The Poetics of the Denniston Plateau

Leicester in Millerton
[photograph: Jack Ross (2000)]

Here's the abstract the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (which I belong to) a re sending out for a talk I'll be giving at Massey Albany next week:

The Poetics of the Denniston Plateau

In a recent reflection piece on the mining of the Denniston Plateau in NZ Geographic magazine [# 122 (July-August, 2013): 114], Editor-at–large Kennedy Warne asked:

To what extent … did John Hanlon’s song “Damn the Dam”, which topped the singles chart for 1973, help tip the balance against the raising of Lake Manapouri? Did Grahame Sydney’s paintings and Brian Turner’s poems celebrating Central Otago landscapes influence public perception of a wind farm proposal for the Lammermoor Range?

He goes on to speculate that “perhaps a shared cultural esteem offers a more resilient protection than laws ever can.”

In this paper I would like to examine the ongoing influence of poet Leicester Kyle’s cultural and conservationist activism on the West Coast during the last seven years of his life, from 1998 to 2006. During this period he published a number of books and poems critical of Solid Energy’s plans for the development of the Stockton Plateau – most prominently The Great Buller Coal Plateaux (2001).

Warne concludes his piece in NZ Geographic as follows:

… for me … it is Kyle who catches the breath of this place and warns of the impending silence – just as he did for Happy Valley, the contentious Solid Energy mining site near Stockton. In his lament for that landscape, he spoke of the birds, writing poignantly: “they have no song for apocalypse”.

Could it be that it is only now, seven years after his death, that Kyle’s work is beginning to have the influence he hoped for it all along? In what sense can (or should) poetry aspire to have agency in cases such as this?

•

Dr Jack Ross is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University's Albany Campus. His latest book Celanie: Poems and Pictures after Paul Celan, a collaboration with artist Emma Smith, appeared in 2012 from Pania Press. His other publications include three full-length poetry collections, three novels, and three volumes of short fiction. He has also edited a number of books and literary magazines, including (with Jan Kemp) the trilogy of audio / text anthologies Classic, Contemporary and New NZ Poets in Performance (AUP, 2006-8). He blogs at The Imaginary Museum.

The Rev. Leicester Kyle (1937-2006) spent the last seven years of his life living in the tiny hamlet of Millerton, on the west coast of the South Island. Jack Ross – in association with Kyle’s other literary executor, David Howard – has been instrumental in setting up the website at http://leicesterkyle.blogspot.co.nz/ (2011-2013) to publicize Kyle’s work and make his collected writings accessible online.

•

Here are the address details (and a little map), if any of you would like to come along (the talk is free, open to all, and we might even run to some wine and biscuits if the college is feeling especially generous):

Wednesday, October 2nd

4.00-5.00 pm

COHSS Seminar Series

Staff Lounge AT3.50
Atrium Building (3rd Floor)
Gate 1
Albany Campus
Massey University

Atrium building, Albany Campus
[photograph: Jack Ross]

Leicester Kyle: Selected Shorter Poems

"Another Rare Botanical Discovery for the Millerton Botanist!"
(Jim Conolly: 2005)

Yesterday I finished posting online the last major remaining section of Leicester Kyle's posthumous poetic works: a selection of his shorter poems, the ones he didn't himself collect in book form during his lifetime.

It's a bit under two years (15 February, 2011, to be exact) since David Howard wrote to me suggesting that we finally bite the bullet and face up to our duties as Leicester's officially designated literary executors. The dual website that resulted, one site devoted to indexing and secondary literature, the other to primary texts, which we launched on July 4th 2011, is now substantially complete.

Of course there are still a number of things to do: I need to make a list of his published poems in periodicals from the copies included in his archive (the remaining sections of which I collected from David when I was down in Dunedin in June last year). The - very perfunctory - chronology page on the website needs a lot of work, too.

Those are inessential tasks, though, I feel, when set alongside the basic imperative of getting the bulk of his work up online so it can be read by poetry-lovers and ecologists everywhere.

That's not to say that I'm anticipating an avalanche of interest: just that I think that Leicester's unique blend of environmental activism, combined with spiritual acuity and a lively interest in postmodern aesthetics, makes him a very useful role model for contemporary poets. If he has anything to say to writers grappling with similar issues in their work right now, then his writings have to be available. In that sense, then, I think David and I have fulfilled our trust. I hope so, anyway.

Leicester was a very good friend of mine, but he was not always the easiest of men to get on with. The surviving volumes of his diary (in particular) contain some very unvarnished word portraits which I doubt he would have wished to be made public. Similarly, there are a good many tentative and unsuccessful pieces in the two fileboxes labelled "Collected Poems," which contained (as he told me) all the work in this genre he wished to preserve.

While I've thought it best to present in full all of the finished works he left us with: the 19 books extending from Options (1996 / 1997) to Breaker (2005), as well as complete texts of those which were substantially complete (albeit unpublished) at his death: Message from a Lightboard (1996), Koroneho (1996 / 2011), The Galapagos Tracts (c.1999-2006) and the God Poems (c.2005), I've accordingly been far more selective with the shorter poems.

Boxfiles I-IV (of 8)

To give you a sense of what I mean, here are a few statistics to mull over:

• 19 published books (1996-2005) = 913 pp.
• 4 posthumous books (1996-2006) = 303 pp.
• 2 boxfiles of shorter poems (1983-2006) = 957 pp.

