A Brief Description of the Whole World (1999)

Pander 9 (November 1999)

A Brief Description of the Whole World:
A Review Symposium of the first twelve issues of this Journal of Experimental Writing, founded by Alan Loney in December 1995,
and thereafter issued by him (in stapled, xeroxed, A4 format) until
October 1998, when the editorship passed to John Geraets.

ABDPOTWW 10-11 (October 1998)

“Our criticism is littered with overviews – the year’s poetry, the year’s fiction, a review of seven magazines in one to two thousand words, five new books from a new press, or yet another anthology to tell us who’s in charge of canon building.”
Alan Loney, ABDOTWW #8 (1997): 3

“It is in the zone of hyper-bowl that we will have to stand.”
– Jacques Derrida, Auckland Town Hall, 18th August 1999

•

Dear John,

Thanks for getting back to me about the Pander review. I’ve collected some views already, and am gradually working my way through the issues (in both senses).

There’s a rather missionary tone in some of the editorials which slightly grates on me, I must admit. I don’t really see being “non-referential” as either inherently wicked or inherently virtuous, I must admit. What appeals to me most is the ludic cleverness of so much of the work I read there.

The purpose of the review – or review-symposium – is to describe and celebrate more than critique, though. There’s too much there which would need to be dealt with in isolation, and I really just want to bring our readers’ attention to the existence of this submerged continent of innovative text-work.

I take your point about not particularly wishing to expand your market. I just think it would be nice if people who would like it got to know about it.

I did this the other night, but lost it, damn!, so v. briefly let me try again:

That, of course, makes me muse on the immense mana of the lost message. What brilliance must have been there! So only this skeletal residue remains ...

The term “literary” is always retrospective. Novelty is not an interest.

No, kinda twentieth-century, really, all that stuff about innovation and “newness,” isn’t it?

Newly experimental is always to do with a self-questioning, although these questions are not necessarily ones that are asked. They address a reflexivity that may be strangely extended, extensive.

I’d add including an implicit challenge to the reader’s ontology – though I quite understand that you might see this as a heretical return to something resembling the affective fallacy …

As well performing a special questioning, ABDOTWW questions its and its material’s performance.

I like this mystic apotheosising of your magazine, and the HLAH-like initials are fun, too.

In all this there is subtlety involved, to be sure.

To be sure – but “don’t rely on subtlety / frighten them or they won’t see” (Tim Rice: Jesus Christ, Superstar)

•

“Go play,” says Hamish. But what said Alan Loney, ABDOTWW’s onlie begetter? Here are extracts from various of his editorials:

I ever hope for words clear as these, on a sign on a lamp-post I saw last year – “Our cockatiel has flown away. We miss him” … a search for clarity among the literally unimaginable welter of words we live in, would be useful.

“On Clarity” #1 (December 1995): p.3.

We want answers. The culture wants answers, the media wants answers, any answers, where all answers are all too equally valid. The ‘unexplained’ is then reserved for the strange, the weird, the spooky, the ‘paranormal’ …
In my own work, the sentence “Nothing like it exists everywhere” still haunts me, as an enigmatic unsolvable puzzle, several years after writing it.

“Defamiliarizing the Familiars” #3 (June 1996): pp.3-4.

While I think that all information is privileged information, it’s hard to see that it’s necessary for information that is not readily available to stay hidden. One reason for the apparent ‘obscurity’ of some writing will be that it has not been spoken for …

“Who do I write for?” #4 (November 1996): p.6.

[from a review of Tony Green’s NO PLACE TO GO printed by Tara McLeod:] … if Green mourns the loss of some of his line-endings, or if McLeod mourns the loss of options that would have been given by different types and papers, and if I myself mourn for the loss of the opportunity signalled by the term ‘collaboration’, then are we doing any more than what we’d do by being faced, as in this book we most concretely are, with the vagaries of reading that are inevitable when the work goes out ‘into the world’, with no place to go but into the hands of those who will read it.

“A place to go” #6 (July 1997): p.6.

… one of the most interesting things I learned from my years as a psychiatric nurse and an orderly in a geriatric wing of a general hospital, was that very many people, even most perhaps, die without ever enjoying classical music, looking at fine art, or reading great literature, yet believed absolutely that they had lived a full life … This flies in the face of one of our most cherished assumptions about the quality of life …

“What are poets for?” #7 (September 1997): p.3.

… there is only one Tradition, and everything whatsoever is in it, like it or not. But if everything is in this Tradition, what can being ‘marginal’ mean?
… What is, for instance, ‘postmodern poetry’? By the mainstream it tends to be taken as a kind of ‘thing’, which one can have to deal with or not as one chooses. Postmodern poetry is then seen as a kind of poetry, a sort of style, as if it’s an option on the menu that we can click on or pass by, take it or leave it. But what if postmodernity is … the name of the condition in which we [as a culture] find ourselves?”

“The Other Tradition” #8 (December 1997): pp.3-5.

“Those who specialise in generalist overviews that mention oppositional writing in passing lack the credibility that only published close readings can provide …” (#4 (1996): 6). Point taken, Alan. This rather scrappy collection of views and re/views is the result. One could hardly hope to consider so varied, so textually adventurous and visually challenging a body of work otherwise. What’s more, “reviews do not necessarily stimulate a lot of sales, but negative reviews almost always stop sales in their tracks.” (#7 (1997): 3). Perhaps it is invidious to single out one from so many examples, but how can I refrain from finishing by quoting this page of Lesley Kaiser / John Barnett’s (#6 (1997): 9)?

Stone is
more stony
than it used
to be

(16/10/99)

Pander 9 (1999): 14-16.

