A Visit to Colville

The Colville General Store
(August 5th, 2001)

"Colville" is one of Kendrick Smithyman's most iconic small-town New Zealand lyrics. (And, yes, I know - I hate that word "iconic," too, and agree that it's overused. It's difficult to find a good alternative in this instance, though).

Here's the poem in its entirety, from his online Collected Poems.

The editors, Margaret Edgcumbe and Peter Simpson, comment:

Colville: first published in Westerly 3 (October 1968), 33; also in Earthquake Weather [1972] and Selected Poems [1989]; a town on the Coromandel Peninsula

Succinct and accurate, but somehow not the full story. For one thing, on his Stout Centre recording of the poem, Kendrick remarks that the poem caused quite a lot of fuss when it first appeared, and that people kept on assuring him that "it's not like that now." As a result (presumably), when it was included in Ian Wedde & Harvey McQueen's 1985 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, the title had been changed to "Colville 1964". Subsequently he seems to have gone back on that decision, though, and the title reverted to its original form.

So is it still "like that"? "That sort of place where you stop / long enough to fill the tank, buy plums, / perhaps, and an icecream thing on a stick / while somebody local comes / in, leans on the counter, takes a good look / but does not like what he sees of you"? Is it still "intangible as menace, / a monotone with a name, / ... an aspect of human spirit / ... mean, wind-worn"? It's not exactly a pretty picture he paints.

Anyway, in the winter of 2001 I decided to find out. I'd been discussing and poring over the poem for years in class, so I felt it was high time to go and check it out for myself.

[Simon & camera]

I went with my friend Simon Creasey, which may not (in retrospect) have been such a good idea - but then he couldn't be said to have stuffed up any worse than I did, so I guess I'd better just stop blaming others for my own shortcomings.

Colville Store (interior)

The trouble began shortly after we first got into town, about mid-morning. I'd been snapping away with my camera, and just naturally lifted it up and took a picture as we walked into the store. There it is above, in fact.

Well, the way the guy glared it me, I realised at once that this went far beyond any conventional faux pas. And fair enough, too! I hadn't actually realised until them just how much people resent flash photography, when they haven't been asked permission (which I suspect he would have refused, in any case).

It was a supremely vulgar, touristy act, and the fact that I was desperate to get a shot of the counter to illustrate those first lines of the poem was neither here nor there. Mea culpa, that's for sure.

What's more, when I looked at the postcards he had on sale (one of which I bought - you can see it there below), it became obvious that the picturesque nature of his shop was part of his stock in trade. Basically, what I'd done was the touristic equivalent of robbing him at gunpoint.

Colville: the sunny side of the street

How do you recover from a thing like that? The obvious answer would have been to get the hell out of Dodge, but it was a misty, moisty morning, we were both pretty frozen, and since the general store doubled as a café, we decided that forking over some cold hard cash for a coffee and a muffin might help restore matters to an even keel.

Simon in the café

Lo and behold, it seemed to work! The coffee was good, the muffins were tasty, and we even found ourselves getting into conversation with some locals at an adjacent table, which almost never happens - to me, at any rate. Everything was going swimmingly, but then ...

The conversation had been cycling generally around Colville, the people who lived there, tall tales of the bush and the communes, and then Simon asked:

"Has Colville always been this small? I mean, you read about it as one of the big trading ports on the Coromandel ... has there ever been more to it than this?" (with a lofty sweep of the hand, indicating the four or five buildings in sight).

Man, you could almost hear those people stiffen! You treat a couple of random Auckland tourists as if they were human beings, and the next thing you know they're taking liberties. I hastily ushered him out of the café and into the car before he could say anything else, and tromped on the gas pedal.

"What's wrong?" persisted Simon. "What did I say? Is there a problem?"

I'm not sure he got it even when I stopped on the outskirts of town to read him a brief lecture on small town etiquette ("Rule 1. Never look around with a sneer and then comment on how small things are here; Rule 2. Never reveal that you hail from Auckland and that your beverage of choice is latte in a bowl; oh, and of course Rule 3. Never take photos of locals without their permission, especially if you have to walk right inside their dwellings to do so ...")

But maybe I'm just paranoid - perhaps they were just a bit surprised by the question, or genuinely didn't know the answer. One mustn't overreact (after all). We'd almost persuaded ourselves to believe that by the time we roared back into town, many hours later, after having been up to the tip of the peninsula and even taken a dip in the icy cold water.

To give you a slightly better idea of the context, here's a panorama of pictures I took just a bit out of town, with suitable captions from Kendrick's poem:

[Thames Estuary Panorama (1-10)]

Face outwards, over the saltings

the bay, wise as contrition

shallow as their hold on small repute,

good for dragging nets

which men are doing through channels

disproportionate in the blaze

of hot afternoon’s down-going

to a far fire-hard tide’s rise

upon the vague where time is distance?

I don't remember too much about our return to town. We were starving by then, and had (as I mentioned above) persuaded ourselves that there was nothing to worry about. So we went back into the café ...

The coffee was lousy this time round. That can happen anywhere, of course, but it had been quite good on the way up. I couldn't help thinking that something had been done to it. One thing's for certain: that latte wasn't made with love ...

these have another tone
or quality, something aboriginal,
reductive as soil itself – bone
must get close here, final
yet unrefined at all. They endure.