To be more precise, there are 746 poems and sequences included in the two boxfiles (some in more than one version). This translates to 860 separate poems, occupying the 957 pages listed above. Quite a few of them (66, to be precise [= 80 poems / pages]) are, admittedly, included in one or other of the 23 books. But then there are another 36 uncollected poems among his computer files, not to mention various miscellaneous verses in Christmas cards, pamphlets, etc.

In all, then, I've so far counted up 2194 pages of poetry left behind by Leicester on his death. The 23 major books account for 1216 pp. of this. I've also posted 14 pp. of miscellaneous pamphlets and ephemera, plus 24 of the 36 uncollected poems on the website. Of the remaining 746 shorter poems and sequences, I've selected roughly a quarter, 193 [200/680 poems; 253/957 pages]. This brings the grand total up to 1570 pp. of his poetry now available online.

I think that's enough. Admittedly it's a subjective judgement. There are still 488 poems and sequences (530 separate poems / 624 pp.) left: all accessible in typescript, and some available as wordfiles also. Future students are welcome to look them over, but I don't myself feel that it would add greatly to his reputation to publish them all online at present. Even Keats and Pushkin must blush to see some of the slighter verses included in their collected works by sedulous editors. The time may come when that's appropriate for Leicester Kyle as well, but that time is not yet.

So, in any case, here they all are:

•


Collected Poems I: 1983-1998

Shorter Poems: 1
(1983-1995)

Contents:


1. Grapefruit [1983]
2. In a New Country [n.d.]
3. Hallelujah [June 1994]
4. Kerikeri, 1946 [n.d.]
5. Dancing Maria [n.d.]
6. Ancient Worship [n.d.]
7. Coal Kingdom [March 1995]
8. Pipes [April 1995]
9. House Guest [n.d.]
10. Edge [July 1995]



Shorter Poems: 2
(1995-1996)

Contents:


11. I Love You (for Miriel) [n.d.]
12. Quietly [Sept 1995]
13. Maundy Thursday at the Mangonui Pub [n.d.]
14. God [n.d.]
15. Karamea Jones [n.d.]
16. Blue Orchids at Burnetts Face [n.d.]
17. Unworldly Thoughts in an Auckland Brothel [n.d.]
18. Walking to Taylor's [n.d.]:
    • Clematis
    • The Heads
    • Geckos
    • Water
    • Cave Houses
    • My Father
19. Caravan Club [n.d.]
20. Where Do I Want to Be [14/1/96]
21. Time Please [n.d.]
22. A Walk Around My Church [n.d.]
23. Living on the Cheap [n.d.]
24. I do magic ... [n.d.]
25. Clean Café [n.d.]
26. My Father’s House [n.d.]
27. Sweeney on a Bicycle [n.d.]
28. A Visit to My Psychiatrist [23/9/96]
29. A Cliff on Mt. Owen [n.d.]



Shorter Poems: 3
(1996-1997)

Contents:


30. His Place [n.d.]
31. Re-Possession [n.d.]
32. Deep Throat [n.d.]
33. Morning Magic [n.d.]
34. Your Spirit Comes to the Aid of My Weakness [n.d.]
35. A Visit from the North [n.d.]
36. On the Slab [n.d.]
37. Sometime in the eighties ... [n.d.]
38. Greymouth [n.d.]
39. The Christchurch Botanical Gardens Horticultural Apprentices’ Mutual Improvement Society [n.d.]
40. Breakfast in Our Block [n.d.]
41. This Book of Ours [3/10/96]
42. Goethe in Sicily [3/10/96]
43. Hound [n.d.]
44. Ancient Worship [n.d.]
45. Ibn al Farid (Cairo, 1280) [n.d.]
46. It’s so quiet ... [21/2/97]



Shorter Poems: 4
(1997-1998)

Contents:


47. Mavis [n.d.]
48. Day From Under A Lillypilly [n.d.]
49. Last Night At Poetry Live [1/5/97]
50. Comfort Stop [5/5/97]
51. Passing On [5/5/97]
52. ‘The nothing, not pure nothing, left over …’ [5/5/97]
53. Ornebius aperta(new-settled from Australia) [21/5/97]
54. Letter to Lorine (Niedecker) [21/5/97]
55. Twice Shy [21/5/97]
56. Villas in Milton Street [6/6/97]
57. A Letter from Elise [24/6/97]
58. Mary's Yard [24/6/97]
59. A Question At The End Of The Line [11/9/97]
60. The Lady Meets The New Land [11/9/97]
61. Death [30/9/97]
62. Precinct [30/9/97]
63. Epithalamion (for Anna and Richard, 14.6.97) [12/6/97]
64. By Touch [10/10/97]
65. To Live In A Cave [31/10/97]
66. rustling / says Jack ... [31/10/97]
67. An Artichoke In The White Garden At Gledswood [25/11/97]
68. On hot spring nights ... [27/11/97]
69. On The Way [27/11/97]
70. Small Change [27/11/97]
71. If I Were a Tree [27/11/97]
72. The Tent [31/12/97]
73. This ... [31/12/97]
74. Last Lost [31/12/97]
75. Her Grand-son’s Son [n.d.]:
    • When you found out …
    • Remember though …
    • Meet me Mama when I do …
76. If I don’t get my words out ... [12/2/98]
77. At A Time Of Sickness [12/2/98]
78. Birthday [17/3/98]
79. The Other Half [17/3/98]
80. Bivouac [17/3/98]
81. Independence Day [31/3/98]
82. Thelymitra pulchella [16/4/98]
83. Death In A Tower Block [16/4/98]
84. At Night [16/4/98]
85. Liturgy (for Miriel) [16/4/98]




