The Little Ache (2022)

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

Reviews:

Ian Wedde

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books are das not der [89]

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

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

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

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

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

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(1-3/8/21)

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

[1104 wds]


Joanna Forsberg: Ian Wedde with Pete


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Notes on NZ Poetry: 11 (2012)

[Jacket 2]

State-of-the-Nation poems (4):
Ian Wedde, “Barbary Coast” (1993)

Auckland Skyline - photograph: Michael Dean

1946 was a good year for poets. Along the fruits of that bumper crop were Alan Brunton, peripatetic troubadour and (co-) founder of radical theatre troupe Red Mole; Bill Manhire, Dean of the Wellington school and unquestioned Top Bard of the country; Sam Hunt, restless road warrior and heart-sore lyricist – and Ian Wedde, New Zealand Poet Laureate for 2011-13.

It’s Wedde [pronounced Wed-dee, not Wed, in case you were wondering] I’d like to talk about here. He’s far harder to characterize in a couple of gimcrack phrases than most other local poets. That’s if he really is a local poet. There’s always been something of an air of the largeness of outside in Wedde’s work from the very beginning.

He’s written six novels (most recently The Catastrophe, 2011) as well as fourteen books of poetry (to date), starting with Homage to Matisse in 1971 and continuing with Good Business in 2009. He’s also written essays, art catalogues, and – perhaps most famously – a combative and polemical introduction to his 1985 anthology The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (co-edited with Harvey McQueen).

Wedde’s was the first substantial anthology to sample poetry beyond the monoglot field of New Zealand Verse in English, the first real attempt to represent the growing cultural complexity of our society in the 1970s and 80s. That’s not the extent of his innovations in this groundbreaking volume, but that will give you some idea of where he started from.

For the next entry in our state-of-the-nation poems, then, the one looking back over the mind-blowing (in retrospect) culture shock of the 1980s in New Zealand – the age of Privatisation, neo-liberalism; the end of ANZUS, our defense treaty with Australia and the US (as a result of our anti-nuclear stance); the beginnings of mass migration to New Zealand from East Asia and the Pacific rim – I offer Ian Wedde’s poem “Barbary Coast” (available, in full, here), from his 1993 volume The Drummer:

When the people emerge from the water
who can tell if it’s brine or tears
that streams from them, purple sea
or the bruises of their long immersion?

They seem to weep for the dreams they had
which now the light slices into buildings
of blinding concrete along the Corniche.
Is it music or news the dark windows utter?

Who are these people emerging from the water? Boat-people fleeing the dark realities of Pol Pot and Suharto? Europeans awaking from their long Pacific swoom? Whoever they are:

The diners are cheap and the food is bad
but you’d sail a long way to find anything
as convenient. Pretty soon, sailor boy,
you’ll lose your bearings on language.

Why “Barbary Coast,” in the first place? A pirate port, does he mean? Some kind of Freetown, the local equivalent to Burroughs’ Interzone / Tangiers? Or Kororareka, hellhole of the Pacific = the shores of North Africa, lair of the Barbary corsairs?

That crack about the diners being cheap and the food bad certainly rings true enough. Was that not the universal cry through the land through the late 80s? “At least there are more restaurants and the coffee’s better; at least the whole city doesn’t close at 5 on Fridays and open again at nine on Monday morning? Surely that’s worth a few tears, a few more bodies in the gutter?”

What’s that he says about losing “your bearings on language”, though?

Takes more than one nice green kawakawa
leaf, chewed, to freshen the mouth
that’s kissed the wooden lips of the figurehead
above history’s cut-water

That’s certainly true. We can redefine ourselves all we want, go out whoring after the Queen of the Night, but these harbour waters are brackish, slimed with the flotsam and jetsam of the past.

Trailing blood across the moon’s wake
the ship bore out of Boka Bay.

Trailing sharks, she sailed
for Port Destruction. In Saint Van le Mar,
Jamaica, Bligh’s breadfruit trees grew tall.
In Callao on the coast of Peru

geraniums bloomed like sores
against whitewashed walls.
The dock tarts’ parrots jabbering
cut-rates in six tongues.

