

this is the war I lost
a woman
versus three poets.
– Bridget Furey, ‘Brag Art’ (brief 6 (1997): 31)

New Zealand poet Bridget Furey flickered into existence for a brief moment between the late 1980s and 1990s. Her contributor’s bio in Landfall 168 (1988), describes her as ‘22 years of age. Recently returned from an extended working holiday overseas; presently living and working in Dunedin.’ That would put her date of birth sometime around 1966.

Her next, and final, contributor note, in A Brief Description of the Whole World 6 (1997), says simply: ‘Bridget Furey has just returned to Dunedin after a stint overseas.’ (brief 56) The rest, it would appear, is silence.

In her brief period in the limelight, Furey contributed three poems – ‘Ricetta per Critica,’ ‘The Idea of Anthropology on George Street,’ and ‘The Book-Keepings of a Ternary Mind in Late February’ – to our most celebrated literary periodical, Landfall. And another, ‘Brag Art,’ which must now be regarded as her swansong, to its antithesis, the avant-garde quarterly A Brief Description of the Whole World.

Out of curiosity, I spent some time recently trying to track down an image of Bridget Furey. I drew a blank in the local repositories, but the photograph above, taken by Alen MacWeeney and dated ‘Loughrea, 1966,’ though clearly not of the poet herself (unless she was unusually prone to concealing information about her age) may come, perhaps, from some cognate branch of the family? Loughrea is in County Galway, Ireland. This Bridget is described in context as a ‘traveller.’

One is tempted to speculate further that this branch of the family may have included a certain Michael Furey, quondam lover of Gabriel Conroy’s wife in James Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’ (1914), and the principal inspiration for its immortal last paragraph:

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

A Brief Description of the Whole World 6 (1997)

When Good Poets Get Bored

one must swing the ice pick
so she can shine like
a sacrifice
(Furey 31)

As you may have gathered by now, there is no ‘Bridget Furey.’ She was a hoax – or should one say a persona? – created by two other New Zealand poets, Michele Leggott and Murray Edmond.

Landfall has (to date, at least) made no official comment on the incident, but the founding editor of A Brief Description of the Whole World, fellow-poet Alan Loney, did not encourage the two collaborators to repeat the experiment. They had been forced to confess to their involvement when Loney attempted to contact Bridget Furey in order to solicit more poems.

Furey, then, remains largely still-born, her small handful of poems sandwiched tantalisingly between two pillars of New Zealand Lit: the official canon represented by Landfall and the alternative tradition enshrined in what is now called brief.

Murray Edmond composed a kind of epitaph for her in a recent email to the author:

the reclusive Bridget Furey … may be dead by now, likely of an overdose (tho’ of what who knows?).

Of what indeed? Why would two poets choose to spend their time in such a manner, composing mock verses for an imaginary alternate self? The first answer is probably the simplest: as a tribute to possibly the most famous (non-existent) poet that ever (didn’t) live: Ernest Laylor Malley.

Michael Heyward: The Ern Malley Affair (1993)

The Ern Malley Affair

I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
The black swan of trespass on alien waters
(Malley 24)

The story is a familiar one, and has been told many times – most conveniently in Michael Heyward’s The Ern Malley Affair (1993). Put briefly, two young Australian poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, irritated by what they saw as the pretentious obscurity of Modernist poet and critic Max Harris’s magazine Angry Penguins, decided to put his critical acumen to the test by inventing a poet and fabricating a number of spurious poems by him.

Ern Malley was the name they chose, and they created his entire body of work – 17 poems – in a single day in 1943. They also provided him with a fake biography, a wasting disease, and a doting older sister, who sent Harris the poems after her alleged brother’s death at the early age of 25.

Harris loved the poems, publishing them en masse in a special issue of Angry Penguins in June 1944, and subsequently as a short book, under the title The Darkening Ecliptic.

Which is when things started to go awry. Max Harris was sued by the South Australian police for the alleged ‘obscenity’ of some of the Malley poems. Despite the fact that Harris had by then detected the imposture, he was found guilty and fined five pounds. Shortly afterwards Angry Penguins folded.

Malley refused to go away, however. His poems continue to be reprinted, discussed, praised, and denounced to this day. They are now a cornerstone of the Australian poetic canon, far outshining any productions of their two authors in propria persona.

Roughly forty years after Malley’s alleged death in the 1940s, did it seem an opportune moment to Edmond and Leggott to stir up similarly the New Zealand literary establishment? Leggott, after all, had herself recently returned from a long ‘stint overseas’ – working on a Doctoral thesis about American Objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky. What could be more likely than the somewhat homespun quality of much New Zealand poetry and – especially – poetry criticism struck her as a bit behind the times in the mid-1980s?

Certainly Bridget’s first set of poems, the three included in Landfall 168, make few concessions to the uninitiated reader. The first, ‘Ricetta per Critica’ [Recipe for Criticism] takes us on a quick cook’s tour of literary modernism ‘as the nineteenth century drew to a close … in shells and golden elbows sailing past a new Byzantium’. Perhaps the most telling allusion here comes in the second stanza, taking us:

from the Charcoal-burners to Marinetti’s circus
simply by sailing in a new direction a whole world
of culinary delight or recipes for disaster

Allen Curnow seems appropriately sandwiched here between Marinetti and the ‘circus’ of futurism – though who precisely who ‘Groqwyn’ is (described as a ‘fascist fly’) remains a little unclear. Is he the facile critic who is being guyed by the poet, or is there some deeper meaning there? In any case, the slightly-off tags continue to fly thick and fast:

From Duchamp:

oh Garibaldi at the holy gates cavorting with futurisms
thin enough to drape like laundry round the kitchen –
next a clicking of legbones, Giuseppe, and she is descending
a staircase hung with noodle doughnaked

and about to slip into the modernist jacuzzi

to Ezra Pound:

the meat and drink of politicsa brew
of bodies piled like pasta (‘in hell’) nothing
the old canto-maker at his gelato couldn’t have
cooked up‘must thou go the road to

hell’

to William Carlos Williams:

weeping catastrophe from the kitchen floorit’s raining
chicken giblets as the doctor arrives with his red barrow

uncertain where to deliver or abort the last primavera
of allmomentary aphasia as the ships pull out

‘Momentary aphasia’ might be, in fact, a good description of the effect this poem is liable to have on the unwary reader. What seems at first sight substantive dissolves under closer scrutiny, leaving one only with the sense of a mischievous sharp tongue, immense erudition, fricasseed with a deep underlying fury.

That rage becomes more intense in the next poem, ‘The Idea of Anthropology on George Street’ (presumably an allusion to Wallace Steven’s ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’). This is a bitter satire on a kind of Jack-the-lad academic whizz kid, with more in common, perhaps, with Carly Simon’s 1972 anthem ‘You’re so vain’ than with the rather more stately and philosophical Stevens poem.

Was it Billy Zydeco’s leg
in the air, synergism of phallus and wheel,
artefact disappearing through a turnstile door,
stag party invites in cuneiform passed under the
boardroom table? Jism, just juice. Freshly.