Collected Poems II: 1998-2006

Shorter Poems: 5
(1998-1999)

Contents:


86. Surf [3/6/98]
87. I saw the soul ... [3/6/98]
88. An Incomplete List [3/6/98]
89. Over The Hill [3/6/98]
90. An Answer to the Last Thing [17/7/98]
91. Burnett’s Face [17/7/98]
92. Metrosideros [17/7/98]
93. Home Thoughts by a Rough Sea [18/7/98]
94. Sunday Morning at Millerton [19/7/98]
95. My Home [20/8/98]
96. Water Lines [n.d.]
97. Driftwood [20/9/98]
98. Dear Judy [21/10/98]
99. Cursor in a Tangled Field [23/10/98]
100. As In Burden Bound [27/11/98]
101. Marlowe Overwritten [3/12/98]
102. An Argument With Houses [22/1/99]
103. Below the Fall [23/3/99]
104. Life on the Flatlands [23/3/99]
105. New Year at Millerton [28/4/99]
106. Whistler’s Mother [21/5/99]
107. Local Resources [3/6/99]
108. The Call [3/6/99]
109. The Bones of an Arse [13/7/99]
110. A Rule [16/7/99]
111. Puzzle Poem [16/7/99]
112. My Coughing Cat [Sept ’99]
113. From ----, With Love [Sept ’99]
114. My New Flower [21/10/99]
115. The Buried Village [21/10/99]
116. It’s a stubborn day ... [2/12/99]
117. “The River Sluices with Many Voices” [2/12/99]



Shorter Poems: 6
(1999-2004)

Contents:


118. At The Falls [4/4/00]
119. Outage [4/4/00]
120. The City Lies Foursquare [n.d.]
121. Mr. Gonzales [10/5/00]
122. Battle of the Bands [10/5/00]
123. Lyn’s Zinnias [14/8/00]
124. The Great Buller Coal Plateaux [10/10/00]
125. Omnia Propter Femina [10/10/00]
126. Cars Cash and Convertibles [8/11/00]
127. I am two weathers ... [11/11/00]
128. The Plateau [11/11/00]
129. Downpour [30/10/01]
130. The Lesser Leptopteris [30/10/01]
131. Trail-Blazer [n.d.]
132. A Bone at the Bushline [n.d.]
133. Before the Throne [n.d.]
134. Summer, Sumner, 1946 [n.d.]
135. Mr Muir and Mr Emerson [n.d.]
136. A Work Of Love In Remembering One Dead [31/5/02]
137. The Impresario’s Muse [31/5/02]
138. Poa cita [31/5/02]
139. Endstop [20/12/02]
140. Posterity [20/12/02]
141. The Pit-Ponies' Picnic [1/7/03]
142. Swing-Bridge [1/7/03]
143. Night Shelter [28/8/03]
144. (Proust Says) [12/9/03]
145. I Like It When The Sun Doesn’t Shine [12/9/03]
146. Happy Valley [31/10/03]
147. In High Fog [20/1/04]



Shorter Poems: 7
(2004-2006)

Contents:


148. A Person, Two; if not the Sun [22/1/04]
149. ‘To Father Huc’s tree of Tartary / on which we are each leaves’ poetry.’ [26/1/04]
150. Ev [30/1/04]
151. If the words say silence suffers less / They suffer silence [26/3/04]
152. Portent [7/5/04]
153. The Tinder Box [7/5/04]
154. Mother [7/5/04]
155. View From the Roundabout [16/5/04]
156. Home [16/5/04]
157. Native At Midnight [16/5/04]
158. Diary Of A Country Cop [17/6/04]
159. To a Daughter Who Has Taken Her Life [11/8/04]
160. For A Lost Longdrop [16/12/04]
161. Tell Me [6/1/05]
162. Water Talk [6/1/05]
163. The Little Mermaid [6/1/05]
164. Useless Love [6/1/05]
165. Educating The Stream [6/1/05]
166. Opus [6/1/05]
167. The Four Comforts [4/2/05]
168. Scar [8/2/05]
169. The Toro Tree [8/2/05]
170. Gloomy Friday [15/3/05]
171. When The Bus Stops [4/7/05]
172. The Rain-Callers [4/7/05]
173. Herodotus [7/7/05]
174. Paris [8/7/05]
175. The New Mayor at the Old Mine [11/10/05]
176. time out [17/10/05]
177. Pre-Loved Days [16/1/06]

Rain:



Quiet Rain [19/1/06]

The Southerly [19/1/06]

Welcome [2/2/06]

Yesterday [2/2/06]

Flood [2/2/06]

From The East [2/2/06]

Night Rain [2/2/06]

With Ice [2/2/06]

Of Earth and Sky [2/2/06]

178. The Botanist and his Dog [15/2/06]
179. The Tree [15/2/06]
180. The Sky Must Fall [15/2/06]
181. We Were Talking [15/2/06]
182. Nematoceras triloba [n.d.]
183. The Creeping Sky Lily [n.d.]
184. Actinotus suffocta [n.d.]



