Fifth Anniversary (Wood)

[Pollinating bee log]

I started this blog on the 14th of June, 2006, so this is The Imaginary Museum's fifth anniversary. I'm afraid that the traditional material for a fifth anniversary present is wood (though modern gift-givers have replaced that with silverware, apparently). For myself, I'm sticking with the wood.

Why? On the one hand, because it's rather shocking to look at all those posts and see just how much time I must have spent typing away in these little blogger text boxes. What a woodenhead! On the other hand, though it's nice to think how much wood-pulp I must have saved by not printing it all out ...

This blog is only part of the story, though. From the very beginning I saw this as a project space: somewhere where I could try online text experiments. The very first thing I did with it, in fact, was to put up a bunch of topographical poems about Auckland, Roadworks, linked to a game-board with twin axes of time and space (okay, maybe that one wasn't all that successful, but I was looking for a three-dimensional way of arranging texts outside the conventions of the book-codex ...)

Quickly, though, I realised that the best way to use a single centralised site, like this one, was as a crossroads to other websites, each one of which could be adjusted to display different techniques and materials. The sidebar over there will testify to the sheer number of these experiments I've done over the past five years. Basically, though, they've boiled down to one big project per year - I'm not quite sure why. Every time I complete one of these things I tell myself Never again ...

So here they are, the "big five", in rough chronological order:

2007:



1. (November 6-December 3, 2007) Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive: Bibliographical Aids for the Use of Those Consulting the Waiata Archive (1974) and the AoNZPSA (2002-2004) - Audio Recordings available in Special Collections, University of Auckland Library and in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.



This website serves as an index to the contents of the:



Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive. Compiled and edited by Jan Kemp and Jack Ross, with assistance from Edmund King and Mark King. Materials collected by Jan Kemp, Elizabeth Alley, David Howard with Morrin Rout, and Richard Reeve with Nick Ascroft. (Special Collections Dept, Auckland University Library). [40 CDs Audio / 2 CDs Texts].


which is a project I worked on pretty intensively from 2002 to around 2008, when the last of the three linked audio / text anthologies I edited with Jan Kemp (Classic, Contemporary and New New Zealand Poets in Performance) was issued by Auckland University Press. We still get quite a lot of hits. There are 200-odd poets' pages included on the site, and I update it periodically with new information (on request).





2008:



2. The R.E.M. [Random Excess Memory] Trilogy (2000-2008):
   • (January 19-30, 2008) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 1]: Nights with Giordano Bruno: A Novel.
   • (January 20-February 13, 2008) [[The R.E.M. Trilogy, 2 - The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis]: Who am I? Automatic Writing.
   • (January 20-February 13, 2008) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 2 - The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis]: Where am I? Cuttings.
   • (August 15, 2006-September 3, 2007) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 3 - EMO]: EVA AVE– Inheritor of silence / shall I be? / Black mass below us / above us / only sky …
   • (August 16, 2006-September 3, 2007) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 3 - EMO]: Moons of Mars – Welcome / to the new reality / Nothing’s stranger / than the will / to survive …
   • (August 15, 2006-September 3, 2007) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 3 - EMO]: Ovid in Otherworld – Wild geese draw lines / across an amber sky / fish bask / in frozen rivers / generators die …



Between 2000 and 2008 I published a trilogy of novels, which are now available in their entirety on these six linked sites: one for Nights with Giordano Bruno (Wellington: Bumper Books, 2000), two for The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Auckland: Titus Books, 2006), and three for EMO (Auckland: Titus Books, 2008). Of course, they're still a lot easier to read in their original print copies, but one must continue to experiment with new formats (I suppose).





2009:



3. Academica (1984-1995):
   • (April 14-August 22, 2009) John Masefield: Early Novels 1908-1911. MA Thesis (University of Auckland, 1984-86).
   • (April 14-July 22, 2009) Versions of South America: An Elusive Identity: Versions of South America from Aphra Behn to the Present Day. PhD Thesis (University of Edinburgh, 1986-90).
   • (August 22, 2006-September 26, 2007) Scheherazade’s Web: The Thousand and One Nights and Comparative Literature.



