Beyond the Ohlala Mountains (2014)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 [Issue #49] (October 2014)

Books and Magazines in brief:

Alan Brunton. Beyond the Ohlala Mountains: Poems 1968-2002. Ed. Michele Leggott & Martin Edmond. ISBN 978-1-877441-47-9. Auckland: Titus Books, 2013.

Alan Brunton: Beyond the Ohlala Mountains (2013)

The book is, for a start, overwhelmingly beautiful. Who would have anticipated those scruffy old papier-mâché masks from old Red Mole performances could look so striking, photographed as they are against jet-black backgrounds, like Picasso sculptures, or – even better – gaudy folk skulls from the Mexican día de los muertos? In terms of design, then, it’s hard to imagine how it could be bettered. Kudos to Brett Cross, Ellen Portch, and the rest of their team at Titus Books.

But was Brunton really any good simply as a poet? This, after all, is our best chance to find out – a careful selection from the whole body of his work by his old colleague Martin Edmond and the careful conservator of his literary legacy, Michele Leggott. There’s a kind of persistent myth that Brunton was all about performance: the sound of the living voice, the impressiveness of his sheer presence. And, having witnessed some of those readings and performances, I can certainly testify to his skill in this regard. What, after all, could be inside here to merit such packaging? I open the book at random:

People here!Yeah. Fucking lots.
See the game?Yeah. Fucking primo, eh? …
Great game.Yeah. Fuck. Watched it on
TV. I got fucking nutted. …
[“Pindaric – Victory Parade,” p.287]

I don’t know about you, but this kind of cruelly accurate transcript of how we actually speak is something I haven’t heard nearly enough of in Kiwi poetry to date. But that’s only one of his many tones of voice: there’s the tenderness of “the heart is a lover with beautiful hips” [“Guru Hoodoo,” p.270]; the high hieratic of “My father died in December. / With my brothers I carried him / to the low house reserved / for dead soldiers” [“Move,” p.263]; the everydayness of “the Ides of March has found us here / & the dope / has all / given out” [“Black & White Anthology,” p.131]. I just can’t convey all the riches inside here. You’re crazy if you don’t get down on a copy of this collector’s-item-in-the-making while you still can.

(26-27/9/14)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 1 [Issue #49]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 225.

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Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 (2014)


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The Brian Bell Reader (2005)

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

Brian Bell, The Brian Bell Reader. ISBN 0-9582225-3-3. Wellington. Bumper Books, 2001. RRP $24.99.

Alan Brunton, ed.: The Brian Bell Reader (2001)

I opened the Brian Bell Reader at random one day (I’d taken it into the office hoping to get a chance to glance through it while waiting for students to keep their appointments – always a chancy business), and happened upon a rather amusing short piece on Robin Hyde (“I Admire This Girl!):

She was a genius of a kind for those times – poverty stricken, exploited yet always alert, bright and generous. (p.106).

The same words could serve as an epitaph for Bell. On the strength of this collection, at least, he comes across as the best kind of Kiwi eccentric: perpetually distracted by a variety of strange subjects (J. K. Baxter, Bertrand Russell, chemistry, Eastern cooking, etc. etc.) What’s more, this way one can avoid the drunken ravings and conspiracy theories and sample only the cream of his diverse, diverting obsessions.

Alan Brunton, who put out the collection through Bumper Books, has assembled a loose anthology of letters, essays, reminiscences, and photos: bite-sized, entertaining and unpretentious. You can open it anywhere and pretty well guarantee finding something good. I guess my favourite piece is still the account of his pioneering experiments with nude photography in Palmerston North in the 1930s (pp. 5-11), but some of the letters to (and from) such luminaries as Norman Mailer run it a close second. I can’t help but feel that this book will still be fun to leaf through in fifty years time, when the more tedious life-and-times efforts of some of our more pompous contemporaries have gone to that great remainder-shop in the sky.