Uncollected Poems

Contents:


185. After They Left [n.d.]
186. Blue Orchid [n.d.]
187. Braided River [n.d.]
188. By Hand [n.d.]
189. Clearance [n.d.]
190. Close-up [n.d.]
191. From the Dam, the Day After [n.d.]
192. Give to the Flower [n.d.]
193. Grace on the Plateau [25/12/99]
194. In a Secular Time [n.d.]
195. My Amiable Mate [n.d.]
196. Our New Snail [n.d.]
197. Photograph [n.d.]
198. Porphyry Reef [n.d.]
199. Potter’s Coil [n.d.]
200. Rising Damp [n.d.]
201. Sunday Late at Grafton [n.d.]
202. Tai Poutini [n.d.]
203. The End of the Day [n.d.]
204. The Hairdresser and the Hat [n.d.]
205. The Last Day [31/12/99]
206. Uncomfort Rock [n.d.]
207. Utu [n.d.]
208. Weak Before You [n.d.]



Pamphlets & Ephemera
(1996-2005)

Contents:


209. Christmas letter (1998)
210. Christmas letter (c.1999)
211. Red Dog / Brown (2005):
     • Red Dog / Brown
     • Where Francis first sang to St. Clare
     • Rules of Engagement

"Red" (2005)
(Jocelyn Maughan: Patonea, NSW)


•

I thought I'd finish by reprinting one of those Christmas messages. It seems somehow to sum up how I feel about the whole enterprise, now that it's (mostly) finished, as well as being a beautiful elegy for Leicester's first wife Miriel:

REMEMBER MIRIEL, D. 29.3.98.

I’ve worked for you
for forty years or so,
wandering about
in some pretty strange places,
and liked it.

Thanks, God,
it’s been good.
You treated me well
and watched over those
whom I love.

But now, if you will,
let me be.
Let me off the hook
for a time,
to loaf in the garden,
write a poem or two,
and read a book.

Then, when I go to bed,
give me a long sleep,
and strength for a good work.

•

Leicester Kyle in the NZ Geographic

[NZ Geographic 116 (2012)]

I had an interesting phone conversation a couple of months ago with journalist Kennedy Warne, who was working on an article about the implications of further strip-mining of coal on the West Coast of the South Island. He'd just come across my Leicester Kyle website, and was fascinated - above all - by Leicester's lyrical sequence of protest poems The Great Buller Coal Plateaux (2001).

I'm happy to see that he's included a number of citations from Leicester in the article which has just appeared in the latest issue of New Zealand Geographic, which he was kind enough to send me a copy of (nor is it true that the hirsute creature in the picture above is intended as any kind of satirical reflection on Leicester's own magnificent set of silver whiskers ...). Here's one example, from the beginning of "The Black and the Green":

... Thin, cold, acidic soils and scant nutrients stunt growth. On the Denniston Plateau, life adopts a low profile.

You might expect such a place to have a pinched austerity about it — sour, waterlogged, battered by the elements, a po-faced bog. Yet the land surges with beauty. I walk across it and discover what the late poet Leicester Kyle, from Millerton, just north of here, called an "untrod field of singing flowers". Sprays of pink, insect-devouring sundews mingle with swards of tufting mosses. Each sprigleaf hair is tipped with a single droplet of dew. Crouching at ground level, I gaze across a field of sparkling globes. ...

I thoroughly recommend reading Kennedy Warne's article as a whole. I have to say that it horrified me to discover just how little of the pakihi land Leicester and others were struggling to save a decade ago is left now. The Millerton Plateau is, it seems, pretty much a done deal. The struggle now is to learn from that lesson, and try to avoid the same ecological devastation on the Denniston plateau, a bit further south.

[Forest & Bird]

The Leicester Kyle Project: Phase Two

Leicester's house at Millerton
(Oct 2005)

Well, it's been a long time coming, but I thought it was about time that I provided an update on how I was getting on with uploading Leicester Kyle's collected works.

Phase one (documented here) was posting all of Leicester's twenty-odd published books online. This is now substantially complete, though a good deal of proof-reading and reformatting still needs to be done.

Phase two is putting up a substantial selection from his posthumous papers and files. That's what I'm engaged on now, and hope to complete by the end of this year.

So far I can record the following discoveries:

1. The Galapagos Tracts [A4: 74 pp.]

   Leicester's own description of this work, taken from the cv he compiled for a Creative New Zealand funding application in 2000, was as follows:

   Poetry based upon material in the first ten issues of ‘The Transactions of the N.Z. Institute’ (1867-1876).

   I remember Leicester showing me the ringbinder where he inserted each new instalment in this series of oddball found poems and pageworks extracted from that bizarre would-be scientific journal on one of my trips to Millerton in the late 90s.
   
   At the time I - rather impertinently, in retrospect - considered it far too esoteric and self-indulgent to be a practical publishing proposition. Now I think I can see more clearly what Leicester was driving at.
   
