Richard Taylor on Celanie

Richard Taylor (2011)

My friend Richard Taylor, author of three books of poems, most recently Conversation with a Stone (Auckland: Titus Books, 2007), who blogs at EYELIGHT and Richard, You MUST try to be more focused -, has sent me the following hitherto unpublished review of Celanie. It was originally intended to appear in Bill Direen's journal of international writing Percutio, but grew beyond the bounds of the issue.

I'm pleased to be able to print it here instead, although it contains some brickbats as well as bouquets. Anyone who's met him knows that Richard is better read in poetry than almost anyone one could name: he does suffer from that unfortunate (and unusual) condition called honesty, however. Anyway, here it is:

Paul Celan (1920-1970)

CELANIE: Poems and Drawings after Paul Celan

(Pania Press 2012)

Belated review of Celanie by Jack Ross and Emma Smith.

Richard Taylor: Michele Leggott speaks
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

Celanie was published in December of 2012, so some time has elapsed. This book is a book of translations by Jack Ross from the German to English of many of Paul Celan’s poems sent to his wife at the time in the late 60s and 70s. She was a French artist, so it is perhaps appropriate that another woman artist has added a number of works, semi-abstract that attempt to ‘capture’ the essence of a number of the poems so translated.

After mulling over this book for some time, and wondering how I would approach a review or ‘appreciation’ of the book and some discussion of Celan himself (and losing my notes I made some time ago) I have broken my ‘block’ and am now launching into what will be only the first of some literary essays, reviews, and other aspects of EYELIGHT which I will ‘place’ in this Blog, which I call my ‘control Blog’.

I also want to consider, in time, books by writers I myself have read (not necessarily recent), or by such as Ted Jenner (‘Gold Leaves’) and comment on various events personal and other. I want to emphasise again that this, all of this is still really part of my larger ‘poem’ or art-lit text called EYELIGHT, but that is for the ‘technically minded’!

Richard Taylor: Isabel Michel, Mark Fryer et al.
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

So Celan. Firstly the launch. It was a hot day and Michele Leggott, one of NZ’s most outstanding poets, gave a speech endorsing the book. Her emphasis was on the intensity of Celan’s poetry [and I will ‘cheat’ here, as I have it from the NZEPC] that her, and perhaps Jack’s ‘take’ on these poems, which were sent with letters to Celan’s wife, was that that intensity derives not only from the well known factors of Celan’s life and poetics but that in fact they were essentially ‘love poems’.

His wife, to whom the letters (in French) and poems (in German) were sent, was Gisele Celan-Lestrange. Due to Celan’s deteriorating mental condition (or so it seems) and some violence, they were separated, but perhaps still in love and these were seen as poems of love. Also, if one agrees with J. M. Coetzee, they are poems to God, and they are poems to the Third Reich.

But Michele saw them as great poems to which she – and one would expect this of a poet of her genius – responded with great emotion and acuity. It took me a long time to come to any such appreciation or view of these poems but, and I will get to this later, I have always struggled to get, poetically or psychically one might say, as much from Celan as say, poets such as (for me) the great poet John Berryman (who also was tormented all his life by a family tragedy and also committed suicide by jumping off a bridge). I have also, of course, been deeply moved by works by Primo Levi (not a poet), and Anne Frank. The first survived Auschwitz but not the second, and it might be argued that Celan also failed to survive the deaths of his parents by the Nazis.

Richard Taylor: Karl Chitham, Therese Lloyd et al.
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

Coetzee, in the essay "“Paul Celan and his Translators,” from his book of criticism Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000 – 2005 (2007), if we take him literally, might “disagree” with Leggott and others, but he has a point, for in many of these poems, and others I have seen (such as those in Breathturn by Pierre Joris) it seems always that Celan is struggling, not only to encapsulate, more and more complexly and riddlingly (and ingeniously if one can read German which unfortunately I cannot, but this has been reported by those who can): more and more desperately it seems his ‘messages in bottles’ (as Scott Hamilton, when he first ‘introduced me’ to Celan, said someone had said of his works) are complex cries for some kind of redeeming meaning in the world that, with the loss of his parents, and millions of fellow Jewish people, and the fact of his tragic love-hate of the language that, for him and his parents had been, not only their main spoken language, but a language of a great culture of Goethe, Rilke, Mann and such as Richard Strauss, and earlier, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven (and yes, Nietzsche and Wagner) and so much else (including maybe my own favourite pre-war German poet Georg Trakl).

These, or some of these artists and writers, were only some of those that Celan’s parents had loved. But they had been murdered by Germans.

This left Celan to reinvent himself and attempt to continue, alone, without parents, and unable for probably deep psychological reasons (and because of a gathering storm of conflict in his own mind as a creative writer, torn between his intense need to write), to avoid writing in German. It was the main language he had used already to write poetry prior to the horrors of WW2. And he was primarily a poet, but a man, aggrieved, and thus deeply conflicted. In my own opinion he thus began a long conversation with himself and God, or to whatever and whoever one feels is 'out there'. However, this is from a relatively limited study of Celan on my part, as well as the aforementioned view of Coetzee.