[1110 wds]


Pander 9 (1999)


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Greg McGee: Foreskin’s Lament (1999)

Pander 9 (November 1999)

Foreskin’s Lament, by Greg McGee, directed by Paul Minifie, designed by John Verryt – with Karl Urban, Roy Billing, Michael Lawrence, Nicola Murphy – Auckland Theatre Company, Sky City Theatre, 29 July-21 August.

Greg McGee: Foreskin's Lament (1981)

It hasn’t aged very well, this play. Perhaps it’s all those years of earnest classroom debates, of precociously conferred “classic status.” I must confess I felt a great desire to see it, though, having unaccountably missed the original and subsequent productions.

That’s surprising, really, as I still remember Mervyn Thompson exhorting all us first year English students to go along to a wonderful new play he’d just been workshopping. The play was called Foreskin’s Lament, and it was clearly going to change the world. And so it did, I suppose: “Whaddarya?” on the protesters’ placards during the ‘81 Springbok tour.

The Auckland Theatre Company has chosen to present it as a museum piece. Every detail in the changing room is exact, down to the late seventies pin-ups. The fart jokes, the bare bums seem now as strange and distant as Welsh “leek” patter in Henry V (I suspect, in fact, that some irreverent members of the audience had actually come to perv at a naked Karl Urban – there were certainly a few gasps as his cunningly delayed striptease finally took place).

And yet, what else could they do? It’s hard to update so relentlessly static and talky a “think-piece” as this. It’s a morality play, really – about the decline of traditional New Zealand values (as exemplified by provincial, small-town club rugby) by contrast with the trendy new ways of the city (seen mainly in terms of flares, free love, and feminism). Twenty years on, the only one who really makes sense is Clean. He may be a brutal thug, but he’s no fool, and he wants to get ahead. Both the tedious Foreskin and the compromised coach Tupper seem refugees from the dustbin of history.

Does it matter that Foreskin’s final monologue now sounds like an embarrassing rollcall of exploded intellectual fashions (Vonnegut, Barth, Ivan Illich – not even the next generation’s now-almost-equally-shopsoiled Kundera, Barthes and Derrida)? Does it matter that Moira sounds like a snotty, spoilt prig, rather than a breath of fresh air? Does it matter that we can’t really believe in either side’s values from the outset?

Well, it’s hard for that not to matter, given the lack of action in the play. It’s fascinating to see, but also rather creepy – rather like the lovingly recreated “traditional Kiwi bach” exhibit in the Auckland Maritime museum. One remembers only too well when such interiors were a living commonplace, and it seems to diminish rather than aggrandise them to be put on such premature display.

Life is no museum, and there really was a time when who-kicked-who-in-the-scrum, and whether your hair was long or short seemed like the real issue. It’s a measure of the horrors we’ve endured since that the turn of the seventies now seems like a distant promised land. Beggary and starvation stalk those streets which once hospitably housed pavlovas and cheerios.

(16/10/99)

Pander 9 (1999): 39.

[507 wds]


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Elisabeth Easther: Salt (1999)

Pander 9 (November 1999)

Salt, by Elisabeth Easther, produced by Sharyn K Duncan, designed by Sean Coyle and Katrina Chandra – with Amy Nye and David Press – New Works Festival, Silo Theatre, 14-24 July.

Elisabeth Easther

Here’s the opposite to Auckland Theatre Company’s Foreskin: rough and raw, where that is slick and seamless. Salt’s set is simple, sandy, in-your-face, Foreskin’s elaborate, painstaking, accurate. Salt, finally, is lively and provocative, Foreskin the “crypt trip” (to quote Ken Kesey on Timothy Leary) with a vengeance.

So what’s the play about? Two travellers, a father and a daughter, are – somewhat implausibly – stranded in the middle of a sandy desert in America. They quarrel, reconcile, quarrel again, discuss futile strategies for rescue, and finally crawl off to sleep in their derelict car.

Of course, it wouldn’t be theatre if it didn’t have a twist, and here that consists of a reversal in the father’s apparent stability and the girl’s designer rebellion (I won’t say any more in case you get the chance to see it some day).

Put like that, it’s a little hard to see how Easther can profitably occupy an hour and a half of our time. She has a good ear for dialogue (witness the fact that one could overhear many of the lines in a Ponsonby Road café any day of the week), but there’s nothing strikingly original about her vision of the generation struggle.

Perhaps that’s it, though. There’s nothing clever here – just energetic re-presentation of the obvious: things we too have thought and heard, but want to see acknowledged somehow. Energy, too, from the two fine actors: both (as is becoming so common on Auckland stages) Shortland Street alumni.

The characters are, perhaps, a little caricatured (or so one might think if, as I discovered in conversation afterwards, analogues for each didn’t so readily spring to mind); the conclusion is perhaps a little pat, but at least there’s no falsifying resolution imposed on this little drama – no Foreskin-esque attempts to square it with the spirit of the age.

Salt, then, is just that: a little salt in the wound of our complacency, as deadpan as possible a report on experience. What is perhaps most significant about it is that Auckland again has a venue for such work. The Silo Theatre (just behind the Auckland Town Hall, at the back of Queen Street) apparently glories in the unevenness and jagged edges of the productions it houses.

To date, they’ve been an impressive bunch. For the first time in a long time, it’s possible to feel that theatre is alive and well in this city, alive and well as it was in the days when Seb Black and Mervyn Thompson (peace to his ashes) were ushering in a new age: workshopping a groundbreaking new play about the national game to be entitled Foreskin’s Lament …

(16/10/99)

Pander 9 (1999): 39-40.

[468 wds]


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AUP New Poets 1 (1999)

Pander 9 (November 1999)

Raewyn Alexander, Anna Jackson and Sarah Quigley. AUP New Poets 1. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999.