   I was very sorry to see that the contents of this ringbinder had not been included among the poems in the two boxfiles David Howard entrusted to me after Leicester's death. It's therefore with great satisfaction that I can announce that 51 of the 56 poems included in Leicester's own index to the Tracts have been recovered from among his online files.
   
   While admittedly still incomplete, I think that this gives us a pretty good idea of Leicester's overall intentions for the work. The text is now up, though the transcription needs to be reformatted before it's really usable.




2. God Poems [A4: 56 pp.]

   These poems and short prose pieces, constructed on the model of Dante's Vita Nuova, chronicle the decline and fall of a family - Leicester's own.
   
   There's something Job-like in the intensity with which Leicester interrogates and inquires into the processes of God in this sequence, meant originally (apparently) to be performed as a kind of slide-show with photographs.
   
   Whether he ever intended to publish it is less certain. For myself, I believe that the questions that Leicester asks here are of more than purely personal interest. The work is complete, though some of the ordering of the individual pieces is conjectural.




3. Five Millerton Sequences (2011) [A5: c.90 pp.]

   I'm hoping to publish this selection from Leicester's Millerton poems sometime later this year - details to be announced on this blog (and hopefully elsewhere as well). They would have come out in 2011, but the chance to do a print edition of Koroneho instead (as I describe here) was too serendipitous to ignore.

So what's left to do?

There are a good many more articles and nature pieces to be added to the page of Miscellaneous Prose. The Bibliography, Chronology, and Index of Titles all need a lot more work.

The most time-consuming task of all, though, will be sorting through the 750-odd shorter poems Leicester left behind in his two large box-files, and making a judicious selection from them available online.

I've decided to group them on seven pages, for more convenient reference:

1. Selected Shorter Poems: 1 (1983-July 1995)
2. Selected Shorter Poems: 2 (July 1995-September 1996)
3. Selected Shorter Poems: 3 (September 1996-March 1997)
4. Selected Shorter Poems: 4 (May 1997-April 1998)
5. Selected Shorter Poems: 5 (June 1998-December 1999)
6. Selected Shorter Poems: 6 (December 1999 - January 2004)
7. Selected Shorter Poems: 7 (January 2004-February 2006)

As well as all that, there's also a page of Miscellaneous Poems: my selection of 24 of the 38 unclassified poems I found while trawling through Leicester's computer files.



What else? Well, there's now a gallery of images, which I'm very keen to expand, if anyone would like to send me any relevant photographs or drawings they have access to.

•

[Short Takes on Long Poems]

I'd also like to use this post to advertise the upcoming poetry symposium on Thursday-Friday (29-30 March, 2012) at Auckland University.

I'll be giving a short paper entitled "Digitising Leicester Kyle," on the process of posting Leicester Kyle’s long poem Koroneho in cyberspace, on Friday morning.

I’ll also be comparing my e-text with the more readable hardcopy version of the poem which is now available: Koroneho: Joyful News Out Of The New Found World. Edited by Jack Ross. Preface by Ian St George. Auckland: The Leicester Kyle Literary Estate / Wellington: The Colenso Society, 2011 (a joint publication with the Colenso Society, for William Colenso’s Bicentennial).

You can find the conference programme here. I'm afraid that it costs money to register, so you'll have to decide for yourselves just how keen you are to hear us. Hopefully it'll be a pretty entertaining event, with lots of interesting people speaking.

The Lounge reading on Wednesday evening (Senior Common Room, 28/3/12, 5.30-7 pm) is, however, free. I'll be reading at that as well.

•


Leicester's house on Calliope St. (Oct 2005)
[photographer unknown]

Koroneho

[Leicester Kyle: Koroneho: Joyful News Out Of The New Found World (2011)]

Why pink, you ask? It does seem rather a garish shade for the cover of this first posthumous publication by my old friend Leicester Kyle.

Actually the whole thing came about rather serendipitously as the result of a request to republish some of Leicester's (many) poems about orchids by Ian St George, editor of the New Zealand Native Orchid Journal.

David Howard and I told him that, as Leicester's literary executors, we'd be happy to cooperate with such a scheme, but I also mentioned in my reply that - while there were certainly a number of short lyrics describing orchids he'd encountered in the hills around Millerton - his major contribution to the subject was a vast epic poem called Koroneho, an account of the life and work of pioneering printer, missionary and naturalist William Colenso (1811-1899), written in the form of a series of descriptions of 14 native orchids found by the latter in his wanderings around the North Island of New Zealand.

[William Colenso (c.1880)]

The significance of these orchids, for Leicester, appears to have been that, while Colenso's description of each of them been duly published in the scientific literature at the time, they hadn't been confirmed as separate species by subsequent classifiers.

They were, then, real specimens of phantom plants - a pretty appealing notion to any poet, given that our business is supposed to be the depiction of "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" (Marianne Moore, "Poetry").

In his reply, Ian mentioned:

Perchance I am also editor of eColenso, the newsletter of the Colenso Society. November 17 is the bicentennial of Colenso's birth, and we are having a Colenso Conference in Napier. It would be brilliant to have a few copies of Kyle's Koroneho available at the conference - perhaps a limited edition of 50 copies? I would be happy to arrange the printing.... are you interested?

Was I interested! Just about any plan that could help spread interest in the life and works of Leicester Kyle would interest me, especially one like this, which seemed just to have dropped into my lap out of nowhere.

