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]

A Day out with David Howard

Poster at Massey Albany
[photograph: Jack Ross]

Funnily enough, last weekend I was teaching a poetry course in the very room this poster adorned - or should I say "infested." It was, admittedly, a session on two contemporary poets: a New Zealander and a West Indian, but the cap still seems to fit, somehow.

After all, who else around here can be held responsible for a Doctoral thesis entitled "An Elusive Identity: Versions of South America in English Literature from Aphra Behn to the Present Day" (University of Edinburgh, 1990)? Written, incidentally, on a large institutional mainframe computer - which did take a bit of mastering, but which has certainly prepared me pretty well for all the idle tapping around I've been doing on them ever since.

I guess the only Mexican poets I looked at in any depth in that epoch-making masterwork were the sublime Renaissance genius Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and (closer to the present day) Nobel Prize-winner Octavio Paz, together with certain of his contemporaries - I don't actually recall any nineteenth-century Mexican poets worthy of being discussed alongside the Argentine José Hernández (author of the epic Gaucho Martín Fierro). I could well be wrong, though.

Anyway, to hell with those dweebs! They're just jealous. Let them go back to their haggling and huckstering in the precincts of the temple. It gave me great pleasure to shake the dust of the place off my feet, and instead head north for a day-long road trip with my good friend and fellow poetry-obsessive David Howard, up here for the Going West Festival.

[Howard in Helensville]

I've known David for many years. We first met in Auckland in the late nineties, when he was making a living as an entrepreneurial pyrotechnician and events-organiser. He could never completely submerge the writer in him, though. The books have continued to appear in steady succession since the mid 80s:

1. Head First. Auckland: Hard Echo Press, 1985.
2. In the First Place: Poems 1980-1990. Photographs by Paul Swadel. Hazard Poets Series. Ed. Rob Jackaman. Christchurch: Hazard Press, 1991.
3. Holding Company. Christchurch: Nag’s Head Press, 1995.
4. Shebang: Collected Poems 1980-2000. Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2001.
5. How to Occupy Our Selves. Photographs by Fiona Pardington. Wellington: HeadworX, 2003.
6. The Word Went Round: Poems. Paintings by Garry Currin. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2006.
7. S(t)et. Port Chalmers, Otago: The Gumtree Press, 2009.
8. Beyond What is Said to What Is. Graphics by Roger Hickin. Governor's Bay, Lyttelton: Cold Hub Press, 2010.
9. The Incomplete Poems. Governor's Bay, Lyttelton: Cold Hub Press, 2011.
10. You're So Pretty When You're Unfaithful To Me. Auckland: Holloway Press, 2012.

After he left Auckland around the turn of the millennium we stayed in touch, even after he moved to the frigid paddocks of Purakanui, north of Dunedin. Financial necessity forced him to visit Auckland from time to time to organise fireworks shows (his principal source of income), and most times we'd end up heading out into the wilds on various crazed excursions to the heart of the New Zealand dream ...

A surprising number of those drives ended up in Warkworth, mostly involving a trip to the Unicorn Bookshop, then run by the late lamented Richard Wasley. I wrote an obituary for Richard here, but since then his beautiful Unicorn Bookshop has reopened under new ownership. They'd been enlightened enough to offer me a $20 book token in their monthly prize draw, thus offering another reason for turning our footsteps in that direction.

[Welcome to the Kaipara!]

[Still a bit of colonial pizazz left in the old town]

[along with other things ...]

Scary, isn't it? If I'd been more assiduous, I would have got some shots of the bizarre old cinema complex at the bottom of the hill as you drive out of town, which is now home to a huge collection of art and antiques, only occasionally open to the public - mostly on weekends. This time we had to content ourselves with staring through the windows and speculating about the effects of damp on pre-loved paperbacks ...

The whole point of these road trips is to barrel along in the car in no particular direction, with no clear destination in mind, shooting the breeze about life, books, poetry, and the doings of mutual friends and acquaintances. We originally met through poet-priest the Rev. Leicester Kyle, long before his departure for the Coast and a date with ecological destiny. We're also the joint executors of his literary estate, so there are generally a few things to sort out about that.