A school, a War Memorial Hall

the store, neighbourhood of salt and hills

The road goes through to somewhere else.

That last line rather sums it up, I'm afraid: "Bleenk and you missed it," as the Australians say. But, then, someone has to live there, maintain the petrol pump and the dairy, organise the dances at the War Memorial Hall.

The poem ends rather equivocally:

Not a geologic fault
line only scars textures of experience.
Defined, plotted; which maps do not speak.

How is that sentence to be construed? Is "scars" to be taken as a verb? "It's not only geological faultlines which scar you - creating textures of experience"? Or is "scars" a noun: one of the items in a list (with commas omitted)? "Not a geologic faultline only, scars, textures of experience" ...?

One thing's for certain, he's positing a close link between the character of the inhabitants and the nature of their surroundings - or, at any rate, speculating (as an urban/e outsider) that such might be the case. I can't help feeling that he was onto something there, or is that just me being crass again?

COLVILLE

That sort of place where you stop
long enough to fill the tank, buy plums,
perhaps, and an icecream thing on a stick
while somebody local comes
in, leans on the counter, takes a good look
but does not like what he sees of you,

intangible as menace,
a monotone with a name, as place
it is an aspect of human spirit
(by which shaped), mean, wind-worn. Face
outwards, over the saltings: with what merit
the bay, wise as contrition, shallow

as their hold on small repute,
good for dragging nets which men are doing
through channels, disproportionate in the blaze
of hot afternoon’s down-going
to a far fire-hard tide’s rise
upon the vague where time is distance?

It could be plainly simple
pleasure, but these have another tone
or quality, something aboriginal,
reductive as soil itself – bone
must get close here, final
yet unrefined at all. They endure.

A school, a War Memorial
Hall, the store, neighbourhood of salt
and hills. The road goes through to somewhere else.
Not a geologic fault
line only scars textures of experience.
Defined, plotted; which maps do not speak.

11. 1. 68

[No wonder they gave me a bit of a hard time ...]

Wildes Licht / Wild Light

[Dieter Riemenschneider: Wildes Licht (2010)]

It's weird seeing yourself in a foreign language. Last night I was at the booklaunch of Wildes Licht: Poems / Gedichte aus Aotearoa Neuseeland, a bilingual English / German anthology of New Zealand poetry, translated and edited by Dieter Riemenschneider, and available from Tranzlit publishers (or from a bookseller near you).

The title comes from Michele Leggott's poem "Wild Light", and you'll find a really fascinating assortment of poems old and new in there. Why I'm in there is a little harder to say (you'll have to ask Dieter), but I have to say that I certainly value the opportunity to see my words through the transverse lense of his careful translation:

Situations ii: CBD

Auckland nach dem Regen

NO VACANCIES
at the “City of Sails” motel.
It’s hard to convey how strange that is:
dark, skid-marked streets; day after day
of grey …
Who the fuck’s there?

Two loonies
standing by the road
(blue parka, beige kagoul)
not waiting for anything
– just waiting.
By a roundabout.

It’s ten at night.


Rain-slick streets are cool.

has become:

Ortsverhalte ii: CBD

Auckland nach dem Regen

BELEGT
das “City of Sails” Motel.
's ist schwer zu sagen wie merkwürdig das ist:
dunkle Schleuderspurenstraßen; tagelanges
Grau …
Wer verdammt ist da?

Zwei Verrückte
stehen am Straßenrand
(blauer Parka, beiger Anorak)
warten auf nichts
– warten nur.
An einem Verkehrskreisel.

’s ist zehn am Abend.


Die regenglatten Straßen sind kühl.

The title (in the unlikely event you hadn't noticed) makes reference to Max Ernst's apocalyptic "Europe after the Rain" paintings from the 1940s - which seemed very appropriate to me in 1998, when this poem was written, as the whole city was blacked-out and diesel generators were chugging away in every shop door in the CBD.

[Max Ernst: Europa nach dem Regen II (1940-42)]

Beyond that, I particularly like the way that my loonies have become Zwei Verrückte [two crazies], and my "Who the fuck’s there?" has been transformed into the equally-heartfelt: Wer verdammt ist da?

Oh, there are joys innumerable to be found in this anthology. You owe it to yourself to read Allen Curnow's "Das Skelett des Großen Moa in Canterburymuseum, Christchurch":

Nicht ich, ein Kind kommt wunderbar zur Welt
und lernt den Trick, wie man sich aufrecht stellt.

(Pretty clever, getting it to rhyme as well), or Hone Tuwhare's "Keine gewöhnliche Sonne" [No Ordinary Sun], or Apirana Taylor's "Trauriger Witz auf einem Marae" [Sad Joke on a Marae] ...

Why is it so appealing to see these familiar poems in such a new guise? I have to say that I hope this is the first of many such anthologies. There was a bilingual French selection of New Zealand poets included in the journal Europe a few years ago: No 931 (Novembre 2006) – Écrivains de Nouvelle-Zélande, but that doesn't really compare with the epic breadth of Dieter's fascinatingly various sampling of historic and contemporary New Zealand poetry to date.

Anyway, check it out if you get the chance. The initial booklaunch in Auckland will be followed by a road-trip during which Dieter and Jan will launch the book at various venues in Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. I'll put up more exact dates and details as soon as they come to hand.

