A Memorial Brass: i.m. Ted Jenner (1946-2021)

Ted Jenner and friends
[l-to-r: Hamish Dewe, Jack Ross, Ted Jenner, Brett Cross]

Edward [Ted] Jenner (1946-8 July 2021) was a friend of mine. I guess one of the things I appreciated most about Ted was his unfailing cheerfulness and unflappability even when things appeared to be going very, very wrong indeed.

Perhaps it was his long years working as a Classics lecturer in Malawi that accustomed him to sudden emergencies, or perhaps it was the hand-to-mouth nature of his life as a writer and teacher in New Zealand, but I never saw him at a loss for a wise and witty thing to say.

I had heard that he was ill, and even in hospital, but I'm sorry to say that the news of his death from cancer in the early hours of Friday morning still came as a shock. He wore his years lightly. He was one of that group of baby-boomer New Zealand poets, all born in 1946, at the close of World War II – Sam Hunt, Bill Manhire, Ian Wedde prominent among them – who've been so influential on our literature.

Much though I always enjoyed chatting to Ted – he was a marvellously learned man, a trained classicist with an expertise in Ancient Greek – I suppose it would be true to say that my only real intimate knowledge of him came through his books. The below is probably not a complete list, but it includes all the titles I myself own:

Ted Jenner: A Memorial Brass (1980)

1. A Memorial Brass. Eastbourne, Wellington: Hawk Press, 1980.




Ted Jenner: Dedications (1991)



2. Dedications. Auckland: Omphalos Press, 1991.




Ted Jenner: Love Songs of Ibykos (1997)



3. The Love-Songs of Ibykos: 22 Fragments. Images by John Reynolds. Auckland: Holloway Press, 1997.




Ted Jenner: Sappho Triptych (2007)



4. Sappho Triptych. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2007.




Ted Jenner: Writers in Residence (2009)



5. Writers in Residence and Other Captive Fauna. Auckland: Titus Books, 2009.




Ted Jenner, ed.: brief the fortieth (2010)



6. brief 40 (July 2010). Ed. Ted Jenner. Auckland: Titus Books, 2010.




Ted Jenner: The Gold Leaves (2014)



7. The Gold Leaves (Being an Account and Translation from the Ancient Greek of the 'So-Called' Orphic Tablets). Pokeno: Atuanui Press, 2014.




Bill Direen, ed.: Percutio 10: Ted Jenner Issue (2016)



8. Complete Gold Leaves: Transcriptions of Sixteen Ancient Greek Gold Lamellae. Compiled with English Translations. Dunedin: Percutio Publications, 2016. [In Bill Direen, ed. Percutio 10: A Special Issue devoted to two projects by Classicist and poet Edward Jenner (2016).]




Ted Jenner: The Arrow That Missed (2017)



9. The Arrow that Missed. Lyttelton: Cold Hub Press, 2017.

Ted Jenner: Sappho Triptych (1980)

Looking back, I seem to have written quite a lot about Ted's work over the years:

• There's a brief introduction to it here, on this blog.
• Then there's my review-essay of his Writers in Residence, on the online poetics journal Ka Mate Ka Ora.
• And, more recently, there's my review of The Arrow that Missed from Poetry NZ Yearbook 2018.

I'm not sure that there's any need to repeat all that here. Suffice it to say that for me, Ted Jenner combined the twin virtues of precise, scrupulous scholarship with an equally strong taste for experimental fiction and poetry – not that I think he saw much difference between the two genres, and, the way he wrote, there really wasn't.

I borrowed the title for this piece from his earliest book, A Memorial Brass, exquisitely printed by Alan Loney at the Hawk Press in 1980. I'd like to conclude with some more of Ted's own words, taken from the title poem:

My dear, they call us bourgeois
But it was essentially

A bourgeois thing to do –
An image of conjugal

Faith – to cross the hands over chest
And breast and stand on

The goblin pups, a monumental
Brass patent

For the bloodstream-fevers.
I remember it was cold

That May with added expense, upkeep
of allotment, and late

Spring blooms falling fierce as
Snow on the gale-lashed

Oats. Very soon a priest mumbled eight
Sacrificia patriarchae nostri

Above us. Commenting now on the
Canon of his mass, I

Like to think it was
Easy in Abraham's time –

Knowledge and fear were deliberate
Then, total, without cover; but

As for us, we lie awake
Until the sleeping's over.

My profoundest condolences to Ted's wife, Vasalua. If he were here I'm sure he could find the perfect words to thank her for making the last years of his life perhaps the happiest of all.

As for me, I'd like to say once more Ave atque Vale: Hail and farewell, to one of the finest scholars and poets I've ever known. Perhaps we'll meet again some day, when the sleeping's over.

Ted Jenner: Love Songs of Ibykos (1997)

•

NZ Herald obituaries:

A service to celebrate Ted's life will be held at the All Souls Chapel, Purewa, 100 St Johns Road, Meadowbank on Tuesday 13 July at 1pm. No flowers by request please but donations to Forest and Bird would be welcome.

You can link to some other tributes to Ted here.

•

Some Ads:

[Rubble Emits Light]

RUBBLE EMITS LIGHT
The Film Archive presents films by Richard von Sturmer

Where:
The Film Archive, Auckland
When:
Wednesday 14th July 2010 - Friday 13th August 2010

I went to the opening of this limited season of Richard von Sturmer films (curated by Gabriel White) the other night, and I definitely think it's worth making the effort to check it out when you're next on K Rd. There are three films, The Search for Otto (1985), Aquavera (1988) and 26 Tanka Films (2007), all on continuous loop. There are also a lot of other bits and pieces of footage taken at various times to sample.