These are not particularly high-pressure conversations. I can't recall us ever having a serious falling out in the fifteen or so years of our friendship. I find a lot of his work incomprehensible, and much of mine seems to him (I suspect) perversely raw and underwritten. Who cares? We get on with the job, always with a certain respect for each other's judgement and dedication to the task in hand.

[The new-look Unicorn Bookshop (Warkworth)]

[The children's section]

And yes, I asked permission before taking these shots. We did spend a fair amount of money on various obscure books of poetry in there, so I guess Tania thought it would be churlish to refuse. She insisted on staying out of the photo, though. Which is a shame, because it's a beautiful little shop she's building there. Much of Richard's old stock still remains, but her own taste for children's books is beginning to make real inroads.

And so the day meandered on. We'd started from Glen Eden, driven north along the coast, via Helensville, then crossed over to Warkworth. By now it was time to hurry David off to the airport - which took a tiny bit longer than anticipated, but still got us there with time for him to check in.

As he left, he gave me a copy of this beautiful little book of poems by Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova (David does love those obscure Eastern-European writers) ... so I'll close with some lines from one of his sparse, spare, fascinatingly deadpan poems, "In the Lake Region" (trans. Ellen Hinsey):

The past does not enlighten us — but still, it attempts
to say something. Perhaps the crow knows more about us
and about history's dirt than we do ourselves.
Of what does she want to remind us? Of the black photos,
the black headphones,
of radio operators, black signatures under documents,
of the unarmed with their frozen pupils — of the prisoner's
boot or the trunk
of the refugee? Probably not. We will remember this anyway,
though it won't make us any wiser. The bird signifies
only stoicism
and patience. If you ask for them, your request
will be granted.

Pretty cool, huh?

If you want to check out some of David's own poetry, why not go to his author page on the nzepc?

['Astonished' Howard named Robert Burns Fellow
(Otago Daily Times September 12, 2012)]

Masson-omania

[Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson]

I guess it's a bit mean of me to put up a post about Jeffrey Masson's talk yesterday at Massey University, because it's too late now to invite any of you to come along.

You did miss out on a treat, though.

I first heard him speak in 2000, when he was invited along to one of my colleague Jenny Lawn's classes to talk about Freud. He hadn't been in New Zealand very long, and of course that was how most of us still knew him: as the author of The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (1984), and as the subject of Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives (1984), which he took her to court over.

It came as a bit of a surprise to hear that he was now working on a book about cats (it would eventually be published as The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats: A Journey into the Feline Heart (2002)), and had begun to shift his attention from human to animal psychology.

When I was asked to oversee the Albany campus version of "Writers Read" -- a very successful series which has been running at Palmerston North for seven years and in Wellington for five -- I must admit that one of my first thoughts was that it would be interesting to look up Jeffrey Masson again and to see what he'd been up to over the last decade.

I do have to say that the book he's working on at present, about the nature of human agression, examined by contrast with other apex predators (there are almost two hundred, apparently, and they including Orcas, African lions, caimans and a whole slew of others), seems to combine the best features of his earlier, more "scholarly" work with his later, more "popular" books on animal emotions.

As his dog Benjy slowly circumnavigated the room, snuffling and making friends with each member of the audience, Jeff held us spellbound with the various theories that exist already about the roots of human aggression and murderousness. Was it the invention of agriculture which was at fault (as Jared Diamond claims), the domestication of animals, or the growth of organised religion? Whatever it was, something went wrong with us around 10,000 years ago which has been plaguing humanity ever since.

To some people, of course, such broadscale thinking is by definition a waste of time. What can one hope to achieve by considering such massive and unanswerable questions? It's a dangerous business, to be sure, but then clinging to the nitty-gritty detail of one's particular specialisation doesn't really absolve one of responsiblity for the rest of the world's ills.

I think everyone in the room yesterday would agree that Jeff Masson did a pretty thorough job of weighing the sources against one another; what's more, he was prepared to suspend judgement where insufficient data was available. It was a rivetting perfomance. A shame a few more of you weren't there. I really am sorry that I didn't have the foresight to warn you in advance that he was coming to Albany.