This is an obeisance to the amount of time I've spent bumbling around in Academia: a complete online version of my MA & PhD theses and my post-Doctoral research (respectively: Auckland University, 1984-85 / Edinburgh University, 1986-90 / Massey & Auckland Universities, 1991-95). Since most of this stuff was composed in the transitional period before the digital age (the Masters thesis on a typewriter, in fact), it had to be scanned and re-edited before I was able to put it up online. Was it all worth it? Who knows? At any rate, there it all is, awaiting the curious ...





2010:



4. (June 1, 2009-July 4, 2010) A Gentle Madness: A Catalogue of My Book Collection: Geographical by Locations & Indexed by Categories.



It may not sound like much when you put it like that, but this was definitely the most laborious of these projects. It does seem worth all the time and trouble it took now, though - it's awful not to be able to locate a book you know you own when you really need it ...





2011:



5. (February 17-June 11, 2011) Leicester Kyle: An Index to the Collected Poems of Leicester Hugo Kyle (1937-2006).



And, last but not least, a work in progress: the online edition of my old friend Leicester Kyle's Collected Poems which I've been engaged on since the beginning of this year. It's just a tease at present, as the site is not yet complete. All you can access for the moment is the overall index, which lists all the works which will you eventually be able to consult in their entirety. This portion of the site does include a bibliography and reprints of all the secondary literature on Leicester I've been able to locate to date, however.

At times I despair at the magnitude of what still remains to be done on this project, but I suppose I can just continue to chip away at it gradually. Watch this space, though. I'm hoping to put out a limited edition of some late poems of Leicester's later this year, and the full text site should be online - albeit only in part - by July or so (I hope).

(By the way, any help in identifying the other person in this photo of Leicester Kyle in Auckland in the mid-90s - and the venue, and the photographer - would be greatly appreciated:)

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)

The 13 Book-launches of Dr J.

[Chris Cole Catley, Jack Ross & guest at Golden Weather launch, Takapuna Public Library]

"There's no such thing as a free launch"

-- Murray Edmond (attrib.)

I guess it's probably one of those old adages like "prise the gun from my cold, dead fingers" which endlessly migrates from speaker to speaker, but there's nevertheless a fair amount of truth in it.

As time goes by, you begin to learn the rules, however idealistic you were going in: always site the book-table near the exit (so that no-one can escape bookless without running the gauntlet of your reproachful gaze); never stint on food and drink (especially the latter-- you want to induce a false sense of euphoria in your guests); don't let the speeches go on too long; and (if possible) include a musician or a juggler or something novel to liven things up; only invite people who are likely to buy the book (that rules out the very rich and the very poor: too canny and too needy respectively).

It's with a certain amount of horror that I realise that the recent Classic Poets booklaunch was actually my thirteenth -- hence the melodramatic title of this post (I guess I was thinking of that old Dr Seuss film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T; or else maybe The Nine Gates of the Land of Shadow, that Satanic tract in the Roman Polanski film The Ninth Gate, which damns everyone who looks at it to eternal perdition ...)

So here they are, in reverse order of occurrence:

