Notes on NZ Poetry: 1 (2012)

[Jacket 2]

JACK ROSS:
Notes on NZ Poetry

New Zealand was, we're told - with the possible exception of Easter Island - the last substantial landmass on earth to be settled by human beings. Even in an age of near-instantaneous electronic communication, New Zealand can still feel a little peripheral. Next stop, Antarctica.

Allen Curnow, in his classic 1943 poem "The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch," wrote of the Moa's (by extension, our) "interesting failure to adapt on islands". More recent ecological theorists have suggested that, on the contrary, islands have a tendency to be engines of evolutionary change: extraordinary adaptations to unique circumstances.

So which is it? Is New Zealand poetry more or less interesting as a result of our isolation? On the one hand, it can lead to a willingness to break the rules, lending our writing a wild and lawless frontier feel. On the other hand, there's a certain tendency to reinvent the wheel, proclaim as innovations techniques which are the most hackneyed commonplace elsewhere.

These posts are designed as a kind of running commentary on my ongoing engagement with New Zealand poetry, both as a practitioner and a critic. I'm looking for the poets, poems, books, performances which best encapsulate what we have to offer here. The choice is bound to be controversial. Speaking for myself, I welcome the debate.

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Jack Ross teaches Creative Writing at Massey University’s Auckland Campus. His publications include three full-length books of poems, numerous poetry chapbooks, three novels, and three books of short fiction. He has also edited a number of books and literary magazines, including (with Jan Kemp) the trilogy of audio / text anthologies Classic, Contemporary and New NZ Poets in Performance (Auckland University Press, 2006-8).

You can find details of previous and upcoming publications at his blog The Imaginary Museum.

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Posts:

1. Begin anywhere [31/3/12]
2. The persistence of memory [6/4/12]
3. Experiments with sound [13/4/12]
4. Dancing on ropes with fetter’d legs [18/4/12]
5. In small press land [27/4/12]
6. State-of-the-Nation poems: Allen Curnow [6/5/12]
7. State-of-the-Nation poems (2): James K. Baxter [11/5/12]
8. State-of-the-Nation poems (3): Cilla McQueen [17/5/12]
9. Work yet for the living: Hone Tuwhare [26/5/12]
10. What's in the mags? brief 44/45 [1/6/12]
11. State-of-the-Nation poems (4): Ian Wedde [8/6/12]
12. State-of-the-Nation poems (5): Kendrick Smithyman [15/6/12]
13. State-of-the-Nation poems (6): Michele Leggott [25/6/12]
14. Coda [3/7/12]

(31/3-3/7/12)

Jacket2: Commentaries
[Available at: http://jacket2.org/commentary/jack-ross]

[19,399 wds]

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Begin anywhere:
The Short Takes on Long Poems symposium

Robert Sullivan & John Adams read in Old Government House, Auckland

I'm taking the beach-poem at its word, and beginning anywhere.

In my case, since I’m just back from the Short Takes on Long Poems symposium at the University of Auckland, I thought I might start there.

And it does seem a useful way of starting some hares of discussion we can pursue at our leisure over the next few weeks (or months).

The gathering was an international one. There were Academics and Poets from Australia, the United States, Hong Kong, Hawai'i, and other New Zealand cities. The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc for short) has built up contacts in a lot of places in its decade of operations.

Last year a group of us met at Deakin University in Melbourne, the year before both in Auckland and the Technological University of Sydney. Many of those people were back in Auckland this year, but there were new faces too.

I suppose this mightn’t seem unusual in other cities or centres, but it’s still something of a radical move here, down at the bottom of the world (or the top, depending on how you flip the globe, which is, after all, still a “circle whose centre is nowhere and whose circumference is everywhere,” to quote Empedocles - though it's quite surprising to see how many other people this apothegm is attributed to ...)

The guest of honour was the distinguished American poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis, who’s been making an extended visit to Auckland over the past couple of months, and whose long poem Drafts, shortly (she told us) to be completed after 25 years of work, gave the symposium its theme.