Celan’s early poem, the famous "Todesfuge" [Deathfuge], is hauntingly powerful and an indictment of Nazi Germany, and was a cry of protest to Germans and others. However it was perhaps so strange, or read too soon after the war (at poetry gatherings) that it wasn’t understood in many cases, and Celan was accused of ‘sounding like Goebbels’. But it is not. It is simply a great poem and goes for the jugular.

Richard Taylor: Jack reads
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

However, Celan was not only a ‘political poet’, he wanted to write poetry of language and meaning. He did so, and became one of the greatest modernist poets. His poetry (mostly in German) has been deeply analysed. Someone, reviewing Jack and Emma’s book, felt that there needed to be more explanation of the complexity inherent in that original German. That Ross could have pointed out that the word ‘Farben’ means colour but refers to the company that made the gas that killed the Jews.

Perhaps, and indeed a larger book may have had some such discussion and analysis, but that we have this translation here means that a reader, regardless of their knowledge of German, or what Celan was ‘about’ has the means to gain some (possibly further) insight into the (admittedly difficult and sometimes perhaps too prolix or ‘tortured’ – although that ‘tortured’ or ‘burnt’ nature tells us something about the poems and the poet, so perhaps not ‘too’) strange poetry of Celan. The critic might have mentioned the word ‘Mandel’ which means ‘almond’ and also refers (probably) to the Russian poet Mandelstam and to the scent of the gas, which was, apparently, like that of almonds.

And the gas killed at least 6 million Jews. Mandelstam and many other intellectuals faced a similar if stranger holocaust in Stalin's Dictatorship of the USSR.

Richard Taylor: Jack reads some more
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

Celan’s parents and the Jewish people dig their grave in the air in the early "Todesfuge":

a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Sulamith he plays with the serpents
He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master
from Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then
as smoke you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one
lies unconfined

Emma Smith: Drawings from Celanie (2012)

However, Jack Ross and Emma Smith’s book has his later, more complex, but concentrated poems, and includes Smith's haunting images of what are abstracts or semi-abstracts modeled on a sheep’s skull. These make it seem almost as if we are looking into the soul of Celan: this book seems to me to do much.

Not all the poems are so good, and as far as I can tell, the German translations veer (as often with Jack Ross’s deceptive methods) to the quotidian. Yet the simplicity, or apparent simplicity that sometimes results, is not only an (possibly inevitable) effect of such a translation from the German. And, indeed, even in the earlier poems of Celan, there was an increasing move away and toward complexity and simplicity and an urge toward the almost knot-like seethe of language messages and codes which we see in Celanie. And these poems or 'messages in bottles' are speaking to the reader, as if the writer was talking to the reader but looking past into the distance.

And, as he said to his wife, who, it seemed, had great difficulty with his poems, these poems will become clear as time passes. The analogy is perhaps with Picasso’s statement about his portrait of Gertrude Stein (another great poet of some linguistic complexity and innovation), when she said it didn't look like her, that that was so: “But it will become to look like you”! Dorian Grayish! Indeed, will become. Celan insisted that his poems would come to be understood.

Richard Taylor: Jack keeps on reading
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

But many remain obscure, and perhaps can only be fully appreciated in the original German. In this respect I have far less trouble appreciating the poetry of Rilke (especially of the extraordinary superb Duino Elegies) or Georg Trakl, another tortured being who committed suicide, dismayed at the terrible suffering he witnessed as a doctor in WW1 (for which see further here).

Trakl is more ‘expressionist’ and perhaps slightly less inner driven (he was lumped with the so-called Hermetic school, although that perhaps oversimplifies his work, especially as it is not too clear if such a unified ‘movement’ or school ever existed.) Rilke too is more expansive.

But none of these writers benefited from reading Laforgue, great poet, but saved also by his clever satire, although influenced somewhat by Whitman. Thus many of the contemporaries of T. S. Eliot, who did discover Laforgue, as perhaps in his own way, Auden of The Orators was to use the writing of Stein. But neither of these was so close to blood: to war, to the Holocaust, the terrible Shoah.

Richard Taylor: Richard von Sturmer, Mark Fryer et al.
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

Were Trakl and Celan too close to these events? The Italian poet Ungaretti, also like Trakl in WW1, wrote poems of great and moving intensity and beauty that are perhaps closer to those of Keith Douglas than Wilfred Owen or even David Jones. But each man or woman caught in the weave of these historic events experiences them in different ways and sees through different eyes.

