Hearts on the Run (2010)

New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre


Hearts on the Run:
Poetry Panels in Sydney


HOME & AWAY 2010
at the University of Technology,
Sydney 31 August – 3 September

[Martin Edmond & Michele Leggott]

The last conversation was in many ways the most interesting. Martin Edmond had kindly offered to show me some Sydney bookshops earlier in the day, but after our ferry-ride to Cockatoo Island, there was really only time left for one: Abbey's in York Street.

By the time we reached it, after a long amble up from Circular Quay, that time was ebbing away (Michael Farrell had stopped us on the way to point out that we were now standing in Martin Place, where the man was found crying in Les Murray's "An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow" – “There’s a fellow weeping down there. No one can stop him”).

Martin Edmond and Mark Young kept on walking to some other mysterious destination, so I found myself, at last, standing in front of a what seemed to me a pretty well-stocked Australian Poetry section.

"What should I buy?" I demanded plaintively.

The only other poets left in our little party by then were Michael Farrell and Amanda Stewart, who both started frantically rummaging through the shelves as if unable to deny themselves the written word a moment longer.

John Forbes's Collected Poems was the first selection. Martin had recommended it to me earlier, and I'd even heard in invoked in verse the night before by Nigel Roberts. Michael and Amanda agreed I could usefully start off there.

At that point, though, volume after volume began to come down off the shelves, each one of them as crisp and desirable as only a new book can be: John Kinsella, John Tranter, Laurie Duggan, a bunch of others.

Eventually, after much anxious scrutiny (and the accidental discovery of a new translation of a contemporary Turkish verse epic which I felt I just had to have), I ended up with just the Forbes Collected and the latest Tranter Selected ... It cost me quite a pang to leave all the other books behind, but it was probably a bit Quixotic to squander even that much of my remaining Australian cash at the end of such an expedition (my luggage was already stocked with numerous trades and purchases from the other participants at the Symposium).

As I left, I could still see Michael scanning the shelves with his usual quizzical intensity. Amanda was sitting crosslegged on the floor leafing through a little stack of poetry books. Bliss.

Unfortunately, in my determination to get to at least one decent bookshop during my stay, I'd managed to miscalculate my departure time by an hour. When I got back to our hotel, the shuttle I'd carefully booked that morning was long gone, and my subsequent dash to the airport was rather more breathless than I would have liked.

I still ended up in exactly the same place I would have been if I'd been more clock-conscious, though: killing time in Sydney airport. In retrospect, that brief hour in Abbey's bookshop with Michael and Amanda was one of the most precious parts of the whole symposium. Why? Because the two of them were so obviously in their element – taking down books and talking about them; sharing their close knowledge and intense dedication to the craft and its local manifestations with a well-meaning stranger determined above all, to buy something, that right something that would bring it all into focus somehow.

It was all a far cry from that first evening at the C Bar, when most of us sat at our little tables in the pub chatting away furiously to our own kind – the faces we already knew from other festivals in our own countries. David Howard, to his credit, was one of the few I saw going up to people he didn't know, determined to break the ice. I unfortunately lacked his self-confidence, and instead spent a fascinating hour or two hearing Jeffrey Paparoa Holman talk about his recent booklaunch in the Ureweras ... an important piece of bridge-building in its own right, mind you, but not yet the kind we were actually there for.

But then what can you really hope to achieve in two days in another town? We were – not all, but mostly – so ignorant of one another's work and antecedents, however willing we might feel to learn about both …

The panels themselves, when they got into session the next day, I would define as dominated by a series of questions. I’d like to take them one by one:

Panel 1, Day 1
(Wednesday 1 September):
Pam Brown, Michelle Cahill, Brian Flaherty and Chris Price present new work

We were really still feeling our way into the event with this session. The four poets read, each of them made comments about the work they were presenting, there were a few questions, and then …

Mark Young to Chris Price: "How is what you just read different from prose?"

That put the cat among the pigeons. In itself I guess it was no more than a restatement of that old Poundian dictum “Poetry must be as well written as prose”, but it was great to see the discussion suddenly coming alive. What is the difference between poetry and prose? Lineation? Depth of focus in the language? The materials? Which (in fact) comes first: form or content? It might seem like rather a banal question, but it’s actually more barbed than that: a kind of Zen koan designed to catch you out.

I don’t really know in what spirit Mark intended his remark, and I’m not sure that Chris knew either, but it did have the effect of immediately jolting us out of that super-polite, super-careful Warren Commission manner (“How was your trip down here, Mrs. Oswald?”) Instead, it moved us on to the common ground of just how, exactly, one might go about defining the territory each of us there had chosen to work in. How can that not be a useful topic of discussion among peers?

We might have been feeling a bit guarded, still – the gloves hadn’t yet really come off, despite Mark’s obvious glee at being so provocative, but I must say it made me feel a lot more relaxed when I realized that this was indeed going to be a symposium about poetry, not some kind of official ambassadorial jaunt.

