Three Cool Cats

Right back at you, Jen, and - Bon voyage! I hope Singapore appreciates you in a way that officialdom (at least) has so signally failed to do in Auckland - knock 'em dead ...

I've been debating for some time what would best to do about various extraordinary beautiful little books of poetry which have turned up here over the past couple of months, and then it occurred to me that maybe a joint post would be the best way to deal with them. They do all seem very interesting to me, though in distinctly different ways.

Once I had the title, the rest started to arrange itself quite easily. It's an old Ry Cooder song, apparently - most famously covered (of course) by the Beatles - but I think that "3 cool cats" is a pretty good summary of these three authors and their three curious little books.

I'm going to take them in alphabetical order, to avoid any unseemly wrangles about precedence, but I seriously doubt that Jill or Jen or Ross would ever feel tempted to do anything so uncool in any case ...

Ross Brighton: A Pelt, A Shrub, a Soil Sample
(Christchurch: Neoismist Press, 2009)

Ross Brighton's A Pelt, A Shrub, a Soil Sample is a really beautifully-designed and put-together book. I think that Annie Mackenzie's drawings, in particular, are a joy, and mesh perfectly with the poems.

I've put in a sample page below so you can judge for yourself.

Ross Brighton himself is an exciting new presence on the poetry scene. He's been giving everybody a hard time with his searching blog-comments and general feisty argumentativeness for quite a while now, and it's nice to see Scott Hamilton and various others (myself included) jolted out of the massive complacency of their judgments on poetry. I believe that even Lee Posna (author of an essay on contemporary American poetry in Poetry NZ 38) is to get the treatment in an upcoming issue of the same magazine ... Check out Ross's blog here (It also contains useful details on how to get hold of his book).

[Ross Brighton]

Do I get his poems? No, not really. I kind of like them - they have a kind of lyric music and complex symmetry to them - but I'm not sure whether they're love poems, nature poems, or experiments in poetic word disruption. Maybe all three at the same time. That doesn't hugely worry me, though - as I say, the book is beautiful, and I imagine his work will come into ever sharper focus as time goes on. Will Christie's work made no sense to me at all until I heard her read one day, after which the scales fell from my eyes. The same thing happened to me once, long ago, while I was reading a John Ashbery poem called "Scheherazade". Suddenly all that had been mysterious was clear as crystal.

No doubt the same will happen with Ross Brighton in the fullness of time. For the moment, though, I see enough in them to persuade me that it's worth taking the trouble to try to understand them, and him, better. I kind of prefer deferred gratification, in any case. Those of you who know Ross' work better will no doubt have already worked out precisely where it is he's coming from already. Comments and elucidations welcome.

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Jill Chan: These Hands Are Not Ours
(Paekakariki: ESAW, 2009)

I guess I've been reading Jill Chan's subtle, understated, contemplative lyrics for more than a decade now. They used to come in little packets to Spin magazine, back in the late nineties, when I edited one of the three yearly issues, and there was always something mysterious and distant about them. They roused my curiosity in a way that few of the other contributors did.

I'm not sure that Jill's work has changed all that substantially since then. There was already a kind of formal perfection about her approach to poetry which risked (on occasion) the suspicion of coldness or distance. She has relaxed a little, though, and it's become ever more apparent just how vociferous are the demons who require this elegant poise, this pirouetting on the edge of the abyss.

In short, I'm a big fan. With the possible exception of Richard von Sturmer, I can't think of another New Zealand writer who could more proudly carry off such labels as "Zen" or "spiritual" poet. Her own personal website has shifted addresses, and now resides here.

[Jill Chan]

This book, These Hands Are Not Ours, is a sequel to her earlier volumes The Smell of Oranges (2003) and Becoming a Person Who Isn't (2007), from the same publisher, Michael O'Leary's "Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop."

And might I just put in a plug here for O'Leary's impressive track record in searching out and publishing the works of just such visionaries as Jill Chan? I do honestly feel that his press (run with Brian E. Turner) will be seen as an increasingly important contributor to New Zealand poetry and writing in general in the years to come.

If you check out their website, I think you'll be astonished at the calibre of much of the work they've put out - and with minimal encouragement from the Arts establishment, too. Hats off to them, I'd say. We need many more such voices in the wilderness.

