JNZL 34.2: New Writing 1975-2000 (2016)
Teaching Late Curnow
Ways into the text
It can be quite a curious experience trying to teach classic New Zealand poems to local students. You tend to start off with an expectation of familiarity: not so much of knowledge of the work itself, as of at least some of its geographical and cultural background. I remember once hearing the late Kendrick Smithyman describe the experience of reading his early poem ‘Bream Bay’ — ‘What does a traveller see, looking north / from Brynderwen over the arc of Bream Bay’ — to an audience of Auckland University undergraduates.
[1] They had absolutely no idea what he meant when he made a side-reference to the Marsden Point smelter having spoilt the view since he originally wrote it. He was therefore left with two alternatives: either he had to explain exactly what you
do now see from the crest of the Brynderwyns when driving north, or else just let it go.
Choosing between those two alternatives—letting the poem speak for itself, or filling in each and every one of the references—does not get any easier over time. If you
do explain them all, you can hear yourself gradually turning into the most dreaded of social types, the professional explainer. But then, by the same token, if you fail to explain them, you have to resign yourself to incomprehension: to your listeners missing a good deal of the point.
The situation becomes particularly difficult when you attempt to teach the poetry of Allen Curnow. When some pedant wrote in to the
Listener to query the accuracy of the line ‘a scarlet geranium wild on a wet bank’ in Curnow’s classic poem ‘A Small Room with Large Windows’, claiming that the flower does not actually
grow on wet banks, Curnow responded to the effect that: ‘irrespective of the customary behaviour of those plants in Wellington, there was, observable from the window of his house, “a scarlet geranium growing wild on a wet bank”’.
[2] Furthermore, lest we be in any doubt as to where this observation took place, the new edition of his poems is careful to specify that ‘the location is the sitting room at 13 Herbert St., Takapuna’.
[3] It is hard to imagine any poet giving more unequivocal directions about how to read their poems than that: Curnow has clearly cast himself as one of Marianne Moore’s ‘literalists of the imagination’, and his ‘imaginary gardens’ certainly appear to aspire to have real toads in them!
[4]
For the most part, however, Curnow survives for our students, as he does for the general reader, in the form of a few tags. People keep quoting these gnomic fragments, year after year, as if they were self-explanatory:
Not I, some child born in a marvellous year
Will learn the trick of standing upright here.
‘The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch’ (p. 99)
It was something different, something
Nobody counted on.
‘The Unhistoric Story’ (p. 56)
Simply by sailing in a new direction
You could enlarge the world.
‘Landfall in Unknown Seas’ (p. 95)
It is hard to think of another New Zealand poet, in fact — even Baxter or Tuwhare — who has gifted us with so many of these irreducible, teasing nuggets of wit.
Having had the rather unenviable experience of dragging successive classes through ‘A Small Room with Large Windows’ in our second-year Massey University
Auckland Writers and Their Region course—What is a mangrove? ‘Why do they ‘truckle’? What is the exact point of the contrast between them and the ‘Seven ageing pine trees’? What
are the ‘thousand diverse dullnesses’ that are being exploding by the exact details described at the end of the poem? etc. etc.—I have formed some rather anecdotal, but definitely experiential, ideas on the most effective ways to teach Curnow’s poetry—his later poetry, at any rate.
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Late and early Curnow
That is if ‘A Small Room with Large Windows’ can really be said to rank as late Curnow. Where does ‘late Curnow’ actually begin? In terms of our
Auckland Writers and Their Region course, the earlier South Island Curnow is postulated to have been succeeded by the later, Auckland-based Curnow after his move up here in the 1950s. Of course, it would be just as easy to claim that the break should be dated later than that. The work collected in
Continuum (1988) overlaps with the end of the 1974
Collected Poems, but one could certainly contend that a modernising shift both in diction and treatment of his overriding concerns can be observed in all of the books after
Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects (1972).
In any case, so far as our students are concerned, the later the better seems to be the rule of thumb when it comes to Curnow. But is this simply a by-product of my own enthusiasm for that remarkable series of books collected in
Continuum:
An Incorrigible Music (1979),
You Will Know When You Get There (1982),
The Loop in Lone Kauri Road (1986)? Might the earlier poems work just as well for them if I concentrated the same intensity of attention on them?
It is, in the final analysis, impossible to say. This is (at best) qualitative rather than quantitative research: tendentious and unscientific, as all such enquiries tend to be, but still valid within certain limits of definition. My own greater enthusiasm for Curnow’s later work can certainly not be counted out as a factor in the choices I have made while teaching him. Nevertheless, the arc of his poetry from first to last towards ever greater specificity and precision might be seen to explain this increased accessibility in his work after the (at least partial) hiatus of the 1960s.