In the meantime, though, I'll leave you with some lines from one of my favourite Curnow poems, "Man wird es wissen wenn man dort ist" [You Will Know When You Get There]:

Hinab geht mann allein, so spät, in den wogenschwarzen Bodenriss.

Down you go alone, so late, into the surge-black fissure.

Isn't that word wogenschwarzen wonderful? "Fissure" still wins out over Bodenriss, though, I think: such a weight of implication in just the sound of those last few words ...

Why John Masefield?

[Masefield as a youngster]

It's always been a bit difficult to explain (let alone justify) my choice of topics for a Masters thesis. "The Early Novels of John Masefield, 1908-1911" -- it sounds like one of those candidates for world's dullest books (Worms and Their Ways, by a "grub"; or Lesser-Known Aspects of Pre-Kantian Metaphysics, by J. M. Snotwood, MA, D Phil, &c. &c.) ...

I remember running into Terry Sturm in the corridors of the Auckland English Department shortly after I'd received permission to undertake this daring piece of original research - "So you're the Masefield man!" he boomed. When I admitted to Sebastian Black that I owned copies (mostly first editions - not that many of them actually went into second editions) of all 23 of Masefield's novels, he remarked that not many people could make that boast ("Perhaps nobody in the world," he added, with a sepulchral chuckle).

So why John Masefield? I guess the real reason is that I grew up on him. The first of his books I really read was The Midnight Folk (1927), a madly-eccentric children's book about pirates, hidden treasure, country houses, talking animals, fox-hunting - oh, and witches. Its hero, Kay Harker, went on to star in a later book for slightly older children, The Box of Delights (1935), which added the delights of time travel and Ramon Lull's philosophy to the heady mixture. There's a particularly good scene where Kay joins a circle of stone-age Britons keeping off wolves with their spears. Wolves are indeed one of the dominant motifs in the book - it's actually subtitled "When the Wolves were Running". What is it really about? I'm still not sure, but it had the effect of waking me up to the heady attractions of folklore, mythology and the past.

As time went by I started to read his poetry (he was, after all, the British Poet Laureate from 1930 to 1967, so that was really his speciality). Old-fashioned, yes, but dedicated to story-telling above all. Before the First World War he was considered one of England's most controversial and hard-hitting poets, mostly because of the runaway success of his 1911 poem The Everlasting Mercy, which first introduced the poetry-reading public to the delights of truly extravagant bad language:

[John Masefield: The English Review (1911)

You closhy put!
You bloody liar! etc. etc.

"His sins were scarlet, but his books were read" (Hilaire Belloc).

As time went by, I started to accumulate more and more books by Masefield, and became more and more attuned to the paradox of an author whom so many people had vaguely heard of, so celebrated and widely-read in his day (judging by the relative ease with which one could collect his work from second-hand bookshops), and yet whom nobody now seemed to rate or even feel curious about.

And yet he was good! Or so he seemed to me. Perhaps not good in a conventional, card-carrying sense (by now I'd picked up all the standard Modernist shibboleths about the sinfulness of adjectives and the intrinsic unreliability of narrators), but so intensely idiosyncratic and strange that his work really couldn't be said to to resemble anything else I'd ever read or even heard about.

I was looking through an anthology on the writing of the sea one day when I stumbled on an extraordinary passage from one of Masefield's novels (Sard Harker (1924))which described the hero first fighting his way through an almost animate swamp, then reaching the beach only to promptly stand on a stingray's tail. It was nearly ten pages long, and so bizarrely circumstantial that I almost felt my own foot curl up in sympathy. Pain, frustration, futility - these were Masefield's principal novelistic stock-in-trade. He would devote fifty pages of a book to the attempt to find someone's address at the drop of a hat. It seemed to be axiomatic with him that committees were set up to frustrate enquiry, that all officials were stupidly obstructive, if not actively malevolent, and that if anything could go wrong, it would - only far worse than you'd anticipated.

Actually his world sounded rather like a heightened version of the tormented wasteland that I myself inhabited (at the time), so you needn't think I took to him because I like sweeping descriptions of ships at sea ...

[John Masefield: Sea-fever: Selected Poems. ed. Phlip W. Errington (2005)]

Masefield hated the sea. That's one point that's pretty much beyond dispute. It's true he wrote "Sea-fever" (the one Masefield poem everyone can quote from):

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky
And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by ...

He was compulsorily apprenticed in the Merchant Navy as a very young boy after the death of both his parents, and his painful experiences on the training ship Conway (as recorded in his 1944 autobiographical volume New Chum) were only surpassed by the sheer horror of going round Cape Horn as a sailor before the mast (as recounted in the 1913 narrative poem Dauber).

He fell ill in Chile (luckily for him) - it was probably a nervous breakdown - and was invalided home. Although he didn't officially leave the Merchant Navy until after he'd travelled to New York to join the next ship he'd been assigned to, the attractions of the city were far too much for him, and he never made another voyage except as a passenger. Masefield, then, was no Joseph Conrad - his first book might have been called Salt-Water Ballads (1902), and he might have continued to mine his early life on the bounding wave as material for the rest of his life (in classic novels such as The Bird of Dawning (1933) or Victorious Troy (1935)), but that's all it was to him - material. He was actualy far happier writing about the English countryside or the wilds of South America (the latter particularly - that time in the hosital in Valparaiso clearly left its mark).