Celan was not a ‘war poet’ but the effects of the Holocaust and the war are clear. His own reaction was to drive inwards into himself so that it seems to me that John Berryman, who also struggled for his own self’s survival through his art (and terrible alcoholism in his case), is a closer tragic parallel. Both writers, while stylistically rather different, but struggling in similar ways, were deeply read in literature. Celan knew of Rilke, Holderlin, Mandelstam and many of the other great poets. He had married and had a child, and there seemed some hope, but perhaps like Primo Levi, the trauma, the loss, were ultimately all too much.

It must be noted that Ross has included an excellent and revealing introduction showing how he came to translate these poems and the importance that these poems were to Celan, sent with letters to the woman he loved.

Richard Taylor: Winding down
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

Jack Ross and Emma Smith have created a singular book in Celanie which also refers to that area of Paris that Celan lived in, the places he moved to. Also working here is the concept of translating these poems that accompanied personal letters, that in fact were written at a time when Celan was struggling with a deep disorder in himself, and was to take his life not too long after the last of these were written, has brought another valuable addition to the culture. By culture I mean not only that of NZ, but the world, and to literature everywhere Celanie can reach.

That these are not always ‘great’ translations, is perhaps real, but, in reading Breathturn (by Pierrre Joris who is German-English speaking and spent some years working on that book), I didn’t find all those poems (or translations of poems) to move me in many cases (some did) is much the same as I find with Ross’s work. Perhaps one misses the German. It seems good to see the German (or the original language) beside the translated text even if one has little knowledge of that language. And perhaps more of the letters. Perhaps. But I feel the criticisms were a little too severe. I also find that perhaps only 20 of the 100 or so poems affected me strongly. But of Breathturn there was perhaps a similar ratio.

Richard Taylor: Michele Leggott, Kelly Malone et al.
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

What is the difficulty? Perhaps it is the ‘failure’ of translators. It is true that Ross combines an attempt to render the ‘urgency’ or Celan’s lines with an almost casual, almost idiomatic style that might upset purists, but there is merit in that, by this method, the reader’s attention is shifted from any fixation on autobiography. And many will see this as the central fact of Celan, which might move them too much from the poems themselves. His life and experiences count for a lot, that is obvious, but what we see here is a struggle, not only with the self and history, but for love and for art. Art was his legacy: a sometimes infuriatingly in-spiraling vortex of reforged suffering. But it was more than that. It was a unique art of language, and even of play, the play of light against shade.

But more likely than any supposed failure (all translations of any work will be different, so failure is not the term): it is perhaps simply the difficulty of translating a poet who, not in all cases, but many, uses a complex of double or triple meanings, obscure references, ambiguities and other Modernist devices, such as sound, and neologisms, often in the form of compound words. Such things can be nearly impossible to render into another language. It is at least a hard task. But this is the nature also of the writer, as his difficulty, his coding of complex linguistic references and sound puns etc, was that of an innovative poet, who, like Stein, was struggling to create something new. His brief was not only to record history or his own anguish (although that is there), but history and a unique art. The art of his poetry, some permanence. His way of surviving as a Jew and a human being.

It seems to me, that while I struggle with Celan, this is not a new thing, and Celanie is a book I am glad to possess.

Richard Taylor: Emma Smith
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

The art of Emma Smith is a great addition to it and the work is rightly the work of Emma Smith and Jack Ross together. Art and language interact.

Emma Smith (2011)

Reviews of Alt

Lisa Samuels
[photograph: Tim Page]

Well, it's April Fool's day - and, sure enough, a review of my book of short stories Kingdom of Alt (Titus Books, 2010) has appeared on Landfall's new online site here ...

The review is by Lisa Samuels, who teaches poetry and creative writing at Auckland University, and I think it would have to be described as extremely charitable by any standards.

In fact, as Lisa conducted her forensic enquiry into the inner workings of the various stories in the collection, I did begin to expect some kind of flying boot to appear out of nowhere and crush my impertinence forever. Not so, though. She ends as judiciously as she began - and to anyone who knows Lisa's fierce regard for accuracy and truth in all she says and does, this is quite a tribute.

I also have to register a strong vote in favour of the new Landfall Review Online here, too. it's been very frustrating, for a long time now, to see excellent books appearing here in New Zealand which can't get a decent review for love or money. Quote Unquote, Mark Pirie's mid-period JAAM, the pander - all those journals which aspired to cover the more interesting stuff appearing here have either bitten the dust or changed their formats. Yes, reviews are complicated to organise and expensive to commission. Congratulations to David Eggleton, Landfall's new helmsman, then, for getting this new initiative up and running. Even if my book had been slated (which it wasn't), it'd still great to see some solid discursive critical writing out there, easily accessible on the internet.