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Ways to discuss a poet
It is, I think, true to say that some poets’ work is easier to discuss in tutorials than others. All of us trained in the strange art of sitting around and simply talking around a poem—using the basic techniques of New Criticism, but hopefully avoiding some of its conceptual pitfalls—would surely have to agree with this assertion.
I have always found Kendrick Smithyman an excellent poet to anatomise in group surroundings. It is tempting to attribute this to his own decades-long bondage to the tutorial system at Auckland University. His poems from this era include so many intriguing details, so many diverse points of entry—surely that has something to do with his own repeated talkfests about Auden, Eliot and Hardy in so many small classes (limited, as a rule, to 20-odd students)? But then, many other canonical New Zealand poets are similarly rewarding when dissected in company. James K. Baxter’s ‘East Coast Journey’, Charles Brasch’s ‘View of Rangitoto’, R. A. K. Mason’s ‘Strange Memories of Earth’, Robin Hyde’s ‘Houses by the Sea’ — all of these can be made to intrigue students with a little prompting,; or so I myself have found, at any rate. None of
those writers (so far as I’m aware) served their time as English tutors.
In fact, some of the most halting and end-stopped discussions I have had are of one of the New Zealand poets I admire most: Hone Tuwhare. There seems to be some sort of inhibition in our students when it comes to analysing the shifting registers and tones of voice in Tuwhare’s poetry. It is not that his poems don’t retain their effectiveness when read out loud, but that is where it seems to end. When one tries to go deeper, a certain feeling of breaking a butterfly on the wheel seems to stymie further discussion.
What, then, of Allen Curnow? It is tempting to draw some connection with the fact that Curnow was upstairs lecturing on poetry whilst Smithyman was downstairs running workshops on it, when it comes to comparing the effect of their poems on students. Kendrick’s, though baffling at times, have less of a tendency to intimidate. ‘A Small Room with Large Windows’, by contrast, leaves far less room for imaginative reconstruction in the reader’s own voice.
In my own case, I have had the most success with Curnow’s poems from the 1970s and 1980s, with their clear focus on quotidian detail. His larger, eschatological concerns are still there, but they are more adroitly concealed beneath the surface of the poem. Take ‘A Dead Lamb’ (1972), for instance:
Never turn your back on the sea.
The mumble of the fall of time is continuous.
A billion billion broken waves deliver
a coloured glass globe at your feet, intact.
You say it is a Japanese fisherman's float.
It is a Japanese fisherman’s float. ...
There is standing room and much to be thankful for
in the present. Look, a dead lamb on the beach. (p. 161)
That poem is a teacher’s gift, whether at a lecture, a seminar or a tutorial. What better articulation of late twentieth-century linguistic philosophy could be found than in those lines: ‘You say it is a Japanese fisherman’s float. / It is a Japanese fisherman’s float’? Is the point that it is that because you say it’s that—or is it an assertion of the possibility of identity between signifier and signified? And then there’s that dead lamb …
Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi: or just a dead lamb? The point is that the speculation is an interesting one—it’s one that everyone, Christian, Agnostic or Atheist, can express an opinion on. And is there a connection there with the danger of turning your back on the sea? Is the presence of that dead lamb a fact of the same order as the Japanese fisherman's float (I have one at home, which I have occasionally brought along to class and brandished at this point in the discussion)? That is to say, is it simply a complication to an otherwise idyllic scene—or is it metaphoric of some larger, metaphysical danger, more than that offered by the mere possibility of drowning?
The sparseness of the diction leaves room for such speculations: it is, finally, the
arrangement of phenomena in such poems that gives rise to such speculations, rather than the more heavyhanded hints in the language of his previous work. That’s not to say that he became an entirely new poet in the 1970s and 80s. His concerns, by and large, remained the same—those anxious anticipations of the next world, and consequent inability to take the values of this world seriously—but now those values were more clearly bound up with the lifestyle and seascapes of his second home,: that West Coast bach above Karekare Beach, situated bang in the middle of the loop on Lone Kauri Road.
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You Will Know When You Get There
For a while it was possible to get instant product recognition for Karekare and even Lone Kauri Road simply by referring to Jane Campion’s 1993 film
The Piano, but I am afraid that that has now become just one more high-culture footnote. West Coast beaches are still a good starting-point for most students, though (more so, at any rate, than the mangroves and salt flats of Shoal Bay).
The latest of his poems I teach is ‘The Game of Tag’, from
Early Days Yet (1997). I use it when lecturing on poetic form in our first-year
Creative Writing paper.