Panel 2, Day 1
(Wednesday 1 September):
Jen Crawford, Martin Harrison, Jack Ross and Amanda Stewart present new work

And then it was our turn. It’s easy enough to sit there carping on the sidelines, but when you’re actually up at the front of the room, you generally find it’s not so simple to make the points you really want to make. All of us, Martin, Amanda (both of whom I’d just met), Jen and I, had clearly read each other’s work on the website, but we still weren’t clear exactly how we should present it.

Martin was in charge of our group, and had – he told us – been emailing us with his ideas over the past couple of days, but unfortunately none of these messages had reached us (his server was down). But then, as the moments ticked down to our personal D-Day, where was Martin? He was, after all, on home turf, and had no doubt been swept off by one of the other currents of university life …

He finally made it with seconds to spare, and so – telling us that he’d like each of us to make some comments on how we saw our work intersecting with the theme of Trans-Tasman relations – he ushered us into our chairs.

I had nothing! And when I get flustered (as people who know me well will tell you), I tend to play things for laughs. I hadn’t anticipated having to address directly the theme of New Zealand / Australian connections. The poems I had with me were mostly reflections on / reactions to the work of Paul Celan … I am, though, half-Australian, as I proceeded to outline.

As each of us went through our paces, I began to see that Martin’s strategy in pushing us onto stage off-balance and unprepared was not as casual and coincidental as it may have first appeared. The poems he read – some of them written and published in New Zealand at the very start of his career – were gradually starting to evolve into areas of casual roughness and intentional blemish and inconclusiveness. Since this was the territory he was exploring in his work, this may also have been the effect he wanted to achieve with this panel of fellow-poets.

The crucial question this time came from Michael Farrell:

MF to Martin Harrison (paraphrased): "How can you seriously expect to end a poem with the word 'heart' in this day and age?”

Roughness, lack of polish, unfinished structures, even – but were there tropes which could not be recuperated however hard you tried? Was sentimentality, the “heart-felt” verse of the past just such an exclusion zone?

As it happens, this is a question which preoccupies me as much as it does Martin (and Michael too, I guess), so I found the discussion which erupted as this point very interesting indeed. Jen, too, has been accused of excessive displays of feeling in her work by those who see pervasive irony as the crucial plank in the Modernist platform, a point which cannot be conceded without sacrificing everything that has been gained since the Imagist revolution in the early twentieth century.

At last I felt at home – these were people alive to the kinds of issues that nag at me all the time. To hell with national divisions – it was linguistic and poetic divisions which now had us all going! Amanda, Jen, Martin and I stood revealed as fellow barbarian roughnecks, formalists detesting formalism, experimentalists determined to assert our right to a place in Yeats’s “foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart ” …

Panel 3, Day 2
(Thursday 2 September):
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Jill Jones, Peter Minter and Lisa Samuels present new work

Panel 3 was every bit as interesting as Panel 2 had been – to me, at any rate. (I hope the audience found the long quizzing of the possibilities of recuperating feeling for poetry as fascinating as those of us on the panel did).

Lisa Samuels is a intensely cerebral poet (though her main preoccupation in the pieces she read us from her projected work Tender Girl lay, she said, in trying to find new ways of expressing emotion and physicality which might somehow sidestep the social and linguistic codes which bedevil our attempts to paint them more conventionally).

This prompted Mark Young to ask yet another loaded question:

MY to Lisa Samuels: “Which comes first, the poem or the plan?”

You can’t really put Lisa on the spot with questions like that, though. She proceeded to outline certain aspects of her method and intentions, but clearly it was a chicken-or-egg dilemma to her. How can you have either without the other?

As the other poets spoke, I felt things which had been previously unclear to me in their work – Peter Minter’s use of almost absurdly baroque “poetic” language, for instance, or Jill Jones’ insistence on using song lyrics in her titles – beginning to come into focus. I could see there was nothing unthought-through or adventitious in their choices. And I saw, too, that just as sometimes it’s necessary to hear someone read before you can really understand the underlying patterns in their work, in this case the pieces I’d read online by each of these poets had not sufficed to give me a clear sense of their respective projects.

It wasn’t that I felt I’d finally “got them”, in some reductionist way. It was more that I felt I had, now, a firmer understanding to base my reading on – that, and a determination to pursue my new acquaintance with their work.

Panel 4, Day 2
(Thursday 2 September):
Janet Charman, David Howard, Selina Tusitala Marsh and Vivienne Plumb present new work

By now I felt a pattern was more-or-less established. This was a symposium preoccupied more with questions of craft and intention than with attempts to find useful generalizations about the respective flavours of New Zealand and Australian verse.

How wrong I was, though! Panel 4 (for me) moved in entirely unexpected directions. I’d thought I knew the work of all four of the participants fairly well, but when some of them began to expound a kind of unproblematic public role for poetry, a way in which it could be seen as just another way of shaping (and selling) words, I felt for a moment as if we were re-entering the world of the ancient Bards and Skalds.

