Showing posts with label elegies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label elegies. Show all posts

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Poem for Hone

My friend Mary Paul went up north to attend Hone Tuwhare's tangi at his home marae in Kaikohe. Here's the poem she wrote about the occasion, and also about the long friendship he had with the Paul family, first with Blackwood and Janet, his first publishers, but then on into the next generation:




Poem for Hone


Your hikoi from te wai o pounamu
Was not planned

Your descent into Papatuanuku not counted on
But you must’ve known they would make their own decisions

You’ve written of it often enough and you know that
‘Cremation is not the Maori way’

Sometime about 1am on the night before the afternoon we got there
Moana your granddaughter gave you a piece of her mind

I don’t know exactly the words she said but it was tough

Coming back up here to this old place
Makes you available for comment

Coming back to this marae, not your own but your people are here
Brings your whanau back too

They are humble but resolute, shattered still by your personal land march away from them in 1965

The tangi is for the man not only the poet
Your son mihis to his mother
‘You may have been a poet but she is the poetry of love’

The next day when by chance I meet her and Rewi in the Kiwaka café
She asks why people think being addicted to alcohol is so amusing
We smile

Later the idea of self-medication surfaces
And I remember a rambling conversation with my friend Peter on this New Years Eve
The thing that is most us is the part we have no control over

Your psychiatrist said you had a fetish –
wanting always the earthiness of our succulent woman bodies

You knew you longed for your mother
Though you issued that Kaka Point challenge

See if I care – scatter me here
Singing cockles and mussels alive, alive, oh

We climb the hill as the sun breaks out from its grey veil
And you are lowered beside her – someone regrets it’s not beside your sister

From your new possie you look North over a valley and hillside of bright bush
Grown up from ti tree since Jean went there with your sister 30 years ago

Hinemoa shelters us from the heat under her green umbrella
and we speak of everyone leaving and of how your fame didn’t spread here

Some things have changed since 1945 1965 1975 but not so much

But no-one should feel ashamed

Likewise for my mother who used to joke of ends and ashes with you
And my sister
They both lie in the clinging earth

At Akaroa
At Makara

We, like your family, are not as fine as them
But they are you, we are them

This was bound to be whatever we did,
but in taking you, carrying you, holding you,
embracing each other, it comes to be seen to be

Kai ora e Hone



Mary Edmond-Paul
26th February 2008

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Bernard Gadd (1935-2007)



Yes, I'm afraid it's another obituary. Bernard Gadd died on December 11th last year, but I only heard about it earlier this month (See the Poetry Society's memorial page here).

Siobhan Harvey and some others are organising a reading in his honour, which I unfortunately won't be able to attend, but here are the details if you'd like to go along:

Where: Manukau Research Library, 15 A Ronwood Avenue, Manukau City

When: Wednesday 20th February at 5.30 pm

For myself, I thought I'd just write a few memories down here.

I first met Bernie in 1998, at the Tauranga Poetry Festival, where he was launching a book of Haibun with Catherine Mair and Patricia Prime. I offered to commission a review of it in the pander, of which I was then one of the editors. The pander's basic schtick (at the time) was anonymous reviews -- like the oldtime Times Literary Supplement -- and the notice, when it came, was pretty scathing.

I got an indignant letter from Bernie, which I printed in its entirety in the next issue, and so peace was restored.

We didn't meet often, but that was the basic pattern of our literary relations. We were both editors of the literary magazine Spin at the same time, and agreed on little, but I think we always respected each other's integrity and right to a contrary opinion: "Opposition is true friendship," etc.

I printed poems by him in Spin, in brief (which actually led to a falling-out with previous editor Alan Loney), and was happy to find myself on the same poetry list as Bernie at HeadworX. Something about his maverick, bull-at-a-gate attitude obviously appealed to Mark Pirie (and to John Dolan too -- I found a most intriguing review of Debating Stones (2002) at the Glottis website).

His name seemed to crop up everywhere! On cross-cultural anthologies of stories and plays for schools, on old articles about Te Kooti in the Polynesian Journal, in poetry magazines ... When Michele Leggott, Murray Edmond and Alan Brunton released their anthology of sixties and seventies poetry, Big Smoke, in 2000, Bernie came back at them with a counter-anthology of all the poets he considered unjustly excluded: Real Fire (Hallard Press, 2002).

He was feisty and irrepressible. I'm glad that he achieved some of the things he really wanted towards the end of his life. Alistair Paterson featured him on the cover of Poetry NZ 34, and his work was increasingly being feted and recognised.