That's not to say that I agree with everything Lisa says, mind you ... but how else are you going to find out how your writing means to other people than through a comprehensive discussion of this sort by a careful and honest critic? What you think is perfectly clear may not turn out to be so ...

brief 41 Launch (19/1/11)
[photograph: Michael Arnold]

The other substantive review of Kingdom of Alt which has appeared in the past couple of months was in brief 41 (2010): 103-5, edited by Richard von Sturmer. The reviewer, one Elmar Ludwig, characterised himself in the "notes on Contributors" at the end of the magazine as having:

... sold his second-hand bookshop in Hamburg in December 2007. He then decided to spend the next ten years in ten different countries. In 2008 he lived in Yokohama, Japan; in 2009 in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil; and in 2010 in Auckland, New Zealand. Next year he will relocate to Israel. His choice of countries is based on a mathematical equation. [107-8]

briefers
[photograph: Michael Arnold]

As the immortal Rabbie Burns once observed: "Would the good Lord the gift would gie us / To see ourselves as others see us" (or words to that effect). One of the most interesting things about Elmar Ludwig's review - to me, at any rate - was the fact that virtually everyone seemed convinced that I'd somehow fabricated his very existence in order to review the book myself ...

Even my publisher, the redoubtable Brett Cross, seemed to have a few doubts on the score. It's true that my fiction is a bit on the tricksy side, and I wouldn't swear not to have invented the odd alter-ego from time to time, but to review my own book? No, honestly not.

Mr Ludwig does sound a bit unlikely, on the surface, but anyone who knows Richard von Sturmer knows that he'd be about as likely to endorse George W. Bush for a Nobel Peace Prize as to collaborate in a literary hoax of this sort ...

You can check out parts of the Ludwig review at my bibliography site here. Elmar Ludwig begins by expressing doubts about my knowledge of contemporary Korean fiction. In this he is quite correct, I should say.

Lisa Samuels begins similarly by wondering if I'm ignorant of J. G. Ballard. There I would have to say that she's less justified, however. The obituary I wrote for him on this very site should constitute evidence of my reverence for the Master's works (though it's true that I haven't actually reread The Atrocity Exhibition all that recently ...)

[J. G. Ballard: The Terminal Collection
(Selected Cover Art: 1978-1984)

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.

Memories of Overdevelopment

[Gerald Martin: Gabriel García Márquez (2009)]

There's some interesting stuff in the preface of this biography of Gabriel García Márquez, which I bought in Borders the other day with one of their special email discount offers. The author, Gerald Martin, reveals that he's been working on it for the past twenty years (ever since his previous book, Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century came out in 1989, in fact).

It's a fairly hefty tome, but he also mentions that it was originally much longer - roughly two thousand pages long - only he began to despair of finishing it after first he, then "Gabo" (García Márquez's official nickname in the Spanish-speaking world) came down with cancer. Both did eventually recover, but it reminded him that while our studies may have no end, our bodies do. Hence the hasty compilation of this truncated, greatest-hits version of the biography.

I can't help feeling that Martin was wise to take this approach. A striking example of an author who didn't truncate the literary expression of his Herculean labours is Norman Sherry, the biographer of Graham Greene. The first volume of his mighty work (published while Greene was still alive) is informative enough, but after that, in the next two volumes, he goes thoroughly off the rails. Footnotes begin to breed on the borders of the text, replete with strange fancies which appear to have less to do with Greene than with Sherry's own advancing mental illness (I swear there's one that speculates what kind of a news report Greene would have written if he'd present at Christ's crucifixion - hard-hitting, to be sure, but basically true to the facts. It's not that I dispute that Greene might well have written a cogent eye-witness account of Calvary - just what on earth this has to do with anything in particular? Why stop there? What might he have written about the creation of the universe if he'd been present at that? Or about the miracle of the loaves and fishes? Who the hell knows or cares?)

Gabo (or "Gabito", if you want to sound even more unbuttoned) is a writer whose path has intersected with Greene's on many occasions. I'm not sure that it's important to know exactly when or where each of their meetings took place. Martin clearly does know, but he mercifully spares us the details. What's more important is that both are deeply controversial, rather dodgy characters, with an equivocal relationship to tyrants - or men and women of power - throughout the world (Fidel Castro for Gabo, Omar Trujillo for Greene).

Martin's, then, is a fascinating and immediately indispensable account of the Nobel-prize-winning García Márquez's career (indispensable because it fills in the holes in his very partial and self-serving half-autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale - then goes on to tell the rest of the story). The complete version will no doubt see the light of day sometime -- probably after Gabo's death - but it doesn't really matter. This is the book, and it must have been profoundly satisfying to see it finally appear after twenty years.

[Gerald Martin: Journeys Through the Labyrinth (1989)]

Which brings me to the real subject of this post. I guess the real reason I couldn't walk past Gerald Martin's book when I saw it sitting on the shelves there in Borders was because of my vivid memories of its predecessor, Journeys through the Labyrinth. It came out when I was in the last stages of my Doctoral thesis, on portrayals of South America in English literature, and offered me, then, a number of vital clues to my own self-created labyrinth.