The interesting question for me in this panel was when someone in the audience (whose name I unfortunately didn’t catch) asked David Howard, à propos of his dual-language Dutch and English poem about Abel Tasman. "How much research do you do for your historical poems?"

It wasn’t that I doubted the validity of this approach to poetry and poetics – just that I hadn’t expected to find it so boldly on display. I felt, I guess, a little like Michael Farrell must have when he heard an attempt to end a love poem with the word “heart” … it was as if a door had suddenly swung open which one had assumed had been rusted shut for generations.

Plenary Session, Day 2
(Thursday 2 September):
Pam Brown (MC), Michael Farrell, Michele Leggott, Jack Ross and Ann Vickery

As I understood it, the plenary session was intended to present a series of assessments of the whole “Home and Away” venture: the Auckland and Sydney symposia, as well as the idea of providing advance materials for discussion on the digital bridge.

That’s how I approached my part in it, anyway. I gave a rather briefer version of the reactions recorded above to the various panels and readings we’d been enjoying over the past couple of days.

It was therefore a bit of a surprise to me to find that both Michael Farrell and Ann Vickery had come with written papers, which they proceeded to read.

Their papers, though, were so fascinating that I found myself wishing that I’d done the same. Michael Farrell’s positive assessment of various aspects of contemporary New Zealand poetry came as quite a revelation to me. Of course I was pleased to find how much he liked (envied might be a more accurate description) the set of three AUP audio/text anthologies edited by Jan Kemp and me. I was glad I’d gone to so much trouble to include a long performance piece by Keri Hulme in the middle volume, Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance (2007), when he singled it out as particularly interesting and representative of a type of poetry – in his view – not often heard in Australia.

When he went on to praise the last couple of issues of brief magazine, especially one piece of delirious raving by the inimitable Richard Taylor extolling the virtues of (among other things) “Delicious peanut butter” (brief 40: 85), I started to wonder if I’d gone through some kind of wormhole to Bizarro World. I’d had no previous intimation at all that Michael admired any of the crazy stuff we’d been getting up to across the ditch. Good on him.

Ann’s paper, too, was closely reasoned and constructive, and set – I thought – a good agenda for future contacts and discussions between New Zealand and Australian poets.

The discussion that came after it was perhaps more dominated by logistics than theory, but I guess that’s inevitable when this whole event had just demonstrated so clearly how important it is, from time to time at least, to all sit in the same room and talk to one another.

I believe that this Sydney Symposium was a very promising beginning to a series of dialogues I hope will continue. I did have some very good conversations with my flatmates Lisa and Jen, but then I already knew from past experience that we were on fairly compatible wavelengths. The warm and interesting chats I had with my fellow-panellists Amanda Stewart and Martin Harrison were, however, new departures for me.

What else? There were so many good readers among the ones I listened to: Ken Bolton, king of the MCs; the dry cool wit of Pam Brown … the one I'm still trying to get my head around is, however, Michael Farrell. I bought a copy of his book of cartoons, Break Me Ouch (2006), and I have to say that it pleases me immensely. He just can't draw at all. And he doesn't care. Most of the cartoons seem quite pointless, but of course that’s precisely why they’re not. I very much admired A Raider's Guide (2008), which he gave me on a previous visit to Auckland, but I have to say that those cartoons really blew me away. I've had a not dissimilar project on the stocks for quite some time, and this has emboldened me to persevere with it.

Maybe that's the conclusion I'd like to come to, then: emboldening each other to go one better, one step further than we'd otherwise dare. I found this Sydney experience very worthwhile for that reason alone.


References:

• Farrell, Michael. Break Me Ouch. St Kilda, Victoria: 3 Deep Publishing Pty Ltd., 2006.
• Farrell, Michael. A Raiders Guide: New Poems. Giramondo Poets. Sydney: Giramondo Publishing Company, 2008.
• Forbes, John. Collected Poems. 2001. Blackheath, NSW: Brandl & Schlesinger Pty Ltd., 2010.
• Harrison, Martin. Wild Bees: New and Selected Poems. New Writing Series. Crawley, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 2008.
• Jones, Jill. Dark Bright Doors. Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press, 2010.
• Murray, Les. Collected Poems 1961-2002. CD included. Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002.
• Ross, Jack, & Jan Kemp, ed. Classic, Contemporary, & New NZ Poets in Performance. CDs included. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006-2008.
• Stewart, Amanda. I/T: Selected Poems 1980-1996. CD included. Surry Hills, NSW: Here and There Books, 1998.
• Taylor, Richard. “Reading Things.” brief 40 (2010): 80-86.
• Tranter, John. Urban Myths: 210 Poems [New and Selected]. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2006.