For my own part, when I look back over old reviews and notices, I feel he treated me with a great deal of forbearance and understanding. He must have thought me an awfully jumped-up young cub at times ... But here he is on When the Sea Goes Mad at Night(Pohutukawa Press, 1999/2000), a millennial anthology edited by Theresia Liemlienio Marshall:

Ross’s poems have the effect of the post-modern. Places evoke crisp images, memories, fragments of thought, literary recollections which, set side by side, successfully create imaginative poems crammed with surprises and interest.
and on Chantal's Book (2002):

This is a book of love poetry for Chantal, but very much of the 21st century, with a keen sense of the ambiguities and contraries of love, a questioning of its permanence and capacity to change the lovers, an almost edgy ambivalence. Here too is humour, satire, irony but not the jokey embarrassment at love and lust of, say, a Glover. A variety of poetic techniques are employed, often giving the page the appearance of a layered modernity. But the poetry is essentially accessible and direct.
You can't say much better than that, can you? I wish I had a similar sheaf of notices of his own books I could flourish, but I always shied away from reviewing him somehow. I wasn't sure that I really understood what he personally was getting at with his interest in haiku and haibun, and his revisionist views on New Zealand history seemed to demand a more informed commentator than myself.

I am glad I printed so many of his poems at various times, though. He was a tireless contributor to magazines and anthologies, and they give off an increasing lustre now that there won't be any more of them. There was one in the special "Smithymania" issue of brief [26 (2003) 86, and this one in a later issue [29 (2004) 45], which now sounds rather sad, in retrospect:

Sketch

your sketch
comes from three days
of typhoon

you stand in a clear white space
your shorts show no hip nub
nor squinted navel

above a shoulder
is hatched shadow
or a hint of stanza
or window slats

our lines lie drifting
on table glass

Thursday, January 17, 2008

i. m. Hone Tuwhare (1922-2008)


Hone Tuwhare
[photograph by Meg Davidson]


Well, sad news on the yahoo/xtra newspage this morning. Hone Tuwhare has finally died, after a long period of illness, at a little hospice called the Ross Home in Dunedin.

The last time I saw him was at that strange, perhaps somewhat over-spectacular celebration of his life and work in the Civic Theatre last year, when a whole bunch of bands and solo artists (Goldenhorse, Don McGlashan, Graham Brazier, even Chris Price & her "Waiting for Donald" ...) performed pieces from Charlotte Yates's 2005 Tuwhare CD.

I didn't quite have the face to go up and reintroduce myself. We only met once, when I was sent to interview him for the Sunday Star-Times. Mary Paul did, though, and he certainly remembered her. He looked in pretty good form, considering the overwhelming nature of the event.

Personally, I loved the CD almost as much as Baxter (2000), its predecessor (which really blew my socks off), but the increasing fulsomeness of the spoken commentary between each act started to grate on me after a while. It seemed unnecessarily protracted, distracted us from the music, and was couched in terms which would have been extravagant applied to Jesus Christ.

So, yes, I think Hone was a fine poet and an extremely interesting man, but I don't have any particular interest in painting him as a kind of secular saint. That he wasn't. He was far more cunning and turbulent than that. Which is one reason why (I suspect) his poetry will continue to live.

The newspaper interview was interesting. I'd been sent to interview him in the wake of the Greg O'Brien curated show about Ralph Hotere's collaborations with poets, and tried my best to return to that subject from time to time. It soon became clear that Hone would talk only about what Hone wanted to talk about, though, and that subtler devices were needed to steer the conversation where one wanted it to go.

Here's the text of that piece, published as "A Mutual Respect: Ralph Hotere and Hone Tuwhare." Sunday Star-Times: August 2, 1998, p. F7:


A Rainy Day with Hone Tuwhare


Hotere: Out the Black Window. Ralph Hotere’s Work with New Zealand Poets. Auckland Art Gallery / Toi o Taamaki, 4 July – 9 September.

I can hear you
making small holes
in the silence
rain.

Rain. It started early that morning: dark, blustery rain. As I drove to meet Hone Tuwhare in Grey Lynn, where he was staying until the Montana Book Awards ceremony (his latest collection, Shape-shifter, won the poetry section this year), I could barely see the other cars on the road. They skidded along, each in their own halo of spray.

But if I
should not hear
smell or feel or see
you

you would still
define me
disperse me
wash over me

The poem “Rain” has been reprinted in anthologies, set to music, and painted more than once by the artist Ralph Hotere, whose touring exhibition Out the Black Window is now on show in the Auckland Art Gallery. But Hotere never speaks about the meaning of his own works. Nor, I soon discovered, does his friend, Hone Tuwhare.

Does rain actually need a meaning? The poem simply calls it “small holes in the silence.” Is it possible to make a painting which expresses that? Ralph Hotere has made a long hanging – rain has a long way to fall from the sky – speckled and lined with grey. The words of the poem, at the bottom, are scrawled, stencilled, smudged in a series of different letterings.

“Every time he’s used something of mine the poems were written first,” Hone told me. “What Ralph has done with them is up to him. I can’t explain it for you.” I can’t explain it either. It isn’t really a matter for explanations. You feel its beauty or you don’t. But perhaps we can all be assisted to feel. Why else do we have poems and paintings?