There were, if I counted correctly, 21 papers and readings over the two days of the conference proper (Thursday 29th-Friday 30th March), as well as an appetiser of 11 readings on Wednesday night. The whole thing culminated in a ferry ride to nearby Waiheke island, at the head of Auckland harbour, where we all collaborated to construct what we fondly hope was the world's longest beach poem, running a thousand odd yards along Oneroa beach.

There were a lot of interesting conversations over the three days, a lot of comparisons of our respective cultural locales. For me, though, one particular session outweighed all the others — not just the details of the session itself, but one particular gesture within it.

Just before Maori poet Robert Sullivan began his joint reading with local Pakeha judge and poet John Adams, he asked for the blinds of the room to be opened and for some air to be allowed in. “To let out the shades,” he explained. “There are some powerful ghosts in here.”

He meant (among others) the ghost of Nineteenth-century colonial Governor Sir George Grey, one of whose official residences this was. And it was Grey's own words that John Adams proceeded to read out, with an accompaniment of some of the Maori proverbs and songs he collected and translated for the following reason:

I found that these chiefs, either in their speeches to me, or in their letters, frequently quoted, in explanation of their views and intentions, fragments of ancient poems or proverbs, or made allusions which rested on an ancient system of mythology; and although it was clear that the most important parts of their communications were embodied in these figurative forms, the interpreters were quite at fault. […] Clearly, however, I could not, as Governor of the country, permit so close a veil to remain drawn between myself and the aged and influential chiefs, whom it was my duty to secure, and with whom it was necessary that I should hold the most unrestricted intercourse. Only one thing could, under such circumstances, be done, and that was to acquaint myself with the ancient language of the country, to collect its traditional poems and legends, to induce their priests to impart to me their mythology, and to study their proverbs.

The quote is from the preface to the book he eventually compiled, Polynesian Mythology & Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealanders as Furnished by Their Priests and Chiefs, which appeared in Maori in 1854, in a (somewhat abridged) English translation in 1855, and as a dual-text in 1885.

Grey was, on the one hand, a grim and somewhat disingenuous man, who never for a moment doubted his own superiority to and right to govern the various native races he fought and administered in various different parts of the British Empire. His explanation that he collected the myths and traditions of the “New Zealanders” in order to control them more effectively gives a somewhat chilling atmosphere to his book, still an irreplaceable foundation text for any serious study of the subject of Maori beliefs and customs.

On the other hand, he was an intellectually voracious polyglot, whose collection of books in many languages (most of which he could speak or read) laid the foundations for the Auckland Public Library. Our poetry seminar was literally taking place in his front parlour — or perhaps it was his study, or even his reception room. In any case, his memory lingers there, along with the memories of the various Maori informants — some of them credited by him, some of them not — who recited to him the powerful texts he wrote down for their future undoing.

“Poets do not forget,” wrote the Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo, at the end of the Second World War, as he lamented the devastation he saw all around him, “Buchenwald is there ... Stalingrad / and Minsk with its marshes and rotten snow.”

“Poets do not forget.” Actually, he wrote “I poeti non dimenticano.” The translation I'm quoting from is by New Zealand poet Kendrick Smithyman (1922-1995), who — I feel sure — meant it as much for his own people as he did as a reminder to any Italians who might read his work (published posthumously here in Auckland in 2004 as Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian, and again in a revised second edition in Novi Ligure, Italy in 2010).

I guess my running definition of any poetry is an attempt to conduct a conversation with the tradition. On Friday morning Robert Sullivan and John Adams talked for — and to — their respective ancestors. The result, to quote Robert himself, “gave me goosebumps.”

As the actual words of Grey’s informants were read out, doubled with Grey’s own brutal letters to local military commanders, his ornate prefaces to works of scholarship, I realised how meaningless this whole event would have been without them. The risk of too international a focus is a kind of bland abstraction, a lingua franca of poetics and literary theory instantly comprehensible to those of us trained in schools of poetics, but detached from the local conditions that give these concepts depth and meaning.