You can find out the original advertisement for his talk here. Do feel free to come along to any others in the series that take your fancy.

[Jeffrey Masson, ed.: The Illustrated Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (2010)]

Kickstarting Your Research Career

(for Cluny Macpherson)


“Her heart was in perfect condition – in fact I have it over here …”
– C.S.I.

i – Spreading Yourself Around

I started to get involved
in cruising

How is it
Filipino boys

work in the laundry
Dutchmen

on the bridge?
Ships plying

the Pacific
as the sun goes down

my page

ii – Entertaining the Visiting Professor

I took him to the zoo
he was bored

I took him to the museum
he was bored

we all took bets
as he nodded off

on whether his cigar ash
would set fire

to his crimpoline suit

Contemporary NZ Poets Teaching Notes

[cover image: Richard Killeen / Cover design: Christine Hansen]

Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance
Edited by Jack Ross & Jan Kemp
(Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2007)

So it appears that I'm down to give a public lecture (in the "Chancellor's Series," no less, alongside the likes of Nicky Hager and Cindy Kiro), on the subject of this series of anthologies: NZ Poets in Performance.

It's at 12 noon on Wednesday, August 1st, in the Study Centre Staff Lounge of Massey University, Albany. If you happen to be passing. Free entry -- free tea and coffee, too ...

That got me to thinking about the bunch of teaching notes I put up on this blog when AUP published Classic NZ Poets in Performance last year. I hope they’ve been handy to someone, at least. I haven't heard much about them either way. In any case, I thought I might continue the tradition and do the same thing for this sequel, Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance.

I guess the philosophy behind our selection of poems all along was to choose those which didn't require a great deal of background knowledge to like. We’ve tried to choose poems about very concrete, accessible topics, by poets who are used to reaching out to a general audience. That’s not to say that there aren’t subtleties and complexities in all three books (these two and the projected New NZ Poets, scheduled for publication next year), but the idea was never to compile an anthology purely for poetry-lovers -- though of course we hope they’re being catered for as well.

The plan, at least, was to try to put in something for everyone in the books, as I’ve attempted to demonstrate in the breakdown of poems by theme which follows this entry.

Once again, I know that some of the poems could be listed under more than one heading, but all I’m doing here is indicating what I think is the predominant subject-matter or thematic direction in each. If you don’t agree, that might be a good starting-point for discussion:

• ADOLESCENCE & EDUCATION
• ANIMALS
• ELEGY
• FLATTING
• FOOD
• FRIENDSHIP
• HISTORY
• LANDSCAPE & LOCALITY
• LANGUAGE & WRITING
• LIFE, THE UNIVERSE & EVERYTHING
• LOVE
• PAIN
• PARENTS & CHILDREN
• PEOPLE
• POLITICS & POLEMICS
• RELATIONSHIPS & SEXUAL POLITICS
• SPIRITUALITY
• SUBURBIA
• WORK

As with the Classic NZ Poets, our new book is arranged in chronological order of birthdates, beginning with Peter Olds in 1944 and ending with Roma Potiki in 1958. The preface to the book explains that:

This second volume, Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance, is our overview of the poetic generation which came to maturity in the 1960s and 1970s, that turbulent era of social, sexual, musical and artistic experimentation.

(Some might call them the baby-boomers, though I doubt it’s a term which appeals much to the people in question. )

Many of the poets in the book have associations with many different parts of New Zealand; others (such as Bob Orr or Keri Hulme) are very strongly identified with a particular region, and constantly revisit it as subject-matter in their work.

Here are some of the places on offer:

• AUCKLAND & NORTHLAND
• BLEINHELM & MARLBOROUGH
• CHRISTCHURCH & CANTERBURY
• DUNEDIN & OTAGO
• GREECE
• GREYMOUTH & THE WEST COAST
• HAMILTON & WAIKATO
• INVERCARGILL & SOUTHLAND
• TARANAKI
• UK
• WELLINGTON & THE HUTT VALLEY

Further information may be accessed at the following websites:

• Authors. The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre.
(A select but valuable list of major NZ poets with pictures, recordings, and critical reactions).