Basically the problem was that my series of readings of novels such as Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1904), & W. H. Hudson's Green Mansions (1904); natural histories by Humboldt, Darwin, Bates & Wallace; poems & translations by Kathy Acker, Elizabeth Bishop & Angela Carter - all of which went to make up the composite picture of "South America" in the European imagination - had to be somehow reconciled with the works of Latin-American visionaries such as Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Mario Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez himself.

I didn't want to retreat onto the then-prevalent notion that all "outsider" views of indigenous cultures were automatically spurious. It didn't seem to be a problem for the locals themselves. García Márquez actually remarked in a book of conversations with his old friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza that "Graham Greene taught me to write about the tropics." The Post-colonial, postmodernist version of Latin America offered by the Magic realists seemed to be acting, rather, as a self-reflecting mirror, echoing back the technical innovations of Joyce and Faulkner to a continent and culture which could now proceed to make new sense of them.

Joseph Conrad spent a total of roughly eighteen hours on the soil of South America, which doesn't seem to have prevented him from composing a towering masterpiece, Nostromo, about the complex politics of Colombia, Venezuela and the Panama canal region (albeit renamed Costaguana and Sulaco for the purposes of the narrative). Was his work automatically inferior to (say) García Márquez's own political Dictator-novel Autumn of the Patriarch, also set in a composite country of the imagination? Was it necessary to be from a place, or know it exhaustively, in order to evoke it imaginatively?

What is South America, anyway? Geographically it makes sense to draw a line across the isthmus of Panama, parcelling it off physically from that other huge landmass called North America. Culturally, however, it makes much more sense to draw that line at the Rio Grande, dividing the Norte-Americano United States and Canada from the complex Hispanic-language-speaking melting-pot referred to as "Latin America" - incorporating (as it does) those vast identities known as Mexico, Central America, Brazil, Argentina, and even a considerable portion of the West Indies and the Caribbean.

Yet "South America" was the name which constantly came up - in European literature, at any rate. That composite region of Amazonian Indians, Lost Andean cities, condors, gauchos and conquistadors definitely had its own place in the Western imagination beside the equally equivocal "Darkest Africa," the "Wild West," the "South Seas" or the "Frozen North."

I'm not sure that I ever solved the logistic problems involved in studying so vast and amorphous a subject: no less than a roadmap of a central region of our cultural unconscious. I had a jolly good try, though, and I owe a definite vote of thanks to Gerald Martin's illuminating book for extricating me at the last minute from even worse abysses of uncertainty.

Twnety years, though! I did wonder what he was doing - why the only book of his I'd seen since was an elegant annotated translation of Asturias's classic proto-Magic-Realist novel Men of Maize. It's a long time to be stuck on just one project.

And then came the thought that it's been twenty years (give or take a few) since I last took a good look at my thesis! The subject started to sicken me long before I'd finished it (is it the same with all Doctoral students? Some of them seem to go on to Post-Docs, wallowing round in the same citations and authorities for another couple of years, attempting - sometimes successfully - to turn their vast beached whales into readable books). For myself, though, I felt my mental health required that I change tack completely, start to fixate unhealthily on something else.

That something turned into a five-year flirtation with the 1001 Nights (I call it a flirtation rather than an affair because it had such meager results: a few published essays and conference papers. You can check them all out online here if you're curious why I found the book so fascinating. If it is a book, that is - more, perhaps, like the iceberg-tip of a whole submerged literature ...)

That, in turn, led to my own series of labyrinthine, Nights-inspired narratives: the trilogy of novels that began with Giordano Bruno in 2000 and ended with E M O last year - there's a good ten years of work in there, too.

But twenty years! The thing is, Gerald Martin's hero-quest has inspired me to go back to my own roots and take another look at that great carcass of a PhD thesis. I approached some publishers at the time, but nobody was biting, and of course a lot has happened since in that field, and (indeed) in the whole area of literary criticism and theory. Some of it still seems of interest to me, though - an honest expression of perplexity at the magnitude of an impossible task, but one which perhaps carved a few tracks through the jungle of Western visions / versions / distortions of the Other.

Anyway, whether it interests anyone else or not, I've decided to transfer the whole thing to a website here. It's unfinished as yet. One of the things about that two-decade gap is that it makes me realise how much we've all had to live on the cusp of technology throughout those years. I did write the thesis on a computer - whereas my Masters thesis (1985) was tapped out laboriously on a manual typewriter - but it was the Edinburgh university mainframe, and there was no obvious way to save the data on any kind of floppy disc or other encoding device at the time.

My "thesis", then, consists of three-hundred odd loose-leaf sheets of paper which I'm gradually scanning and collating into an electronic file, and thence putting up online. I'm resisting the temptation to rewrite it too much, but I am replacing footnote references with inline citations,and making various other hopefully labour-saving alterations. The bibliography, appendices and introduction are all up, though, and I imagine by the end of the year (at the latest) that the rest will have followed them into cyberspace.