Masefield's first book came out in 1902, and his last, In Glad Thanksgiving in 1967. Over that immensely-long career he published poems, plays, novels, war reportage, and literary criticism with pretty consistent success. When one genre ran dry, he shifted his energies to another. His first two plays The Campden Wonder and The Tragedy of Nan enjoyed immense acclaim when Granville-Barker put them on in 1908. Subsequent dramas failed to repeat the precedent, however, so he shifted his energies to fiction: first grown-up "problem novels" in the style of the day, then (somewhat more successfully, as they were more congenial to him) boys' books. The unheard-of acclaim garnered by the first publication of The Everlasting Mercy in The English Review in 1911 diverted him into writing narrative poems. The War, when it came, saw him working as an ambulance orderly in France, then a writer of patriotic "histories" (including the still-celebrated Gallipoli (1916)).

And so it went on. He came back to novels in the 1920s, when the public's interest in long narrative poems was starting to flag. The last novel he published came out in 1947, after which he stopped writing much except poetry (and letters - the five or six volumes of these which have appeared since his death contain some of his liveliest and most engaging writing).

It's easy to patronise Masefield for his lack of self-conscious intellectualism. He's no no proto-Modernist, no unsung precursor of Joyce or Pound. And yet he was taken pretty seriously by his contemporaries: Hardy, Conrad and Yeats. They read him and saw him as one of themselves. At the very least his career seems to offer an interesting parable in the pitfalls of literary celebrity.

I set out to write about all of his novels, but found the task too vast for a standard-length thesis. By the time one had summarised their plots, there would have hardly have been room for any analysis. Instead my supervisor, Prof D. I. B. Smith agreed to my proposal simply to look at his pre-war career, by turning it into a kind of case-study of a young writer on the make in the Edwardian era. So that's the thesis I wrote. It's awfully long. Two or three times the length one would get away with today, I suspect. But things weren't so strict in 1985.

I suppose then (to paraphrase my friend Scott Hamilton) that Masefield offered me a kind of keyhole on the literary conditions of the early to mid-twentieth century which I could hardly have got by looking at a more conventionally celebrated writer.

I still like his work, though I haven't read any for quite some time. The Box of Delights is well worth a look, though - unless it's one of those books that you have to have read when you were a kid for it still to exert any charm later on.

[John Masefield: Selected Poems. Ed. John Betjeman (1978)]

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.

•
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.

•
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.

Concern for Tony Veitch's Safety

"Time for my close-up, Mr DeMille?"

Yes, I felt concerned
when he went missing yesterday
Tony had tried to do it twice before
his lawyer said

(or was that his publicist?)
kill himself, that is
This time was far more serious
wandering around Ngaruawahia

on his own!
He could easily have been killed
crossing the road
Cynics said it had something to do

with Dame Susan Devoy
the former Queen of Squash
complaining of the misuse
of her testimonial

for a passport application
produced in court with 20 others
from “prominent New Zealanders”
in support of domestic abuse

When celebrities turn on their own
it’s never pretty
He has been fined & given 300 hours
Oh right, it was his publicist

(call her a “media minder”)
who explained that the references
solicited from sporting stars
were alleged to be for a passport

because “the sentencing hearing
needed to be kept
completely confidential”
I mean, what did they think?

That he was going to fuck
off? It’s hard to get these things
straight, easy to be fooled
by media bias. I mean

how many times
does a poor guy have to cry
on television before we accept
that it’s okay

to kick a stroppy bitch
down some concrete stairs
when she gets in your face?
It’s just not true that

he left her lying there for hours
with a broken back
I mean, what kind of a man
do you take him for?

& all that namby-pamby
shutting up that she’s been doing
angling for sympathy, I call it
from women and pinkos and gays

the ones who’d turn on any
red-blooded guy
administering domestic correction
They were all over it from the beginning

It’s as if they had something to prove

Poetry Publishing Degree Zero

Zero says hello ...

[& - contrary to popular belief - our cat is named Zero because of the big white circular markings on her sides, not because we want to belittle her or give her an inferiority complex. Looks pretty hard done-by, doesn't she?]

I received an email the other day:

Hi Jack,

Im trying to get a hardbook copy of my poetry. As i dont know the process involved in creating a book and marketing it im wondering if you could help

regards
[...]

Sent from the NZ Society of Authors - the New Zealand writers' website

It was a bit hard to know where to begin with the reply. And yet I can't even claim it's that unusual a question. Nobody ever seems to ask me "Where do you get your ideas from?" (I suspect that if they've read any of my books, they're a bit afraid of the answer). What they do ask me is: "How do I go about getting my book of poems published?"

I've just been reading a very interesting book called Reinventing Comics (2000), by that great pundit and prophet of the graphic novel form, Scott McCloud, and I must confess I was very struck by his answer to a similar question:

Go out and photocopy your comic a few times on a double-sided xerox machine, then sell it to a friend for a buck ...

Sounds a bit frivolous, doesn't it? But there's something in it, all the same.

The traditional hierarchy of poetry publishing runs more or less as follows:

• self-publishing: the "my-basement" press (or whatever name you choose to call it)
• vanity publishing: that plausible sounding gentleman in the High Street who offers to put out your book for you, handle all the editing, proofing etc. for a (substantial) fee
• small press publishing: that group of close friends / enthusiasts who've set out to reform the world of letters single-handed
• scholarly or specialist press publishing: nice-looking books, often, but priced quite high and not very widely available
• commercial publishing: generally only accessible to the stars in the genre: Simon Armitage, Billy Collins, Derek Walcott, etc.