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Jen Crawford: Napoleon Swings
(Auckland: Soapbox Press, 2009)

I've already had my say about Jen Crawford's poetry in the speech I gave at the launch of her full-length Titus Books collection Bad Appendix last year, and also in the editorial to Poetry NZ 38, which featured the bulk of her searing "Pop Riveter" sequence. Her blog, Blue Acres, can be found here.

[Jen Crawford]

What can I say about Napoleon Swings, the latest poetry chapbook in an increasingly distinguished sequence from Michael Steven's Soapbox Press? Sarah Broom perhaps put it best in her launch speech at Galbraith's a couple of Sundays back. Reading these poems is like trying to make your way through a thick jungle of foliage, with no possibility of getting up high enough to see your way through the gloom.

She concluded that probably the best approach was to stand still for awhile and allow the lianas and creepers to twine themselves around your feet and start to root you to the forest floor.

Beyond that, Sarah pointed to certain verbal analogies and echoes of T. S. Eliot's Waste Land, but also to the vital fact that the dedicatee of the sequence, Debbie Gerbich is the woman who committed suicide after her confidential confession to having had group sex with convicted rapist Brad Shipton was made public by the Sunday Star Times in 2007.

Just as "Pop Riveter" explored the alienated wasteland of a factory workplace, then, "Napoleon Swings" looks at the battle-ground of contemporary sexuality with a dispassionate and truthful eye. It's a poem to be studied and thought about long and hard, combining as it does Jen's characteristic lyric conciseness and precision with an ever more intense engagement with the debased language of our bankrupt mediascape.

I think you need to get this book, and you need to read it. Get back to me on what you think. If it's a sexy book, it's sexy in a really profoundly disturbing way.

Mark Young: Lunch Poems

[Mark Young: Lunch Poems (Auckland: Soapbox Press, 2009)]

Title sound familiar? It certainly should.



I guess a lot of others grew up on those beautiful City Lights Pocket Poets editions of Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and - of course - Frank O'Hara. The latter's sublime Lunch Poems came out in 1964, two years before his death in a freak traffic accident on the beach at Fire Island.

There've been a lot of collected and selected editions since, but it's still arguably the best introduction to him and his hip, relaxed, laidback aesthetic - "Ave Maria," "The Day Lady Died" or "Lana Turner has collapsed!"

Mark Young's own slim volume is the seventh in Michael Steven's elegant series of chapbooks, issued through Soapbox Press. Here's the list to date:

2007

Michael Steven: Homage to Robert Creeley
Jack Ross: Papyri
Renee Liang: Chinglish

2008

Christian Jensen: Zin Uru
Martin Edmond: The Big O Revisited
Mark Young: Lunch Poems

planned for 2009

Jen Crawford: Napoleon Swings
Francis McWhannell (ed.) Poems of Lawrence Rees

Interestingly enough (to me, at any rate), the last time I was sent a book of Mark Young's to review was in 1999, when Alan Brunton's Bumper Books put out his first volume of verse after forty years of writing: The Right Foot of the Giant.



Here's what I had to say then (the review was commissioned by Mark Pirie for JAAM 13, but he ended up not including it in the magazine, I'm not quite sure why - I think he said at the time for reasons of space). I wish I could take some credit for prescience, but it was (at any rate) the best response I could come up with then to a wholly new name (for me) in the poetry firmament.

You see, I wasn't around in the NZ poetry scene in the sixties and seventies, so the Mark Young poete maudit legend was simply something I would eventually read about in the pages of Brunton, Leggott & Edmond's Big Smoke anthology of 2000.



Here's my review:

What would you call it? A conjuration of masks, perhaps? You know, the Venereal Game, those nouns of multitude: a pride of lions, an unkindness of ravens, etc. Mark Young certainly runs through a fair few masks in this, his first volume of poems – despite forty years in the writing game. Let’s take them one by one.

There’s late Baxter-ish Grafton poems:

On the edge
of a condemned gully, we too await
the graders that will be our guillotines.

Sexually frank Ginsbergian homosexual love poems:

Until that night when you fucked me more
ferociously than usual, & I felt carnivore breath
on the back of my neck …
& as you came in me I called you ‘Lion.’

Early Baxter-ish heterosexual love poems:

This sad flute was once the white bone
of your thigh, beloved …

Janet Frame-y incarceration poems:

I could not watch
the sports today – to see the spastics & mongols
running races is too bizarre …

Is such a multiplicity of personae a problem? Not if they are personae – but they seem to me, some of the time, rather too close to their originals.