I conclude this post for the moment, then, with two pictures. One comes from the 1968 film-adaptation of Edmundo Desnoes' classic novel about growing up poor in Cuba, Memories of Underdevelopment - albeit linked to an extremely artful book and film, I guess this image might be said to stand in for the reality of Latin American poverty and political turmoil.

[Memories of Underdevelopment]

The other, Antonio Ruíz's "El sueño de la Malinche" [Malinche's dream] has fascinated me since the first moment I saw it (on the dustjacket of Gerald Martin's Journeys through the Labryrinth, actually). Malinche (or Dona Marina), as you no doubt know, was the Indian woman who acted as an interpreter to the conquistador Cortes, thus greatly faciliating his otherwise virtually-inexplicable conquest of the Aztec Empire. Interpreter and mistress - she bore him a child, also, who has been described as "the first Mexican" - the first human being to suffer that particular and peculiar imbalance between Old World and New World, Spanish and Indian, Coloniser and Colonised, which has since afflicted so much of the globe we all live on.

Malinche's dream of spires and churches might be seen, then, as more of a nightmare - but was the colossal, merciless violence of the Spanish conquistadors really worse than the monotonous diet of human sacrifice and warfare which the Aztecs imposed on their somewhat more peaceful neighbours? Who knows? Who can possibly say? Weighing up oppressors and miseries against each other can be a rather fraught procedure.

One thing is certain. Ruiz's painting (for me, at any rate) perfectly portrays this point of balance, the single woman on whom the fate of Empires and whole cultures rests - a Indian Madonna with the first Latin-American growing in her womb. It reminds me that I'll never regret having spent five years of my life looking for some answers to the questions posed by such images of colonial (and post-colonial) identity.

To a New Zealander they have a certain everyday relevance which is perhaps a little difficult to convey to Europeans. Finally, though, Conrad, Hudson, Darwin, Bishop and the others still seem to me have vital contributions to make to our understanding of this conundrum of the divided self - the need to feel remorse for a rapacious, violent past, and yet the equally strong necessity not to be paralysed by such a crippling mountain of guilt.

In each case, it seemed to me then and now, they took a worthy place beside the magicians of the Latin American literary "boom" - Jose Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and of course Gabito - by dint of the sheer "intensity of attention" (the phrase is W. H. Auden's) each of them paid to this adopted country of their imagination: call it "South America" or what you will. Intensity of attention ...

"or, less pompously, love."

[Antonio Ruíz: El sueño de la Malinche (1939)]

M. Edmond & the Marti-verse

[Martin Edmond: The Supply Party (2009)]

You know how it is with some writers - as time goes by, and you read more and more of their books, something in them begins to add up to more than the sum of their parts? It's as if the worlds of their imagination have undergone some kind of Hegelian change into a universe - even, in certain select cases, a multi-verse (to borrow a bit of phraseology from DC comics).

I guess that's what's started to happen to me with Martin Edmond. One of the most entertaining aspects of being a magazine editor for me - first brief (2002-5), then my guest issue of Landfall (2007) - has been the chance to see (& publish) new pieces of work by Martin.

Extracts from both Chronicle of the Unsung (issues 21 (2001): 69-74 & 22 (2001): 82-88) and Luca Antara (issues 29 (2004): 33-41 & 30 (2004): 21-26) appeared in brief long before the two of them came out as books.

More to the point, though, I was privileged to include a piece from Martin's as-yet-unpublished short novel Terminus Motel in brief 27 (2003): 32-36; extracts from his White City: The Autobiography of Ernest Lalor Malley first saw the light of day in Landfall 214 - "Open House" (2007): 54-66; and Tina Shaw and I included Martin's short story 'The Temple of Baal' in our anthology of new fiction Myth of the 21st Century (Reed, 2006).

Here's a quick rundown of his work to date (or the pieces I've come across, at any rate):

Bibliography:

[Martin Edmond: The Big O Revisited (2008)]

Poetry:

• Streets of Music (1980) - winner, Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry
• Houses, Days, Skies (1988)
• The Big O revisited b/w Providence (Auckland: Soapbox Press, 2008)

[Leon Narbey, dir: Illustrious Energy (1988)]

Screenplays:

• Illustrious Energy (1988) [feature]
• The Footstep Man (1992) [feature]
• Philosophy (1997) - winner, Best Short Film, New Zealand Film Awards 1999
• Terra Nova (1998) [feature] - winner, best first film at the Montreal World Film Festival, 1998
• Earth Angel (2002) - winner, Best Screenplay at the Breakfast Film and Music Festival, 2003

[Martin Edmond: The Evolution of Mirrors (2008)]

Prose:

• The Autobiography of My Father (AUP, 1992)
• Chemical Evolution: Drugs & Art Production 1970-80 (Bumper Books, 1997)
• The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont (AUP, 1999) - finalist in the 2000 Montana Book Awards
• Fenua Imi: the Pacific in History & Imaginary (Bumper Books, 2002)
• Chronicle of the Unsung (AUP, 2004) - winner, biography category in the 2005 Montana New Zealand Book Awards
• Ghost Who Writes. Montana Estates Essay Series. (Four Winds Press, 2004)
• Luca Antara: Passages in search of Australia (East Street Publications, 2006)
• Waimarino County & other excursions (AUP, 2007)
• The Evolution of Mirrors (Otoliths Press, 2008)

I guess the easiest way for me to summarise my views on Martin's oeuvre is simply to reprint the review I did of Waimarino County in Landfall 214:

[Martin Edmond: Waimarino County (2007)]

At the Revival Meeting

• Martin Edmond, Waimarino County and Other Excursions. Auckland: AUP, 2007. ISBN 978 1 86940 391, 240 pages, RRP $40.