This hierarchy is, it should be said straight away, completely out-of-date in the digital age, but it still governs a lot of the audience reaction to particular poetry books. Readers are a conservative bunch, and poetry-readers are even more conservative than most. It takes quite a lot to jolt them out of reliance on this particular paradigm.

Now, at this point, if you're really serious about wanting to produce a book of poems, you should ask yourself a series of questions (the answers are for you, not for public consumption, so there's no point in being anything but rigorously honest):

1. Have you ever had any of your poetry published?


2. If so, where?


3. How many poems?


4. Have you done any live readings or performances of your work?


5. Do you have any fans or people who've expressed an interest in your work?


6. Do you have any friends or family members interested in your poetry (or prepared to pretend to be for the sake of peace)?


7. Do you have any money, or access to any through friends, fans, family etc.?


8. How much of it do you feel like spending on this project?


9. Or is it rather that you want to make money out of it?

If you've never published any poems anywhere (except in the school magazine), you don't have any following based on live performance, you don't have any money or any sympathetic rich friends or relatives, my own advice would be to hold off on publishing a book until you've addressed a few of those preliminary steps. Don't give up on the idea - simply postpone it a little.

If, however, you're already some way down the poetry highway, and are beginning to feel that there's enough interest in your work to justify a book (or you'd simply like to get it all in order by gathering and selecting the best pieces for a volume), then a different set of possibilities begins to appear.

The facts of life

• A printer will charge you far less to produce a book than any of the publishers-on-demand traditionally referred to as vanity presses. If you already have the editing and layout skills needed to produce a long document, it makes a lot of economic sense to eliminate the middleman.


• If, however, you're doubtful about the quality of your work, and would like a second opinion from a professional, be warned that editors and manuscript-assessors make their living from the job, and accordingly tend to charge high rates. Don't go down this route unless you're very clear on:
  • exactly how it will benefit you
  • just how much it's likely to cost
  Have you actually seen any work that's been edited by the professional you're proposing to employ? Was it published as a result of this work? Does their recommendation really hold any weight with publishers?


• Do you need an agent? In some countries, yes. In New Zealand, certainly not - that is, if your only aspiration is to succeed as a poet. Agents here are largely a waste of time unless you expect to attract substantial overseas sales. Even then, how much does your particular agent really know about (say) the Frankfurt book fair or copyright law in Venezuela?

Let form fit function.

If all you want is a sumptuous giftbook edition of your poems to hand out to friends and family at Christmas, then talk to a specialised printer such as John Denny of Puriri Press. Ask him to show you samples of his work - collaborate with him on the design.

If, on the other hand, your main objective is to break into the poetry world, remember that it's one thing to make a book, quite another to distribute it. It's very difficult to get a book into shops unless you go from door to door yourself. Even then you'll get a lot more "no's" than you will "yes's." And very few shops are prepared to deal with individual operators on anything but a sale-or-return basis.

Once your book's in the shop, chances are you'll never see any profit from it. Either it'll be returned to you shopsoiled in eighteen months time, or you'll end up forgetting just how many shops you left it in (one prominent bookshop in Christchurch which will remain nameless simply chose to ignore all my requests for the - extremely trifling - money due me from sales. They knew I didn't live there, so they just threw my letters in the garbage. Way to support local culture, guys! You know who you are ...)

Print no more copies than you need.

You do not want to prop up your basement with unsold boxes of your book for the next twenty years. Be warned. Very few books of poetry in New Zealand sell more than a hundred copies - and that includes titles from the alleged high-end publishers.

Unit cost goes down as you produce more copies, but what use is that if you can't sell or distribute them? Some printers will try to persuade you to produce thousands of copies of your book. They will never sell. Modern digital printing makes it easy to produce runs of 20-50 copies at a time at no great cost. Better to stick to 50-100 copies initially and build up by increments than take a punt on the possibilities.

Be realistic. How many friends, family, fans do you really have? Will they be supportive, or just treat it as a joke / aberration on your part? People can be surprisingly cruel at the expense of their friend's artistic ambitions - generally (one suspects) as a result of jealousy / embarrassment / tall-poppy syndrome or a combination of the above.

The world, as we all know, rests on the back of a giant elephant (as Zero the cat is so elegantly demonstrating for us in the picture above). Works of literature rest similarly on the back of a huge amount of calculation and forethought, both artistic and commercial. It's no accident when they arrive in your local bookshop just in time for you to buy them.

Traditional commercial publishers sell books through various types of advertising, which creates (hopefully) popular demand, which is met by their network of national and international distribution.

This is difficult for smaller operators (you or your friends' or your publisher-on-demand's recently founded imprint) to match. So far as I'm aware, there are no NZ firms which currently distribute small-press titles nationwide. The last one that did charged well over fifty percent of the unit price for the privilege, and even then it went out of business!

There's a new player in the game, though, which should embolden us all. The internet. If you have your own website or access to someone else's, you can advertise and sell your book over the net to anyone who wants it, worldwide. Access to all this is just one mail-order package away!

There are even, now, sites such as Lulu.com which will advertise and sell your book on a print-on-demand basis if you supply them with print-ready files.