Hone Tuwhare, one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets, was born in Northland, in the Hokianga, in 1922. His 1964 book No Ordinary Sun was the first ever published by a Maori poet. The title-poem, about the effects of nuclear testing in the Pacific, is the subject of another memorable painting in Hotere’s exhibition.

“He’s one of our most political painters,” Hone said. “I’ve always respected him for that.” The two men share a passion for the environment, for ecology, for political commitment, which goes some way towards explaining the harmony of their work.

Their two careers have run strangely parallel in many ways. Hotere, also born in the Hokianga, now makes his home in Dunedin where (he once remarked) “they accept that I’m a painter and leave me to go about my work.” Hone, after long years in Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin, has settled on the South Otago coast. Like Hotere, he now needs solitude a good deal of the time. Both artists share a fascination with language, with the sounds and shapes of words – with their limitations, also.

Gregory O’Brien’s exhibition catalogue for the Hotere show sets the dark, wordless painting “Requiem” beside Hone’s “We, Who Live in Darkness.” That poem, about the Maori creation myth of Rangi and Papa, asks “what was time, anyway? Black intensities / of black on black on black feeding on itself? / Something immense? Immeasureless?”

As Hone read the poem aloud to me (his usual response to any question about them), he paused on the last word. “‘Immeasureless’ isn’t correct, they tell me – not good grammar.” The same thing has been said about a lot of his poems. They veer from pub language, Kiwi vernacular, to Shakespearean or Biblical rhetoric.

“Immeasureless” does stop us short, make us think about those “intensities of black on black” – the same blackness brooding in the heart of Hotere’s painting. In the poem “Hotere,” Hone said:

… when you score a superb orange
circle on a purple thought-base
I shake my head and say: hell, what
is this thing called aroha

Like, I’m euchred, man. I’m eclipsed?

The language is careful, precise – but local. That question mark at the end is not, Hone remarked to me, to show doubt, but because “Kiwi kids always go up at the end of a sentence.”

“I thought he’d hate the poem. But when he saw it he really liked it; he wanted to use it in his exhibition.”

We live in a dark world: “a visual kind of starvation,” as Hone puts it. South Africa, the Springbok tour, the French nuclear tests, the Aramoana smelter, these are some of the issues which Hone and Hotere have dealt with together. Hotere paints on old bits of corrugated iron and canvas which have been discarded as rubbish; Hone writes, at times, in a kind of disposable street language. Perhaps what they finally have in common is that they are trying to salvage something for us. And not all the paintings are black.

As I ended my long conversation with Hone Tuwhare he pressed a bottle of wine on me as a parting gift. “Are you sure?” I asked, uncertain. “It’s a koha,” he said, “for aroha.” Read his poems; look at Ralph’s pictures. What is this thing called aroha?


Two incidents during that interview didn't make it to the final draft. The first was that my taperecorder stopped functioning (without warning) about five minutes in, so all the fine recordings I thought I was getting of him reading poems into the microphone were completely wasted. Ah well. These little things are sent to try us.

The other thing is that he spent a good deal of time talking about the poet Sappho, and how much he'd like to locate a good translation of her work. I recommended the Mary Barnard version, and (when I got home) took the liberty of ordering a copy on Amazon.com and asking them send it giftwrapped to Hone Tuwhare, c/o Post Office, Kaka Point, Otago. A koha (you understand) for aroha.

When he received it a few weeks later, he promptly got on the phone to thank me. Unfortunately I was out at the time, so instead he got my father, who has exactly the same name I do, and until the time they sorted all that out, the conversation operated rather at cross-purposes.

Never mind. I hope he enjoyed the Sappho poems. I certainly enjoyed the bottle of wine. He was a very complex man who enjoyed using the strategy of the simplehearted child of nature. It was a very effective strategy when it came to making a living as a writer in twentieth-century New Zealand. It won't do to mistake the "Uncle Hone" persona for the poet, though.

Likeable as he undoubtedly was, for me the real interest of his work will remain the adroit way in which he was able to manipulate all the different registers and levels of New Zealand English, darting from one to the other with a seeming naivete to make his sudden, unexpected points.

So Ave atque Vale, Hone. There'll never be another like you. You really will be missed.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Theresia (2)


Well, you can imagine my surprise -- consternation, almost: let's be honest -- when I got home this week to find Theresia's Christmas card waiting for me unopened. Not only a card but a copy of the latest Pohutukawa Press publication. Not only a book but a little poem, too.

Here's the poem:

is this kirihimete kirisimasi christmas?
(for jack ross)

from the green sea against the grey sky
a band of light arises
red orange yellow green blue indigo violet
which the rain erases

from the land of the living
against the world of the dying
a voice of thanks arises
for those gifts sought and needed
for these lessons in avoidance and remedies
which the refusal to accept gratitude erases

but i do not care
you are you
i am me
sing I will
'thank you again'
this is christmas!