Again, it’s hard to attribute biographical allusiveness to this poem in the absence of a biography, but one yearns to detect in this ‘Glass case whizz kid’ some ex-lover of Bridget’s:

Wow. & ow. (o, & pow).

The last of this early group, ‘The Book-Keepings of a Ternary Mind in Late February’ is more meditative in tone (as befits its apparent echo of Eliot’s ‘Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season’). Its last stanza has an especial poignancy as a kind of self-portrait of the poet herself, in the guise of one of Chagall’s models:

She wants to take both glasses and pour them over the white drapery he is condemning her to wear like paint, she has a notion to uplift the fiddler from the street and snap his matchstick wrists for musical effect. But the future perfect will allow them only one-way flights and she is already three-quarters full and falling into the theatre of the city, the opera of images where the swarming paint is still wet upon the flats.

Mudrooroo (1938-2019)

Colonial Constructs

Seeing that provocation and dissent are the diastole and systole of critical enquiry, I close with a provocation: literary forgery is a sort of spurious literature, and so is literature [my emphasis]. Consequently, when we imagine the relationship between [them], we should not be thinking of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde but rather of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
(Ruthven 200)

‘Where the swarming paint is still wet upon the flats.’ To continue this conjecture of Bridget Furey as Ern Malley redivivus, I’d like to introduce here a comment from a recent conference I attended. It was the 14th International Conference on the Short Story in English, held in Shanghai in 2016, and dedicated to ‘Influence and Confluence in the Short Story: East and West.’

At one of the plenary sessions, Canadian writer Clark Blaise proposed a new schema of the Affluent North versus the Indigent South to replace what he saw as the outdated unchanging East / Go-ahead West one. Someone in the audience (not me) asked ‘What about Australia and New Zealand?’ To which he replied – and I quote – ‘Australia and New Zealand are merely colonial constructs.’

It seems an odd phrase for a Canadian to use. What, after all, is Canada if not a ‘colonial construct’? Or do the older New World colonies possess a legitimacy that the newer ones lack? Perhaps ‘authenticity’ might be a better term to use than ‘legitimacy,’ in that case?

What actually makes a person, a culture, a piece of writing ‘authentic’? Because it comes from the heart? Because it is a true expression of its environment? Because it lacks guile or subterfuge?

But nothing in colonialism is authentic, can be authentic. Colonialism is the polite mask we don to cover dispossession, usurpation, even genocide. Perhaps it’s for that reason that the deliberately inauthentic holds such currency among us – or those of us who hail from down under, that is.

Ern Malley has been hailed as Australia’s greatest poet not so much in spite of the fact, but because of the fact that he never existed – just as the ‘Australia’ he wrote in and about cannot be said to exist, except, possibly, in the imaginations of those outside it. But – by the same criterion – should we call Mudrooroo (or, for that matter, B. Wongar) her greatest novelist?

The fact that both of these men, Colin Johnson (‘Mudrooroo’) and Sreten Božić (‘B. Wongar’) had (at least implicitly) claimed Aboriginal ethnicity as a kind of guarantee of the ‘authenticity’ of their writing seemed to have the effect of completely discrediting them when a controversy began over their ‘true’ ethnic origins.

Colin Johnson’s claim that ‘his dark skin meant he was always treated as Aboriginal by society, therefore his life experience was that of an Aborigine’ (Mudrooroo) did not really satisfy most critics. Nor did Božić’s statement that the name ‘B(anumbir) Wongar’ – which he says can mean ‘both morning star and messenger from the spirit world’ – was given to him by his tribal wife Dumala and her relatives in the course of instructing him in their traditional ways (B. Wongar).

On the one hand, such cases seem to illustrate the tendency of Europeans to try to monopolise both sides of the colonial debate: to disenfranchise the subaltern, and then impersonate them, with equal facility – and, dare one add, cynicism?

On the other hand, did those novels and stories of Mudrooroo’s and Wongar’s which had been so praised by critics, and prescribed for so many university courses, suddenly lose all value when their authors’ ethnicity came into question?

What exactly had we all been reading? Books? Or windows onto some alleged alterity? One reason that Mudrooroo’s and Wongar’s fictions satisfied those demands so well was because they had been written with them in mind. As at a fraudulent séance, it turned out we’d been talking to ourselves all along.

Catfish: The TV Show (2012-?)

Catfish

one
i kept in hiding
one
i renamed ‘citoyen’
one
who stood doyen
(Furey 31)

Of course, it’s true to say that such questions of cultural usurpation are not reserved for the post-colonial world – let alone the ‘colonial constructs’ of the South Pacific. The case of Bridget Furey certainly raises such issues, but there must be more to her than that for us to maintain an interest in her.

At this point, then I’d like to take a complete cultural tangent and throw into the mix one of my favourite reality TV shows, Catfish, which has been running now for seven years, since it began on MTV in 2012.

In the 16th episode of the 4th series (first broadcast in August 2015), our dynamic duo of presenters, Max and Nev, discovered that Ayissha’s online romance with ‘Sydney’ had been with ‘Whitney,’ instead, all along. What’s more, ‘Whitney Shanice’ (like ‘Sydney’) turned out to be just one more online identity of her real interlocutor, who admitted to having ‘8 or 10’ online identities, which she used for a variety of reasons: including viciously criticising Ayissha online in order to jump in – as herself – to defend her.

At a certain point such information stops making sense, and you just have to accept the proliferating forest of personae offered up to you so easily by modern social media as an irresistible temptation to a certain sort of person.

What exactly is a catfish? Thanks to the TV show, the term has now come to mean any kind of unscrupulous online troll or predator, but specifically one who fabricates a fictitious online identity. As the original 2010 Catfish documentary explained it:

They used to tank cod from Alaska all the way to China. They’d keep them in vats in the ship. By the time the codfish reached China, the flesh was mushy and tasteless. So this guy came up with the idea that if you put these cods in these big vats, put some catfish in with them and the catfish will keep the cod agile. And there are those people who are catfish in life. And they keep you on your toes. They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh. And I thank god for the catfish because we would be droll, boring and dull if we didn't have somebody nipping at our fin. (Harris)

Just as there must surely have been a little of Ern Malley behind the Bridget Furey hoax, so too I would have to postulate a little of the catfish. It’s not that the actual TV programme was born or thought of then, but the basic idea of deliberately introducing some discord to rile up the other fish and keep them fresh is surely a universal one.

Which brings us to the main point of this comparison – another of the major (probable) influences on the creation of Bridget Furey – the Portuguese Modernist poet Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa (which coincidentally means ‘person’ in Portuguese) is famous for publishing under a variety of names (including his own).

These were not mere hastily assumed personae in the Poundian sense, however. They, or at any rate the major ones, were fully fleshed out with biographies, bibliographies, discordant styles, and a variety of contradictory opinions. He called them heteronyms. He himself has been called many things, but probably never (as yet) a catfish. And yet he was a bit like that, surely? A catfish avant la lettre?