Always remember, when people scoff at "self-published books" or "vanity publications," that both George Bernard Shaw and Fyodor Dostoyevsky published their own books from mid-career onwards. Neither of them started off that way, but, in both cases, that's how they became rich - by taking all the profit from booksales themselves and not divvying it up with publishers. Robert Browning, too, spent the first twenty years of his career publishing his own books (with his father's money). No publisher was interested in work that was just so downright odd.

How many authors drive expensive cars? Precious few. No NZ poets that I know of. How many publishers drive nice cars? All of them except the small press ones, so far as I can see. That should tell you that the ten percent royalty they'll offer you isn't quite such a good bargain as it might seem at the time.

Who is it who goes on loudest and longest about the "stigma" of self-publishing? Funnily enough, it tends mostly to be publishers or their lackeys. (What class of people are the first and loudest in denouncing "escapism"? Jailers, as C. S. Lewis once observed).

Poetry is not really a mass medium (though it may have been one once, in the days of Homer or Shakespeare). Rather than lamenting the fact, let's acknowledge it, and even see it as a strength.

If even the heavyweights in the field of local poetry (especially the page-bound Academic variety) are lucky to exceed more than a couple of hundred sales, then you don't have to be that much of an entrepreneur to match them through your own efforts. You can give readings, set up your own website, go on the radio ... If people like what you're doing, they'll respond just as readily to work you're spreading through your own efforts as work that's been "officially" sanctioned by a university press.

If they don't like it (and it took readers a long time to crank around to liking Robert Browning or Ezra Pound - another inveterate self-publisher), well, then, having the name of a fancy publisher on the back of your bookspine won't help all that much.

And having your publisher gobble up all the profit gets to be less and less amusing as the years go by. Try reading that contract you signed with such eager glee long ago when someone offered to publish your first book and you may be quite surprised to see how much you signed away. What do you actually own of your own work?

The main thing, I think, is to be bold. Make wild experiments. Please yourself with the way you format your text. Nobody ever went to see a movie because they heard it came in under budget, as Billy Wilder once remarked. Sir Walter Scott said it a different way: "There's only one unforgiveable crime in an author: to be dull."

So, to recap:

• If you self-publish, do it with pride - but be very careful to limit the number of copies and make sure that it's a good-looking, well-edited and carefully-proofread book.
• If you're a mad revolutionary in the field of poetry, try and find some likeminded souls: there may already be a small press out there dedicated to the same principles (this happened to me when I sent a copy of my first novel Nights with Giordano Bruno to the late lamented Alan Brunton's Bumper Books).
• If you want the assured distribution and prestige of a traditional publisher, make sure you read the contract carefully before you sign it. Different publishers make very different demands. If your poetry book becomes a blockbuster movie, it won't be much fun to see that you've already ceded all the rights.
• Above all, don't listen to nay-sayers and professional wet blankets. By the same token, though, a book can have a very long shelf-life - so a few months or even years spent editing and perfecting it will not be wasted. You don't want to pick it up in ten years time and blush with shame and chagrin. None of us is on the clock. Spend some time to get it right.

Comments, anyone?

What is the "Writer's Voice"?

[Kathleen Ferrier sings]

What exactly do people mean when they talk about "voice"? In writing terms, that is.

The subject came up recently at work when it was proposed to replace the term "point-of-view" - in a list of literary techniques to be covered in one of our Creative Writing papers - with the expression "voice."

Now, for me, trying to teach writing in terms of "voice" is the equivalent of adding a few of the basic tenets of Alchemy to one's Chemistry lesson. It isn't that I don't like Alchemy (or Black Magic in general, for that matter). In fact, if I were teaching a course in the history of Poetics and Literary Theory generally, I'd certainly devote a good deal of time to the discussion of "voice." But I see it as more integral to the growth of the discipline than an item of practical, quantifiable information (unlike image, point-of-view, personification and other useful literary critical concepts).

However, nobody else seemed to get what I was waffling on about. They said that "voice" didn't have to have anything to do with ideas of "the writer's authentic voice" or any of that Black-Mountain-poetry stuff. It was a perfectly legitimate narratological term: "the voice in which the writer chooses to write."

But is it? To find out, I started off with that repository of all idees recues [aka "common knowledge"]: Wikipedia.

On their page of voice definitions, I found a list of the principal ways in which the word could be used:

First, general definitions:

• Human voice
• Voice control or voice activation
• Writer's voice
• Voice acting
• Voice vote
• Voice message

Second, in music:

• Vocal music
• Voice register
  • Vocal range, referring to soprano, alto, tenor, bass
  • Voice type, referring to operatic and classical soloists
• Voice (polyphony), a melodic strand in a polyphonic texture
• A monophonic signal in sound synthesis

Third, in linguistics:

• Voice (phonetics)
• Grammatical voice (passive, active etc.)

That was basically it.

Clearly the only one of these of any use to us is the second.

This is what the page devoted to it had to say:

Writer's voice is a literary term used to describe the individual writing style of an author. Voice is a combination of a writer's use of syntax, diction, punctuation, character development, dialogue, etc., within a given body of text (or across several works). Voice can also be referred to as the specific fingerprint of an author, as every author has a different writing style.

In creative writing, students are often encouraged to experiment with different literary styles and techniques in order to help them better develop their "voice." Voice varies with the individual author, but, particularly in American culture, having a strong voice is considered positive and beneficial to both the writer and his or her audience.