(copyright The Pohutukawa Press, 2006)


There's a slight sting in the tail there, I fear. Maybe a hint of admonition. I guess I'd like to talk the poem over with her now -- maybe I'm misreading. But all too late, unfortunately. Now it'll have to speak for itself.

That last gift of hers also enables me to put up a list (as complete as I can make it, at any rate), of the publications Theresia put out through her two imprints (you know us academics love to make lists -- and Theresia was no exception):

The Pohutukawa Press
has published

POETRY:

Soft Leaf Falls Of The Moon (1st ed. 1996, reprint misnamed 2nd ed. 1997, 3rd ed. 1999, 4th ed. 2003). (Apirana Taylor).

nothing is as physical as a poem (1997). (Robin McConnell).

City of Strange Brunettes (1998). (Jack Ross).

dreaming of flight (2002). (Dreu Harrison).

Tagata Kapakiloi: restless people (2004). (John Puhiatau Pule).

passages (2005). (Andre Antao).

Matua: parent (2006). (Rev. Mua Strickson-Pua).

PLAYS:

Apirana Taylor’s two plays in one volume Kohanga and Whaea Kairau: mother hundred eater (1999).

SHORT STORIES:

Iti Te Kopara: the bellbird is small (2000). (Apirana Taylor).


Christian Gray New Zealand
has published

COLLECTIONS OF POEMS:

That was Then (1998). (Lee Dowrick).

Pieces of Air (1999). (Alison Denham).

ANTHOLOGY:

when the sea goes mad at night (1999-2000). (ed. Theresia Liemlienio Marshall).


Twelve books in all -- a substantial legacy.

We're planning a celebration of Theresia's life and achievements to be held at Massey Albany sometime in March. If you'd be interested in coming along, or sharing your own memories of her -- either as colleague, friend, or teacher -- please get in touch.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Theresia

i.m. Dr. Theresia Liemlienio Marshall (1940-2007)

Once again I have to record a very sad event. My good friend and longtime colleague, Theresia Marshall, died unexpectedly in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 2007.

Where to begin when writing about Theresia?

We met first in (I think) 1992, when I was just beginning as a tutor at Auckland University. Theresia had already been teaching in the English Department there for a few years, while working towards her PhD, and seemed dauntingly knowledgeable about the various papers and their practices. She was never one to pull rank, though, and we hit it off from the start.

We really got to know each other, though, when she rang me up one day early in 1996 to ask if I’d like to help teach a writing paper at Massey Albany, the new campus which had just opened up on Auckland’s North Shore.

As it happened, I was rather anxious for a job at that moment, so the offer was little short of heaven-sent. For the rest of that semester we shared an office in the prefabs in the muddy building site which was then all that was visible of Massey’s Auckland venture (the main campus had scarcely been begun at that point). I’ve been grateful ever since for this act of kindness.

Virtually every semester since then we’ve worked together teaching Written Communication (with the odd lecture in New Zealand literature) at Massey. There have certainly been ups and downs, shifts of responsibility and premises, but this much has stayed constant over the last decade: we’ve always been supportive of one another.

Publisher

Soon after she started to teach at Albany, Theresia began a new career as a publisher. The first book issued by her imprint, The Pohutukawa Press, was Apirana Taylor’s fine book of poems Soft Leaf-falls of the Moon, in 1996. In fact, she told me she founded the press after hearing Api Taylor, then writer-in-residence on Massey’s Palmerston North campus, remark that he couldn’t find a publisher for his poems. She immediately volunteered to publish them herself, so great was her respect for his work.

The next book, a year later, was Robin McConnell’s book of sports poems Nothing is as Physical as a Poem, a characteristic piece of fine design married with powerful writing.

A year later, in 1998, she very generously issued my own first book of poems, City of Strange Brunettes, in tandem with a book of poems about the 1930s by Lee Dowrick, This was Then.

The Pohutukawa Press (and its brother imprint, Christian Gray New Zealand) never dealt in bulk or mass-market titles. There was always a steady demand for Api Taylor’s poems, plays and short stories, and for the various titles she continued to issue, mainly indigenous and Pacific Island poets (John Pule and Dreu Harrison were two I remember reviewing, but there were of course many others). They have and will continue to hold a place of honour both in the history of poetry and the history of fine printing in this country.

Writer

Theresia’s own book of poems, The Pohutukawa-Beringin Tree, was published by Ron Holloway’s Griffin Press in 1993 (a second edition came out in 1997). It’s a pioneering book in the history of multicultural writing in this country – particularly women’s writing. Theresia’s title, and the poems within, draw attention to her own Melanesian origins, and the ways in which both New Zealand and her native islands had shaped her.