Young’s publisher, Alan Brunton, regards him as a significant, but so far largely unrecognised player in the transition from the regional controversies of the forties and fifities to the more outward-looking poetics of the sixties. Certainly a poem like “Lizard” could easily be read in that way. I wasn’t born when it first came out in the NZ Listener in 1959, but I can see how intensely exciting it must have looked right then:

’Lijah Lizard, put your Woolworth glasses back on.

It’s intensely urban imagery (“I wanted to see the big city. / Still, there is an even bigger one / waiting for me now”), albeit filled with a sense of apocalyptic dread. The strange thing is that this was his “first poem attempted” – and has had perhaps the greatest success of any of his poems. It looks a little out of place here now, as if in inaugurating an era it left little space for the poet himself to manoeuvre, nowhere much for him to go.

I notice that Young makes no particular “important player” claims for himself, though. His engaging author’s note concentrates on the personal: an enthusiastic list of influences, authors, eras. “This book assuages my greatest regret, that I never had a collection of poetry published.” That, to be perfectly frank, would seem to me to be its principal function. I leave to better informed critics than myself the precise determination of Mark Young’s place in New Zealand literary history, but his importance to the average poetry reader is always going to depend on the merits of the individual poems.

Brunton also comments on the “sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll” ambience of so much of his work, but claims that they are “peripheral references, past of the landscape in which he existed … he was too busy surviving in it to write about it.” There’s something in that, I think. If you take away all the “period” details – invocations of all the people one might like to be (“Tristan Tzara, William Burroughs / Han-Shan The Rolling Stones”), jazz stuff, Beat stuff, French surrealism, and so on – there still has to be a distinctively personal voice left behind for us to continue to enjoy Young’s writing.

Is there? I think there is. Funnily enough, it’s a voice (fresh, fierce, frank) which would fit quite easily into the technically conservative, sixties-nostalgiac live poetry scene today. That’s not to say his work is unsubtle, but somehow unreflective, despite the breadth of reference - it's more Frank O'Hara than John Ashbery, if one wants to put it in those terms: more Beat than New York School. As he puts it in “I begin with Crazy Horse”:

Then it was easier. Your heroes
were alive, at least in mind.

“The shining images of youth” … those days of hope when internationalism, in the form of the Beats and the French New Wave, first came to rid the land of its demons. It’s nice to see that that the second part of this book, ‘A Bestiary for Borges’ (poems mainly 1969-79) is stronger (though, admittedly, less unified) than the first, which dates from 1962-68. I take that as a promising sign. With Mark Young, now that this history has finally seen the light of day, the best may yet be to come.

God, that sounds patronizing when I reread it now! I suppose that's the real reason Pirie wouldn't include it in his magazine.

There are a couple of good points hidden away in there, though, I think, if you strip away all the portentous bullshitting about Young's "place in NZ literature." First of all, the masks are certainly there, and clearly identifiable - I just didn't realise how much of a feature of his mature work they would become. There's a persistent tendency to duck and hide the moment a particular method or approach becomes identifiable in his poetry. Now I'd see that as a strength. I did then, too, I think, but was just a little doubtful about how many stances there'd actually been over that long haul between 1959 and 1999.

Second, my identification of the second part of the book, ‘A Bestiary for Borges’, as the stronger of the two, seems at any rate a little prescient. I'm not sure that anyone then could have foreseen the profusion of blogs, books, chapbooks, magazines and styles that Mark Young would go on to pioneer over the next decade, but at least I could see the best was yet to come.

If you want to see at least a preliminary bibliography, I recommend his author page at the nzepc as a good starting point.

Beyond that, what should I say about this particular book, the one Michael Steven has just put out? It's Mark Young. It's hip, streetwise, unaffected, urban & cool. It's a lovely tribute to its predecessor, Frank O'Hara's book, 45 years on from its first appearance.

I could go through the poems and talk about them individually, but what I like best about them is their sense of flow, their updated version of the O'Hara list poem ("I do this / I do that") in a new, electronic continuum.

Mark Young certainly is a poet for our times. I see now, as I couldn't really see ten years ago, that it's because of that long haul from 1959, not in spite of it, that his relentless trying-on of new hats has become a series of Borgesian avatars, not the set of exercises in the currently-prevailing fashionable styles I then thought it.

Happy fiftieth anniversary, 'Lijah lizard!