The design is eye-catching yet functional, reminding us – yet again – of the cultural loss we’ve sustained in the suspension (hopefully, rather than the close) of Bumper’s series of “experimental texts & cultural investigative studies charting moments where definitions changed.”

(15-21/5/05)

brief 32 (2005): 103.

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brief 32 (2005)


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Alan Brunton: Grooves of Glory (2005)

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

Alan Brunton. Grooves of Glory: Three Performance Texts. ISBN 0-9582225-5-X. Wellington: Bumper Books, 2004. RRP $24.99.

Alan Brunton performing Grooves of Glory (September 2001)

It’s fascinating to see, finally, a text of “Grooves of Glory,” the performance piece Alan Brunton was touring through Northern Europe when he died in 2002. I heard it in its earliest form as one of the “Bad Language” Readings organised by Wystan Curnow and Leigh Davis in the Auckland Art Gallery in 2001, and was immensely struck by the effectiveness of tumbling these poems and routines into and over each other in a kind of conceptual spindryer. The final three-person piece is, inevitably, a little less anarchic and way more organised, but it still has that lingering otherworldly atmosphere of Dreamville, “where each day was the memory of the day before” (p.88). Dreamville doubles, of course, with that other imaginary space, “the happening place in the place where the life of the spirit ends, Zee-land,” where “everything is strictly local” (p.80). As the poet so rightly remarks:

You need a bit of the mongrel if you want to participate in our community events. (p.80).

“Grooves of Glory” constantly teeters on the edge of making sense, yet never completely surrenders to the exigencies of autobiography or metaphysics. It has more of the romantic tension of a tango than the rigour of a treatise, and thus pairs up nicely with the dithyrambic “Zarathustra said” (also available on the Bumper CD Nietzsche / Zarathustra).

“Compostela – A Walk” appeared first in brief 25, but (though I say it who shouldn’t) appears to better advantage here, with a rather disturbing set of snapshots taken along the pilgrim route, not to mention Sally Rodwell’s illuminating introduction (a great addition to the utility of the book).

Can these three texts, however adroitly edited, however bolstered up with pictures and reminiscences, ever replace the atmosphere and spontaneity of an Alan Brunton performance? Clearly not. But then neither, really, can videotapes and CDs. In any case, that’s just sour grapes. Best to be grateful for what we have, and in the case of this book that’s something very considerable (and charming) indeed.

(15-21/5/05)

brief 32 (2005): 103.

[350 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)


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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)


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Alan Brunton, my publisher (2002)

New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre

Alan Brunton, my publisher

Alan Brunton

Keeping the surprise alive
– AB

My first contact with Alan Brunton came when I sent him a typescript of my newly-completed novel – or “text,” or whatever you want to call it – Nights with Giordano Bruno. I’d recently published a review (by Richard Taylor) of his atomic-energy poem Moonshine in The Pander [9 (1999): 42-43], so I had an idea that Bumper Books might be hospitable to strange and offbeat work.

When I finally had the chance to check my email a couple of weeks later (I was travelling around the South Island at the time), this is what I found:

Sent:Tuesday, December 28, 1999 12:41 PM
Subject:Nights with G. B.

Dear Jack
Season's Greetings and Millennial Fevers etc ...
Thank you for the Pander. Nice review of Moonshine! One of the very few ...
Also, for your letter and manuscript ... good to have the background laid out so clearly. …
I found the manuscript immediately attractive – just about covered all the sites I'm interested in too. As you say, not an easy book; the sort of thing you must either leave now or spend the rest of your life working with!
So, the problem is how to circulate the book. We (at Bumper International HQ) have talked and have a few thoughts …
Thanks for your trust. Let's talk it through.
Regards
Alan Brunton

All in all, a pretty positive response to an unsolicited manuscript from a complete stranger! “Just about covered all the sites I’m interested in” – Renaissance Hermeticism, Outer Space, urban angst – it was almost as if we were speaking the same language, though with completely different accents. (Later on, in an interview with Mark Pirie, he was kind enough to say: “Jack Ross showed me his manuscript and I was knocked away; this crazy, obsessively sexual novel … an echo in Auckland of Eco. …” [JAAM 16 (2001): 67].)