Further information on this can be found in some of her own critical writings, as well as the poetry she continued to write throughout her life (I remember encouraging her, the last time we met, to work more concentratedly on her long-promised second volume of poems. She said she would. I hope the materials for such a book remain among her papers. Hers was a unqiue voice in Pacific poetry, as the samples I’m reprinting below will, I’m sure, demonstrate).

Among the prose works I can recall offhand are two long pieces contributed to brief during my editorship of that journal: "Kendrick Smithyman," in the special Smithymania issue (#26 (2003): 94-100), and a comprehensive review of Paul Sharrad’s Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature in issue #29 (2004): 93-100, where she discusses some of her own deeply-considered reactions to the question of Pacific self-representation.

Here, then, are two of the poems she published in brief (the intensely characteristic formatting is, alas, impossible to reproduce in the context of this blog entry):

yarn-spinning
(for c and l campbell)


hello officer of the law said i
on that damp night
of two twelve two thousand and one,
what have i done now?
alright – the truth is that the
commander
of her majesty’s navy
requested the pleasure of my company
to dine with his chief aboard the frigate.

the drinkies were just starting to make merry
when the chief’s sister drove us all off
to a brainstorming tour of the garden of eden where
our raconteur friend rendered clusters of insight into vanuatu-phlegm where
our story-teller cobber strung a rough sketch of singapore-sterility where …
our balladeer mate sang of jakarta-muddle
in polished final version, however, stifling bush-poetry vitality
altogether
frustrating my public tendency
to locate expectation of cultural conduct
in place of birth.

the air of confusion refused to clear
when we sat down to dinner at last
i ploughed into the kebab
while others were still serving
(and my parents rolled over in their grave)
i shouted
i honked
my appreciation thrice
nevertheless at the close
now i am on my way straight home of course.

it was anything but straight?
oh well - at least allow me my turn to say
"cobbers mates and friends
kia ora thank you for a whale of a time –
have a riot of delectable diversions at christmas!"
before you lock me up for the night.

[brief #27 (2003): 61-62]


harbour-bridging


into the shade of seagulls
one sparrow dived to
snatch a crumb or two from
under her eyeshadows

into the rays of sunrise
many powerpoles cast a track to
race a railfence or two alongside
the shadow of her eyes

in the shades and shadows
of bread and buttering
peace worn to a shadow
words catching at shadows,
a delicate shade of meaning
not afraid of its own shadow
she is a shade better today
may her shadow never grow less


[brief #30 (2004): 70].


Theresia Marshall was a subtle and painstaking scholar (her PhD work indexing the New Zealand contributors to Australian periodicals in the early twentieth century has already proved invaluable to more than one research project since), a gifted poet, an inspired teacher and a generous and insightful publisher.

I’ll miss her very much. So will all the hundreds of students whose lives she touched at Massey and elsewhere.

One of my last memories of her is her childlike delight in being taken out to a surprise lunch by this semester’s writing students. They knew she was something special. I hope the rest of us appreciated her enough while we had her.

One last story to conclude on:

One of Theresia’s jobs was working as Academic Director for a Language School in Newmarket. One day, whilst walking down a sidestreet there, she was pelted with eggs by some pakeha schoolboys, who shouted that she should "go home."

Most of us would be pretty upset by such an experience. Theresia, however, took note of the uniforms they were wearing, tracked down the school they came from, went there, demanded to see pictures of the pupils, found the faces of the two boys, had them hauled into the headmaster’s office, forced an apology from them, and made them acknowledge their shame.

That’s the kind of courageous, resourceful person that she was. She wasn’t content to accept, fatalistically, that that’s the kind of country we’re living in now.

Peace and love to you, Theresia. We won’t forget you -- ever.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Tony Chad on Leicester Kyle

Tony Chad writes in to say:

Hi Jack - strange though it may seem (I was in Mexico on 4th July) I have only just heard of Leicester's illness and passing - although I fondly kept in mind the thought of another visit to the West Coast and inevitably to Leicester's hideaway in the hills, I never did make it and now of course it is too late. I was deeply saddened and shocked to read the news in the August NZPS newsletter (only just received). I had (I think) 2 visits to Leicester's, where I enjoyed his hospitality and some memorable walks. These memories are often referred to in our home, and will I am sure, stay with me through time. He was indeed a real gentleman and touched many people's lives and hearts. As you so rightly remarked, he moved visitors to write poems about their visit... here attached is one from my latest book - all the best, Tony



Of chains & bondage & a walk in the bush

Two hours we journeyed in the faithful red land rover, the Ngakawau landscape instantly recognisable by the way the residents had transformed coal trolleys from the mines into flower boxes. We arrived safely at the secret parking place in the bush and travelled another hour on foot attended by the fantail and accompanied at times by bellbird, robin & tit. We smelled and glimpsed tiny native orchids and other memorable plants (whose names I forget), marvelled at gushing waterfalls, lunched on an island, carried the heavy rucksack by turn filling it with treasures until it was time once more for the faithful red land rover, a pint of Miners Dark at the Seddonville Hotel, then home to Millerton wondering who put chains around the trees, and why?
- Tony Chad (from Self Titled (HeadworX 2006)

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

We Were Talking



David Howard writes in to say that this poem by Leicester appeared in the Press today. I guess that as joint literary executors we can jointly give permission for it to appear here. Please also check out the fine obituaries here and here on the Reading the Maps blog ...