The fact that he started out as a poet in (bad) English, rather than Portuguese, shows a certain fluidity of identity from the very first. ‘Eu não escrevo em português. Escrevo eu mesmo’ [I do not write in Portuguese, I write myself] is one of his most celebrated dicta. I have it up in my kitchen as a fridge magnet – though I should add that the woman who translated it for me in a shop in Lisbon opined that it sounded ‘a bit pretentious.’ Maybe she was just sick of seeing all those Pessoa mugs, t-shirts, shopping baskets and posters on sale in every tourist gift shop.

After all, what is a heteronym but an artfully forged and skilfully substantiated fake identity? The actual merits of Pessoa’s writing can be hard to perceive in translation. Whose writing, anyway? One of the things that conspire to keep him in the public eye is the constant proliferation in the actual number of heteronyms he is alleged to have created – in one of the many senses Pessoan scholars have so far identified. Is it 74? 84? 124? It depends on who last edited his Wikipedia page, and (of course) on the way in which you mean the question.

How many heteronyms can dance on the end of a pin? It would be easier if one could simply conclude that there was no definitive answer to the question. But maybe, just maybe, as in the Periodic Table of Elements, there may really be a final, arithmetically convincing solution.

José Saramago: The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984)

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

that boy i kept five years
in my apartment
while the war waited
just outside the door
(Furey 31)

José Saramago’s novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984) depicts the effect of the death of Pessoa on his drifting creations, as they try to come to terms with the melancholy of their floating, spectral state. Australian novelist Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake (2003) tries to do something similar with the ‘Ern Malley’ myth. ‘Bob McCorkle,’ his version of Malley, lurches into life like a kind of Frankenstein’s monster as a result of the intense acts of inventive energy which have been poured into his creation.

Perhaps a more subtle evocation of his influence can be found in critic and historian Martin Edmond’s unpublished novel White City, a fictionalised autobiography of Ern Malley, a few sections of which were published in a special issue of Landfall in 2007. Martin Edmond, son of the poet Lauris Edmond, is also the cousin of Murray Edmond, Michele Leggott’s co-conspirator in the Bridget Fury hoax.

Martin began his career as a prose writer with a book entitled An Autobiography of My Father, so it’s safe to say that he’s no stranger to the paradoxical effects of shifting identities. In his stand-alone 2004 essay Ghost Who Writes, he evokes the persona of Pessoa to explain his own conception of the writer as one who channels voices, regardless of what those voices may prompt you to say.

Murray Edmond, too, though better known as a poet and dramaturge, has – in his recent novella collection Strait Men and Other Tales – composed a series of stories ‘almost like urban myths, a kind of informal history of a counter-culture,’ claims poet-critic John Newton in his blurb comment. Novelist Emily Perkins, a little further down the jacket-cover, chooses instead to emphasise the slippery, a-historical nature of these works:

Stories are disputed and rights are stolen; danger lurks at the edges, sometimes in comic guise. ‘Morning will determine whether scene from thriller or screwball comedy,’ reads one character’s journal entry: the same, Strait Men suggests, could be said of life. (Edmond)

The identity crisis implied by this multiplicity of masks threatens, at times, to overwhelm any stable sense of the literary self in our own corner of the Antipodean colonial construct: witness ‘one of [our] more notorious acts of plagiarism … when a winning short story in a competition run by [Metro] magazine turned out to be a chapter from a Martin Amis book’ (Brown). As a friend of mine, Murray Beasley, commented at the time, in the late 1990s, all that its ‘author’ would actually have had to have done would have been to preface her story with the words: ‘My name is Martin Amis. This is what I have to say…’ to make it a perfectly respectable act of literature.

Then there’s MOTH, the ‘Museum of True History,’ whose series of art exhibitions and websites chronicle an alternative history of personalities and artefacts which are – like Monty Python’s renowned Hackenthorpe Book of Lies (Chapman, Cleese, Gilliam, Idle, Jones & Palin) – all of them guaranteed false. Despite the running header ‘lies and madness’ on their latest site (MOTH), there’s an embarrassing fervour to believe in many of the viewers who first encounter these extracts from MOTH’s faux archives and artefacts.

I discovered this myself when talking to some of the visitors to ‘Fallen Empire,’ a collaboration between Museum of True History, artist Karl Chitham and myself at Dunedin’s Blue Oyster Art Project Space in 2012. I felt a bit guilty, I must confess, at wasting so much of their time with this particular pack of lies when most of us have so little of it to spare.

Michele Leggott: Vanishing Points (2017)

Vanishing Points

and poets bawled and called
across cafes
(Furey 31)

Michele Leggott’s recent book Vanishing Points (2017) accomplishes a shift in her work from ‘poetry’ (arranged on the page in long lines, punctuated only by four-spaced gaps) to ‘prose’ (printed in paragraphs, with conventional pointing). This shift has emboldened her also to invent rather than simply attempt to resuscitate the voices she hears. Her study of the Taranaki war of the 1860s led her to fabricate an Emily Dickinson-like poet to comment upon the drama.

After completing the piece in question, she discovered a real nineteenth century New Zealand painter and poet, Emily Harris, at least one of whose few surviving poems does indeed betray a Dickinson-like freedom and boldness with rhyme. Leggott, who is now completely blind as a result of macular degeneration, can no longer accomplish the kinds of intricate page arrangements and archival research which characterised her earlier work, so is now forced to rely almost entirely on amanuenses in her continuing search for the missing works of Emily Harris.

But: can one, admittedly very striking, poem make a poet? Is there not a certain element of self-deception in this quest to find a downunder doppelgänger for Emily of Amherst? Of course there is. Leggott has read her Borges (cited repeatedly in the book), as well as her Pessoa. The emblematic side of her blindness has never been invisible to her. Where authenticity is a vain hope, pursued vainly by those who hope to find it in born-again indigenism, perhaps the most futile – because the most brutally inappropriate – of religions, then perhaps the truest poetics really is the most feigning.

The self-serving impostures and complacencies of colonial oppression are no joke: but cruellest of all is, perhaps, the overwriting of alternative experiences accomplished by well-meaning outsiders, often with the most innocent of motives. The (appropriately named) Bridget Furey may sound like little more than a footnote to literary history.

Perhaps, however, this is the lesson she has to teach, and the reason why her ghost goes marching on.