(Another example of shared interests came earlier this year, when I was travelling in India. I found a copy of Somadeva’s Katha Sarit Sagara [Ocean of the Streams of Story], a fabulously rare ten-volume compendium of Sanskrit fiction, in a little shop in Bangalore. I’d only seen it once before, in the Massey University Library (none of the libraries in Auckland has it), so I was – to put it mildly – rather surprised to see that Alan had used a xerox of its title page in his article “Illuminations” in brief [20 (2001): 7]. I’d been meaning to write and ask him about that, in fact. Was it a particular interest of his? Or was it just the bizarre nature of that particular title-page that struck him? Now I’ll never know.)

We only met four times, I realise, counting up. It seems like more, but perhaps that’s because of the amount of ground one can cover in an afternoon’s conversation.

• July 23rd, 2000: Coffee at Columbus’s



the pattern must be simple
so it can be faked again and again


– AB


We met at a café in High Street. I’d just been sent a review copy of Big Smoke, the anthology of sixties and seventies poetry Alan had edited with Murray Edmond and Michele Leggott, so we used that as a recognition signal. He came in with an old friend, another publisher (that was another trait, I would subsequently discover: taking one friend with him when he went to meet another – a sense of interconnections, not exclusions).

He seemed immensely self-confident and relaxed. Maybe it was all those years of performance; perhaps he was just easily amused by eager neophytes. In any case, we talked about plans for my book (which he’d now definitely decided to publish), about the anthology, about the abysmal failure of CNZ and other grants organisations to support this or any other of this printing projects.

He was not the sort of guy who refuses to talk business (“Why cain’t you never talk turkey,” as Pound once complained to Eliot), but it was obvious that it came a distinct second to his joy in the work itself – his missionary desire to wake people up, turn them on, transform their consciousness … all those sixties cliché’s, here magically brought to life.



• December 14th, 2000: Book-launch in Wellington



God does not forgive
poets who make mistakes
God takes their jewellery away


– AB


The day of the big launch. We met, to start with, at a café in Cuba Street. Michele Leggott came along, as they were going on together later to a Big Smoke reading in town, and we had a nice time assassinating reputations and denouncing the kinds of cosy domesticities that lead to success in this game.

“But if you write like that we won’t be interested in you,” said Michele. Tableau. They’d even forgiven me (apparently) for my Big Smoke review in the Listener, which came out sounding pretty carping once all the challenging bits had been sub-edited out. I felt ashamed of it, though – a squandered opportunity. One more example of how big a man Alan Brunton was. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him to blackball me as a result.

I haven’t got space to go into the baroque happenings at the reading. Suffice it to say that it was a fairly exhausting afternoon. Alan now had a play to appear in, with a group of student actors, at The Space. After that came the co-launch of Sally Rodwell’s book (Gonne Strange Charity), then mine. A bunch of strangers stared at me strangely as I read out passages from the Kabbalah mixed with vatic prose. We didn’t sell many.

By now, Alan was definitely running on empty. His state might be described as one of generalised euphoria. I, unfortunately, had a train to catch. Luckily one of the actors offered to drive me to the station (she was writing a Ph.D. on the connections between Paradise Lost and Philip Pullman’s anti-God children’s trilogy; I’ve often wondered how she’s getting on with that).

Do I have to spell it out? This was a kind, considerate, over-committed man. Reading, play and launch in one day was (at least!) one thing too many. It didn’t seem to phase him.



• August 8th, 2001: Bad Language



It’s just like Confucius says in the Analects
Love starts out simple & ends complex


– AB


It’s nice when one can be wholeheartedly and unreservedly enthusiastic. We spend so much time parroting polite expressions that it’s often difficult to believe that someone really does like something.