AUP New Poets 1 (1999)

In format, a little like those black-covered Penguin New Poets which were the first exposure to post-Eliotic English poetry for so many of us, this first volume in a projected series of “fresh voices in contemporary New Zealand poetry” certainly has the virtue of variety. It’s perhaps more of a buffet than a book, for that reason, but is none the worse for that. I therefore propose to discuss the poets separately, and in alphabetical order (as they appear on the cover).

Raewyn Alexander does “performance poetry which involves the audience.” That’s how she describes it in the AUP press release, but as a frequent member of the audiences in question, I’d say that was putting it rather mildly. As she strides about in her “$300 shoes I bought with plastic,” tossing discarded sheets of typing to the fans, forcing them to read aloud to one another, seizing hapless spectators by the lapels, the vaguely surrealist long lines connect into unwieldy baggage trains of imagery. “She encourages readers to enjoy the play of words, the flow of feelings, drive and drama, rather than any rational argument or surface sense” (another quote, this time from the blurb).

I’ve always loved the show, but it’s interesting to see a substantive amount of “page work” finally. I have to say I like it, not just for the energy and verve we’re already familiar with, but for the strange finesse with which the details are arranged. Take “this fundamentalist I used to pogo with in 1978” (the first lines of all the poems are printed in bold as titles, giving a clipped, disjointed effect which complements the apparent anarchy within):

She had an orange mohawk and zips on everything
now reckons there’s dinosaurs in the bible

That’s interesting about the zips and the mohawk (like different designer brands for “wildness”), and the dinosaur detail is beguiling, but it only really achieves critical mass later in the poem:

but I search Job for stegosauruses anyway
wondering if suffering’s extinct and knowing that’s a lie

The Bible has been pared down to Job, the dinosaurs to “stegosauruses,” the former suggesting “suffering,” the latter “extinction” – which is good, substantial writing and thinking, but there’s also that crucial what-the-fuck? quality (or je ne sais quoi, if you refer something a little less vernacular). You see, I believe Raewyn when she talks about searching for stegosauruses in the book of Job – and it’s a very original and unexpected thing to do.

Forget about making allowances for lack of “rational argument or surface sense” then – these are carefully structured poems, and they’re worth the price of admission in themselves.

Anna Jackson has a good line in beguiling details also, but her poems are more faux-naïve. When, in “Similes for Lisa,” she informs us that:

The sun bites into my skin
like the patriarchy.

one’s immediate reaction is to say “give me a break” – until it becomes obvious that she’s having us on; she has, after all, been trying to read “feminist theory” while sunbathing.

At its best, in a poem like “Elvira’s first day at crèche,” this barbed simplicity can be wonderfully evocative: “A bear is good,” but

That lady is dangerous. The yellow
one. She picks up the pieces
and fits me to the blocks and the trucks
but fits me wrong.

At other times one feels that this diction can be a little confining, leaving “My Friendship with Mayakovsky” with few places to go after its splendid opening, for example.

Sarah Quigley, by contrast, over-determines many of her poems. She has that vice of the significant last line which ties up all the diverse strands. Or perhaps it’s a virtue. Many would say so. I find it a bit much, but perhaps I’m just jaded. However, in “Route 111” she writes:

… all I can think of

is your beautiful Jewish mouth
and how I want to kiss it until the sun
is only a bruise behind Palm Springs.

Now that’s in really bad taste. I like it. Better still, I believe it. The “Jewish” detail and the bruise, make it deliciously sickly. I don’t like all the rest of the travelogue details, though: “it is not expensive to see the moon here in / Constantinople” or “On the crackling grass, find memories / of Milan.” We know you’ve been abroad – don’t go all Kassabova on us.

One thing is certain: it’s nice to see these three poets between the same set of covers. It encourages critical readings, correspondences and comparisons. There’s a lot to be learned from this book. Perhaps I’ll learn to appreciate Quigley’s solid virtues better as I read her more. It’s by no means just a springboard, but a thing in itself.

(16/10/99)

Pander 9 (1999): 40-41.

[647 wds]


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Janet Charman: Rapunzel Rapunzel (1999)

Pander 9 (November 1999)

Janet Charman. Rapunzel Rapunzel. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999.

Janet Charman: Rapunzel Rapunzel (1999)

thrust wet biscuit
in your gob
without those
filthy hands

It was written on a yellow sheet of paper. I could see it protruding from under a pile of other typed sheets. Rather nicely put, I thought. Who the hell is that by? In a sense, I didn’t want to know … too soon. Instead, I craned over to see more verses:

i was backing
out for beer
when the bones
burst in your chest

Man, that’s cold – but very expertly put. The “b” sounds not too obtrusively juxtaposed, yet the “backing out” and “burst” and “chest” (incremental repetition of consonance) give a curious sense of clipped closure.

Where on earth did this poem come from? How had it got on my writing desk? I didn’t like all the stanzas as much as those two, but none lacked that sense of effortless control. It was entitled: “we all have to” – but no mere list of imperatives followed:

need leave off
the concrete
cutting
job

That’s something we do all need, for sure. Finally, with slight reluctance, I turned it over, and understood. It was Janet Charman’s latest, Rapunzel Rapunzel, sent out for review, which had somehow got turned over and insinuated itself in a pile of other imperative [= long-delayed] tasks.

get up and
i’ll go you
drink for drink
into oblivion

The book is complex. It consists of five longish sequences of poems, some more attractive to me than others. The press release includes a quotation from Robinson and Wattie’s Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature: “Democratic features of her style reveal her agenda: limited capitalisation, lower-case pronominal ‘I’, and minimal punctuation.” I don’t quite get the point about the “agenda,” but those features certainly recur in this collection. Is she especially “democratic”? Can’t say.