For me, the symposium was a success because of this single act of Sullivan (who identifies himself as being of Nga Puhi, Kai Tahu; and Irish descent) and Adams (a high-ranking member of the New Zealand judiciary as well as a poet). They acknowledged the central historical paradox that underlies our life here in these islands: the reasons why most of us here speak English as a first language instead of Maori (or French, or Spanish, or Chinese).

Most, but by no means all. The symposium touched on many cultures, languages and poetic traditions. It was enabled and made welcome in the space, though, by this gesture towards the contradictions that surround us and give us life. It was necessary for Robert to usher out the ghosts, to clear a space for himself and John, before he could begin to speak. The moment they stopped the ghosts came crowding back in, though.

I don’t think I can really write any meaningful “notes” here on New Zealand poetry without doing the same: naming the memories and the spirits, and allowing them to jostle my pen as I write. We're in this thing together, as poets of Kendrick Smithyman’s generation knew so well. Our attention to the outer world must not distract from the voices of the tangata whenua, the people of the land, all of those who were here before us and who laid down traditions for us to act within.

(31/3/12)

Jacket2: Commentaries: 1 - Begin Anywhere.
[Available at: https://jacket2.org/commentary/begin-anywhere]

[1391 wds]


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


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Notes on NZ Poetry: 2 (2012)

[Jacket 2]

The persistence of memory:
More reactions to the Short Takes on Long Poems symposium

Michele Leggott & her guide-dog Olive

Lisa Samuels, one of the three co-organisers of the Short Takes on Long Poems symposium (with Robert Sullivan, mentioned in my previous post, and Michele Leggott, pictured above with her guide-dog Olive), writes in to specify that it was she who was responsible for the two words "begin anywhere" which started off our long, collective, ten-part beach poem the other day:

Nice to see your Jacket2 write-up, and that you used the 2 words I wrote at the beginning of our very very very very very very very very very very long beach poem – I'm sure I am pulling 'begin anywhere' from some co-making moment, and that too is par for the symposium. …

Which prompts me, in turn, to claim responsibility for inscribing the four words visible in the picture above, beside Michele and Olive, which were meant to be a quote from the last line of the title poem of Allen Curnow's 1982 collection You Will Know When You Get There:

Down you go alone, so late, into the surge-black fissure.

On the surface, the poem records a walk down Lone Kauri Road to Karekare beach, where the poet intends to gather some shellfish. Figuratively, however, it seems to be reminding us that we’re all going to be taking a long walk on a short pier one of these days, into the "surge-black fissure" of "there" – whatever version of the afterlife we can imagine for ourselves.

You'll note that I failed to remember the correct wording of the poem, and instead wrote "blue-black fissure" (Robert did correct me, but by then it was too late to erase it and start again – wet sand is a rather unforgiving medium).

In fact all the scraps and fragments of poems I wrote on the beach that day seem to have been plagued by misprints: Curnow was only one of the many people I got wrong. After a while I began to think that the only way out was to claim it as some kind of postmodern trope: intentional incorrectitude.

Funnily enough, this matches almost perfectly with one of the papers we'd heard the day before. Susan Schultz of the University of Hawai'i-Manoa (whose own impressions of the symposium can be seen here) had shown us some videos of the very elegant thought experiment she'd been conducting with George Oppen's poem "Of Being Numerous," where she read out parts of the poem to "mainly friends and local residents who are not poets," and then recorded the words and concepts they could remember: in some cases a lot, in one (very memorable) instance, a little girl possibly perturbed by some of the rude words being used, nothing at all.

Her paper was extremely interesting to me. It made me think at once about the long controversy over the technicalities of the oral transmission of Homer (and the apparently fathomless repertoires of traditional knowledge associated with tribal chiefs and tohungas): of the power and persistence of memory (to quote the title of Dali's iconic 1931 painting). But then, on the other hand, we have the immense lost corpus of Ancient Greek (the missing books of Sappho, the rest of Greek drama, all those plays which have not come down to us) or Anglo-Saxon literature to remind us of the fragility of such mnemonic systems.