So anyway, to make a long story short, having just laboriously transcribed the poem from the one surviving typescript, a mass of crumbling yellow pages given by Leicester to his great friend and poetic ally Richard Taylor in the late 1990s, I sent it off as a file-attachment to Ian.

He had a number of interesting comments to make about it:

I think it's an important (at least in NZ) modernist collage long poem in cantos, and I wondered if he had been influenced by William Carlos Williams' Paterson, as well as Ezra Pound.

(This was in response to my comparing it with The Cantos - not to mention Smithyman's Atua Wera - in the introduction I'd written to the poem.)

I had thought to make it a simple paperback in much the style of Colenso's Paihia press publications - even to the pink paper! Thus it would be all monochrome. An alternative would be to have a colour illustration of an orchid - or one of his orchid drawings (mine actually!) from the original, but in a way that detracts from the theme of insubstantial unreality.

Hence the pink cover, you see - hence too the rather offhand style of the production: Ian's encyclopedic knowledge of Colenso enabled him to find a form which seemed to fit so eccentric a piece of Colenso-iana, in a way which would make sense to the other enthusiasts attending the conference.

Another interesting point about the pink came up in a subsequent email, where he mentioned that it matched "the pink blotting paper that Colenso was forced to use when the CMS forgot to send out any printing paper." That was enough for me. Pink it must be.

Ian also mentioned that Leicester had been a bit premature in thinking that all of these particular orchid identifications by Colenso had been rejected. Apparently some of them have been reinstated in the latest listings. In his foreword to the book he enlarges on his belief that "in imagination Kyle WAS Colenso ...

(I suppose all biographers "become" their subjects) - both were botanists, priests, writers - had similar names - and Colenso stands as the kind of kafkaesque figure, sensitive and intelligent, but beset by machiavellian insensitive authority, that we all find it easy to identify with. There are a number of minor inaccuracies in Kyle's biographical bits about Colenso, but they don't matter: as he suggests, "if you want the facts, go to the biographies - this is about the truth".

•

Leicester Kyle. Koroneho: Joyful News Out Of The New Found World. Edited with a Introduction by Jack Ross. Preface by Ian St George. ISBN 978-0-9876604-0-4. Auckland: The Leicester Kyle Literary Estate / Wellington: The Colenso Society, 2011. ii + 110 pp.

So there we are. If you'd like to purchase a copy of Koroneho, you can either contact me here online or at the address given on the cover page of the Leicester Kyle website. They're $NZ 10 each (plus $2 postage & packing).

Or you can write to Ian St George, secretary of the Colenso Society, at:

The Colenso Society Inc.
c/o 22 Orchard St.
Wadestown
Wellington 6012
New Zealand

For more about the centennial conference, see here.

What an auspicious project for an auspicious anniversary!

[Māori New Testament
printed by William Colenso (1837)]

Launching Leicester Kyle's Collected Poems

Leicester & his trademark fire-engine-red Land Rover
(Buller, 2000)

It's five years to the day since poet, priest and ecological activist Leicester Kyle (1937-2006) died in Christchurch hospital. I doubt that he'd recognise the city of his childhood if he could see it today. That former Christchurch is now a thing of the past ...

The main purpose of this post, though, is to advertise the Leicester Kyle website which has been set up by his literary executors (David Howard and myself) to make his writings more accessible in the future - both to those already familiar with his poetry, and those who've never heard of him or it. My model was Kendrick Smithyman's online Collected Poems 1943-1995 site, edited by Margaret Edcumbe and Peter Simpson, and designed expertly by Brian Flaherty.

There are eleven books (at present) listed under the name "Leicester Kyle" in the NZ National Library database, together with another earlier prose pamphlet indexed under "L. Kyle". My present intention is to put all of these up on the website. We'll be supplementing them with another eleven or so works which are not presently available in any public collection, though.

I certainly can't rival the snazzy production values and (very useful) search engine facilites on the Smithyman site. This will be another attempt on my part to make free space on the internet work for us as well as the corporate giants. What I've done, then, is to set up two linked websites:

• The first site - Leicester Kyle - is basically confined to bibliographies and indexes. It aspires to provide complete listings of all primary and secondary material by and about Leicester. It gives details of each of his works, together with notes, and a table of contents hyperlinked to:
• The second site - Leicester Kyle Texts - which will provide complete texts of each of the major books, together with a selection of the shorter poems.

The first site is as complete as I can make it at present, without further information and research. The second site is more of a foretaste at present, with only a few of his books up in full.

Basically, if you just want to read through one of them, you can go straight to Leicester Kyle Texts, and scroll down reading it page by page (I've also included a jpg illustration of each page, in order not to obscure any details of the original formatting. If you click on these pictures individually, they will enlarge).

If, on the other hand, you want to see the table of contents for a particular book, together with any notes or details from letters about it, you can go to the Leicester Kyle index site and click on the relevant link.

The list below will tell you which works are available already, and which ones will be going up over the next few months. I'll try to keep it continuously updated as each website grows:

•

Contents

[* = listed in the NZ National Library Network]

Accessible online:



1. Koroneho: Joyful News Out Of The New Found World (1996-2001) [A4: iv + 96 pp.]

   This work, a kind of Zukofskyan verse epic about the life and times of William Colenso ("Koroneho" in Maori) has never before now been published in full, although four extracts from it appeared in Alan Loney's magazine A Brief Description of the Whole World between 1997 and 1998.