I like the fact that the poem on the back of the book is not repeated within – economy of means. That would be my dominant impression, in fact: economy. Janet Charman says no more than necessary – less than necessary, if one requires instruction or a moral of a poem. Her “agenda” clearly includes celebration of women and domestic concerns. Household economy, perhaps: a Mrs Beeton for modern life. The subverted fairytale of the title sequence ends with a beautifully managed “happily ever after”:

my child is sick
shall i give up my job
…
my job is sick shall i
Give up My child

my child is my job
shall i give up
…
jobsickchild my give is my up

What, then, has she achieved in this book? She’s succeeded in talking movingly about real things, with a deceptive simplicity of means, and an almost Elizabeth Bishop-like precision of craft. I wouldn’t say I was overly well-disposed to her project (insofar as I understand it) to start with, but now I’m a convert. Those lines on the back cover won’t go away and leave me be.

DIY now
open one
arm props
up the spuds

Yes, exactly.

(16/10/99)

Pander 9 (1999): 43.

[502 wds]


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Janet Hunt & The Wizard (1999)

Pander 8 (July 1999)

Janet Hunt. Hone Tuwhare: A Biography. Auckland: Godwit, 1998; The Wizard. My Life as A Miracle. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 1998.

Janet Hunt: Hone Tuwhare: A Biography (1998)

At first sight, this might seem an odd coupling: The Wizard of Christchurch (aka Ian Brackenbury Channell) gestures out from the purple haze and poppy lettering of his glossy paperback in hat and staff and full regalia; Hone Tuwhare’s faun-like eyes gaze soulfully at the camera, with grainy black-and-white particularity, like a latter-day version of the Michael Joseph Savage icon which used to adorn so many mantelpieces up and down the country. And yet there are some interesting connections.

“For twenty-five years I had been marginalised and trivialised by my enemies,” the Wizard concludes his strangely disjointed yet poignant memoir, but:

My life has constantly surprised me so far. It may not be a miracle, as the title suggests (publishers, not authors choose titles), but it has been both funny ‘ha ha’ and funny ‘peculiar.’

The really funny thing about the book is that the man is deadly serious. He has, in fact, provided the bones of one of those classic British autobiographies: Edwin Muir’s The Story and the Fable (1940), or Stephen Spender’s World Within World (1951). His “enemies,” however – for which read publishers, whom he inveighs against throughout – continue to marginalise and trivialise him.

The book is festooned with photographs. On almost every page he is seen leering from some unlikely angle, surrounded by foes and acolytes. The text has been divided up into bite-sized chunks, with headings such as “Cursed!” or “The Wizard in Cyberspace.” It’s all an awfully jolly romp, as the press releases emphasise. “Here’s something to make you smile,” the Canterbury University Press circular begins, going on to list the major “selling points:”

• The first-ever book about one of our cultural icons and tourist attractions.
• Full of hilarious anecdotes and illustrations.
• Lavishly illustrated and designed.
• An ideal gift book.

The wizard’s own philosophy, a curious mixture of Playpower and The White Goddess, which he is allowed four pages to expound near the end of “his” book, perhaps hardly deserves much more space, but the reader ends up feeling curiously dissatisfied. His buck-hungry publishers have conspired to keep us at arms-length from the anguished human merchandised as “the Wizard,” while the man himself has refused to write the Barry Crump-ish laugh-a-minute memoir they required of him. What could have been a book has ended up as a curiosity.

The reason this is of more than passing interest is because the same thing applies, in a rather different way, to Janet Hunt’s memoir of another one of our “cultural icons” (not yet “tourist attractions,” one hopes). In fact, those “selling points” could be repeated almost verbatim. Here, though, the conflict is not between a subject who wanted to write one way, and whose publishers packaged him another: here we find what is, essentially, an illustrated introduction to Tuwhare’s life and works, aspiring simultaneously to be a serious biography and critical study.

“Is that so bad?” you ask. No, of course not. Janet Hunt’s book became indispensable the moment it was published. It’s a mine of information, and does, indeed, introduce us to one of New Zealand’s favourite poets with economy and wit. The author has designed her own book, which explains the lovingly ingenious layout of some of the pages, artfully combining manuscripts and printed transcripts of poems with photographs and commentary. All of these virtues should be stressed at once before any reservations are expressed.

However (there’s always a “however”), one begins to get an uneasy sense of hagiography quite early in the piece. Has Tuwhare ever been a scallywag? Has he ever made any unfortunate choices? You wouldn’t think so from the book. An uncomfortable air of pious incense, combined of Pakeha reverence for “Maori spirituality,” and sentimental middle-class regard for free-spirited Poets, pervades all discussion of the numerous complex and controversial movements with which Tuwhare has been associated over the years.

This is what I mean about the conflict of intentions. For a children’s picture-book (a New Zealand equivalent to that famous pamphlet about Walt Whitman which labelled him once and for all as The Good Grey Poet), or even a coffee-table “portrait,” such carping would be inappropriate and out-of-place. But Janet Hunt, I suspect, wants to have her cake and eat it too. She wants to write a “serious” book about Tuwhare which proves him right at every turn. And, after all, we have to remember that he’s still alive, still active as a writer, and her principal collaborator in putting the book together.

Patrick White, who was able to read his biographer David Marr’s final text (which he’d helped compile) shortly before he died, allegedly burst into tears, declaring himself “the monster of the world.” Hone Tuwhare can have had no such epiphany. The old fox had done it again. No serious enquiry into his private life, politics, or even means of subsistence over the years was able to break through the golden calm. And yet my feeling about the Patrick White biography is that it enabled us to see him, finally, as a good, though complex and self-excoriating man. My reaction to the Tuwhare book is that, while it tells me a lot about the external circumstances of his life and writings, his true greatness as a poet and goodness as a man (which is quite possibly the conclusion we’ll come to anyway) remain to be explored by a more acerbic pen.