Von Sturmer is (I think) one of our most interesting poets, and these films form an essential part of his work to date. Gabriel's essay in the exhibition catalogue is also well worth reading.

•

[John Dickson & Ted Jenner, “After Hours Return"]

brief the fortieth
Editor: Ted Jenner
Number 40 (July 2010)

The latest issue of New Zealand's longest-running avant-garde literary magazine (1995-2010) is now out, and can be ordered from the Titus Books website here.

Guest editor Ted Jenner has assembled a rather modified assemblage of whacked-out freaks for this special anniversary issue - not just your old favourites but some newcomers too ...

•

[bravado 19 (July, 2010)]

The latest issue of Tauranga's literary magazine bravado is also now out, with the fiction guest-selected by yours truly, and the poetry chosen by Majella Cullinane.

I would have liked to include quite a few more of the stories which were sent in, I must admit, but the ones that did make the cut certainly constitute a pretty strong group, I reckon.

•

[Jack Ross: Kingdom of Alt]

This is Brett Cross's rather elegant ad for my forthcoming book of short stories, Kingdom of Alt. The image comes from Bronwyn Lloyd's pop-up version of the Wolfman story "Notes found inside a text of Bisclavret". The basic idea of the collection is storytelling through unusual means: notes written in the margins of other texts, in course journals and private diaries and even email exchanges ...

Just to give you an idea of what to expect, here are some of the reactions I got to my previous collection of short fiction, Monkey Miss Her Now, in 2004:

Original, dense, musical; and … erm … confusing. … Reading this book is like a wild lunge in the dark – you just never know what you’re going to find.

– Sue Emms, Bravado

As postmodern as it is parochial, Monkey Miss Her Now drags a venerable tradition into the strange new worlds of twenty-first century New Zealand.

– Scott Hamilton, brief

Woody Allen sometimes springs to mind, but so equally do the Surrealists.

– Roger Horrocks

Nobody else in New Zealand writes quite like Ross …

– Mark Houlahan, NZ Books

Outside of literati farm, this sort of thing has a very limited life expectancy.

– Joe Wylie, Takahe

•

[Travesty]

Oh, and last but definitely not least, Mike Johnson's eagerly-awaited new graphic novel Travesty is due out from Titus Books next month. The book will be launched by Dylan Horrocks at the AUT Centre for Creative Writing on Thursday August 5, at 6.00pm:

"Mike's thirteenth published book, it's also a graphic novel in several senses of the word - including more than 30 striking panels drawn by comics artist Darren Sheehan.

To attend Thurs August 5 @ 6.00pm please RSVP Helen HuiQun Xue - HXue@aut.ac.nz - by Friday 30 July."

•

Hooked on Classics

Recently I was invited to a poetry gathering up north where I read out some of my versions from Sappho. Afterwards a rather indignant-looking elderly lady came up to me, introducing herself as a former Latin teacher:

“What you read – that was all right, that wasn’t too bad … but some of those poets are just filthy, complete degenerates. Catullus, for instance. In one of his poems he actually encourages another man to go to bed with his girlfriend! Three of them, all together! It’s depraved …”

I agreed that he was a bit of a one (actually I was secretly relieved that she wasn’t intent on criticising some of my more daring translation choices), whilst congratulating myself inwardly that I hadn’t chosen anything raunchy from Ovid or Anakreon or any of the less respectable Greek or Latin poets.

Eventually I managed to escape without committing myself to any too quotable opinions about the morals of the ancient world.

It got me thinking, though. What is it with the Classics? "Reams of ancient filth," as my father used to put it (apparently the editions of Latin authors they used at school had all the "adult" bits taken out and printed at the back in an appendix for scholarly reference; I think you can guess which parts of the book were most thumbed and dog-eared ...)

Anyway, the latest issue of Ka Mate Ka Ora includes some more of my reflections on the subject in the form of a review-essay of Ted Jenner's recent Titus Books collection Writers in Residence ...

Ted Jenner is perhaps unusual among modern writers in being a Greek scholar as well as a poet. Most other venturers into the field of classical translation nowadays (myself included) seem content with a Loeb dual-text and a lot of - possibly unmerited - self-confidence.

You don't really learn anything new that way, though. What's fascinating about Ted's work is the precision and finesse with which he reconstructs these fragments of the past, some of them literally combed out of the rubbish-dumps of Egypt (it's amazing how long papyrus can survive in a really dry climate).

Obviously I have a good deal more to say about that in my piece over at the nzepc. For the moment, however, here's a brief listing of Ted's publications to date (I've also included a few illustrations so you can appreciate what beautiful pieces of bookmaking many of them are):

• A Memorial Brass. Eastbourne, Wellington: Hawk Press, 1980.
• Dedications. Auckland: Omphalos Press, 1991.
• The Love-Songs of Ibykos: 22 Fragments. Auckland: Holloway Press, 1997.
• Sappho Triptych. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2007.
• Writers in Residence and Other Captive Fauna. Auckland: Titus Books, 2009.

You can hear more of Ted's own views in the online interview with Brett Cross and Scott Hamilton available here.

And if your curiosity extends even beyond that, why not have a look at the pages on Anne Carson and Michael Harlow which I'm gradually building up for our new Massey MA course Contemporary New Zealand Writers in an International Context?

Carson is herself a very considerable scholar (witness her fascinating 1999 book Economy of the Unlost, which daringly juxtaposes the poetry of Paul Celan with the surviving lyric fragments of Simonides of Ceos) ...

But that's more than enough self-advertising from me for the moment. Do check out the new (James K. Baxter-themed) issue of Ka Mate Ka Ora if you have a moment, though.