I think that's a pretty fair summary of the way the word is generally used.

Paragraph one is, I think, talking about something which we might equally easily call a writer's style, though the implication in context is that this is a more comprehensive term, covering other aspects of their characteristic signature and literary "fingerprint."

Paragraph two is the one which really interests me, though. I can't count the number of writers I've met who were angsting about the unearthing of this "personal voice" which some Creative Writing teacher or other has convinced them was the central component of success in the field. It always seemed to me to have a strong affinity with the Pentecostal gift of tongues: a kind of self-baptism in the zeitgeist which would descend upon you when you least expected it.

[Kathy Acker: Young Lust (1989)]

The late, lamented Kathy Acker has some wryly amusing things to say about the quest for a "personal voice" in her essay "Humility," written after she'd been sued for plagiarism by the late, not-so-lamented Harold Robbins:

In late teens and early twenties, entered New York City poetry world. Prominent Black Mountain poets, mainly male, taught or attempted to teach her that a writer becomes a writer when and only when he finds his own voice.
...
Since wanted to be a writer, tried hard to find her own voice. Couldn't. But still loved to write. Loved to play with language. Language was material like clay or paint. Loved to play with verbal material ...
...
I can't make language, but in this world, I can play and be played.

So where is 'my voice'?

Wanted to be a writer.

Since couldn't find 'her voice', decided she'd first have to learn what a Black Mountain poet meant by 'his voice'.

What did he do when he wrote? A writer who had found his own voice presented a viewpoint. Created meaning. The writer took a certain amount of language, verbal material, forced that language to stop radiating in multiple, even unnumerable directions, to radiate in only one direction so there could be his meaning.

The writer's voice wasn't exactly this meaning. The writer's voice was a process, how he had forced the language to obey him, his will. The writer's voice is the voice of the writer-as-God.

Writer thought, Don't want to be God; have never wanted to be God. All these male poets want to be the top poet, as if, since they can't be a dictator in the political realm, can be dictator of this world.

Want to play. Be left alone to play. Want to be a sailor who journeys at every edge and even into the unknown. See strange sights, see. If I can't keep on seeing wonders, I'm in prison. Claustrophobia's sister to my worst nightmare: lobotomy, the total loss of perceptual power, of seeing new. If had to force language to be uni-directional, I'd be helping my own prison to be constructed.

There are enough prisons outside, outside language.

Decided, no. Decided that to find her own voice would be negotiating against her joy. That's what the culture seemed to be trying to tell her to do.

Wanted only to write. Was writing. Would keep on writing without finding 'her own voice'. To hell with the Black Mountain poets even though they had taught her a lot.

Decided that since what she wanted to do was just to write, not to find her own voice, could and would write by using anyone's voice, anyone's text, whatever materials she wanted to use.
...
Wildness was writing and writing was wildness.

"There are already enough prisons outside language." Acker's equation of the "writer's voice" with the desire to be God, i.e. a creator ("maker") rather than just a user of language, seems to me a cogent one. Of course our characteristic language choices are idiosyncratic, particular- we each have a "voice" already: not simply the timbre of the way we speak, but the kinds of things we say (our personal idiolect, if you prefer a more technical term).

But enshrining a particular version of this voice as our "writer's voice" does seem a bit like adding yet another layer of mystification to the writer''s "priest-like task / of pure ablution round earth's human shores" (Keats)). In any case, why bother to look for it if it's already there?

Jorge Luis Borges said he spent years trying to convey the tone and atmosphere of the barrios of Buenos Aires. Then one day he gave up and wrote a detective story, "Death and the Compass," in the manner of Poe or Chesterton, in which he deliberately eschewed local references. "After the story was published, my friends told me that at last they had found the flavour of the outskirts of Buenos Aires in my writing." ("The Argentine Writer and Tradition" [1951])

In other words, if you're getting too worried about what might or might not constitute your "authentic voice", why not just turn round and start questioning what you're writing about instead?

Acker's strange, third-person essay continues:

There were two kinds of writing in her culture: good literature and schlock. Novels which won literary prizes were good literature; science fiction and horror novels, pornography were schlock. Good literature concerned important issues, had a high moral content, and, most important, was written according to well-established rules of taste, elegance, and conservatism. Schlock's content was sex horror violence and other aspects of human existence abhorrent to all but the lowest of the low, the socially and morally unacceptable. This trash was made as quickly as possible, either with no regard for the regulations of politeness or else with regard to the crudest, most vulgar techniques possible. Well-educated, intelligent, and concerned people read good literature. Perhaps because the masses were gaining political therefore economic and social control, not only of literary production, good literature was read by an elite diminishing in size and cultural strength.

Decided to use or to write both good literature and schlock. To mix them up in terms of content and formally, offended everyone.

Writing in which all kinds of writing mingled seemed, not immoral, but amoral, even to the masses. Played in every playground she found; no one can do that in a class or hierarchical society.

(In literature classes in university, had learned that anyone can say or write anything about anything if he or she does so cleverly enough. That cleverness, one of the formal rules of good literature, can be a method of social and political manipulation. Decided to use language stupidly.) In order to use and be other voices as stupidly as possible, decided to copy down simply other texts.

Copy them down while, maybe, mashing them up because wasn't going to stop playing in any playground. Because loved wildness.