Janet Hunt’s book is obviously far better and far more worthy of attention than the Wizard’s, but both are, unfortunately, instances where the (necessary?) conflict between commercial packaging and artistic intention has leant too far towards the former – blunting, rather than sharpening, the point of these two very dissimilar works. I fear it’s a sign of things to come.

The Wizard: My Life as a Miracle (1998)

(14/7/99)

Pander 8 (1999): 32.

[976 wds]


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John O’Connor: A Particular Context (1999)

Pander 8 (July 1999)

John O’Connor. A Particular Context. Christchurch: Sudden Valley Press, 1999.

John O’Connor: A Particular Context (1999)

This book began, for me, with two strikes against it: a section of family poems, complete with potted genealogy (“chloroform in print,” as Mark Twain remarked of The Book of Mormon), and then a section of haiku, for God’s sake. What’s more, the first two (quite long) poems are rather laborious satires at the expense of Christchurch pretentiousness which largely miss their target here up north.

So why am I so impressed by it? Why do I find it so enjoyable? Why have I been going around recommending it to people? Mainly it’s because, when I close my eyes, I see images from it imprinted on my retinae.

There’s the “game called autumn” in “Something to Say,” for example:

all down the Jewish lane children are falling. it’s a game called autumn, a pastiche of drifting leaves and gathering. yet one stays out, has not joined her companions in what they suppose is a fine tumble, quick in the wind, now still.

which ends with the extraordinarily bold image of a gas chamber with “one figure … in front of the group – as if she had something important to say.” This is something important to say. It works, but it could so easily not have worked, and it takes courage to venture out onto such thin ice.

Then there’s the “police cordon. that thin blue line” in “Shining,” another prose poem – puzzling, a little menacing, yet absolutely right.

Some of the haiku, even, succeed in rehabilitating that thoroughly overworked genre for me:

billboard …
the lingerie girl smiling
through the snow

And, well, I have to admit that not all family poems are bad. It’s not that I care who anyone’s ancestors were unless they were interesting in themselves, but I like the sense of barely suppressed venom about some of these. The “derelict swimming pool” which was:

the only green
before the bishop’s house
though the fat bastard

never ran on it
as far as I could see.

There’s nothing comfortable about John O’Connor’s sense of the past – nothing cosy, heritage industry-y – on the contrary, these poems are alive. Not life as we know it, perhaps: it’s a nervous, edgy, rather terrifying vision, but you won’t forget it in a hurry.

(14/7/99)

Pander 8 (1999): 34.

[382 wds]


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Kenneth Fea & Graham Lindsay (1999)

Pander 8 (July 1999)

Kenneth Fea. on what is not. 55 pp. & Graham Lindsay. Legend of the Cool Secret. 63 pp. Christchurch: Sudden Valley Press, 1999.

Kenneth Fea: on what is not (1999)

i am/ am not

if you
delete whichever

is not/ is
applicable

if no go to
to go or no

i go/ go not

if yes
put no

This short poem, one of three in Kenneth Fea’s book, illustrates the advantages / disadvantages of his method. Baffling in appearance, allusive in style, it nevertheless conceals a core of instruction: an essentially didactic nihilism. The poem broadcasts certainty (albeit of uncertainty) rather than doubt.

If Fea’s intention is to challenge conventional responses to the lyric, then he is successful. We might otherwise be beguiled into facile reading of a poem such as “The Reaper.” The discipline is also required to avoid any suggestion of sentimentality. In the sequence CHILDWARHOOD, for example, the lines “barrel of / a toy gun thrust through a pane (bandage and kiss)” gives a vivid sense of childish infraction – with all its despairing guilt and rapture at forgiveness. It’s hard to see how this could be otherwise achieved. “The perfume of romance” wafting through the innocent scatology of “small beer” is another marked success for Fea’s approach.

His francophilia is a more complex case. It assists him as a formalist, but seems in other ways not really crucial to his aesthetic (I’m comparing him here with poets like John Ashbery or Frank O’Hara who also see life through French spectacles: there, though, it is visual art rather than literature which influences them). “Vacances colorées” is an extreme piece of bricolage in franglais which, I feel, becomes him less than most of the other block-shaped monologues about place, and time, and distance.

“Brief human-like signs persisting for no reason.” This line, nicely juxtaposing the fosslized footsteps of three australopithecines with some hikers (on the previous page), encapsulates what Kenneth Fea has done for us in this book. Made up, as it is, of “snapshots … letters … fragments,” as the blurb informs us, it is hard to see how commentators can do more than “obscure it with their clarifications” (as one of his – many – French epigraphs puts it). Fea may fall short of the fragmentary eloquence of an Ashbery or an O’Hara, but his book is its own thing: unique, precise, well-plotted – not a wellspring, perhaps, but a mirror-maze of beguiling shards.

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The poem “Wellspring,” on page 54 of Legend of the Cool Secret (and repeated, with different formatting, on the back cover) might be seen to sum up the difference between Graham Lindsay and Kenneth Fea – a curious coupling in many ways. It becomes more than a mere reviewer’s convenience, however, when we see the extent to which Lindsay is interested in the process of creating a poem, which has become for him a voyage into inner space. Fea, by contrast, likes to give the sense of a frozen moment detached from time. We might see them, in Freudian terms, as poised on either side of the pleasure principle: Lindsay still hunting for the meaning behind experience, Fea content to trace its lineaments with a diamond on the glass.