Alan’s reading in the “Bad Language” series at the Auckland Art Gallery was a revelation to me. It went on for an hour, and took the form of a debate about love, incorporating bits and pieces from all sorts of poems (mainly from Ecstasy). At the end he walked down into the audience and handed a girl a poem, together with a request for her phone number. Point taken. A hard thing to carry off, certainly, but one would have had to be a bit of a churl to object.

I’d heard he was a spellbinding performer, but this was my first experience of it. No tricks or gimmicks, either. He just read well – it was the material that spoke.



• August 9th, 2001: Coffee in Ponsonby

Everything we see is God

– AB

We met at another café, this time in Jervois Road. He came with John Barnett and Lesley Kaiser, whom I’d never met, but whose work I was familiar with from brief.

I’d been very struck by the warmth with which he’d greeted me at the reading the night before. There are a lot of things to think about, a lot of commitments, a lot of meeting and greeting to do on such occasions. Once again, I was impressed by his ability to seem genuine in the midst of so much sham.

The conversation was a little muted. He was tired. We talked about James K. Baxter (at Alan’s suggestion, I’d taken a detour up the Whanganui river to visit “the grave” on my way back from Wellington after the launch).

As he left I asked him if he’d be interested in publishing another book. “Why not?” he replied. “Send it down.”

It took a little longer than I thought. I finished working on it late last month, June 2002, a few days before hearing the news of his death in Amsterdam.


A couple of extracts from letters to end up with:

Your note about the Serbo-Croat website [Jim Norcliffe had sent me the address of a site which seemed to mention the names of various NZ poets] is the sort of thing we need. We're big in Belgrade! And that your book will be ready too ... product, product, product (a TV series?). Actually, most overseas sales are to Vancouver – there seems to be a little Bumpo Groupo there.

[one of the last things he wrote me – in response to an email from India]:
Hope all is well with wandering around in your dhoti ... I see where Tagore has come off copyright and all the Indians are singing his songs out in the open; doing the Baxter homage as well?
Alan

•

Stone Pine Lavender
for Alan Brunton

Journey to discover the unknown self
– Nissan tyre cover

Part way through your personal
labyrinthshe was on
a different levelsaid the Maori
hitchhikerpause
to turn upriver

last night at the party
my stricken darlingcooed
the crew-cut girl
who drove you
to the station

walk round Hiruharama
hum of beesbell-bird
a van with muffled mirrors
till you’re struck by
what?

not peacenonot exactly
something more like waste
desuetude
following what?
your nose

straight aheadup through
the bush supplies a skidding
kidyou’ve come some way
to see this
music raps nearby

At the Grave of James K. Baxter
s such a cliché
standing at the spot
where so much
bullshit stopped

a trifle unkind perhaps?
no doubtbut nothing
seems to happen either
wherever he is
taint here

in books?
their readers?
words of a dead man
modified
in the guts of the living?

Stone Pine Lavender
a sign said miles ago
Stonea nun
gathers up clothes
you fail to wave

(1-12/7/02)

New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre [Available at: https://ndhadeliver.natlib.govt.nz/webarchive/20240725121601/https://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/brunton/recollections/ross.asp (6/12/02)]

[1695 wds]


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Big Smoke (2000)

NZ Listener 175 (3146) (26/8-1/9/2000)

Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960-1975, edited by Alan Brunton, Murray Edmond, Michele Leggott. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000. [xii + 344 pp. ISBN: 1-86940-230-8. RRP $49.95]

Alan Brunton, Murray Edmond, Michele Leggott, ed.: Big Smoke (2000)

I wish I didn’t feel nagging reservations about this project. After all, if it’s the acid test of an anthology to tell you things you didn’t already know, Big Smoke is a winner. There’s nothing predictable about this line-up of poets – or poems. Murray Edmond explains the distinction in his introductory essay:

Big Smoke … is a collection of poems rather than poets. At least 29 of the poets here have never appeared in any other collection …

That’s quite a burden of novelty to put on any publication, but then, this is an ambitious book (two introductions, a detailed chronology, cartoons, drawings, manifestos – it’s more than one might have expected, though perhaps no more than the subject requires).