• Homepage. Auckland University Press.
(Details of books and other publications by a number of the authors in the anthology).

• New Zealand Literature File. University of Auckland Library Website.
(This has thorough – though not always entirely reliable – bibliographies for many major New Zealand writers).

• Twelve Taonga. The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre.
(A brief account of the creation of the 1974 and 2004 recorded poetry archives, which were the main source for this sereis of books).

• New Zealand Writers. The New Zealand Book Council Website.
(This has pictures and short biographical and critical summaries adapted from Roger Robinson & Nelson Wattie's Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998), but with updated information and supplementary entries on more recent writers).

Life Writing

[cover design: Sarah Grimes / cover image: Simon Creasey]



[cover design & image: Lisa Allen]

Yesterday Dr Mary Paul, Xiaoping Wang and I were interviewed by Ling-Ling Liang of World TV for her Chinese-language news programme (available, she told us, on Sky Channel 10). The subject? The Life Writing course Mary and I teach at Massey Albany. We've been getting quite a lot of publicity for it lately.

Ling-Ling's interest was specifically in the various International students who have taken or are taking the course. There were three Chinese students in the class this semester alone (including Xiaoping), and in the past we've had many others, as well as people from a plethora of other countries: Russia, South Africa, Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe, and so on. It's been running for six years now, since 2001.

The course has three major parts: there's an anthology of readings, which are discussed and analysed in the weekly lectures; there are two-hour workshops, where students read out and critique a series of prescribed writing exercises; and there are the assignments: a reading journal, a selection from each students' completed exercises, and the final assignment -- a ten-page piece on any subject (biographical, autobiographical, genealogical, even fictional ...) in virtually any genre (verse, prose, interview, script, video, album ...)

It's a creative writing course, then, but also a vehicle for the Academic study of the various ways in which people use their own lives (or the lives of others) as raw material. What we do in teaching it is discuss the pragmatic implications of certain technical writing choices. Any story, true or false, needs to be told -- it's how best to tell it we can help with most. Beyond that, a large part of the pleasure of the course lies in sitting back and listening. It's amazing how well you can get to know a person simply by hearing some of their stories.

So far we've published two anthologies of work generated by the course: [your name here] (2003), and Where Will Massey Take You? (2005). A third is now in preparation. They're available from the School of Social and Cultural Studies at the (to my mind very reasonable) price of $10 each.

So if you're interested in exploring some of the ramifications of your own life story, or the life stories of people close to you, why not begin by doing our paper? It's a stage two English paper, but there are no specific prerequisites, and you won't have to submit a portfolio of work in advance. The more the merrier, so far as we're concerned -- the more diverse points of view and backgrounds the more we'll all end up learning.

I'll end with a passage from Nathan Calvert's interview with Farid Shafizadeh Dizaji, a young Iranian immigrant to New Zealand:

Did you know when you talk with a bad intention,
Every word in your mouth is a lethal weapon?
– Lethal Weapon (written 03/05)

… He grabbed me by the throat and I grabbed him by the throat and I had a crowbar in my back pocket and, um, I started hooking him and then all my friends started beating him up too, and the police officer he had no partner, no nothing, and then I grabbed my crowbar and hit him in the face and then he got knocked out and we were all just stomping him down and, um, yeah, and then we just gapped it and jumped in the car and rushed off while we left him bleeding, and left him injured really bad.

... and then about nine cop cars arrived on the scene and we all got arrested. That cop that we assaulted came as well and he said, “Yep, this is them.” From then we got arrested, went to court, no, went to jail, Takapuna cells, got fingerprinted. Got like, you know, got pretty hits in the cells too from other cops for hitting the other cop. But that was all good, we couldn’t do nothing, there was thousands of them, um, we just stayed there and took it. And then we got bailed, like, four hours later and then we just, yeah, and that was it. That’s how the incident happened.

Nathan: So what’s happening now? Have those actions had consequences after the event?