2. A Christmas Book (2000) [A5: 26 pp.]

   After moving to Millerton, an old mining town on the West Coast of the South Island, in 1998, Leicester developed the habit of producing a small book of poems every Christmas to send to his friends and family. This is the first of them, and one of the most charming and accessible of all of his works.




3. * The Great Buller Coal Plateaux: A Sequence of Poems (2001) [A5: 31 pp.]

   Despite its unpretentious packaging, this little chapbook is one of Leicester's most important publications. It was an attempt to harness deliberately the propaganda power of poetry and the Arts in general against a large-scale commercial mining company. Of course we're constantly being told by every authority in sight that this is wrong, that Art should not be "political", that it's concerned with "higher things" etc. etc. But are there any higher things than the systematic despoliation of an untouched environment? The destruction of any joy or profit that any of us or our descendants can ever take from it in the future? This is an important book, and I'm glad to be able to make it accessible here to more people than were ever able to read it in Leicester's lifetime.




4. Dun Huang Aesthetic Dance (2002) [A4: 10 pp.]

   One of Leicester's shorter poetry sequences. This was posted to me by him as a separate pamphlet, or else I might simply have included it in the "Shorter Poems" section of the site. It reflects his strong interest in syncretic religious traditions and in their bizarre and excessive linguistic registers.




5. * Things to Do with Kerosene (2002) [A5: 34 pp.]

   Another one of his Christmas books, this one compiled from Aunt Daisy's depression-era household hints. One of the most entertaining books he ever put out, its publication was partly funded by the Buller Community Arts Council. It was launched by the Mayor, and got a great reception from the West Coast locals (by all accounts).




6. * Panic Poems (2003) [A5: 39 pp.]

   Another Christmas book, this one concerned with the mechanics of his life in Millerton. His move there from Auckland was motivated (at least to some extent) by the death of his wife Miriel in 1998, so there must have been a lot of issues for him to work through. Others in similar circumstances may well find this book very helpful.




7. Living at a Bad Address (2004) [A5: 38 pp.]

   The last of the full-scale Christmas books. This one is an anthology of shorter poems with brief introductions. Some of them are very moving to read, particularly those concerned with his daughter Anna's funeral.




8. * Miller Creek (2004) [A5: 22 pp.]

   This is a beautiful gem-like little book of poems and pictures designed to draw attention to the ecological devastation caused by rivers poisoned by runoff from the mines. Joel Bolton's sketches are colourful and deft and the whole production deserves a wider audience, I think.




9. Pamphlets & Ephemera

   This section includes the first and last of his Christmas letters and pamphlets, sent to various correspondents - principally Richard Taylor - between 1996 and 2005.




10. Miscellaneous Prose

    A preliminary gathering of Leicester's reviews and critical introductions to the various publications he edited or contributed to in the last ten years of his life.




11. Secondary Literature

    Articles, poems, reviews and tributes by a variety of people, among them Stu Bagby, Tony Chad, Scott Hamilton, David Howard, James Norcliffe and Richard Taylor. Again, this is a preliminary collection which will undoubtedly grow in the future.




12. Bibliography

    As complete a listing as I can make at this point of his published works.

•

Not yet available:



1. * Options (1996-1997) [A4: 63 pp.]

   Leicester's first long narrative poem: "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 ...; Fran, a thirteenth-century Franciscan mendicant transported to contemporary Northland; and finally Maria, the celebrated nineteenth-century dancing prophetess of Kaikohe." [Jack Ross, "Leicester H. Kyle: Prophet without Honour." Pander 6/7 (1999): 21 & 23.]
   
   [posted online Monday 19/12/11]




2. * State Houses (1997) [A4: 43 pp.]

   This is a more personal piece: "interweaving tragic family history with the history of the first state houses in the Christchurch suburb of Riccarton. Leicester's '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'.” [Pander 6/7 (1999)]
   
   [posted online Monday 12/12/11]




3. * A Voyge to New Zealand: The Log of Joseph Sowry, Translated and Made Better (1997) [A4: 117 pp.]

   This is an actual nineteenth-century emigrant's journal, which has been "teased ... 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'.” [Pander 6/7 (1999)]
   
   [posted online Tuesday 20/12/11]




4. Heteropholis (1998) [A4: 52 pp.]

   Some readers see this as Leicester's masterpiece. "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. ... It is, nevertheless, a profoundly serious and, indeed, partially autobiographical work." [Pander 6/7 (1999)]
   
   [posted online Friday 16/12/11]




5. * A Machinery for Pain (1999) [A4: 37 pp.]

   This is his first book written entirely at Millerton: "a ... sequence on pain management, prompted by close personal experience" - the death of his wife Miriel, in particular.
   
   [posted online Monday 14/11/11]




6. * A Safe House for a Man (2000) [A4: 86 pp.]