Seven thigh-thick
hamstring-high posts,
embedded two
metres and cemented
in, where the side
of the road burst
into bird space,
tree-toppling all
that plunging way
down. A clean-cut
horizon shapes
daylight. A gap. (p.301)
Do the students like it, or get it? It is hard to be sure. Certainly, there is not quite the same quick response they give to those wonderfully lucid
Continuum poems. But it is fun to talk about it, to take them up Lone Kauri Rd, every precipitous twist and turn of it etched into clipped, claustrophobic couplets, and to watch the aging poet trying so hard to form a bond with his alter-ego, ‘my spray-gun-toting rival’, the AFRIKA POET tagger, who:
Gave
Death the fingers.
Shook the dreadlocks
from his eyes, for
his best shot.
‘Does it date?’ asked E. M. Forster anxiously of Christopher Isherwood, after allowing the latter to read the then unpublished manuscript of
Maurice, his novel of forbidden love, abandoned by him some time in the Edwardian era. ‘Yes’, replied Isherwood, ‘but why
shouldn’t it date?’ (Moskowitz 2018).
[5] These ‘dreadlock’ lines of Curnow’s have dated also. They may sound a little dismissive, even a little patronising at first glance. But if you persevere with the poem, try to enter into its author’s world as he climbs the long slope, hypnotised by the signs of vehicular mayhem combined with the tagger’s obscurely allusive words, you begin to realise just how much he has conflated the two, how
small the distance he maintains from this ‘rival’:
Where have they all
gone, with CICERO
BEASTIE and me
and which of us
leads the way down
post and plank not-
withstanding, car-
apaced in Korean
steel, to be wrapped
round a bole two
hundred years thick,
two hundred feet
below? One wild
wheelie and we’re off.
There’s been a car crash. That much is obvious. The heavily reinforced posts guarding one of the many precipitous corners on this most treacherous of roads were not sufficient to save whoever side-swiped them so disastrously, sometime since:
Rain-forest soon
repairs its ruins.
Dead men’s dental
records and cellphones
tell no lies. Rust
finishes the job
(almost). One chip
of red Perspex
under a stone
in the stream was
his (whose?) tail-light.
The tagger, ‘AFRIKA POET,’ came subsequently, adding his words to the ‘hefty planks’ mounted across the gap, and then again on the subsequent bends. Then he, too (the poet conjectures) signed off with ‘skid marks in the gravel.’
This kinship between the two, poet and tagger, both insisting on giving ‘death the fingers’—on murmuring ‘name upon name, / As a mother names her child’, as Yeats puts it in ‘Easter, 1916’
[6]—on somehow finding some way to
record the prior presence of those who trod this road before them, is profound, albeit still a little teasing:
A-F-R-I-K-A P-O-E-T
writes, and I quote
THANKS FOR THE TAG.
These two writers, the tagger of ’93 and the poet born in 1911, will never quite see eye to eye, but—in the end—they have a lot more in common than one might think. Both are engaged in fighting off death and oblivion with powerful incantations.
Certainly, many of the allusions and attitudes in Allen Curnow’s works have dated, and will continue to date—even in the poems of this later, reinvented self. But so what? There’s something deeply satisfying about those last two books of his,
Early Days Yet and
The Bells of Saint Babel’s—those final attempts to screw his own idiolect just a couple of turns tighter.
‘The Game of Tag’ remains one of my favourites among his later poems because the effort he makes to bridge the gap between then and now is
so great, and yet the wry smile implicit behind the lines makes it clear how little faith he puts in success. However strong the words, death will still come for us all: but one can greet it on one’s feet or on one’s knees.
It may not be quite saving the best for last, but it seems to me considerably closer to it than any other New Zealand poet I know of has achieved so far.
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Notes:
1. Kendrick Smithyman,
Selected Poems, ed. Peter Simpson (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1989), p. 25.
2. C. K. Stead, ‘Allen Curnow: Poet of the Real’, in
Kin of Place: Essays on 20 New Zealand Writers (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002), p. 129.
3. Allen Curnow,
Collected Poems, ed. Elizabeth Caffin and Terry Sturm (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017), p. 362.
4. Marianne Moore,
The Poems of Marianne Moore, ed. Grace Schulman (London: Faber, 2003), p. 135.
6. W. B. Yeats,
The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1973), p. 394.
JNZL: Journal of New Zealand Literature
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(18-24/9/17; 8/10/18; 13-14/12/18)
JNZL [Journal of New Zealand Literature] 37.2:
Remembering Curnow. Edited by Alex Calder. (Wellington: Victoria University, 2019): 92-102.
[2701 wds]
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