Michael Farrell & Janet Charman on Cockatoo Island

(5/9-29/10/10)

Home & Away 2010. New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (19/11/10).
[Available at: nzepc]

[3078 wds]


Home & Away (2010)


•

brief 32: Editorial (2005)

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

Editorial:
i.m Joanna Margaret Paul (1945-2003)

New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre

Peter Harrison: Joanna Margaret Paul (2002)

Do librarians ever actually look at (let alone read) the periodicals they order? I’ve now had numerous requests from the Hocken library (by phone), AUT (two letters) and the Auckland Public Library dunning me for their “missing” #31 (or #30 – depending on which side of the double-issue came out of the envelope first, I suppose). I realise it’s frustrating and complicated of me to run two numbers into one, but I can’t honestly see that I’m shortchanging anyone. Never mind, never mind … Think happy thoughts.

“Courage!” was the last word in the last letter I received from Joanna Margaret Paul. The generosity and support she showed me then meant a great deal. They mean even more now. When I heard of the tragic circumstances of her death, the undignified absurdism of being drowned in broad daylight in the busiest tourist site in Rotorua, the Polynesian Pools, it seemed almost impossible to believe. She was one of our most original (and most unsung) poets, a painter who’d never really received her due, an artist in the fullest sense of the term: one whose life reflected her art in every particular. She combined a voice of compassion with a spirit of misrule. She was an environmental activist a philosophical anarchist, a natural mystic and a religious extremist …

The idea of a special issue of brief seemed like a natural one. She was a strong supporter of (though fairly infrequent contributor to) this magazine, and she shared our passion for the rough democracy of the Xerox machine. There was, of course, no point in covering the same ground as the various other commemorative projects: the wonderful exhibition “beauty, even,” assembled jointly by the Wellington City Gallery and the Sarjeant Gallery in Wanganui; the projected Selected Poems planned by her literary executors Bernadette Hall and Charles Bisley. I thought the most useful thing I could do was to try and contextualise her work a little, provide some critical and biographical framework for the twin meteors of Imogen and Unwrapping the Body – almost the only writings which have been easily accessible hitherto.

The discovery of just how much of a legacy she left behind (the poems alone fill four large boxfiles), has obviously complicated this task. It will all take a long time to assess. In the meantime, thanks to the generosity of the Paul family and her literary executors, I hope the work (both published and unpublished) that I’ve been able to include in this issue will make it clearer just why this loss is such a tragic and untimely one …

•

… editor Jack Ross at brief, and Riemke Ensing as envoy, must share the accolade for publishing if not the best, then the most important poem this year. That prize must go to the chain of versions of Ahmed Zaoui’s ‘In a Dream’ (brief 31, Spring 2004); of which the most successful, to my mind, is the version given by Ensing herself. …

Why the most important poem? For its role as a nexus of politics and aesthetics. … ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’, WH Auden once wrote; yet he then continued ‘it survives / In the valley of its making’. I’ve always read that continuation as a counter to the first statement. That is, although poetry alone might make nothing happen, it can italicise the collective voice of any particular cause. The poem can also persist beyond the circumstances which carved it out, to speak to us across apparent barriers of era, gender, sexuality, and culture. …

… through Riemke Ensing’s essay in brief, the cry of the soul is [also] brought up against the hard wall of poem as technical artefact, an object made in language, a social construct, as the translators debate and struggle with how to render it best in English. In the history of this poem, the post-modern and the traditional each must have their due. It seems to me that the poem is a vital presence on our poetry radar, even though the difficulties in rendering it effectively, fluently, and fully in English means that no single version could make it one of the year’s best.

– Emma Neale, Best NZ Poems 2004
[http://www.vuw.ac.nz/modernletters/bnzp/2004/introduction.htm].

I must confess that it gave me extraordinary satisfaction to read these wise and generous words from Emma Neale. Of course there’s something hubristic in the whole idea of a “Best NZ poems” website, but when that rubric can be stretched to include David Howard’s “Harrier Suite” from brief 30, not to mention a commendation of Olivia Macassey’s haunting “Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” from brief 29 (although Livvie indignantly denies the charge of being a “postmodernist” – sentimentalist, we agreed, would meet the case much better), then there’s certainly no point in claiming that brief isn’t being given a fair hearing.

The satisfaction, however, came mainly from the realisation that someone actually understood what we were trying to do by including quite so many versions of Ahmed Zaoui’s poem. The first time I heard Riemke read it (at an Amnesty International gathering) I knew I had to try to get it for the next brief – that this was the only magazine whose format and, dare I say it, editorial policy would make such an assault on the staid world of the New Zealand lyric possible. Yes, the purpose behind it was largely political (Mr Zaoui was still in jail at the time), but Neale is quite right to detect an almost equally subversive aesthetic intention behind it.