---

Works cited:

• B. Wongar. Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Wongar. Accessed 15/11/17.
• Brown, Russell. ‘Walk away, Renee.’ NZ Listener (21 August, 2004). Available at: https://www.noted.co.nz/archive/listener-nz-2004/walk-away-renee/. Accessed 6/10/18.
• Chapman, Graham, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones & Michael Palin. The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok. 2nd edition. London: Eyre Methuen Ltd., n.d. [1974]. N.p.
• Edmond, Murray. Strait Men and Other Tales. Wellington: Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2015.
• Furey, Bridget. ‘Ricetta per Critica,’ ‘The Idea of Anthropology on George Street,’ ‘The Book-Keepings of a Ternary Mind in Late February.’ Landfall 168 (December 1988): 377-79.
• Furey, Bridget. ‘Brag Art.’ A Brief Description of the Whole World 6 (July 1997): 31.
• Harris, Aisha, ‘Who coined the term ‘Catfish’.’ Slate’s Culture Blog (2013). Available at: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/01/18/catfish_meaning_and_definition_term_for_online_hoaxes_has_a_surprisingly.html. Accessed 15/11/17.
• MacWeeney, Alen. ‘Bridget Furey stands beside a stone wall’ (Loughrea, 1966). South Dublin County Libraries. Available at: http://source.southdublinlibraries.ie/handle/10599/5393. Accessed 15/11/17.
• Malley, Ern. ‘Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495.’ Collected Poems. 1944. With Commentary by Albert Tucker, Colin Wilson, Max Harris & John Reed. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993.
• MOTH: Museum of True History (24/3/11-21/9/15). Available at: http://museumoftruehistory.blogspot.com/. Accessed 15/11/17.
• Mudrooroo. Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudrooroo/. Accessed 15/11/17.
• Pessoa, Fernando. Livro do Desassossego, por Bernardo Soares. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 2008. Pensador. Available at: https://www.pensador.com/frase/MzU0Ng/. Accessed 15/11/17.
• Ruthven, Kenneth Knowles. Faking Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001

References:

• Catfish: The TV Show, hosted by Nev Schulman and Max Joseph, episode 54: Ayissha & Sydney (USA, 2015). Available at: http://www.mtv.com/news/2238470/catfish-stalker-sydney-ayissha/. Accessed 15/11/17.
• Carey, Peter. My Life as a Fake. 2003. Sydney: Vintage, 2005.
• Edmond, Martin. The Autobiography of My Father. Auckland: Auckland UP, 1992.
• Edmond, Martin. Ghost Who Writes. Montana Essay Series. Wellington: Four Winds Press, 2004.
• Edmond, Martin. ‘from White City: The Autobiography of Ernest Lalor Malley.’ In Landfall 214: Open House (November 2007): 54-66.
• Heyward, Michael. The Ern Malley Affair. Introduction by Robert Hughes. 1993. St Lucia, Queensland : University of Queensland Press, 1994.
• Leggott, Michele. DIA. Auckland: Auckland UP, 1994.
• Leggott, Michele. Journey to Portugal. Collages by Gretchen Albrecht. Auckland: Holloway Press, 2007.
• Leggott, Michele. Vanishing Points. Auckland: Auckland UP, 2017.
• Museum of True History (15/8/09-23/4/10). Available at: http://moth-projects.blogspot.com/. Accessed 15/11/17.
• Pessoa, Fernando & Co. Selected Poems. Ed. & Trans. Richard Zenith. New York: Grove Press, 1998.
• Ross, Jack. Fallen Empire: Maui in the Underworld, Kupe & the Fountain of Youth, Hatupatu & the Nile-monster: Three Play-Fragments from the Literary Remains of The Society of Inner Light. Attributed to Bertolt Wegener. Museum of True History in Collaboration with Karl Chitham and Jack Ross (20 June – 21 July 2012). Dunedin: Blue Oyster Art Project Space, 2012.
• Saramago, José. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. 1984. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. 1991. London: The Harvill Press, 1999.

(15/11/17-31/3/18; 14/3-9/7/19)

Ka Mate Ka Ora 17 (October 2019): 62-79.
[Available at: http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko/17/ka_mate17_ross.pdf]

[4504 wds]


•


Murray Edmond

Appendix:

The Complete Poetical Works of Bridget Furey

(1966-c.1997)


Michele Leggott

Ricetta Per Critica


Risorgimento diamonds sprinkle the Mare d’Azov
four times a year the best tossed
behind tall ships which began the world’s liquefaction
as the nineteenth century drew to a close
and drained il miglior grano duro
in shells and golden elbows sailing past a new Byzantium

miracles against the grain
from the Charcoal-burners to Marinetti’s circus
simply by sailing in a new direction a whole world
of culinary delight or recipes for disaster
on the boilstrain rinse and leave to drain
many things have changed but not

The doctrine that the world is always al dente
though the time of preparation may be critical
oh Garibaldi at the holy gates cavorting with futurisms
thin enough to drape like laundry round the kitchen –
next a clicking of legbones, Giuseppe, and she is descending
a staircase hung with noodle doughnaked

and about to slip into the modernist jacuzzi
three minutes and Groqwn’s disaster is replete
the meat and drink of politicsa brew
of bodies piled like pasta (‘in hell’) nothing
the old canto-maker at his gelato couldn’t have
cooked up‘must thou go the road to

hell’ (van Eng himself knew Groqwyn
for the fascist fly he was) ‘the shade of knowing
so full of the shade of hell’ (to paraphrase
a phrase) revolution done to turn the head
or stomach ‘crying VIVA FERNINANDO and in all parts of
the piazza were flames in great numbers and grenades burning

to sound of bombs and mortaretti and the shooting of
guns and of pistols …’ the obscene rubric
of Malebolgia lowers itself on innocent and corrupt alike
flowered hands reach silently into the messwiping
weeping catastrophe from the kitchen floorit’s raining
chicken giblets as the doctor arrives with his red barrow

uncertain where to deliver or abort the last primavera
of allmomentary aphasia as the ships pull out

– Landfall 168 (December 1988): 377-78.


•


The Idea of Anthropology on George Street


Who he was. The theatrical red Honda as
chariot. Had edge, Kid Creole, liquid boogie
wouldn’t do. All-comers, then Billy Zydeco
on two wheels for a parking motif. Chopped
through an exchange of hands, iso-jack
the-lad manners, phone-in, talk-back control of
the tie. Also theatre. Hands-on promiscuity
raw silk and rolled edge, deployment had nothing
the overnight pack revealed, lambently geared
to a one-night bull market. The old museum
with its palimpsest architecture downsiding
all futures. Was it underwriting dinged the coup’s
immaculate fender? Was it Billy Zydeco’s leg
in the air, synergism of phallus and wheel,
artefact disappearing through a turnstile door,
stag party invites in cuneiform passed under the
boardroom table? Jism, just juice. Freshly.

Offshore, taboos multiply harmlessly for the Kid
and his all-stars. They breakfast on boxed PR
brioches printout spill of guts. Jeremy Bentham
look-alike prints out paper keys. Glass case
whizz kid. Wow. & ow. (o, & pow). Breakout
patterns link head and shoulder with the tied lines
nobody connected to museological narratives
in the display cases. The doctor riding a
well-covered liberal ass through city
parks. Who wants a psychic dig? The
rapists would pay him to present. A case
history could never resist, diaphanous in its
assent, nodding at the up and up, wistful
only in the sense. Ass hits Honda:
BIG BANG THEORY BORN IN VACUUM:
Tell us, if you know, what message to
code in the strings of time. Excavate
your machine, mocker up those 5.30 eyes, turn
sharp. There was never a word for her. Fax it.

– Landfall 168 (December 1988): 378-79.