Having fun with texts is having fun with everything and everyone. Since didn't have one point of view or centralized perspective, was free to find out how texts she used and was worked. In their contexts which were (parts of) culture.

Liked best of all mushing up texts. Began constructing her first story by placing mashed-up texts by and about Henry Kissinger next to True Romance texts. What was the true romance of America? Changed these True Romance texts only by heightening the sexual crudity of their style. Into this mush, placed four pages out of Harold Robbins', one of her heroes', newest hottest bestsellers. Had first made Jacqueline Onassis the star of Robbins' text.

Twenty years later, a feminist publishing house republished the last third of the novel in which this mash occurred.

- Kathy Acker, HUMILITY, from The Seven Cardinal Virtues, ed. Alison Fell (London: Serpent's Tail, 1990): 113-31.

So precisely what I'm not saying here is that everyone should go off and emulate Kathy Acker by cutting up schlocky novels and exposing their beating hearts to the purifying rays of post-structuralism. Not at all. I think it worked for her precisely because she turned her eyes outwards - away from all the self-help, personal-building mantras about the "inner you" - to the basic building blocks of the society she lived in. Acker is perhaps more appropriately seen as an avatar of Charles Dickens than of Jorge Luis Borges, Raynmond Queneau & other dedicated game-players.

It also got her into a lot of trouble, though (just as it did Dickens in his day). Game-players and court jesters are generally more welcome to society at large. But really, either approach is fine: the rapier or the bludgeon. Just as long as you have some kind of an end in view.

Personally, I don't care what you write about - as long as you write about something. If you've never given any thought either to your subject matter (the myriad things there are to write about) or the make-up of your target audience/s, then I don't think concepts such as "voice" are going to be of much help.

What they do contribute to, in my doubtless prejudiced view, is a quietist, depoliticised writing, on bland, twice-chewed-over subjects, designed not to rock the boat or get your readers to think (let alone feel) anything new. Yawn.

Why not write about everything that interests you? Why not (like Borges) deliberately eschew your own lovingly-polished tricks of style? Try to start again every time you pick up a pen (or sit down at a screen)? Forget all those self-aggrandising, cult-of-personality techniques for making yourself famous?

I guarantee it won't be long before people start telling you what a pronounced personal style (they may even, heaven forbid, use the v-word!) you have. The only thing is, you'll be quite unaware of the fact - your eyes will be elsewhere, on all those fascinating things you were dying to write about in the first place ...

[Francis Barraud: Nipper & His Master's Voice]

Summer Poetry in Grey Lynn

If you're not doing anything else on Thursday 19th February, you might consider coming along to a poetry reading at the Grey Lynn library. Here's what's up about it on the Auckland Library Website:

Join us for a summer evening of poetry readings.

Thursday 19 February 2009
7.00pm - 8.30pm
Grey Lynn Library
Free event.
Light refreshments will be available after the readings.
For more information, phone (09) 374 1314.

Revive your personal relationship with poetry by coming along to hear four established, local poets at the forefront of what is happening in New Zealand poetry, reading their own original works as well as their favourite works ...

Short biographies of the featured poets (in alphabetical order):

Thérèse Lloyd

Thérèse completed her MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2006. She was awarded the Schaeffer Fellowship to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2007-2008. Her work has appeared in Sport, Landfall and in the anthology New NZ Poets in Performance.

Lee Posna

Lee grew up in New Jersey. He completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2008. He has since immigrated to New Zealand to be with his partner Therese and is now working at Grey Lynn Library. His favourite poets include Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, and Robert Duncan.

Jack Ross

Jack’s latest novel EMO (Titus Books, 2008) completes the trilogy started in 2000 with Nights with Giordano Bruno. Together with Jan Kemp he edited the series Classic, Contemporary and New NZ Poets in Performance (AUP, 2006-8). He teaches English and Creative Writing at Massey University’s Albany campus.

Michael Steven

Michael runs Soapbox Press and has published chapbooks by Martin Edmond, Jack Ross, and Mark Young. He is poet first, publisher second. His favourite poets include George Oppen and Robert Creeley.

[Grey Lynn Library]

*

And while we're on the subject of poetry & poetry-related activity, you might also be interested to see the new travelling exhibition of Len Castle ceramics: Mountain to the Sea, curated by Tanya Wilkinson, which has just reached Lopdell House in Titirangi.

The catalogue contains a number of specially commissioned poems inspired by particular Len Castle works. The poets in question are:

Riemke Ensing
Paula Green
Michael Harlow
David Howard
Jan Kemp
Thérèse Lloyd
Olivia Macassey
Cilla McQueen
Richard Reeve
Jack Ross

Yes, yours truly again!

There'll be an opening on Thursday 12th February. Riemke and I have been asked to read some poems at the supper afterwards. You can find more details on the Lopdell House Website.

Curious to see my poem? All I can say is that it was inspired by the piece in the picture above and is entitled (somewhat predictably?) "Volcanic Glass":

That line on your thumb
white/ red
exuding blood

like David Hawkes’
obsidian
at school

clean lines of break
the signs of
manufacture

evident
immaculate
anti-

evolutionary
artefact
ruling out

an intervention
cutting
the subject

short


[Len Castle. Mountain to the Sea: Ceramics / Poetry / Photographs.
Ed. Tanya Wilkinson. Introduction by Peter Simpson.
ISBN 978-0-473-13835-6.
Napier: Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery, 2008. 33.]