All in all, it seems like a nice note to be going out on. This will be the last issue of brief I put out for the foreseeable future. Alan Loney founded and edited the magazine for three years (1995-98) and ten issues; John Geraets for three years (1999-2002) and eleven issues; I’ve now done it for three years (2002-2005) and nine issues. It’s time for someone else to take over. That new editor will be Scott Hamilton, who will no doubt have a lot more to say on the future direction of the magazine in the next issue, #33. Be sure to renew your subscriptions in good time so you can find out. No bucks, no Buck Rogers, as the man says in The Right Stuff …

As the former editor of Salt, and a man as notable for political conscience as aesthetic acumen, Scott seems to me ideal to carry brief into the new millennium. Ave atque Vale, then.

(6-21/5/05)

brief 32 (2005): 3-4.
[Reprinted at New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre
[http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/paul/index.asp (26/8/05)].

[1092 wds]

brief 32 (2005)


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brief 28: Editorial (2003)

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

Editorial:
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

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

New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre

Alan Brunton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Moving on to poems, tributes and critical pieces:

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

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

(27-28/9/03)

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

[841 wds]

brief 28 (2003)


•

F**k you, Faerie Queene (2003)

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

F**k you, Faerie Queene

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

Red Mole: Stairway to the Stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

you

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

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

wept

onto stones like the ‘unrecapturable
nostalgia for nostalgia’ …

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(9/03)

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

[2795 wds]

brief 28 (2003)


•

brief 26: Editorial (2003)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 26 (February 2003)

Editorial:
Critical Vistas Family Tributes

Margaret Edgcumbe: study, typewriter, banana palms (1996)

The room’s empty. There’s a desk, an old portable typewriter, packed bookshelves. Light glances in from a northwest-facing window. It’s as if he’d just stepped out for a moment, to take a turn in the garden, or greet a guest, or drive down to the nearby shops.

If I stepped outside there would be no light to surprise my body
making demands.

In 1993, two years before his death from cancer, Kendrick Smithyman wrote a poem describing his own working environment: this basement study, the “cave of making” in the split-level Northcote house he shared with his wife, Margaret Edgcumbe.

I crouch in my cave
under the house, basement solitary. Anachronist,
on the look out: it cannot be like this downtown in the city.

No, it’s certainly not like this in downtown Auckland, a short way away over the bridge. Here, “nothing goes / visibly traded between pine, lemon and silver dollar.” It’s a pleasant wooded garden (now, alas, encroached on by North Shore in-fill housing) where, “without given notice rain surprises, rain tilts headlong / into fall, past rata, past silvery gum, oleander, Norfolk pine …” Where, when you go outside, only

light flows, pure enterprise.

As for the label “basement solitary,” those of us who knew him, or were taught by him, can testify that Kendrick was no recluse but the most gregarious and clubbable of men, a master-storyteller and talker. “Anachronist,” though, perhaps. It translates as one who looks into the past, making patterns from his own and others’ histories.

Mirrorglass towers squinting all ways into themselves
discover they are heartless, at best coldhearted,
never forthright, only arrogant. (Last Poems, 11)

It’s a curious room, this one – heaped with the detritus of a writer’s life: books, page-proofs, manuscripts, notebooks … the discarded cicada-shell of a lively, witty spirit. Forthright, though, not “arrogant”: what’s been left behind here is very real …

•

Well, anyway, that’s how I started an abortive article (“In the Smithyman Archives”) for the Sunday Star Times in 1998. A recent editorial in that ghastly rag e.g. – the one part of the NZ Herald I read with devoted attention – quoted Gregory O’Brien to the effect that the opposite of television was poetry. “Or more specifically … the poetry of the late Kendrick Smithyman.”

“Host Kim Hill thought she got it:” the writer continues, “Smithyman’s poetry is dense and difficult and rewarding. Telly is, well, stupid stuff for stupid people.” (Michele Hewitson, “Poetry in Commotion,” e.g. [November 28, 2002] p. 3).

Having heard a fairly spirited paean of praise from Kendrick, almost the last time I saw him, on the merits of Destry Rides Again, an old Jimmy Stewart western he’d been watching on television the night before, I can’t help feeling that this high art / low art dichotomy might have seemed a bit simplistic to the man himself.

That was, in fact, one of the motivations for compiling this posthumous Festschrift or symposium of views on his life and work. I’ve included unpublished pieces from the archive (a selection of Northland poems omitted from the otherwise monumentally inclusive Collected Poems; an essay on Bruce Mason, and a note on Sargeson); bibliographical and critical essays by Scott Hamilton, Heather McCann, Theresia Marshall, Mark Pirie and Peter Simpson; poems by Grant Duncan, Bernard Gadd, Anna Jackson and Richard Taylor; and, finally, some biographical materials: an interview with his second wife Margaret Edgcumbe, an exchange of letters with Judith Binney, some occasional verses offered by Professor D. I. B. Smith, and a tribute from his granddaughter Alexandra Smithyman.

I would have liked to put in more, but the pages are looking dauntingly full already (as it is, I’ve had to shrink the longer essays to A5). I guess that serves to illustrate the fecundity and variety of the work he’s left us. “Would he had blotted a thousand,” said Ben Jonson of the thrifty ways of the similarly prolific Shakespeare. Maybe so, but what a writer leaves behind contradicts that old cooking adage: You can add but you can’t take away. We can select, prune, read judiciously, but there’s no more to come.