That subject is no less than New Zealand’s “decade of crisis” (as Alan Brunton calls the sixties in his own essay, “Restoring the Commune”). He defines its characteristic tone in terms of five crucial differences from a “deeply conformist and monocultural colonial society which had already created its poetry and its poetics, thank you.” (Edmond). They are, in order:

1. Race – “as misrepresentation, manipulation, and excuse”
2. Consciousness – “The normal state of mind was paranoia”
3. Sex – now achieving “autonomous status”
4. Politics – “the recognition that equilibrium was patriarchal, oppressive, and indifferent”
5. The Commune – “Beloved Community”

So far so good. Brunton’s analogies with the Paris Commune and the career of Rimbaud seem a compelling and original way to approach this sense of radical disjunction from a compromised past.

The real problem comes when we get to the poems themselves. Many of them are, I’m afraid, not all that good.

Take, for example, the poem “August 1974” by Nuru Jaya (presumably one of the 29 who have never appeared in any other collection – please bear in mind also that with so wide a choice, any singling out is bound to be invidious):

and in our sharing, we both know
who will drown, for you have
made me shiver into beingness –
impinging a thousand images of you upon me

That’s a nice sentiment, but rather underwritten, wouldn’t you say? “Beingness” strikes me as an unnecessary and infelicitous neologism, and “impinging a thousand images of you upon me” seems a remarkably round-about way to express that particular poetic cliché.

So what? So there are some undercooked poems in there – wasn’t the whole sixties thing about hanging loose? After all, as Edmond makes clear, part of the point of this book is to be the 1960 Curnow anthology’s evil twin: bigger, badder, and broader all round. Nuru Jaya is just one of many new voices unearthed from under the dead weight of patriarchy.

But many of the voices in this book are not new. We have Bill Manhire, we have Ian Wedde, we even have Hone Tuwhare (not to mention Edmond and Brunton themselves). And I don’t think that it’s just familiarity with their works that makes me say that their contributions are – for the most part – amazingly strong: sinewy, powerful poems which really do go a long way towards substantiating the grandiose claims made in those two prefaces (not to mention Michele Leggott’s rock-bio-intense chronology).

Who isn’t there is equally striking. When I think of the sixties in NZ poetry I tend to think of Baxter’s Jerusalem Sonnets (referred to here obliquely with the inclusion of Manhire and Brent Southgate’s “New Jerusalem Sonnets”), the first flowering of late Curnow, Smithyman’s self-reinvention as a Jamesian monologist. I have no trouble with leaving these mainstream voices out, but in that case why count Tuwhare in?

“Voices that first came to prominence in the sixties” answers that, I guess, and I do like the idea of not just confining oneself to the canon. Brunton and Edmond were, after all, there – and retain much street-cred as founding editors of The Word is Freed, not to mention continuously productive artists ever since.

Interestingly, the first thing I saw when I opened the book was the cartoon on the last page, depicting a schoolgirl called Judy discovering an old Freed in some landfill of the future: “Judy is going to make a discovery! Namely some poets about whom I’m very familiar in my capacity as university lecturer!” comments a tweedy old perv from a side panel.

This is fun, and succeeds in bringing back that romantic aura of witty freshness which must still hang around these faded magazines for those who were there. There’s an air of the campus rag about it, though – clever but immature: the kind of thing I used to admire so when I read Craccum as a beady-eyed youth.

Perhaps one could sum up by saying that’s the strength and weakness of this collection. It makes it possible to re-experience that Dylan mantra “the times they are a-changing;” but it also tries to perpetuate the myth that poetry can be made “by all not one.” There is a kind of poetry that can be made that way – it’s called living. However, Brunton, Edmond, and their peers are poets in a very different sense from, say, Nuru Jaya, and it’s disingenuous of them to pretend otherwise.

(11-12/7/2000)

NZ Listener 175 (3146) (26/8-1/9/2000): 40-41.

[877 wds]


NZ Listener 3146 (2000)


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