I would have to give my preference to Lindsay. His poems gesture, at times, with wild indiscipline – his reach can exceed his grasp. The bizarre social commentary of Father Lapsely’s (pun no doubt intended) “blowjob thoughts” in “Juxtaposed windows” sits strangely with the poet’s resonant refusal to be a camera in “Hospital in Kabul”:

No-one breaks the tableau
nurse, doctor, or member of the camera crew
to rescue her

from the point
live in our face
on the dinner news

However, returning to “Wellspring”:

You come to the edge of thought
and peek over

into a kind of quarry
or amphitheatre facing the sea
at the joy of consciousness.

It is not that these lines are extraordinarily well-crafted, but simply that they express a kind of passionate involvement in mere existence which can, at times, achieve a lava-like intensity. In “Freeze frame”, for example, the somewhat hackneyed subject of a family snapshot (“These slow-flowering images”) bursts into an exploration of life, death, and history – from “soft, chuckling / water logged / with corpses” to a “Tight-lipped doll in a bassinet, fiercely asleep.” Even (one might almost say “especially”) dolls, clocks, and photographs are fiercely alive in a Graham Lindsay poem.

There are obscurities – references (even with the notes) I miss; but these will no doubt bring me back again and again to this strangely compelling book. I can’t resist closing with a quote from the first poem in it:

Maybe the children will
bring the story to light.

Maybe, in the end, they will.

R. Norrie: Graham Lindsay

(14/7/99)

Pander 8 (1999): 35-36.

[782 wds]


Pander 8 (1999)


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Royal NZ Ballet: Peter Pan (1999)

Pander 8 (July 1999)

The Royal New Zealand Ballet, The Shell Season of Peter Pan, Choreographer Russell Kerr, Designer Kristian Fredrikson, Composer Philip Norman. National Tour, 27 February-18 April.

Royal NZ Ballet: Peter Pan

It’s been done before, of course: a ballet of Peter Pan. One might have thought the play was spectacular enough, with its doggy nurse, trapeze wires, variegated sets and pantomimic audience participation (“Clap if you believe in fairies!”), but no, another dance verison was, it seems, required. You’ll have gathered that it was with a certain trepidation that I repaired to the Aotea Centre to see the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s new version of the immortal tale (that ghastly Disney film did little but leach away at its strangeness).

To say I was pleasantly surprised is to put it mildly. I loved it. True, it’s less perverse, less self-exploratory than J. M. Barrie’s original, but perhaps there are abysses there that it’s best not to peer into for too long (those of you who’ve read, or watched, Andrew Kerr’s The Lost Boys will know what I’m talking about: the bizarre psychodrama of Barrie’s involvement with the Llewelyn-Davies children).

One strong point in favour of the ballet is the strongly masculine presence of Peter himself. The convention of having girls in the leading role had perhaps gone far enough. It’s time to see this parable of arrested emotional development in another, franker light. The other “archetypes of the collective unconscious” (surely one of the great titles) embodied in Barrie’s play – mermaids, Indians, pirates – were equally fresh and clear.

Perhaps that’s the keynote of this piece, in fact: clarity. The original Peter Pan is muddled, mad, multi-faceted – this one is clipped and elegant. The sets are sumptuous but never de trop – the dances precise and unprotracted. It’s hard to see a foot put wrong.

The strongest accolade is that both the adults and the children in the audience enjoyed it. The frisson one feels when looking round at large numbers of children in expensive theatre seats is seldom an agreeable one, but even the ones who were too young to be studying ballet seemed satisfied. Jon Trimmer’s genial nabob Captain Hook, the roly-poly Lost Boys, the sinuous star maidens provided sufficient spectacle for all.

The music was quite adequate to its purpose, though perhaps a little uninspired. It’s hard to imagine it in a concert hall on its own. I’d rather have that, though, than another tired production to first-rate music: one more Nutcracker, say. The freshness of the choreography (particularly scenes such as Peter in search of his shadow) and ingenuity of the design were a joy. Full marks and felicitations.

(14/7/99)

Pander 8 (1999): 38-39.

[435 wds]


Pander 8 (1999)


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Patrick Marber: Closer (1999)

Pander 8 (July 1999)

Closer, by Patrick Marber, directed by Simon Prast, designed by Dorita Hannah – with Marton Csokas, Sophia Hawthorne, Theresa Healey, Jeffrey Thomas – ATC, Maidment Theatre, 17 Feb-20 March.

Patrick Marber: Closer

Woody Allen’s film Bullets over Broadway frames a twenties problem play (part-Ibsen, part-Eugene O’Neill) entitled The Sins of the Fathers. A man leaves his wife for a younger woman, who then leaves him for a young lieutenant, who ends up having an affair with the wife – at least, that’s what one gathers the plot is about through the numerous revisions, rewrites and rethinks which occupy most of the movie.

For The Sins of the Fathers read Closer. True, the jazz age props (machine guns, flappers, flivvers) have been replaced with contemporary London strip-clubs, hospitals, and aquariums, but we have a younger man who takes up with a younger woman, and then an older woman, who gets married to an older man, then leaves him for the younger man, who is shocked to learn that the younger woman has been seeing the older man, etc. etc. The scenes are constructed with a geometrical precision (younger man + younger woman; older man + younger woman; older woman + younger man) which leave one longing for the easy fluidity and psychological insight of a typical episode of Coronation Street. The characters say “Fuck” a lot.