Like those television sets that reign in our living-rooms like little lares et penates, Kendrick’s work is a baroque compendium of stories. Their significance can be oblique at times, they do require some reading, but then so does Shortland Street. I’d lay a bet that there’s been more academic ink spilt about that than any NZ littérateur bar none.

(Friday the 13th December, 2002)

brief 26 (2003): 3-4.

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brief 26 (2003)


•

New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre

Smithymania

Robert Cross: Kendrick Smithyman

I’ve been an enthusiast for the poetry of Kendrick Smithyman (1922-1995) for quite some time, and I’m convinced that more people would enjoy it if they appreciated the sheer range of his interests and achievement. At any rate, that was my principal motive for compiling a posthumous Festschrift or symposium of views on Smithyman’s life and work. Smithymania, a special issue [# 26] of the literary magazine brief (formerly A Brief Description of the Whole World) appeared in February 2003. Many of the pieces were co-listed on the nzepc website.

You’ll find here:

• a selection of Northland poems omitted from the final text of the Collected Poems
• bibliographical and critical essays by Scott Hamilton and Peter Simpson
• an interview with his widow Margaret Edgcumbe
• a reminiscence by Judith Binney

In the magazine itself (still available from the address below, for $NZ12 plus postage) you’ll find much more: further unpublished pieces from the archive, including an essay on Bruce Mason, a note on Sargeson’s “Hole that Jack Dug,” and some occasional verse; critical essays by Heather McCann, Theresia Marshall, and Mark Pirie; poems by Grant Duncan, Bernard Gadd, Anna Jackson and Richard Taylor; photographs by Michael Dean; a tribute by his granddaughter Alexandra Smithyman; and a chronology of his life and work.

brief [ISSN 1175-9313]
is published by the Writers Group
6A Hastings Rd, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1311, New Zealand
Email: jack.ross@xtra.co.nz
Subscription rates: $NZ30 for 3 issues in NZ / $60 for institutional addresses
$50 for Australia / $65 elsewhere
$12 for single and back issues
Cheques should be made payable to The Writers Group

(4/10/03)

nzepc
[Available at: https://ndhadeliver.natlib.govt.nz/webarchive/20240725080000/https://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/smithymania.asp]

[272 wds]


•

Life with Kendrick (2003)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 26 (February 2003)

Life with Kendrick:
A Conversation with Margaret Edgcumbe

Kendrick Smithyman

Kendrick Smithyman married Margaret Edgcumbe in 1981, after the death of his first wife, the poet Mary Stanley. She spoke to me about him on December 8th, 2002, at the Northcote house they shared together.

How did you first meet Kendrick?

It was while I was doing English Honours (this was the first time I set eyes on him, you understand, rather than the first time I met him). He came into the Honours Room to fetch a book, as it then doubled as the library. Somebody said, “I’m warned that you’ve decided to write a play about one of the boys that you used to teach,” and he said, “Yes, it’s going to be about a twelve-year-old who was blackmailing people about homosexual sex,” or something of that sort, and added as a parting shot, “Don’t poke borax – there are perversions I haven’t touched on yet!” So that was my first image of Kendrick: small man delivering devastating line as he left.

Then of course he was around the university a lot, and there was an Honours party for Shakespeare’s birthday, and he came along with all the usual suspects. After that, it wasn’t until I was applying for the tutor’s job in the English Department in 1967 that I saw him again. Much later on, when we were married, he said that I’d been showing far too much leg (those were the days of miniskirts) …

He ran the first enrolment I ever took part in; but the next year he was away, and I had to run it, and I’m afraid I took it out of his hands and never let him have it back. He wasn’t all that pleased by that. He wasn’t going to run it himself, but he was damned if he was going to let me feel that I was doing the right thing!

What was it like working with him?

Oh, it was fine. He didn’t give advice or tell you what to do, which of course under the present regime is what senior tutors are supposed to do, but Kendrick was never that sort of figure.

We had a lot of interests in common. I am a sucker for a story, you see. I could listen to his stories for hours and hours and hours, and we were across the corridor from each other in Wynyard Street, so … I think he was researching the Jacky Marmon stuff at that point, and I was interested in anything that anyone was prepared to tell me about – most of the time.

Did you know much about Northland history then?

Of course I knew that I had roots in Northland, but I didn’t have much information about it. My great-great grandfather was a missionary called Robert Burrows. He came out in 1840 and was stationed at Waimate at the time of the uprising or war or whatever you want to call it. That’s why there is a Russell poem and a Waimate poem in one of the books , which you will doubtless have seen.

What was it like going on holiday with him?

The first time that we went away on holiday together, it was a question of, “Where will we go?” and I said I would rather like to go up north, because I’d heard so much about the Hokianga. This was after we married. I had been up north before, but only to the touristy bits. I’d never been to the Hokianga.