I first met Martin Edmond in Devonport, on the night of Alan Brunton’s memorial concert in December 2002. A group of us were booked to do a cabaret-style performance at a café as part of the Massey Gothic Conference (also on that weekend). We were planning to speed on over the bridge afterwards to catch the dying minutes of the concert. As it turned out, the venue we’d been booked to perform in had – quite unexpectedly – gone out of business, so we ended up being able to attend the whole of that baroque, extraordinary, farewell celebration.

From the moment we met, I felt as if I’d known Martin for years. It’s true that we’d been corresponding for a while – over his contributions to brief magazine, which I was then editing, and also various matters to do with Brunton’s Bumper Books, the publishing arm of Red Mole. Meeting people you feel you know through letters is not always entirely satisfactory, though. All sorts of things you hardly notice on paper can suddenly rear up when print converts to flesh.

Which is a rather roundabout way of saying that we got on well, and have continued to get on well. What’s more, the manner of our meeting was a characteristic serendipity. I’ve never had a conversation with Martin Edmond which hasn’t involved him filling me in on some piece of arcane lore about a little-known writer, or place, or iconic event.

In one sense, then, I’m the ideal reader for Martin’s collection of essays, Waimarino County & Other Excursions. Leafing through it is a lot like the experience of meeting the man himself. Witty, urbane, well-informed – but not in the distant, old-world way that those words would appear to imply. No, Martin’s writing never eschews emotional involvement with the matters he is describing. There’s hardly an essay here which sounds as if it was constructed to order. The subject matter is always close to his heart.

I guess, for me, the most striking example is “The Hallelujah Chorus.” At the centre of this essay there’s a terrifying account of his visit to a revival meeting:

And as these sinners declared themselves, the chanting in the theatre rose in pitch and fervour and intensity until there came above the thunderous chorus a weird, high ululation from the stalls on the front left-hand side. I had never heard people speaking in tongues before. Glossolalia sounds like someone yodelling so hard their uvula goes into spasm. It reminded me of a time I heard a flock of sheep mustering at dusk on a Lands and Survey block out the back of Stratford ... [20]

I was there! Not at that particular meeting, of course, but many similar ones (Billy Graham, the Church of Christ, the Assembly of God). The only difference is that I would have been part of that flock yodelling strangely as the spirit of Pentecost came down on us …

Praise the Lord the Holy Ghost has descended upon us in Tongues of Flame! the Preacher screeched above the clamour of the Believers, doubling and redoubling their efforts. Then he began to call particular people out of the crowd. Suddenly I heard him say: There is a young man of sixteen or seventeen years (I had just turned seventeen) and he is sitting on the right-hand side of the cinema (I was) two thirds of the way towards the back (exactly!) and be is wondering whether to come forward now and give his soul to Jesus (I wasn’t, but, hell …). Let us all now raise our voices to the heavens and ask the Lord to give strength to this young man so that be may come and join us...

That’s precisely it. He’s put his finger on the mastery of it, the curious effectiveness of those techniques of mass persuasion. How many times have I sat fidgeting in the middle row, sure that I was the one who was being singled out for attention, sure that this was it, that tonight was the only chance I would ever have to escape perdition?

And I did feel a powerful force calling me. I was young and uncertain and the exorcism of possible demons from the chaos of my awakening mind did for a moment seem desirable, even seductive. Surely there was no harm in it? It was certainly impressive to see old people getting out of their wheelchairs and tottering forward to lean on the edge of the stage.

An opportune bit of squabbling saves Martin in the nick of time – “Any chance I would go forward to be saved blew away in that poor kid’s outraged, helpless sobbing” [21]. What impresses me, though, is that he is prepared to admit that the opportunity was there, that he might have given in.

Mind you, I doubt it would have taken. Martin Edmond was born to be a flâneur, a Baudelairean dandy exploring the byways of the metropolis (whether it be Auckland, Wellington or Sydney). There’s another part of him that is in deadly earnest, though. The strength of his writing is that he is able to give equal weight to both sides.

Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde named the two warring impulses within his hero after the two dominant intellectual influences of that time, the late nineteenth century: on the one hand, the amoral aestheticism of Walter Pater, on the other, the moral earnestness of John Ruskin. In Martin’s case I’d be tempted to call the two Ohakune and Alan Brunton.