To be honest, I don’t quite get the point. There’s no economic axis in the play. The four personages have professions (doctor, journalist, photographer, stripper) but none of these cause them any particular anxiety, or seem to influence their behaviour significantly. No Naked or Shopping and Fucking insights here. They all fall in love with ridiculous ease, and always within the charmed circle of four (another soap opera trick). The name that sprang to mind was Peyton Place (or Melrose Place, for that matter)

The sets were nice: elegant and economical (alas, that recalls another twenties diatribe. Thomas Wolfe in Of Time and the River denouncing people who praise plays for the sets: “Did you ever hear such damned stuff since the world began?”). The actors looked a little shell-shocked at the end, as if they were somewhat surprised to be greeted with applause. Marton Csokas found little scope for his usual aggressive stage presence, Sophia Hawthorne looked much too bouncy and lively for the doomed waif who (I presume) was the original idea of the character. Good on her. Theresa Healey played a very plausible older woman, while Jeffrey Thomas poured huge energy into a bland and featureless role.

Four characters in search of an author? I’m racking my brains to think of anything else that’s nice to say about the play. It was so boring. As they drearily went through the umpteenth soul-searching I began to wonder if life really was as Patrick Marber portrays it: tedious, self-possessed characters going on about themselves and their motives with a depth and circumstantial precision which makes the characters in Whit Stillman’s “Doomed Bourgeois in Love” trilogy look like healthy extroverts.

The Woody Allen film is funny precisely because we don’t have to sit through the play it portrays. Unframed, we laugh at it, not with it.

(14/7/99)

Pander 8 (1999): 39.

[525 wds]


Pander 8 (1999)


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Martin MacDonagh: The Cripple of Inishmaan (1999)

Pander 8 (July 1999)

The Cripple of Inishmaan, by Martin MacDonagh, directed by Simon Prast, designed by John Verryt – with Leighton Cardno, Sophia Hawthorne, Jonathan Hardy, Lee Grant – ATC, Maidment Theatre, 19 May-19 June.

The Cripple of Inishmaan (1996)

The man behind us made it clear from the beginning that he was a reviewer. As the first few guffaws broke out in the audience, he observed to his neighbour in a top-lofty way, “Isn’t it curious how they always laugh at physical violence?” No doubt it is. We too were close enough to feel at risk from some of the flying egg-yokes.

He was still pontificating as we got up to go. Actually, I would have liked to pick his brains a bit. Sometimes I think I’m just too thick for this world. Why on earth choose this play, this strange piece of Irish slapstick, to put on in Auckland in 1999?

I mean, it is funny. There’s no doubt about that. Some of the accents were a bit wonky, but there were certainly plenty of laughs. The author’s main talent, it should be said at once, is the running gag:

– “D’ye have any mintios?” asks the thick lad who once fell in a hole as a child.
– “We have only what you see,” replies one of the eponymous cripple’s two aunties (the one who doesn’t talk to stones).
– “Mintios are good swayties. They have them all the time in America. D’ye have any mallow yallows?”
– “We have only what you see …” And so on and so on, beyond any duration you could imagine.

Later on it turns out that the auntie in question has a mad passion for mintios, and single-handedly ate all of the last consignment. Luckily there are some mallow yallows (and a stone) left to comfort the two old dears for the loss of their crippled boy to Hollywood. There’s a moment of awful tension when our hero returns having (it seems) forgotten to bring back any mintios for his old pal the thickie, but all is well when he triumphantly produces a bag of mallow yallows instead. Those are good swayties!

The style, as you’ll have gathered, is a curious mixture of J. M. Synge and Father Ted. It’s hard to say which of them predominates. The shadow of Riders to the Sea and (above all) The Playboy of the Western World lies heavy on this play. Comparison with the latter proves a bit invidious, though. Synge exposed the fatal Irish tendency to idolise braggarts and the violent bullies with lighthearted accuracy and a deadly aim. No wonder Yeats had to harangue the rioting crowds from the Abbey Stage. They didn’t like what the mirror was showing them. Ninety years on, Martin MacDonagh seems content to exhibit a collection of Irish stage types for the amusement of the English. Shades of Mrs Doyle and Father Jack, that’s what it is. One shudders to say it … Ballykissangel?

Okay, I have to admit there aren’t any leprechauns, but there’s a real winsome colleen with a wicked tongue on her (Sophia Hawthorne), a dipsomaniac old lady played with insane (and infectious) glee by Elizabeth McRae (a rest cure from Marge in Shortland Street) … oh, and there’s gossiping ol’ Johnnypateenmike, and grim Babbybobby, and thick Bartley, and just a host of other delightful comic lads and lasses down from the glen.

In the programme note we’re told that Martin MacDonagh is “one of the most sought-after young playwrights in Britain.” He remarks modestly “when they start saying it’s brilliant you … take it with a little pinch of salt.” Sorry, old chap. As far as I can see it would go down a treat at the Sunday School concert, but there’s just no point to it. As for the ATC, why didn’t they revive The Playboy of the Western World instead? It’s just so much more up-to-date.

The sets were good, though.

(14/7/99)

Pander 8 (1999): 40.

[647 wds]


Pander 8 (1999)


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Leicester Kyle: Prophet without Honour (1999)

Pander 6/7 (March 1999)

Leicester H. Kyle
Prophet without Honour

Leicester Kyle

Are you the kind of reader who goes for the fattest, glossiest, most shameless paperback on the bestseller shelves? Or are you the sort who snoops through ratty old second-hand bookshops looking for the esoteric and elusive: the promise of the unknown masterpiece?

Ezra Pound chanced upon Andreas Divus’ Latin translation of the Odyssey on an bookstall in Paris; D. G. Rossetti found Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in a remainder bin in Charing Cross Road. If we wait long enough, eventually someone may pick up a copy of Leicester Kyle’s Heteropholis in the stacks of one of our larger public libraries (defenders of the obscure, God bless them), and be similarly transfixed by this strange work of the modern sensibility. Why wait, though?