Where’s Boka Bay? A port on the Adriatic, in the tiny country of Montenegro. It’s a long haul from there to Jamaica, but not quite so long as Bligh's trip from Tahiti, where the breadfruit grow, to the West Indies, where they can be used to feed slaves.
Boca is also Spanish for “mouth” – Italian bocca, French bouche, Latin bucca, Portuguese and Catalan boca (both). It’s the safe haven of the mouth that this barque of language seems to be leaving from, bound for all points west, across the ocean:

‘I would tell you if I could - if I could
remember, I would tell you.
All around us the horizons
are turning air into water

and I can’t remember
where the silence ended and speech began,
where vision ended and tears began.
All our promises vanish into thin air.

So says the “voyager”, as his “briny eyes / flood with chimerical horizons”:

What I remember are the beaches of that city
whose golden children dance
on broken glass. I remember cold beer
trickling between her breasts as she drank.

But my paper money burned
when she touched it. The ship
clanked up to its bower, the glass towers
of the city burned back there in the sunset glow.’

There’s a great passage in Alan Brunton’s last long poem Fq (shorthand for Faerie Queene -- or does it, rather, stand for F**k you?), published posthumously in 2002, where he talks of the future he foresees for his daughter Ruby, the “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

Is that where Wedde’s poem is going at this point? From the very outset of his poetic career he seems to have shared his friend’s need to “eat the wind … and ramble” – his second book, way back in 1973, was the Selected Poems of Mahmoud Darwish, translated from the Arabic with Fawwaz Tuqan – even before those groundbreaking longer works Pathway to the Sea and Earthly – Sonnets to Carlos.

Cool star foundering in the west.
Coast the dusty colour of lions.
The story navigates by vectors
whose only connection is the story.

The story is told in words
whose only language is the story.
All night the fo’c’s’le lamp smokes above the words.
All day the sun counts the hours of the story.

It’s all very fine. Like all of us lost in the impenetrable seas of poststructuralist 80s – “no context / nothing outside the text” – the story was “told in words / whose only language is the story.” Heady stuff, to be sure – nothing to guide us but narrative logic, nothing but language flexing itself.

But then:

Heave of dark water where something
else turns -- the castaway’s tongue
clappers like a mission bell.
Unheard his end, and the story’s.

Raconteurs in smoky dives
recall his phosphorescent arm
waving in the ship’s wake.
Almost gaily. The ship sailed on.

That castaway makes the poem, I guess.

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

I fear we were all a bit beguiled by those “glass towers” of the city, the “beaches of that city / whose golden children dance / on broken glass” in that headiest, most hedonistic of times: Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, as much as Eliot’s own “unreal cities” from The Waste Land.

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

Another avatar springs to mind, though, Cowper’s own “Castaway,” set in the Atlantic Ocean during a storm, who “bitter felt it still to die / Deserted, and his friends so nigh.” In the end, though, the poet has little mercy on him:

We perish'd, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm'd in deeper gulphs than he.

Like Eliot’s, Ian Wedde’s is a poem about history – or possibly the end of history. He sees the beguiling gleam of that will-o’-the-wisp in the distance, that “Cool star foundering in the west. / Coast the dusty colour of lions,” but also sees that it’s an illusion. Raconteurs may tell the tale of your “phosphorescent arm / waving in the ship’s wake” but time, tide. language and history wait for no man:

The ship sailed on.

(8/6/12)

Jacket2: Commentaries: 11 - State-of-the-Nation poems (4): Ian Wedde
[Available at: https://jacket2.org/commentary/state-nation-poems-4]

[1435 wds]


[Jack Ross: Notes on NZ Poetry (2012)]


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Hotere: Out the Black Window (1998)

Pander 5 (Spring 1998)

Hotere: Out the Black Window. Ralph Hotere’s Work with New Zealand Poets, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki – a City Gallery, Wellington Touring Exhibition (July 4th to September 6th, 1998).

Greogry O'Brien: Hotere: Out the Black Window (1998)

Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land

The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s. This passage (chapter 2, verses 10-12) is one of the most beautiful aubades, dawn-songs, ever written – who knows when, or by whom? Ralph Hotere has included some of the words on a vast dark canvas in one of the far rooms of his travelling exhibition Out the Black Window. It seems as good a test case as any.