•


The Book-Keepings of a Ternary Mind in Late February


Lately Chagall has been saying it, over and over
to a violin: ‘The jaws of a three-quarter moon
may swallow me up, the peppermint lovers who fly
out of my kettle have looked at Paris
and there they saw the three-quarter moon
put on a thin coat of riverboats and serenades.
Her ripples desolate the painted ceilings
of de Sade’s cracked-cup cafes. She stirs
tiny quavers of light, grace-notes, into the Seine.’

He is clearly doubting these words as they fall.
In the Louvre Paganini’s violin is bandaged,
muted with absurdity, and yet a Renault passing by
blows a cool jazz air in his face then veers
effortlessly into the future perfect.
By the time Chagall gets there on his tender bicycle
workmen in chapeaux are wrapping her in gauze.
He murmurs, ‘Absinthe,’ and ‘Alabaster,’ alternately.
A swallow on an acid-eaten cornice plunges low.

She wants to take both glasses and pour them over
the white drapery he is condemning her to
wear like paint, she has a notion to uplift
the fiddler from the street and snap his matchstick
wrists for musical effect. But the future perfect
will allow them only one-way flights and she is
already three-quarters full and falling
into the theatre of the city, the opera of images
where the swarming paint is still wet upon the flats.

– Landfall 168 (December 1988): 379.


•


Brag Art


this is the war I lost
a woman
versus three poets

(world where women

one
i kept in hiding
one
i renamed ‘citoyen’
one
who stood doyen

(where women are
far between

one must swing the ice pick
so she can shine like
a sacrifice

and few
and few

that boy i kept five years
in my apartment
while the war waited
just outside the door

and poets bawled and called
across cafes

– A Brief Description of the Whole World 6 (July 1997): 31.

Ka Mate Ka Ora 17 (2019)


•

Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019: Editorial (2019)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019 (March 2019)

Editorial:
What makes a poem good?

Manawatu Writers' Festival
[Photograph: Jenny Lawn (8/9/18)]

It’s a somewhat absurdly ambitious premise for an editorial, you may think. Certainly I did, when I was booked to speak on the topic at the 2018 Manawatū Writers’ Festival.

I won’t attempt to reprise everything I said on that occasion (vanity —— not to mention sanity —— forbids), but I thought I might mention a few points. First up is a quote from Robert Graves, one of my favourite poetry gurus:

The most popular theory advanced to account for the haunting of houses is that emanations of fear, hate or grief somehow impregnate a locality, and these emotions are released when in contact with a suitable medium. So with a poem or novel, passion impregnates the words and can make them active even divorced from the locality of creation. (On English Poetry, 1922)

You see what I mean? What a man! Graves, fresh from the trenches of the Western Front —— and even fresher from the psychoanalyst’s couch —— went on to argue in favour of the even more sweeping opinion that ‘Art of every sort . . . is an attempt to rationalize some emotional conflict in the artist’s mind.’

If the work created as a result succeeds somehow in resolving or at least exteriorising the conflict in question, he claims, then it can be said to be successful —— for that artist, at any rate. There is, however, no automatic reason to expect this success to translate to others. If, by some stroke of luck, it does, then we have what is commonly thought of as a ‘work of art’; i.e. something that speaks meaningfully to the emotional conflicts and traumas of others, as well as to yourself.

Certainly, as an editor, I have to acknowledge a certain futility in most of my attempts to make objective judgements about poems. A. E. Housman said that he always knew the real thing because it made the hairs on his chin stand up while he tried to shave. In other words, even that most austere of Classicists had to resort to a physical reaction rather than any more reasoned definition of poetry.

As my father grew older, and especially after his first stroke, we began to see a more emotional side of him (the exact words the doctors used were ‘emotionally labile’ —— apparently a common symptom of cerebral damage). In layman’s terms, he would burst into tears at the drop of a hat. Any mention of war sacrifice, moral courage, or bravery of any kind, would have him sniffing away in a manner that would probably have embarrassed him profoundly as a younger man. It certainly embarrassed us as the more-or-less standard products of a repressed Kiwi upbringing.

Even at the time I felt ashamed of this embarrassment, and tried to persuade myself to look on at such displays with joy and affection. It’s hard to overcome the conditioning of a lifetime, though.

Now it’s happening to me! I have always been pretty susceptible to uplifting speeches or noble acts in movies —— that moment in Rabbit Proof Fence, for instance, when the little girl pulls herself up off the sand to struggle on for just a few yards more with her sister in her arms . . . Pretty much the whole of that movie, in fact. I could make a list. Jimmy Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington (‘Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for . . .’); Cher in Mask (‘Now you can go anywhere you want, baby’); Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird (‘Stand up, child, your daddy’s passing’). You know the sort of thing.

It’s starting to affect my poetry reading, too. It’s not that all the poems I like now have to be tragic or elegiac: humour is a pretty strong emotion, too, and everyone needs a good laugh from time to time. It’s just that I’m no longer afraid of being moved by them —— by the last lines of Brett Gartrell’s ‘After the principal calls’, for instance:

The dogs broke into the hen house
stringing two birds out in bloody feathered scraps.
My son cornered the panting terriers
washed the blood from their lips
as they licked the tears from his eyes.

Or, for that matter, by the whole of Wes Lee’s extraordinary ‘The Things She Remembers #1’, which is almost the only poem I could imagine knocking Brett’s into second place in our annual Poetry New Zealand competition:

Standing looking in the mirror saying:
No, No / The cold orange lipstick of the
Big Nurse / The patient who screamed like
a bird / her mouth wide as the abyss /
The patient who jumped on my back, kicked
in her heels, tried to gee me up like a
donkey / The painful embarrassment of being
thirteen / The laughter of the nurses / At
a terrible time I believed / At terrible times
I still believe / There are still things left to
sell / On the bus a wasp and a homeless man.

My God, there’s some pain in that poem! I hope that it had some success in working out certain traumas for its author (as prescribed by Robert Graves). Whether it did or not, it certainly works for me.

It’s not that I sit here boo-hooing as I read through all the submissions for each issue —— but every now and then something in one of them sits up and looks alive, persuades me that something is being worked out there that might be relevant to others simply because it seems so relevant to me.

It must have been very difficult for A. E. Housman to shave without constantly cutting himself. Every time he thought of ‘Into my heart an air that kills / From yon far country blows’ or ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun / Nor the furious winter’s rages’, up the little hairs would go.

I wouldn’t trust myself to read out loud either Brett or Wes’s poems —— or quite a few of the other wonderful poems I have included in this edition of the Yearbook, either —— but I’m very glad the poets wrote them. Glad to have had the privilege to read them and to present them for the rest of you to fall for as hard as I did. (That’s if you’re not still stuck at the embarrassment-before-strong-emotion stage of your development. You wait: the time will come when you, too, find your face wet with tears when the townsfolk burst in to give their hard-earned savings to Jimmy Stewart at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life.)