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Leicester Kyle 30.10.37-4.7.2006

[photo by Simon Creasey]


Leicester passed away this morning at 1.28 a.m.

"The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house."
-- Philip Larkin, "Aubade"

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

for Leicester Hugo Kyle, b.1937




Persistence of tussock
maxed-out Mastercard


Well, I’ve had some rather bad news. My friend Leicester Kyle is in extremis, with terminal cancer, at the Bone Marrow Unit of Christchurch Hospital. He’s elected to receive no further treatment for it, and his partner Carol circulated an email on the 18th of June warning his close friends and associates that he wasn’t long for this world.

As I write, a week later, they’re administering the Anglican last rites, or “final anointing.” David Howard – who was able to travel up from Dunedin to see Leicester one last time – just rang to tell me that, and also that he and I have been asked to be literary executors. I wish I could be there too. Writing this instead is, it seems, the best that I can do.


Barns raise rooftops
in reverse


Leicester’s wife Miriel died of cancer, too, a year or so after we first met. It was at a poetry workshop in 1997, actually – rather an auspicious day: the day I met Lee Dowrick and Stu Bagby, also. We’ve been friends and allies ever since.

The first Leicester I knew, then, was the Auckland Leicester – the man who invariably went along to Poetry Live on K Rd and sat there looking avuncular with his long white beard and broad-brimmed leather hat, before standing up to read some wry and witty verses to the assembled hipsters.


The scenic guard-rail’s

whited out


After Miriel’s death I asked him if there was anything I could do for him, anything at all to make things easier. He said that there was one thing, rather a trivial thing – if I were to organise a regular gathering of friends, perhaps weekly or fortnightly, to talk about poetry, that might be a nice distraction.

Accordingly Richard Taylor, Scott Hamilton, Leicester and I began a semi-regular series of meetings in the London Bar, punctuated by visits from the likes of Hamish Dewe, Michael Arnold, Miriam Bellard, Kirsty and Andrew McCully, as well as the boys from evasion ... Those meetings still continue, at Galbraith’s tavern, under the nom-de-plume of the brief organising committee. Leicester got us onto a good thing.


Charming Creek
takes an awkward turn


Then Leicester left. He bought a house, sight unseen, in the tiny village of Millerton, in the hills above Westport, and drove off there in his red Land Rover. It seemed a bit of a leap in the dark. I felt quite worried about him at first. But when I heard he’d acquired a little cat called Cursor (because he kept pace with the lines every time you turned over a new page in a book), I thought he’d be all right. And he was.

I visited Leicester in Millerton three times. The first time, in 1998, I flew down for ten days. The second time was after escaping that vast melancholy mud hole called the Gathering at the turn of the millennium. The third time, a few years later, I drove over in a rental car with David Howard for a week or so.


A naked tap
for Miner’s Dark


The lines I’ve been quoting above are from a poem called “Tips on Stress from Seddonville” which I wrote during my first sojourn in Millerton. We drove over there to buy some coal, after trying rather unsuccessfully to dig some out of one of the exposed coal seams that criss-cross the region (it looked bona-fide enough, but belched out acrid smoke whenever we tried to burn it).

The Tavern is, it appears, quite famous. We had a beer there, and then tried to compose some poems in each other’s manner. After a while the proprietor came over and remarked that there were two types of weather in Seddonville – if you can’t see the hills, it’s raining; if you can see them, it’s about to rain. Then he turned on the rugby. No poetry-scribbling drifters for him!

This is the poem I wrote that day, called “Kylesque.” I’m sure it doesn’t do him justice, though it later appeared in one of Tony Chad’s anthologies under the title “City Face”, so it must have touched some kind of chord:


Told yesterday
I had a ‘city
face’

this morning
I spent
practising
before the glass

insouciant sneers
atrocious leers
insolent stares

till I noticed
the espresso
had gone
cold

(9/7/98)

[As “City Face” – Valley Micropress 1: 11 (1998) 6;
All Together Now! A Celebration of New Zealand Culture by 100 Poets,
ed. Tony Chad (Wellington: Valley Micropress, 2000) 85].