I didn’t like camping. He liked camping, and he camped with Mary and the boys (he had loads and loads of camping gear), but I couldn’t see why two elderly or getting-to-elderly people shouldn’t use motels and do it in reasonable comfort, so we didn’t actually follow the path that he’d taken with Mary around the Hokianga. Actually I don’t think we could have on that first trip, as there’d been one of those disasters they have where the road had been wiped out or was under repair, so we never got round to the other coast and Mitimiti and all that. That would have been in 1982.

And did he drive down every shingle road?

He had a great fondness for metal roads. And of course up there those are the sort of roads you get. He didn’t drive down all of them, but he always knew exactly where he was and where he was going, whereas I was always terrified that the car was going to break down, which it did have a tendency to do on most of his trips.

There was one story about the car having to be towed out by a tractor from the ditch it had fallen into. And there was another time that we set off to go to the East Cape and hadn’t got far down the Southern motorway when a terrible noise arose which turned out to be the radiator cap, and that bugged us, off and on, all the way around the Cape. And the first time that we went in the direction of Taupo, we were in a new car – not brand-new, but a new car to us – and it broke down in Taupo. So he was very prone to having cars turn to custard on him, and I was always terrified that we were going to be down one of these bumpy roads in the middle of nowhere when it happened, but actually we didn’t have too many disasters up north.

My absolute worst journey – I cannot remember which year it was, and I don’t think it gets into any poems – was when we were down south somewhere, and he decided to come back in the middle of winter through the Ureweras instead of taking the more normal road, and, oh, that was eight hours of absolutely terrifying journey, the whole thing.

Would he plot out the whole trip in advance?

Oh yes. There are, as you know, whole envelopes full of maps downstairs. Before each trip he would go to the AA and get a new one, and he had all his old maps in a folder in the car along with the camera (which usually went phut, or didn’t work, or got cooked along the way). He also took bird books, and any historical guides he needed, and so on.

He could remember absolutely blow by blow where he’d been and what we’d seen and everything about it, but I have very little visual memory. I suppose most of the time I was clutching the side of the seat and worrying whether the car was going to hang together. He always knew where he was going.

Did he do all the driving?

He did all the driving. Towards the later part of our marriage I did drive a couple of times going down the main road. I drove on the desert road, but when we got close back towards Taupo he said, “I’m taking over again,” whereas I thought I was getting into my stride.

Did he write every day when you were away on holiday?

He didn’t write on holiday at all. The only autograph things which survive are various fragments which he started off in England. Otherwise I don’t think he did. If he did make notes he destroyed them. It was all in his head. As I say, he could drive down the Great South Road to Palmerston and remember every inch, and be able to say what he saw: people by the side of the road, and horses in paddocks, and houses and so on.

With sequences like that late one “Going North” [in Auto/Biographies (1992)], I think he wrote them once he got back. He did write poems in his head. Every now and then when he came up from his study down below he might make a note in the kitchen of something: a line or a word or something. And then he spent a lot of the night awake. He had difficulty sleeping. But I don’t think he wrote things down in the middle of the night.

Did he get up?
He read murders.

Did he have a particular writing routine, times that were set aside for work?

He didn’t have specific writing times during the day, no. After he retired, he used to nap in the afternoon, but he spent most of his time down in the basement writing whenever he wanted to. He wasn’t just writing poetry, of course. He edited books, wrote academic papers, did research, and so on. My impression was that editing was done in the morning and composing in the afternoon. I did notice that the poems were usually finished by five o’clock, when he started the cooking.

We shared the cooking. I would do it one night and he would do it the next, though he usually ended up doing the lunches because otherwise he wouldn’t have got fed properly – mainly what he called resurrection pudding, which was leftovers. He was very good at it, actually. Much better than I was.

Did he talk to you about what he was working on?

Well look, Jack, I wasn’t really much good to him in that connection. He would read me what he had written. Sometimes he would try to do it at inauspicious moments like when I was trying to do the cooking. I would also read it when I was downstairs because it was usually on his desk, but I think stuff got written which he didn’t talk to me about. I was surprised to discover that all those family poems [Imperial Vistas Family Fictions] are dated from the mid 1980s, because I don’t remember him showing them to me till much later on. And I didn’t really see very much of Atua Wera at all.

I think he may have given it up as a bad job after a while. He would say, “If you had read my poems you would know that I had written a poem on such and such.”

Would he look faraway from time to time, as if he was composing something?

Whenever he was in earshot he was usually talking or telling you something. There was nothing of demanding silence from people. I was possibly a bit insensitive, because when I did the housework I usually liked to play the radio, since I think I’ve got as much right as him to have my pain covered up, but the noise would get under the house. He’d make an objection to it every now and then, but not all the time. Maybe that was because I was so set on it.