Heteropholis is a complex, multi-faceted narrative poem, not predominantly lyric in inspiration – which at once condemns it in the eyes of most readers of contemporary poetry (the only sin more heinous being what Milton calls “the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing”). It concerns a fallen angel, who has descended to earth in the form of a small green native gecko (species: Heteropholis gemmeus). This gecko has been caught by an apartment-dwelling Aucklander, and makes observations on his habits, on the weather (a subject of particular concern to angels, who are used to looking down), and on sundry other matters. Some of the matter is lewd, some liturgical.[1] It is, nevertheless, a profoundly serious and, indeed, partially autobiographical work. No commercial New Zealand publisher will touch it with a barge-pole.

Leicester Kyle, like his lizard protagonist, has been caught. Poetry snared him late, after a long and successful career as an Anglican pastor. He had written short stories before that (notably for the Listener and the London Magazine), but his poems began to appear in New Zealand magazines midway through the nineties, and have now become almost inevitable features of any local publication. Like other late-flowering converts to poetry (Thomas Hardy, say, or Herman Melville), he is prolific, and could undoubtedly present us with a collection or two of lyrics which would take their place with the others so routinely reviewed in these pages.

Instead, he perversely insists on writing erudite, book-length works in an experimental mode (Zukovsky and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets are acknowledged influences). His shorter poems have tended to be wry, ironic reflections on modern New Zealand life, which explains their ready assimilation into the bland modernism-without-tears of our present literary milieu. The longer works, though, defy ready characterisation. They display a darker, more rebellious gift.

In order, we have Koroneho: Joyful News out of the New Found World (which has been appearing serially in Alan Loney’s journal A Brief Description of the Whole World from issue 6 onwards). A series of descriptions of – misidentified – native orchids compiled by the missionary and botanist William Colenso are here versified and complicated by Leicester into a work combining the scientific and literary vocabularies (a continuing preoccupation in his writing). This is perhaps the most austere and “difficult” of his works to date.

Next comes Options (1996-1997), available only through Leicester’s own Heteropholis Press (now removed from its former location in Mt. Eden to the wilds of Buller). This set of four poems examines, with a wickedly satirical eye, a series of religious and mystical vocations. We have Evagrius, the fourth century ascetic; Jeremy Taylor, the seventeenth-century Anglo-Catholic Jeremiah:

Always look for death.
Every day knock at the gate of the grave.
… Consider the tomb
At your triumph; the skeleton
At the revel; the bones
At the banquet …

(Leicester comments, perhaps tongue in cheek: “It was my intention to make better use of Taylor’s humour, but I found this oddly difficult to do. It is here, but unexpectedly dark”); Fran, a thirteenth-century Franciscan mendicant transported to contemporary Northland; and finally Maria, the celebrated nineteenth-century dancing prophetess of Kaikohe. The disjunction of cultures and epochs might seem extreme, but that’s how its author likes it.

As a whole, Options is a delightful and witty work which deserves a wider audience, and which might have great value as a corrective to the mouthings of the New Age prophets who surround us in these last days of the millennium.

State Houses (1997) is more personal, interweaving tragic family history with the history of the first state houses in the Christchurch suburb of Riccarton. Leicester explains that his “dream-like recollection” of childhood “is set against the ideology of which the state houses were part” (hence the Bauhaus epigraph, and the various diagrams and maps), but that “progress is provided by a ritual house-blessing, an alternative ideology, which moves the family group from room to room, part to part, of reality.” This is an intense and moving poem, whose total effect can perhaps be best summarised by repeating the quotation (from Lorine Niedecker’s correspondence with Louis Zukovsky) on the dedication page:

“Yes I know you’re moving – in a circle, backward with boxes –”

The “moving” pun is intentional.

Finally we come to A Voyge to New Zealand: the Log of Joseph Sowry, Translated and Made Better (1997). “Made better” is a description cribbed from Talmudic commentaries, but this is more ludic, a bit of fun. The author has taken a real nineteenth-century journal, and teased it into strange shapes on the page and in the imagination. It reads as an affectionate tribute to the spirit of our pioneers, a fin-de-siècle version of Curnow’s “Landfall in Unknown Seas.”

As I mentioned earlier, Leicester Kyle has moved from Auckland to the West Coast of the South Island, where he can scribble, observe, explore and botanise to his heart’s content. The samples I have seen of recent work (including sections of The Machinery of Pain: a new sequence on pain management, prompted by close personal experience) promise some extraordinary new directions. My own hope is to see, eventually, a single volume, a little like the Black Sparrow Press collection of Jack Spicer’s poetry books, which will showcase his work for a larger public.

Jack will have his heroes, you may say. Regular Pander readers have already observed me constructing “hagiographies” (Danny Butt’s word, Pander 3:6) of Kendrick Smithyman (1: 10-13) and Kathy Acker (5: 26-27). But saluting the unorthodox is a principal reason for this magazine to exist, it seems to me.

There is nothing inaccessible about Leicester’s mad, funny, eccentric verses, seen in their proper context, but perhaps they do sound like a barbaric yawp next to the anaemic pipings of our other bards.

Now pursuing truth
I make new moves
and am more business-like …

I must learn more

I’ll take to interstices

I’ll live in the wall that divides

I’ll watch with my bespectacled unblinking eye

I’ll see all sides

It’s a strange thought, but I’m uneasily aware that in this strange flowering of Leicester Kyle we may be seeing genius.

___________________________________________

Notes:

1 For an example of the former, see Pander 3: 19.

(8/7-14/11/98)

Pander 6/7 (1999): 21 & 23.
[Available at: The Imaginary Museum (26/6/06)]

[1148 wds]


Pander 6/7 (1999)


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