Housman called poetry ‘a morbid secretion’. Graves, too, sees it as the necessary working-out of a repressed trauma or complex. Whether or not that helps as a tentative answer to what makes a poem good, I don’t know. I just know that spotting the real thing has become, for me, as much of a somatic as a psychosomatic matter.

•

So, to reprise, the winners of the third annual Poetry New Zealand Poetry Prize are as follows:

First prize ($500):Wes Lee,
for ‘The Things She Remembers #1’
Second prize ($300):Brett Gartrell,
for ‘After the principal calls’
Third prize ($200):Natalie Modrich,
for ‘Retail’

I’ve already given you some idea of what I found so extraordinary in the first two of these poems.
The third is a complete change of pace. Natalie herself refers to it as ‘a very therapeutic poem’, and while it did make me laugh like a drain —— for which I thank her profoundly —— it also made me think a little about all the rest of the people doing what she calls ‘soul-crushing’ retail jobs. I don’t know if reading such things helps at all, but I’m prepared to believe it might. After all, Housman said that his poetry was meant for the ‘ill-treated . . . / For them to read when they’re in trouble / And I am not.’

This time the three poems have been printed separately, in their own section of the journal.

The same is true of the winning entries for the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook student poetry competition. All three of these poems seem to show an almost frightening maturity and skill. The difficulty in judging the competition was not so much in finding merit, as in deciding which of so many good poems to put first.

Aigagalefili Fepulea‘i-Tapuaʻi’s ‘275 Love Letters to Southside’ is a passionate piece of work —— richly imbued with the spirit of her beloved heimat:

When I learnt that no place outside of South Auckland would want to pronounce my name properly
I scraped it off their tongues
So now all they do is spit on us instead . . .
Haven’t my ancestors’ screams been muffled between textbook pages?
Didn’t a white teacher at my South Auckland sch tell us we’re just ‘typical South Auckland crap’?

If that teacher ever reads this poem, I hope he or she feels very small.
Kathryn Briggs’s ‘Earth is a Star to Someone’ is equally passionate, in a very different context. ‘Let —— This —— Matter,’ she pleads:

Let us be heard,
Let us take up the space we deserve in the universe.

Let all this youth, all this idealism, count for something. I certainly hope it does. I guess we all do.

Amberleigh Rose’s ‘Snake’s Tongue’ comes from a very different side of the poetic universe. Here passion has been turned to self-destruction, but there’s an aching residue of hope in there, too, somewhere, I feel:

Last night we slept in our blood stains
and whispered over the sound of our bones
trying to leave our skin and you
were the prettiest girl I had ever seen.
What was that? Not love?

Quite a few of the poems I read while judging this competition frightened me profoundly, I must confess. Where are all the flowers and bunny rabbits we used to write about at school? In fact (as a reviewer once remarked of one of my own books), ‘the spirit of darkness certainly prevails.’

•

There are 100 poets in this issue (besides Stephanie Christie, our featured poet). There are also three essayists and 10 reviewers —— though some of these have also contributed poems: 110 authors in all.

Among the poets I’ve included are such well-known names as Sue Fitchett, Michele Leggott, Stephen Oliver, Bob Orr, Vaughan Rapatahana, Elizabeth Smither and Emma Neale. In her reply to my acceptance letter for the poems she’d submitted, Emma, now firmly established as the new managing editor of Landfall, explains the process of selection better than I could ever imagine doing:

... it’s finally made me realise that rejections aren’t always a comment on literary merit! And it doesn’t even mean an editor dislikes someone’s work, it just means there is chronically limited space.

Quite so. What she said. My long list for this issue was full of beautiful poems which have, one after the other, had to bite the dust for one reason or another. Never assume that your poem didn’t make it into that giant file! And don’t think that I didn’t sweat blood over those rejections, either.

Of course my subjective reactions have a great deal to do with the poems you see before you. As long as I’ve been reading her, which is almost 20 years now, I’ve been impressed and (at times) flabbergasted by the sheer virtuosic brinksmanship of Stephanie Christie’s poetry. It’s great to be able to introduce her poems to —— I hope —— a wider audience than they’ve so far reached in this country. Her fractured word-play —— reminiscent at times of late Celan but with a pop culture edge he never achieved —— can be daunting at first, but I think you’ll see after a while how relentlessly quotable she is:

I hold onto hope because I want something
to do with my hands
(‘-OH’)

Every morning the first word I say is
Yes.
(‘Felt calculus’)

Nothing’s happened. You make me feel
less alone. You’re also real.
That might ruin everything.
(‘Unfinished Objects’)

If you need more evidence, here it is, in the form of a rich selection of 19 recent poems, plus a tell-all interview!

•

The reviews section is a bit smaller than in previous issues: not because I don’t think they’re important, but because I want to give them more space on their own. We’ve decided to follow Landfall’s good example and to cover most of the books we receive on our website, the Poetry NZ Review [https://poetrynzreview.blogspot.com/].

The reviews that we do include in the text will now be more in the nature of review-essays, and there will be no more simple notices of books. This also has the advantage of enabling us to include more poems and stand-alone essays. There are three of the latter in this issue, covering issues such as narrative strategies in poetry, Zen Buddhism, mourning, and death, in poets as diverse as Airini Beautrais, Richard von Sturmer and Derek Walcott.

I’m also happy to be able to include here some dual-text poems in Chinese, German, Spanish and te reo Māori. What more need I say? Enjoy!

— Jack Ross
November 2018

(1-13/9/18)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2019. ISBN 978-0-9951029-6-5 (March 2019): 14-20. [Available at: https://issuu.com/masseypress/docs/pages_from_pnzy19].

[2172 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019


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An Interview with Stephanie Christie (2019)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019 (March 2019)

An Interview with Stephanie Christie
[via email – 8 August-12 September, 2018]

Stephanie Christie

Stephanie Christie

‘I’ve been publishing and performing poetry for twenty years, while living in a lot of different places in Aotearoa. Ten years ago I changed my active name, Will, back to my birth name, Stephanie. I live in Hamilton in the Waikato with my partner and an elegant hound. I work as a creative coach, and also teach adult literacy skills, run community art classes, and edit instructional materials.

The selection in this issue combines new material with (recent) classic hits, to share a sense of my work with you. The pieces show the range of forms I use, along with the voice and vision that run through everything I create.

My creative practice has always been a space in which I can challenge myself to go outside of what I know. This has led me into collaborations, poetry in theatre, sound poetry, visual poetry, songs, installations and video poetry. On a good day, I have no idea what I’m doing and am a hundred percent committed to doing it. This is exactly where I need to be.’

Select Bibliography:

Poetry Books:

• [as Will Joy Christie]. luce cannon. Auckland: Titus Books, 2007.
• The Facts of Light. deciBel Series 001. Ed. Pam Brown. Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2014.
• Carbon Shapes and Dark Matter. Pokeno: Titus Books, 2015.