Farid: Well, I’m sure they do, but I haven’t really met them yet. What has happened is they’ve made me go to court and at first I didn’t wanna plead guilty because the way I was treated. I didn’t feel I was treated like a normal human being, a normal citizen. In New Zealand. I have a New Zealand citizenship. And I don’t think no-one should treat me the wrong way because I’m from somewhere else. They should treat me the same because I treat everybody else the same. No matter where they are, I treat them like brothers. But, um, so I pleaded not guilty, so they held my court case for a month, no, I think it was two weeks, to go back to court. And then they told me to write a letter, why I believe, why I plead not guilty.

[Where Will Massey Take You? Life Writing 2, ed. Jack Ross (Massey: School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2005) pp.34-36.]

It's no excuse, I guess (nor would Farid and Nathan see it as such), but the policeman Farid assaulted referred to him and his friends as "mongrels."

Coromandel

[photograph by Simon Creasey]

Hello Jack - I had a great tutorial on Wednesday, I read them Celan's 'Corona' and we spent about 30 mins discussing your own poem, coming up with ideas, me talking a little about dialectics and poetry referencing poetry.

Afterwards the students requested I ask you to provide your own reading of your poem, and i thought this would be a good idea, so, if you get time before next week could you send me a few lines on the poem? The main query was: who is the 'she' saying 'it's time the asphalt bled'? - '5-fingered sky' brought up some interesting comments: fingers of light coming through clouds and some discussion on the sky as a hand, or were there five clouds?...
Cheers,
Matt

Matt Harris and I are teaching the Massey-@- Albany Stage One Creative Writing paper together this semester. In each tutorial we discuss work by the students, but also pieces from the course anthology. It includes the following poem by me - first published in Poetry NZ 28 (2004): 9:

Coromandel

Es ist Zeit, daß es Zeit wird
– Paul Celan, ‘Corona’


bird stalks by
5-fingered sky
Sunday

in the rearview mirror
Autumn gnaws my hands
we’re friends

van reversing
past the
pharmacy

check out those jeans
swap spit
talk shit

don’t stare at
us
it’s

time she said
it’s time the asphalt
bled

it’s time

I guess I should preface any discussion of it by saying that it's the first (and so far only) time that I've published a poem which began as a class exercise. A few years ago I was teaching a session for a Masters course in Creative Writing, and I decided to get the students to compose a poem based on a picture I gave them and a literal translation of a poem in a foreign language (rather similar to the Workshop exercise we did at Bluff 06 this year).

The pictures were all landscape photographs taken by my friend Simon Creasey, whose (then) girlfriend Kika was very keen on hillsides and cloudscapes. The photos he took to send to her were accordingly mostly bare of human beings, buildings, and other obvious distinguishing features. The one I've included above was the sole exception, and it's the one I used myself to write my own version of the exercise.

I attempted to combine it with the Paul Celan poem "Corona":

Corona

Aus der Hand frißt der Herbst mir sein Blatt: wir sind Freunde.
Out of my hand Autumn eats its leaf: we are friends.
Wir schälen die Zeit aus den Nüssen und lehren sie gehn:
We shell time out of nuts and teach it to go:
die Zeit kehrt zurück in die Schale.
time returns into the shell.

Im Speigel ist Sonntag,
In the mirror is Sunday,
im Traum wird geschlafen,
in dreams is sleeping,
der Mund redet wahr.
the mouth speaks true.

Mein Aug steigt hinab zum Geschlecht der Geliebten:
My eye descends to the sex of the beloved:
wir sehen uns an,
we look at each other,
wir sagen uns Dunkles,
we tell each other dark things,
wir lieben einander wie Mohn und Gedächtnis,
we love each other like poppy and memory,
wir schlafen wie Wein in den Muscheln,
we sleep like wine in mussels [conches],
wie das Meer im Blutstrahl des Mondes.
Like the sea in the blood-beam of the moon.