After a while, as Leicester became more and more of an iconic figure on the West Coast (mainly because of his intense involvement in the fight to save the local environment from strip mining), I began to feel that someone should compile an anthology of the various poems and tributes to him which had begun to appear all over the place. Virtually everyone who visited seemed to want to write a poem about Millerton and his strange, old-man-of-the-mountain role in the community.

Tony Chad, David Howard, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Jim Norcliffe are just some of the writers I know who went there and wanted to record something of the extraordinary nature of the place.

So what will I miss most about Leicester? His wry sense of humour, above all, I suppose. In the very last letter he wrote me, just six weeks ago, he offers one parting reflection: “it isn’t really true that the quality of a poem has anything much to do with the beauty of the reader” – a typically sly and offbeat reaction to my own moonings over girls.

Also, his unfailing courtesy. He was a gentleman in the deepest sense of the term. When I heard how ill he was, a couple of months ago, I sent him an advance copy of the Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance anthology that I’d edited for AUP with Jan Kemp. I thought he might like it, hearing again the voices of Curnow, Glover, Tuwhare and the rest reading their iconic poems. Even from a cancer ward he took the trouble to ring up and thank me.

I was out at the time, so he had to leave a message. Is it sentimental of me to have saved it, and to play it back again now? The voice is thin and breathless – a shadow of what he used to sound like – but it’s so recognisably him:

Message recorded Sunday June the 4th, 12.27 pm:
“Hello Jack, this is Leicester. Just ringing to thank you very much for the poetry book. I think it’s a real triumph. The poems are so well chosen, and it’s really good to read New Zealand poetry all keeping such good company. So very thoughtful of you, and I’m reading it with great pleasure. Bye.”

I guess that’s the last time I’ll hear his voice. There are a thousand more stories I could tell. Maybe I will tell some more of them later on, but for the moment I just want to put on record my love and respect for that wise and complex man – priest, poet, conservationist – the Reverend Leicester Kyle.

Monday, June 26, 2006

for Leicester Kyle (2)

A Preliminary Bibliography


Longer Poems:
Koroneho: Joyful News out of the New Found World (1996)
[In A Brief Description of the Whole World, 6 (1997) – 9 (1998)]

Options. Mt Eden: Heteropholis Press, November, 1996. [& Maria (July, 1997)]

State Houses. Mt Eden: Heteropholis Press, June, 1997.

A Voyge to New Zealand: the Log of Joseph Sowry, Translated and Made Better . Mt Eden: Heteropholis Press, October, 1997.

Heteropholis. Mt Eden: Heteropholis Press, February 1998.

A Machinery for Pain. Millerton: Heteropholis Press, 1999.

A Safe House for a Man. Millerton: Heteropholis Press, 2000. [republished: Auckland: Polygraphia Ltd., 2000.]

Five Anzac Liturgies. Millerton, Buller, 2000. [republished: Auckland: Polygraphia Press, 2003.]

A Christmas Book. Millerton, Buller, 2000.

The Great Buller Coal Plateaux: A Sequence of Poems. P.O. Box 367, Westport: MAPPS [The Millerton and Plateaux Protection Society], 2001.

King of Bliss. Millerton, Buller, 2002.

Things to Do with Kerosene. Westport: Heteropholis Press, 2002.

A Wedding in Tintown. Millerton, Buller, 2002.

Dun Huang Aesthetic Dance. Millerton, Buller, 2002.

8 Great O’s. Millerton, Buller, 2003.

Panic Poems. Westport: Heteropholis Press, 2003.

Living at a Bad Address. Millerton, 2004.

Anogramma. Westport: Heteropholis Press, 2005.

Breaker: A Progress of the Sea. Illustrated by John Crawford. Millerton, Buller: Heteropholis Press, 2005.


Publications in brief (1995-2006):
[the magazine formerly known as: A Brief Description of the Whole World / ABDOTWW / description / ABdotWW / Ab.ww / brief. &c.]

Koroneho: Joyful News Out Of The New Found World / 6 (1997): 10-19
from Koroneho / 7 (1997): 35-40
from Koroneho / 8 (1997): 62-67
from Koroneho / 9 (1998): 49-54
Comparative Atmospheric Pressure; On Forest Culture / 10 & 11 (1998): 43-47
Marlowe overwritten / 13 (1999): 36-39
On The Principle Of New Zealand Weather / 14 (1999): 57-62
Errata / 15 (2000): 86
Mr. Buller To... / 16 (2000): 84
A Voyge to New Zealand / 18 (2000): 12-21
On The Great Buller Coal Plateau / 19 (2001): 38-40
Sign-off/ 20 (2001): 66-67
Mr Muir and Mr Emerson / 24 (2002): 75-77
from Dancing in the Cave / 25 (2002): 58, 60, 62
On Birchfield Fen / 27 (2003): 55-56
Spawning Galaxis / 29 (2004): 57
Death of a Landscape / 31 (2004): 83-92
Peninsula Days / 32 (2005): 61-64
A Letter from Buller/ 33 (2006): 44-45