Zines:

• Ravel (2001)
• Urbane Mysts (2001)
• Orientalisman (2002)
• WA.N/S.TED (2003)
• Femme fatality (2005)
• self [help/harm] (2005)
• Re:[play]er (2006)
• My findings (2008)
• crzy (2009)
• Art-icu-late (2009)
• W.inter (2010)
• So light and so fair (2010)
• The calling (2011)
• Bloom (2014)
• Wingettes (2014)
• First the wheel then the revolution (2014)
• I like the idea I have of you so much (2014)
• Freak out! (2015)
• Nix (2015)
• Runt (2017)
• Fakelore (2018)

Multimedia Projects:

• ‘Arcadia’, collaboration with choreographer Alexa Wilson at Soliton, Auckland, 2003.
• 'Husk', collaboration with composer Alex Taylor, Auckland University, 2012.
• 'Home Heart Land', poetry in devised theatre, Hamilton Fringe Festival, 2012.
• Two video poems with videographer Paul Bradley, featured in HUFF, 2012/2013.
• 'Aubade', installation at Hamilton Museum, Intraspace Project, 2013.
• 'Clean as you go', installation with artist Paul Bradley, Hamilton Arts Festival, 2014.
• ‘Storm Warning’, poetry in collaborative performance, Hamilton Fringe Festival, 2015.
• ‘Why So Normal?’ collaboration in Hamilton City of the Future, 2015.
• ‘True True’ art exhibition, visual poetry installation, Calder and Lawson Gallery, 2017.

Secondary Sources:

• Alexander, Raewyn. ‘A Sharp Intelligence: Review of Carbon Shapes and Dark Matter.’ Rochford Street Review: A Journal of Australian & International Cultural Reviews, News and Criticism. (February 5, 2016). Available at: https://rochfordstreetreview.com/2016/02/05/a-sharp-intelligence-raewyn-alexander-reviews-carbon-shapes-and-dark-matter-by-stephanie-christie/
• Harvey, Siobhan. ‘A Reduction to the Bone: Review of Carbon Shapes and Dark Matter.’ Landfall Review Online (December 1, 2016). Available at: https://www.landfallreview.com/a-reduction-to-the-bone/#more-3120
• Morton, Elizabeth. ‘Review of The Facts of Light.’ Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 (2015): 251-52. Available at: https://poetrynzreview.blogspot.com/2017/07/stephanie-christie-facts-of-light-2014.html
• Prime, Patricia. ‘Review of Carbon Shapes and Dark Matter.’ takahē 86 (April 2016). Available at: http://www.takahe.org.nz/t86/reviews/stephanie-christie-carbon-shapes-and-dark-matter/
• Samuels, Lisa. ‘Affective mind and blood language and Stephanie Christie.’ Poetry NZ Yearbook 2017 (#51): 214-29.
• Slaughter, Tracey. ‘How the Raptures Slip: Review of Luce Cannon.’ Landfall 214 (2009): 169-75.
• Wright, Tim. ‘Review of Carbon Shapes and Dark Matter.’ Cordite Poetry Review (November 4 2016). Available at: http://cordite.org.au/reviews/wright-christie/

Online Resources:

• Author’s homepage: Stephanie Christie
  https://www.stephaniechristie.xyz/
• NZEPC Six-pack Sound: Stephanie Christie
  http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/six-pack-sound/02/christie.asp

Some of the poems in this selection have already appeared in the following publications: ‘Felt Calculus’ in Atlanta Review (US); ‘Mag[net]ic’ in The Capilano Review (Canada); ‘Unfinished Objects’ in Cordite (Australia); ‘Poverty Mentality’ and ‘Mall Song’ in Landfall (NZ). Thanks are due to the editors of these journals for permission to reproduce them here.

Stephanie Christie: Aubade (2016)

• When did you start writing poetry? The first poems of yours I saw were, I think, in A Brief Description of the Whole World in the early 2000s. Was that the beginning, or was there a long prehistory to those pieces?

I’ve always written poetry, from when I was tiny. I would catch a flicker and then work on it in my head and then on paper until it turned into something. I remember asking my mum to write down for me what I’d created. Then it started rhyming and became very ‘poetic’. I entered a poem about a foal to a Listener children’s poetry page and was rejected because they thought it had been written by an adult. It was very earnest and used words that probably haven’t made it into this century. Then as a teenager it got very dark and I’d write them on my desk at school.

When I was 25 I finally wrote a piece that I considered to be an actual completed poem that could be shared. After that I made my first zine and left it at various bus stops. But my poetry was never like the poetry that I was able to get my hands on. A few years later I was shown L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. poetry, and realised that there was a huge space available to me. This was my most abstract phase, and it was amazing to me when John Geraets of Brief published some poems.


• You already seemed to have a very individual way of writing (and performing) at that stage. Could you say a little about the thinking behind your characteristic word-breaks and lineation innovations?

Although I’m very analytical and logical in my purposeful thinking, my writing is something I feel. It has a physical presence for me. The breaking is a form of liberation from the effects that language and discourse in general has on me. I’m super-sensitive to words, so being able to play with them is important for both my enjoyment of life and my ability to breathe freely. I would love to have theory around it but my mind refuses to engage. I feel poetry and sometimes get instructions, but that’s it. Of course, I have editing processes and hundreds of rules – just no theory.

The clash between the shape of words and their sounds fascinates me. So I’m magnetised towards words that are impossible to say, where the meaning multiplies and gets out of control, or where line breaks show a voice taking the stated phrase in more than one direction, mimicking the true ambivalence of the sure statements we shelter behind.


• I’ve always thought of you as a very political poet – or, at any rate, with a strong ideological bent behind your work. Is that accurate, would you say?

Yes, to the extent that the world is political already and we engage with this or consent to the status quo by accident. Poetry isn’t a form that makes it easy to explore the stuff that I often find myself asking questions or feeling strongly about. I get the sense that for a lot of poets it’s one of their rules – don’t say it directly, use the object as a mirror. But for me, any part of language itself is an available object. And I need to think and feel more deeply about the world, especially because I’m privileged enough to not be forced to do it that much. I want to lead myself through these journeys, and poetry provides a safe process and a way to share the results.

Slam or spoken word poetry is a form that allows the political in, in a way that what you might call ‘high’ poetry doesn’t. Although I like to perform, the spoken word genre has its own rules that tend to conflict with my interests, which are largely oriented not towards my identity but to what I see around me.


• Tell me a little bit about Hamilton as a place to write in. Do you find it hospitable to poets and artists generally?

Hamilton is amazing because it supports you to create what you want; there’s stimulation but also space. I’ve made the effort to find other poets, which is magic. Writers tend to self-isolate compared to people working in other creative mediums, so most of my creative communities are made up of non-writers. This works for me because thinking about other art forms feeds into my thoughts about writing.

One of the most useful things I get out of living in Hamilton has actually been meeting more people who are way different from me. We’re all mixed in together. This brings me language, story, psychic and detail influences that are invaluable to my practice.


• I know that you’ve done a lot of work in various multimedia forms: painting, design, zines, and so on. Is poetry just one of your media of expression, or is it central for you?