Wir stehen umschlungen im Fenster, sie sehen uns zu von der Straße:
We stand embracing in the window, they look up at us from the street:

es ist Zeit, daß Man weiß!
It is time that one knew!
Es ist Zeit, daß der Stein sich zu blühen bequemt,
It is time, that the stone condescended to blossom,
daß der Unrast ein Herz schlägt.
That restlessness beat a heart.
Es ist Zeit, daß es Zeit wird,
It is time that it should be time.

Es ist Zeit.
It is time.

Notes:
l.15. bequemen (v.t) – to accommodate oneself to, conform with, comply with, put up with.

[Inspired by the literal version in The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century German Verse, ed. Patrick Bridgwater, 1963 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) 268]

I guess it's obvious that I took a lot of images from the Celan poem. I also tried to emulate its atmosphere of a doomed love story ... at least I read it as doomed. Celan scholars might disagree with me there.

I tried to combine that with the sense of desolation and emptiness in Simon's photo of the main street of Coromandel. The van comes from there, as does the 5-fingered sky, which I think was meant to evoke the five fingers of cloud which seem to be reaching out towards the viewer in the photograph.

I think my lovers (the guy driving into town at the beginning, the girl in the jeans) are trying to get out of town. I think they may not succeed. I think the asphalt is hungry for them. My friend Stu Bagby told me he thought I meant to imply that they'd robbed the pharmacy first. I hadn't thought of it, but maybe they did. Certainly they seem to be on the run from something at the end: fate?

I wanted to pare down my language to what my two characters might actually say to one another, but also to echo the kind of prophetic Biblical tone which Celan is so adept at. The poem is (obviously) meant to be suggestive of a story rather than filling in all the blanks, but I think in that it's fairly true to human experience. Mine, at any rate.

Classic NZ Poets Teaching Notes

[cover image: Pat Hanly / Cover design: Christine Hansen]

Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance
Edited by Jack Ross.
Poems Selected by Jack Ross & Jan Kemp
(Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006)

Well, yes, I am a teacher. I teach Academic and Creative writing at Massey University’s Auckland campus, and give lectures on NZ literature as well.

AUP asked me quite a while ago to write some teaching notes for the audio / text anthology which we launched on Thursday last week, so I thought it might be a good idea to put them up here for maximum accessibility.

I guess our desire all along was that the book could be used to promote awareness of NZ poetry in schools and tertiary institutions (though of course it’s priced to appeal to individual consumers as well).

Some of the teachers I’ve met have told me that they don’t quite know how to go about teaching poetry in their classes. Clearly I don’t have any magical panacea for that, but here are one or two suggestions:

Think of a theme or subject you’d like to discuss, and choose a poem (or, if you have time, poems) which deals with it in a way you think might interest your students.

I’ve compiled a thematic breakdown of all the poems in the anthology (and it took quite a wee while, too, so don’t wax too sarcastic at my expense. I know some of the categories are a bit suss):

• ADOLESCENCE
• ANIMALS
• CHILDREN & GROWING UP
• COMMUNICATION & POETRY
• DEATH
• FRIENDSHIP
• GETTING OLDER
• HISTORY
  · colonialism
  · the depression
  · the first world war
  · the second world war
  · the atomic bomb
• LANDSCAPE & LOCALITY
• LIFE IN GENERAL
• LOVE
• MAGIC
• MEN
• NATURE & CONSERVATION
• PAIN & IMPRISONMENT
• RELATIONSHIPS
• SEX
• VISION QUEST
• WAR, VIOLENCE, PREJUDICE
• WOMEN
  

Our book is arranged in chronological order of birthdates, beginning with Rex Fairburn in 1904 and ending with Brian Turner in 1944. (Some of the reviewers appear to think that this implies we believe that one has to be over sixty to be a “classic” poet, but I guess I’d see this as about as intelligent as attributing conscious bias to a librarian’s choice of Dewey decimal numbers. Chronology simply seemed to us the most convenient way of arranging the material. No-one’s yet claimed to find the book difficult to navigate.)

Another way of approaching a poetry class might be through region and locality. Why not get your class to talk about a poet who comes from where you live? The idea would be to get the students to consider the characteristics of their particular place: culture, physical features, lifestyle – even at some distance away in time. What are the continuities (and discontinuities) in your area?