Longer Prose:
The Abbot and the Rock [32 pp.] (c.1970s)

I Got Me Flowers: Letters to a Psychiatrist [54 pp.] (c. 1975)

Deosa Bay: A Pastoral [47 pp.] (c.1970s)

The Visitation; An Account of the Last Diocesan Visitation of John Mowbray, Bishop of Calcutta; Largely Compiled form His Journal and His Letters [68 pp.] (c.1970s)


Shorter Poems:
There were at least 475 of these, when I attempted a preliminary census in 1999. Heaven knows how many have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the seven years since ...

untitled

rustling
says Jack
and tentative

is the wind

that blows

over dead hills
on the Manukau


[© Leicester Kyle. Spin 31 (July, 1998): 31].

Der Berggeist



‘If there were no small pines in the fields,’ he murmured to himself. Such a fitting reference, I felt; far better than any new poem of mine could have been. I was most impressed.
– Diary of Lady Murasaki



[Monday, 3rd January – 10.55 a.m.]

Leicester has found a strange orchid, which he wishes to collect. Time for an orange-break.


Sunlight gleams

the leafy spot
we passed on the track

foaming, tannin-brown stream

miraculously green rock


“The weather’s not doing what it should be – I don’t have it properly trained” – Leicester Kyle in the Fisherman’s Rest, Granity.



Der Berggeist


Tom’s words laid bare the hearts of trees
– J. R. R. Tolkien



Bush-lawyer glow-worms
in the garden butcher’s
shop ground to stone
slabs Dracophyllum
Mountain Neinei Dr
Seuss Trees the yellow
orchid like
Aladdin’s cave a pothole
in the moors with water
flowing by
the Christmas
bush so long
as no-one mentions
anything to do
with Christmas

green like that stone
you picked up last
time from the Gentle
Annie



[Jack Ross, Chantal’s Book (Wellington: HeadworX, 2002) 95-96].

In the Ngakawau Gorge




Plastic arrows broken
off, DOC plaques
erode to
native yellow.

Detour, they said,
back on that
tramline
fuelled by gravity.

Irrupting from fern-
bush: creek, stream,
rill, foam-
berged, peat-

stained. No further
forth – no rain
(as yet). We sat,
said:

What does one do
with this? Cite
Rilke? Prate about
milady’s favours? Fail to

(9/7/98)


[Spin 32 (1998): 37].

A Clearer View of the Hinterland:

Leicester at Millerton


Absence of rapids on Ngakawau stream.

Big Ditch and Little Ditch Creek – impious hand bisects the ‘D.’

Cobweb of raindrops in dragon sun.

“Down, down, down from the high Sierras ...”

Electrical storms: intensity of affect.

Fund-raising at the Fire Depot.

Grey & white kitten, black robin, and black fantail.

Huffing into an Atlas stove.

“If you can see the hills, it’s going to rain.”

Jack said: “A succession of inner landscapes.”

Kiwis peck through sphagnum moss.

Leicester said: “A community devoted to male play.”

Millerton speaks – A Cannabis Landslide.

Nature tips – gorse is choked by bush.

Other landrovers get one wave.

Proud grey donkey; manure in a sack.

Quarrelling over the Fire Service.

“Rain has a persistency of grades, much noted by the locals.”

Siren: “I’m always free on Wednesday nights.”

Twin side-logs set for smoke-alarms.

Utopia St, Calliope Rd.

Village hall stained with camouflage paint.

White-packaged videos, too frank a stare.

X of three rocks marks one rare tussock.

“You have to say: Great! Awesome! Choice!”

668 – Neighbour of the Beast.


(7-10/7/98)


[Spin 36 (2000): 51].

[This alphabet poem, written during my first stay with Leicester at Millerton, was described by the one reviewer of that particular issue of Spin as "languid and oddly-themed" (Wayne Edwards. Small Press Review 334-5 (November-December 2000): 18). I've always taken that as some sort of backhanded compliment, though it may not have been meant that way at all ...]

for Leicester Kyle (1)

Here's the full text of an article I published in our lamentably shortlived print journal the pander early in 1999:

Leicester H. Kyle
Prophet without Honour


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The “moving” pun is intentional.

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

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

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

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


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

I must learn more

I’ll take to interstices

I’ll live in the wall that divides

I’ll watch with my bespectacled unblinking eye

I’ll see all sides

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


[Pander 6/7 (1999) 21 & 23].

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

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Coda


[photograph: Jack Ross (2006)]

Blinds
(at Massey Albany)


blocking
the wind’s
wolf-howl
as students
scribble

Judith
Fredricsen
walks past
towed by
her seeing-eye

dog
Hi Jack!
won’t stop
I stop
remember her

three months
after
the funeral
where Fairburn
walked


that poem
she cut out
read out
by me
he’s buried

over there