Poetry is everything. Or maybe my experience of the world is poetic, and so whatever I make ends up that way. It’s that crystallisation, the way that the vision edits itself down and then inserts that gaps that let us inhabit it.

I like to play around, which is how I’ve ended up doing different stuff. Also it’s a way to keep having that crucial finished object when you struggle to get your work published. I return to page poetry mainly because it won’t let go of me. It’s the fastest surface, the purest, the most ridiculous, and brutal. It makes other things seem easy. Having said that, I’m transforming my ways of making page poetry, so that it can be playful for me.


• How, in fact, would you define the term “poetry?"

The mapping of psychic dance routines through patterns of presence and nothingness.


• I notice that your work – your recent Tinfish chapbook, for instance – often receives a better response overseas than here in New Zealand. Do you feel there’s a certain innate conservatism to the poetry scene here?

I struggle to recognise the response to my work. I haven’t carried the flag for my work in the way that would have made it accessible to any wider audience – I was too self-conscious. And it doesn’t serve me to make decisions about the nature of the local scene that might protect my ego but close me off from connecting.

I can see logically that the difficulty in getting less conventional poetry published in the bigger journals must limit the development of the New Zealand poetry scene. There was a period where I tried to write in a more ‘normal’ way to be able to be published. The effects were awful – I hated my work, it was mediocre and I lost my confidence. Then I started to get positive responses to my first (wildly experimental) book, which taught me the meaning of the word ‘bittersweet’.

Finally I thought, “I’m still here, still writing, so now I’m going to do whatever I want and stand by it.” Learning how to do this has been a crazy journey that’s changed my sense of myself and the world. I’ve had to go right to the foundations and teach myself skills around self-esteem, and build structures to support my practice.

I’m incredibly grateful for the help and encouragement I’ve gotten from particular people – Jack, you’re one of them – because when you need to write to feel like a person and you have to write what is calling you but you don’t know how to share that work, people clearly articulating that they like your work makes a huge difference.

I’m excited to know people here now who are writing experimentally, and sharing it in a bunch of ways. It motivates me to make the work I want to make and to get it to the people who hunger for it, whoever and wherever they may be.


• There’s a narrative expansiveness in poems such as “Bode” (included in the group chosen for your Poetry New Zealand feature) which I, for one, find very exciting. Is that a new direction for you, or would you say that’s been part of your poetry from the first?

Sometimes I see poetry as music, with or without lyrics. So a poem with a narrative element is like music with lyrics, and a poem without a narrative element is like music without lyrics. It brings a world and makes its own sense. I’ve always made both. They don’t feel different to me but I can see that they could be very different to experience. In narrative poems we ask: ‘Who speaks and what is the relationship between their words and the truth of their world?’ In non-narrative poems something else is going on, and it’s useful to abandon that question and give over to whatever happens as you encounter the poem.

I have more options than page poetry as a medium now, and perhaps that makes me take less joy in the pure destruction of the form. I don’t feel constricted and like I need to lash out. I want my poems to do something else.

Sometimes the amount of narrative comes from how the poem is created. “Bode” was generated out of fragments created from directing attention towards one big thing while writing over a long period. Other poems are resonant pieces thrown into a room together to see what happens in the editing process – more like a party than an expedition into a specific question.

I’m glad that you’re excited about it. Sometimes I want a crystalline moment and sometimes I want to explodify. I need both and the tensions and webs between them.


• Are there any writers – local or international – you feel have been particularly important for you, or influential on your work?

I take my poetry where I find it. Phantom Billstickers have a poster of a poem by Sue Wootton that I just read – amazing. And right on the street!

I’ve often found it hard to read poetry – like I can’t generate the right kind of attention – but when I can it all sticks to my brain and reappears later. I’ve had phases of reading Tusiata Avia, Ian Wedde, Baxter, Czeslaw Milosz, Gertrude Stein, Rilke, Adrienne Rich, Raymond Carver … I can’t see how these poets influence my work, but they all share a capacity for devastating accuracy. The poets I know personally have a big influence on me, because I think about their work and imagine what it’s like to be them writing poetry, and I think about what they say to me about poetry. My favourite thing is that if I read enough then I get the poet’s voice narrating my world for a week or two.

In the last few years certain poets have inspired me by giving me hope that I can make the work that interests me and find the people who want it. Ya-wen Ho, Lisa Samuels and Essa Ranapiri all have an attitude to sharing their unconventional work that is engaging and open, in contrast to my traditional approach of choosing to give so few fucks that you risk spiralling into a black hole of nihilism. And their work makes my poetry brain happy.


• What other sources of inspiration do you find particularly valuable to you as a poet and an artist in general?

Lyrics. Theory. Other creative forms. Conversation. Errors. Questions.

I love science, psychology, all languages, listening, and wondering about reality. And mainly people – their battles for meaningfulness. These things pour into my work.


• What drives your interest in abstraction?

In the more abstracted poems, there is no single entity standing in a stable ground and narrating emotional shapes through lines and line breaks. The poem itself is the flesh and blood, the whole entity, built out of swarming words. This reminds me of the strangeness of the experience of consciousness, and the beauty of broken forms is that the seeping in of unconscious elements can be made visual.

Poetry that lets go of narrative and narrator is challenging to make. On the one hand, you are free to do whatever you want, when we know that restrictions can be creatively motivating. On the other, it’s hard to make something that comes alive. It’s easy to end up like a frustrated Dr. Frankenstein, with phrases lying round in heaps. You work and work towards internal coherence, agile tension, and movement. When the heart starts to pump on its own, it’s a form of magic.

An important part of abstract poetry is that it can be a relief from the manipulation of narrative that saturates our linguistic encounters. Play is a delight and refreshes us. Meaning is something we make, so let’s investigate the guts of the machinery.


• What influences the style of your work?

There are two things that consistently guide my work. The first is the question I’m carrying around. It may be philosophical, social, psychological, political, or emotional, and I’ll be holding on to it while I live my life and looking at the tiny moments through its lens. This then bubbles up into my writing. The second is something I don’t have a word for (so if you know the word please tell me). It’s that thing that poetry zones in on - a thought feeling or a felt thought, an atmosphere, an emotional environment. Every poem I make has its own and this guides the editing process.

I realise that sometimes my poetry can seem cold or harsh. Part of this is my aesthetic. In other people’s work, I’m often drawn to intense, challenging work with a strong flavour. It’s unexamined emotional cliches that offend me, not the work that someone else has generously done to lead me out of my normal world into spaces where I receive new visions. I also love the dirty aesthetic, things that are wrong and awkward and imperfect and still full of force.

My work is often anti-heroic; I actively resist the heroism that is so common in poetry. I change the pronouns to give the ‘I’ the damning judgements that began as ‘you’, because we are all raging messes on the inside. I generate conflicted pauses instead of happy endings, because I align to the mad complexity of reality, and believe that meaning needs to be constantly adapted to be useful, and that the arts are one manifestation of the human urge towards that.

(6/8-12/9/18)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2019. ISBN 978-0-9951029-6-5 (March 2019): 22-25; 68-74.

[2407 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019


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