   The blurb copy I provided at the time read (in part) as follows: "The landscape of Leicester Kyle's long semi-narrative poem ... will be familiar to most of us: separation, self-analysis, acknowledgment of loss. There's little that's recondite or difficult about this poetry, and yet the craft and subtle intelligence of its author come through in every line. The title poem is accompanied by two others: The Araneidea - an oddly disturbing account of how to 'make good-looking, sightly cabinet objects' from live spiders; and Threnos - a moving elegy for the poet's wife Miriel."
   
   [posted online Saturday 10/12/11]




7. * Five Anzac Liturgies (2000) [A4: 45 pp.]

   Calum Gilmour, whose Polygraphia Press published both this and A Safe House for a Man, wrote of it at the time: "This set of poems contains five pieces addressed to the South Island towns of Hawarden, Waikari, Rotherham, Culverden and Waiau respectively. Each poem is based round the theme of Anzac Day and how it affects each place addressed. The focus is on Anzac, on the people involved, on the significance of the remembrance in each place."
   
   [posted online Tuesday 29/11/11]




8. King of Bliss (2002) [A4: 46 pp.]

   This book contains Leicester's thoughts on the subject of psychoanalysis, prompted by his experience of various therapies for clinical depression which he underwent while still living in Auckland in the 90s.
   
   [posted online Thursday 1/12/11]




9. A Wedding in Tintown (2002) [A4: 36 pp.]

   This is a portrait of a place, revealed through a blow-by-blow account of a wedding celebration. Leicester wrote to me about it: "The wedding is one I took here in Millerton, and this is a faithful account of its proceeding; I've set it in Tintown, a now vanished mining village on the Plateau ... My aim was to describe the events, with little overt interpretation, and by means of a low tone to - by contrast - heighten and clarify the colours of the day. ... My hope is that the peculiar culture of the occasion just might make it interesting enough to be a good read."
   
   [posted online Tuesday 15/11/11]




10. 8 Great O’s (2003) [A4: 46 pp.]

    This is a set of interlinked pieces connected by themes of religion and ritual. Leicester's preface specifies that the main text "is an adaptation of the last page of a pious biography, ‘The Life of St. Mary tbe Harlot’, written by her uncle, Ephraem, deacon of Edessa, around the year 370. ‘The Word' is a family story. 'The Great 0 's' is a term taken from the Advent liturgy."
    
    [posted online Friday 18/11/11]




11. Anogramma (2005) [A4: 64 pp.]

    An amusing and lighthearted piece of autobiography, which records Leicester's first job after leaving school: as a "horticultural apprentice at the Christchurch Botanical Gardens ... All apprentices were required to attend monthly meetings of the Christchurch Botanical Gardens Horticultural Apprentices Mutual Improvement Society" and much of the text is devoted to an account of these meetings, together with some details of the 50 year reunion of the apprentices.
    
    [posted online Saturday 10/12/11]




12. * Breaker: A Progress of the Sea (2005) [A5: 78 pp.]

    Leicester's last book, and one of his most ambitious, "suggested by the Catalogue of Armed Forces in the second book of the Iliad. I read it in Pope's translation, and was fascinated by the whole idea and the poetry of it. The fascination led to a desire to do something of the kind myself and, casting about for a local battle, I hit on the idea of our self-defence against our eroding coast." says Leicester in his preface. The illustrations, by John Crawford, are very fine.
    
    [posted online Sunday 20/11/11]




13. Collected Shorter Poems: 1 (1983-1998) [A4: 428 poems & sequences / 568 pp.]

    This is a list of all the poems and sequences included in the first of the the two large "Collected Poems" fileboxes which David and I inherited from Leicester's estate, and which contained (in approximate chronological order) all of the individual poems (outside published books) he wished to preserve. I'll be putting up a bare selection of these poems to start with - more over time, if demand warrants it.




14. Selected Shorter Poems: 2 (1998-2006) [A4: 318 poems & sequences / 387 pp.]

    This includes all of the poems written after Leicester's move to the West Coast, mostly contained in the second of the the two large "Collected Poems" fileboxes. I'll be putting up rather more of these poems than the ones in the first box, as befits their superior quality (in my opinion, at any rate).




15. Five Millerton Sequences [A5: viii + 48 pp.]

    This is a preliminary selection from the Millerton poems, chosen in consultation with David Howard, and intended both as an advertisement for this site and (hopefully) to revive some interest in Leicester in general. Few people have ever had the chance to read any of these poems before, after all. I hope you enjoy them. The book will be launched sometime next year - details to be announced on this blog (and hopefully elsewhere as well).
    
    [posted online Friday 16/12/11]




16. Prose Fiction
    • * I Got Me Flowers: Letters to a Psychiatrist [A5: 56 pp.]

    Leicester began as a prose writer, in the 1970s, and had some success with this and some of his other stories before switching to poetry in the early 1990s. This "excessively Jungian" (as Leicester himself described it) novella from the mid-70s is the finest of his extant works of fiction - or at any rate that was my impression when I read through them all while staying with Leicester at Millerton in 1998.
    
    [posted online Sunday 13/11/11]




17. Chronology

    As complete a listing as I can make of the known events and dates of Leicester's life.
    
    [posted online Saturday 12/11/11]

•

So there you go. I know it's a bit crazy to entrust all this material to the tender mercies of blogspot, but you can be sure that I'll be keeping sedulous backups and printouts of everything as well.

•


The view from Leicester's verandah at Millerton
[photographs: Jack Ross (2000)]