What would I remember of the tradition if the libraries burned tomorrow? Precious little, and that contaminated by misreadings and misquotations, as the beach at Oneroa reminded me.

"Poets do not forget," I said in my first post – quoting the Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo via a translation by NZ poet Kendrick Smithyman. But of course they do. The other day at dinner my father broke into a conversation about my mother's recent eye operation with a long anecdote about the seagulls he used to feed out of the back window of their house (he's now too frail to go out and forage for the left-over muffins and bread-rolls they were so fond of). The truth is that everyone forgets: poets, doctors (like my father), and archivists alike. My father's illness is gradually wiping out all of his memories, new and old. It won't be long before the last residue is gone: our names, his name, where he lives, who he is ... That impassioned recital of the names and attributes of his seagull friends was a Chekhovian moment – sad, and yet somehow intensely poetic at the same time.

My father feeding the birds

Like so many Kiwi men of his generation, my father has always been a great teller of anecdotes and reciter of humorous verse (much of it composed by him). Some of them I remember myself, and no doubt my mother and my brothers could supplement my recollection with a few more. It's deeply disconcerting to witness the gradual erasure of so great an oral store though. Perhaps I should write them all down while I still can. But then where should I keep them? In a notebook? on the internet?

Which brings me round to the point I’d like to make as a reaction to all this. It’s a critical commonplace that the existence of reliable writing systems – the ability to write it all down (as Governor Grey did with the words of his traditional informants in the mid-nineteenth century) leads eventually to the erosion of formal memory training and memory systems.

The existence of the internet – a kind of immense mnemonic metaphor – has led, in its turn, to the erosion of print archives and physical memory repositories. If it’s stored online, we’re virtually absolved from reading it. It’s accessible anytime, therefore need not be looked at right now.

In his lifetime Allen Curnow (1911-2001) was generally regarded as the most distinguished and internationally recognized New Zealand poet of his generation. A brief web search will reveal to you how little of his work is available online, however. The Curnow estate – quite reasonably – sees his work as far too valuable to put up on sites where it could be copied or downloaded for free.

Kendrick Smithyman, on the other hand, far less widely read – though greatly respected – during his lifetime, now has an immense website, co-edited by Professor Peter Simpson and his widow Margaret Edgcumbe, devoted to his collected poems, with full cross-indexing and critical and biographical apparatus available at the click of a finger.

Despite the (alleged) “difficulty,” the mandarin complexities, of a good deal of his work, Smithyman has thus become automatically the most readily accessible of the major New Zealand poets of the last century. Whereas even the need to check my quote from “You Will Know When You Get There” required me to have a copy of Allen Curnow’s Selected Poems to hand.

What do we remember of a poem, any poem – even our own? Very little, I fear (even if she’d extended her experiment to other poets, I suspect that Susan Schultz would have found our memories for recited verse pretty sketchy): a few scraps of wording, some vague sense of atmosphere and event … The internet may delude us into imagining that we can use it as a kind of external hard-drive devoted to extra memory, and its convenience and flexibility in this regard do mean that we’ll be shifting more and more of our work onto it. Who, after all, can question the value of projects such as the online Smithyman edition?

In the end, though, any memory system or set of storage protocols is mortal: a single mind, a caste of priests, a library vault, or an engraved microchip. Osip Mandel’shtam’s widow Nadezhda kept the memory of his last poems alive by reciting them to herself and a series of helpers till the day they could be smuggled out and published in the West. The only moment in which they truly come back to life, though, is the one when we experience – read or hear – them again ourselves.

[Salvador Dalí: The Persistence of Memory (1931)]

(6/4/12)

Jacket2: Commentaries: 2 - The persistence of memory.
[Available at: https://jacket2.org/commentary/persistence-memory]

[1344 wds]


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


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