Does that sound frivolous? It isn’t meant to. The Martin Edmond of Autobiography of My Father, of the childhood portions of Chronicle of the Unsung, of the “Autobiographies” section of the book we’re examining here, is a man profoundly, wistfully in love with his own past – with the complex intensities of youth and adolescence in that little town on the Grand Trunk Line. He’s the poet of that region, in fact – more alert to its contradictions and diversities even than that near neighbour of his, the Gothic novelist Ronald Hugh Morriesson.

And yet there’s also the Martin who ran away – almost literally – to join the circus, who followed the mercurial Alan Brunton on tour with Red Mole, abandoning the academic gravy train of Victoria University to do so. This is the Martin who writes so lovingly about Cavafy and Pessoa, who understands the attraction of that shifting signifier of international modernism, the heteronym.

Why are Martin’s books so challenging in form? Why does he resist easy genre identification, that secure place in the bookshop racks? It’s cost him, that’s for sure. Anyone straddling the uneasy frontiers of fiction and non-fiction, whose work might equally well be shelved under autobiography, travel writing or cultural commentary is liable to the suspicion of lazy readers. Praise, yes – there’s been a lot of praise of the originality of Martin’s work., but it’s usually (paradoxically) coupled with the name of some other writer whose example he is implied to be imitating: W. G. Sebald is the most obvious example, but recently Thomas de Quincey has been cited as a strong precedent (this despite the fact that Martin assures me that he has only the most tangential familiarity even with the original Opium Eater essays).

It’s hard for me to imagine any reader not finding something to their liking in the four sections of this book: ‘Autobiographies’; ‘Meditations’ (on subjects ranging from the Rosetta Stone to Alan Brunton); ‘Illusions’ (prose poems and dreams, mostly from his online blog); and ‘Voices’, published previously under the title Ghost Who Writes in Lloyd Jones’s excellent little Montana essay Series. Nor do I think I’m unique in finding virtually all of it to my liking. In fact, I can’t think of a book which has beguiled me as much since I first picked up Borges’ Labyrinths when I was a teenager.

The idea of the blog, the online diary, is another important component of Martin’s collection. He began (as I understand it) with the idea of starting a new blog for each new book project, but they appear to have evolved into a more complex symmetry.

There’s Luca Antara (“... who knows what other travellers might not have set out with a wild surmise for these shores? Looking perhaps for Luca Antara; perhaps just for the day after tomorrow”), described as being the work of a “schizoid antipodean.” That one has been running since 2004.

Then there’s dérives (started in 2005), which began with prose poems and reflections, but has now settled down to a portrait of the seedier side of cab driving in Sydney.

White City (begun in 2006), now a compendium of dreams and dream essays, was presumably intended to accompany Martin’s Ern Malley memoir / novel (accessible, so far, only in extracts such as the one included in this issue of Landfall).

No doubt Martin foresees a date at which he can move over to the new blog, Fetchers (started in July 2007) At present it’s confined to the single optimistic statement: “It’s a happy day today,” but there’s no doubt a lot more to come.

[The funny thing for me about this particular paragraph from the review is that "Fetchers" turned out to be the name of an imaginary dog, whose adventures in various parts of the world are being charted online by Martin's kids. I did think at the time the tone of some of the entries was a little outré even for him ...]

Raw material for the books? Undoubtedly. But the mere fact of being able to make your random jottings available online within minutes of writing them has an inevitable influence of the nature of that writing. It’s hard to see how writers can continue to ignore the possibilities of instantaneous communication – the barrage of comments and cross-references possible through hypertext.

In the present case, it’s fascinating to see how they’ve stolen into the texture of Martin’s book, along with more considered pieces from the nzepc, brief, and various other anthologies and projects, to give us the closest thing to an anatomy of the life of a twenty-first century writer I can readily imagine.

So I guess the reason I’d really advise to buy this book is not simply as an entry pass to the world of Martin Edmond, but also as a cartography of where we are, right now, at the bottom of the world, in the complex of world culture.

[Landfall 214 (2007): 187-90.]

Now there's a new addition to the canon, and thus to the labyrinthine complexities - already, one would have thought, quite sufficiently baroque and strange - of what I'd like to refer to from now on as the "Marti-verse."

Martin's new book The Supply Party, which has just appeared from East Street Publications, the publishers of Luca Antara, charts the adventures of the German scholar and naturalist Ludwig Becker, whose twin careers - as a contributor to Shakespeare iconography, and official artist on the ill-fated Burke & Wills expedition - have never really been clearly juxtaposed before.

I'm looking forward to reading it just the moment I can lay my hands on a copy. Now that Philip K. Dick is well and truly dead, and there doesn't seem much hope of more posthumous books to flesh out his bizarre, prolific cosmos, who else is left to feed my addiction to the strange new worlds of cold hard print?

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!