My colleague Mary Paul has been teaching a course called “Auckland Writers and their Region” at Massey Albany for a number of years now, and we’ve always found it an excellent way of approaching the major themes and concerns of New Zealand life and culture: Arrival; Assimilation; Civilisation & Barbarism; Colonial Identity; Cultural Cringe; Landscape; New World / Old World dichotomies; Settler Blues ...

Many of the poets in the book have associations with more than one region, but some (like Kendrick Smithyman or Brian Turner) are very strongly identified with a particular place, and constantly revisit it as subject-matter in their work.

Here are some of the places on offer:

• AUCKLAND
• CHRISTCHURCH & CANTERBURY
• DANNEVIRKE
• DUNEDIN & OTAGO
• GREECE
• HOLLAND
• NELSON
• NORTHLAND
• SAMOA
• TARANAKI
• TONGA
• UK
• WELLINGTON

When it comes to teaching the actual class, I would recommend beginning by introducing the poet, telling them some picturesque details about them, where they lived, what they liked to do (drink too much, in many cases, alas …) A lot of this information is available online, and I’ve tried to provide links where you can find a picture and discussion of each poet.

Hand out the text of the poem, then play them the recording.

Some of the poets, one has to admit, sound distinctly plummy and odd at this distance in time (Fairburn and Brasch, for example); others (such as Mason and Janet Frame) are quite vernacular and plain. You might tell your students that their own recorded voices will sound a bit strange in twenty or thirty years. Or else just let them laugh. After all, it’s not a crime. Some of them do come across as pretty weird, even to me.

The more they listen, though, the less attention they’ll pay to all that. The content of some of the poems (different ones for each person, I would imagine) is just too compelling to be ignored.

Make sure you go through what each poem means in literal terms. Are there any difficult words? Any allusions needing to be explained?

Try to elicit general reactions from the class. Do they like the poem? Does it interest them? Are there are other approaches to the material they’d prefer the writer to have used?

Write up the material generated by the discussion on the board, grouping it into a kind of mindmap of the various reactions (negative / positive; specific / general).

Depending on how much time you have, at this point you might want to get the class to try and write their own poems on the same theme (either individually or in groups). Get them to write them on posters and/ or read them out loud when they’ve finished.

Alternatively, if you have internet access in the classroom, you could get your students to research particular writers and find pictures and information about them.

The best place to begin would be at one of the following websites:

• Authors. The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre.
  http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/index.asp

(A select but valuable list of major NZ poets with pictures, recordings, and critical reactions).

• Homepage. Auckland University Press.
  http://www.auckland.ac.nz/aup/

(Details of books and other publications by a number of the authors in the anthology).

• New Zealand Literature File. University of Auckland Library Website.
  http://www.library.auckland.ac.nz/subjects/nzp/nzlit2/authors.htm

(This has very thorough bibliographies for most major New Zealand writers).

• Smithyman Online. Mudflat Webworks.
  http://www.smithymanonline.auckland.ac.nz/

(The final text of Kendrick Smithyman's Collected Poems, edited with copious notes and chronologies by Margaret Edgcumbe and Peter Simpson. The first substantial presentation of a major New Zealand poet's works on the internet. Hopefully it will be followed by many more such sites).

• Twelve Taonga. The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre.
  http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/taonga/index.asp

(A brief account of the creation of the 1974 and 2004 recorded poetry archives, which were the main source for this book).

• New Zealand Writers. The New Zealand Book Council Website.
  http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/index.html

(This has pictures and short biographical and critical summaries adapted from Roger Robinson & Nelson Wattie's Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998), but with updated information and supplementary entries on more recent writers).

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

Massey Campus (9.00 am)

[photograph: Jack Ross (2006)]

Cruisy morning, eh?

White haze above the hills
of Albany

“pools of fir”
(H.D.)

or “sooty altars”
(Curnow)

cracker stuff
I like the crosses, man

sparrows bob
across the cobbles

high heels click to class

[First published in Bravado 2 (2004): 22].