Test case for what? Well, at the poetry reading held at the Auckland Art Gallery on Saturday, August 1st, there seemed to be a consensus that we – audience and poets – liked the paintings, but didn’t have much to say beyond that bare fact. Ian Wedde read out his superb “Pathway to the Sea,” and talked about cooking feeds of mussels on the beach. Hotere has a dark sense of humour, he told us, and a way with silence.

Cilla McQueen, who was married to the painter for twelve years (until 1986), read a number of poems, including the text she compiled from Gulf War commentaries in Time and Newsweek for use in his Song of Solomon (1991):

sharpbreak revenge warpath gas bodybag bodybag loopgas blitz pin
cluster destroy tactical moth atomicflame mother of germbattles shift

the flowers appear on the earth

There are fourteen couplets, for the fourteen stations of the cross, each followed by a fragment from the original Song. What McQueen referred to as this “conscious un-language” of war was, she said, designed to contrast with its lyric beauty.

I wondered how much of the conception of the painting was hers, and how much his. The answer was almost entirely his – “cross-pollination, not collaboration.” She could not tell me where the Arabic text just visible at the bottom of the picture came from. (My Arabic teacher, Mr. Alan Dabaliz, tells me that it translates roughly as “Libyans Unite!” Copied, perhaps, from some news bulletin?)

Gregory O’Brien’s exhibition catalogue claims that the “oily black inks” of the painting “evoke the oil slicks” of burning Kuwait, the “trails of dots … become tracer fire in the night sky,” and the “horizontal panels of white and black denote the desert landscape.” Perhaps so.

My problem is with this easy sense of an equation. Song of Solomon = beauty; Time Magazine = warspeak. The black is the oil; the fourteen numbers Christ’s passion; the white is the desert. I have no objections to didacticism in itself, but I want to know if what I’m looking at is an anti-war poster, or a work of lasting complexity. It’s a question of genre. The Gulf War’s been over for seven years now. Is Hotere’s work, then, so time-bound?

The poets are little help here. They (naturally enough) trust Hotere to handle the visual side, while he trusts them to handle the verbal. Does the juxtaposition of these two media: an already-written poem by Bill Manhire, or Cilla McQueen, or Hone Tuwhare, or Ian Wedde, with the unpainterly surfaces of Hotere’s scraps of metal, or canvas, or paper, work as the catalyst for an artistic fusion reaction? Or are we being sentimental to think so?

Nigra sum, sed formosa, filiae Ierusalem
I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem …
Look not upon me, because I am black,
Because the sun hath looked upon me:

The original Song of Solomon is not really so simple a work as analyses of the painting would make it appear. It is, it’s true, a marriage song, conveyed through a series of voices: The “dark but comely” Shulamite, her Beloved, the Choruses of her brothers and the daughters of Jerusalem. It’s a love poem, but it’s also about pain and misunderstanding. The Shulamite wanders through the city at night till “The watchmen … found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me.”

I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
If ye find my beloved, that ye tell him,
That I am sick of love …

The second time I visited the exhibition there were groups of sixth and seventh form girls seated in front of the paintings, scribbling industriously in their bursary notebooks – a frame, a few lines, some words of text: “O Africa,” “Rain,” “Wulf.”

What do the words mean to them? Anything? Or do they take them on trust, like the rest of our incomprehensible charades of endlessly-deferred meaning? I fear I may be looking for a sense of closure unattainable in art or life, but I find it hard to assent to smug readings of these paintings of Hotere’s as mere proof of his being on the “right” side in a series of recent controversies. Song of Solomon may have been inspired by the Gulf War, but it seems to me as much about the complexities of love between two people as the jagged confrontation of two cultures: “Jealousy is as cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.”

The last part of this strangest, most modern of poems assures us that:

Many waters cannot quench love,
Neither can the floods drown it

But what does it mean by that bitter coda: “If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned”? That there are limits even to love?

If the poem matches the painting in complexity of levels, does that justify both? Is the fact that both are about light and dark, love and betrayal some kind of criterion of merit? – Libyans Unite! – Perhaps so. Perhaps that’s as close as I’ll get to an answer. It is, as I say, a kind of test case.

I’m going to be taking a lot more things on trust from now on.

(7/98)

Pander 5 (1998): 32-33.

[1037 wds]


Pander 5 (1998)


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