I think that most of his poems sprung with feathers and helmet from his head onto the page. And actually they tended to cut themselves off at the bottom of a page. I don’t think he got stuck in between. There’s very little sign of editing. There are several starts sometimes – particularly early on – and then the poem will get changed in a second draft, or go beyond that into two or three drafts, but towards the end I don’t think he did get stuck.

All this is post-1980, of course. In the forties and fifties he was preoccupied with counting syllables and arranging stanza patterns, which must have taken a lot of time and trouble.

So he wouldn’t necessarily make a handwritten draft before typing it out?

He used to tell his creative writing class that they must learn to type, and produce at the typewriter, and that’s what he did. He would compose at the typewriter. It was quite a noisy typewriter. You could hear it from upstairs. Keith Sinclair got onto computers, and Bruce Biggs used them, but Kendrick never did.

Was there a big change after he retired in the amount of writing work he was able to do?

A lot of the work he did after he retired wasn’t new work, but looking back on old stuff and revising it, but he did fit in an immense amount on his various history projects (including a very, very long article proving that the chief who got the nail from Captain Cook couldn’t possibly have been telling the truth or was sadly mistaken, which the history journals decided they couldn’t possibly publish …)

Did you know about the Collected Poems before he died?

I did know that he had this archive downstairs which he was always reshuffling, but I wasn’t aware that he’d practically been compiling his collected poems since he first took up his pen (or typewriter), and yet this had clearly been in his mind all along. Every draft had to be kept and put in somewhere.

How do you find the job of being his literary executor?

I don’t think I do anything, really. All I do is smile graciously and let other people do the work. I did make a decision that I wasn’t going to be a difficult literary widow, but I haven’t had anything to be difficult about, really. He had left the books that were unpublished in the form in which he wanted them published. I did do a rough index of the letters and the Collected Poems before I handed them over to the University Library. The only thing I have to do every now and then is give permission for things to be published.

I have learnt one thing, though: a good literary executor will always look through everything, and not let things leave the house otherwise!

And are all of his anecdotes really recorded somewhere in the archive?

I was probably being a bit hyperbolic when I told you that, but that was the impression I got when I went through and did that index of the first lines of the poems and all the drafts for the library.

There seems to have been only the one period of drying up, a gap while he was writing A Way of Saying. But I mean, who knows? He was very prone to destroying stuff. I don’t know if he destroyed any of his own poems but certainly there are some very weird blanks of things that you think should be there but which you find aren’t any longer. Things which he’d obviously got rid of: a lot of letters. He must have had Here & Now, the magazine, but that’s not there now.

I can’t think of any other specific examples of stuff that he’s got rid of, but there are cases where he’s definitely destroyed letters – the early ones to Mary, for instance. When he was dying I rang him up one day from the university and he told me that that was what he had been doing. He said they were full of doodles and drawings, and things which had no meaning for anyone else.

Was he a heavy drinker, like some other North Shore writers?

Basically he drank white wine, Chateau Cardboard. He could drink it all day from eleven o’clock onwards if he had a visitor, but it didn’t affect him, and he reckoned that was because there was so much water in the mix.

As for the cardboard, I don’t think that he had very much of a palate. I can think of lots of embarrassing situations we were in where Kendrick produced a cheap wine for connoisseurs. I don’t think he cared. He didn’t keep beer or spirits in the house.

I’m sure that an enormous amount of liquor got consumed at various times earlier on. He used to go to the Lowry parties, after all. I remember a lovely story about James K Baxter at Nile Road [Milford, where Kendrick lived with Mary Stanley]. James K said, “Of course I’m an alcoholic,” and Kendrick said, “Look, Jim, don’t give us that. You’re not an alcoholic. You haven’t got the temperament.” And James K said, “You know, I think you’re right,” and poured a whole bottle of whisky down the sink, much to Kendrick’s horror!

Which parts of his work do you like best?

Well, certainly the post-1980 ones, and I think the Northland poems are often quite brilliant. I think Atua Wera is extraordinary.

It will never be popular, though. The problem is that there’s so much of it. If there could only be a simple Smithyman or a Smithyman primer.

What would you like to see happen with his work in the future?

I am still hoping that there will be a scholar who will be able to come to grips with the Smithyman oeuvre one of these days, someone who will be able to say what were the influences on what he was trying to do, especially in the early poems.

So far as I know there has been only one doctoral thesis attempted on him so far. The thing Heather McCann and I agreed on was the strong influence of the seventeenth century: it was as if he was trying to be Shakespeare or Jonson.

Was he happy, do you think?

People have told me that he seemed happy. There’s a review of one of the books by Peter Bland where he says “These are the poems of a happy man, a man of many enthusiasms.” When we next met, I said to him, “You said that he was a happy man! That’s not the way he comes over at home.” “Oh,” said Peter, “I think he’s happy.”

He had his enthusiasms and I had my enthusiasms. We certainly had our rows, but …

(8/12/02-4/2/03)

brief 26 (2003): 103-9.
[Available at: nzepc features: Smithymania (2003)]

[2930 wds]

brief 26 (2003)


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