1. 2006 (20 July) -- Peter Simpson & Elizabeth Caffin launch Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance, edited by Jack Ross & Jan Kemp (Auckland: AUP), in the Hobson Room, Jubilee Hall, Parnell. MC: Jack Ross. Readers: Riemke Ensing, Anne Kennedy, Alistair Paterson, Jack Ross, C K Stead, Richard von Sturmer & Sonja Yelich.
2. 2006 (15 June) -- Gabriel White, Scott Hamilton & Brett Cross launch The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis, by Jack Ross, & Bill Direen’s Song of the Brakeman (Auckland: Titus Books), at the University of Auckland English Department Common Room.MC: Michele Leggott. Readers: Jack Ross & Olwyn Stewart.
3. 2005 (16 November) -- Mary Paul & Grant Duncan launch Where Will Massey Take You? Life Writing 2, edited by Jack Ross (Massey University: School of Social & Cultural Studies) in the Common Room, Atrium Building, Massey @ Albany.
4. 2005 (21 May) -- Mike Johnson & Brett Cross launch Trouble in Mind , by Jack Ross, Olwyn Stewart’s Curriculum Vitae , & Bill Direen’s Coma (Auckland: Titus Books), at Shanghai Lil’s, corner of Anzac Rd & Customs St.
5. 2004 (24 October) -- Roger Horrocks & Raewyn Alexander launch Monkey Miss Her Now, by Jack Ross (Auckland: Danger Publishing), at the George Fraser Gallery, University of Auckland.
6. 2004 (19 September) -- George Wood, the Mayor of the North Shore, & Chris Cole Catley launch Golden Weather: North Shore Writers Past & Present, edited by Graeme Lay & Jack Ross (Auckland: Cape Catley), at the Takapuna Public Library.
7. 2004 (12 September) -- Jan Kemp & Jack Ross launch the Aotearoa / New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive (Auckland University Library: Special Collections), at the Titirangi Pioneer Hall, Auckland. MC: Jack Ross. Readers: C K Stead, Janet Charman, Stu Bagby, Riemke Ensing, Mike Johnson, Paula Green, Bob Orr , & Sonja Yelich.
8. 2003 (4 June) -- Tina Shaw & A/Prof Mike O’Brien launch [your name here]: Life Writing, edited by Jack Ross (Massey University: School of Social & Cultural Studies) in the Common Room, Atrium Building, Massey @ Albany.
9. 2002 (10 November) -- Alistair Paterson launches Chantal's Book, by Jack Ross (Wellington: HeadworX) at the Birdcage Tavern, 133 Franklin Rd, Ponsonby.
10. 2000 (14 December) -- Alan Brunton launches Nights with Giordano Bruno, by Jack Ross, & Sally Rodwell’s Gonne Strange Charity (Wellington: Bumper Books), at The Space, 146 Riddiford Street, Newtown, Wellington.
11. 2000 (10 December) -- Professor D. I. B. Smith launches Nights with Giordano Bruno, by Jack Ross (Wellington: Bumper Books), at 6 Hastings Rd, Mairangi Bay.
12. 2000 (1 October) -- Jack Ross & Gabriel White launch A Town Like Parataxis, text by Jack Ross, photos by Gabriel White (Auckland: Perdrix Press) at 23 Maxwell Ave, Westmere.
13. 1998 (25 September) -- Theresia Marshall launches City of Strange Brunettes, by Jack Ross, & Lee Dowrick’s That was Then ((Auckland: Pohutukawa Press), at the Takapuna Public Library.

I guess my main impression, looking at this line-up, is to marvel at the number of people who've helped me and my collaborators out over the years. I mean, I have tried to do my bit to reciprocate, but it doesn't make nearly such an impressive list:

1. 2005 (5 December) -- Launched Richard von Sturmer’s Suchness: Zen Poetry and Prose (Wellington: HeadworX), with music by Don McGlashan, at the St Columba Centre, 40 Vermont Street, Ponsonby.
2. 2005 (20 October) -- MC, with Ahmed Esau, introducing Riemke Ensing, Deborah Manning, and Bill Manhire, at the launch of Ahmed Zaoui’s Migrant Birds: 24 Contemplations (Nelson: Craig Potton Books), in the Crypt of St. Benedict’s Church, Newton.
3. 2005 (17 October) -- Launched Bill Direen’s New Sea Land and Stephen Oliver’s Either Side The Horizon , with Alistair Paterson, launching Olivia Macassey’s Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Auckland: Titus Books) at Rakino’s, High Street, Auckland.
4. 2004 (17 July) -- Launch, with Jan Kemp, Olivia Macassey, and Richard von Sturmer, of nzepc feature: 12 Taonga from the Aotearoa / New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, at the Gus Fisher Gallery, Shortland St, Auckland.
5. 2000 (21 July) -- Organised the book-launch of Leicester Kyle’s A Safe House for a Man (Auckland: Polygraphia Press) at the Takapuna Public Library.

I suppose they can be quite fun sometimes -- meeting your pals, scarfing bread & cheese, making sure you're next to the drinks table when the speeches begin ... next time you go to one, though, do remember that you are expected at least to consider buying the book. Otherwise it's a bit like spending all afternoon tasting fine vintages at the vineyard and then rolling off without having purchased a single bottle -- it can be done, but it is a little gauche.

Really, though, I just want to put on record my thanks to all of you excellent people who have taken the trouble to come along on these many, many occasions. I guess your true reward will have to be postponed till you reach the next world, because it's unlikely to come in this one. I hope you take some satisfaction in knowing that you truly are the salt of the earth ...

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 ...

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"

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.

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.