Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Classic NZ Poets by Theme

poetry is magic
– W. H. Auden


Here's a thematic breakdown of the 110 poems in our Classic NZ Poets in Performance anthology (Auckland: AUP, 2006). The categories are pretty subjective, and could undoubtedly be improved on. Not a bad starting point for discussion, though: what's the poem really about?

ADOLESCENCE
[Adcock’s “Camping” speaks for itself. Campbell’s “Gunfighter” is definitely having trouble growing up, even if he isn’t actually an adolescent. Wendt’s poems from The Book of the Black Star (AUP, 2002) are clearly about a great many things: depression, friendship, etc. but it was hard to think of any other heading to put them under].
Fleur Adcock: Camping - 89
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell: The Gunfighter - 60
Albert Wendt: On Our Way - 115
Albert Wendt: Over Ponsonby - 116
Albert Wendt: Scavengers - 116
Albert Wendt: Bus - 117

ANIMALS
[The poems here may actually be about love, death and a number of other subjects, but animals star in all of them].
Peter Bland: Death of a Dog - 93
Lauris Edmond: yellow-eyed penguin - 47
Janet Frame: The Cat of Habit - 50
Brian Turner: Fish - 133
Brian Turner: Pig - 134
Brian Turner: Trout - 131

CHILDREN & GROWING UP
[Kids often seem smarter than grown-ups, but maybe that’s because we just project our preconceptions onto them].
Peter Bland: The Happy Army - 95
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell: Home from Hospital - 61
Michael Harlow: Cassandra’s Daughter - 99
Alistair Paterson: Jenny Roache Love all the Boys in the World - 71
Albert Wendt: Conversation - 113

COMMUNICATION & POETRY
[These could be useful pieces for a class focussed on their own writing].
Fleur Adcock: The Pilgrim Fathers - 88
Louis Johnson: Singing to the Ancestors - 55
Alistair Paterson: On reading Robert Bly’s Selected Poems … - 72
Kendrick Smithyman: Communicating - 34
C. K. Stead: from The Masks of Catullus, 16 - 77
Albert Wendt: Bound For Whangamata - 117

DEATH
[One of the two great poetic staples].
Lauris Edmond: Before a Funeral - 45
Kevin Ireland: Villanelle for a Smile - 85
R. A. K . Mason: The Spark’s Farewell to its Clay - 8
R. A. K . Mason: Stoic Overthrow - 10
Vincent O’Sullivan: Elegy for a Schoolmate - 105
Keith Sinclair: E. D. S. (1893-1969) - 31
C. K. Stead: from The Masks of Catullus, 11 - 76

FRIENDSHIP
[Some of the most charming poems in the collection – I think so, anyway].
Janet Frame: Lines Written at the Frank Sargeson Centre - 51
Elizabeth Smither: Smoking with Carol - 126
C. K. Stead: from The Masks of Catullus, 19 - 77

GETTING OLD
[Best not to let it get you down, I guess ...]
Lauris Edmond: Autumn in Canada - 47
Louis Johnson: The Seventies - 56
Elizabeth Smither: Saveloy - 127
Kendrick Smithyman: Closing the Chocolate Factory - 37
C. K. Stead: Horation - 79

HISTORY
  • colonialism
    [“History is real” -- Kendrick Smithyman]
    James K. Baxter: Prospector - 66
    Allen Curnow: House and Land - 16
    Allen Curnow: The Unhistoric Story - 17
    Allen Curnow: The Skeleton of the Great Moa … - 19
    Kendrick Smithyman: Near Ellon - 36
  • the depression
    [memories of the Great Depression]
    A. R. D. Fairburn: Walking on my Feet - 4
    Denis Glover: The Magpies - 23
  • the first world war
    [A Gallipoli poem]
    Alistair Te Ariki Campbell: Lest We Forget - 61
  • the second world war
    [Three different aspects of the war – North Africa, the camps, and the front line].
    Alistair Te Ariki Campbell: Maori Battalion Veteran - 62
    Riemke Ensing: Transport - 111
    M. K. Joseph: Drunken Gunners - 26
  • the atomic bomb
    [Two poems written after Hiroshima]
    Keith Sinclair: The Bomb is Made - 32
    Hone Tuwhare: No ordinary sun - 41

LANDSCAPE & LOCALITY
[Autres endroits, autres moeurs].
James K. Baxter: Poem in the Matukituki Valley - 65
James K. Baxter: The Fallen House - 68
Allen Curnow: A Dead Lamb - 19
Denis Glover: Threnody - 24
Kevin Ireland: A Hard Country - 82
M. K. Joseph: Mercury Bay Eclogue I & II - 26
M. K. Joseph: Elegy in a City Railyard - 29
R. A. K. Mason: Flow at Full Moon - 11
Kendrick Smithyman: Inlet - 34
C. K. Stead: Auckland - 79
Albert Wendt: The Mountains of Ta’ū - 113

LIFE IN GENERAL
[So what’s it all about? -- dunno, really].
A. R. D. Fairburn: Full Fathom Five - 1
Janet Frame: The Icicles - 51
Michael Jackson: Seven Mysteries - 120
Louis Johnson: Coming and Going - 57
Vincent O’Sullivan: Butcher on Life in General - 103
C. K. Stead: Birthday Sonnet - 75

LOVE
[The second great poetic staple ...]
Charles Brasch: from In Your Presence - 14
A. R. D. Fairburn: Cupid - 4
Michael Harlow: And, yes - 101
R. A. K. Mason: Be Swift O Sun - 9
Vincent O’Sullivan: Seeing You Asked - 106
C. K. Stead: from April Notebook - 75

MAGIC
[How else could one characterise these poems?]
Fleur Adcock: A Game - 87
Riemke Ensing: Morning Glory - 109
Michael Jackson: Shape-Shifter - 119
Vincent O’Sullivan: Still Shines when you Think of it - 104
Elizabeth Smither: Late Summer Dew - 129
Brian Turner: In the Swim - 135

MEN
[Two versions of the Kiwi bloke].
Kevin Ireland: A Whiff of the Old Adam - 84
Vincent O’Sullivan: Butcher in Sunlight - 103

MUSIC
[Pianos seem to have more fans than any of the other instruments – so far, at any rate].
Michael Harlow: Today is the Piano’s Birthday - 100
Elizabeth Smither: Listening to The Goldberg Variations - 128

NATURE & CONSERVATION
[Jackson stresses the violence of nature, Tuwhare its gentleness].
Michael Jackson: Green Turtle - 122
Hone Tuwhare: Rain - 40

PAIN & IMPRISONMENT
[Suffering / illness ...]
Riemke Ensing: T’ai Chi - 110
Janet Frame: O Lung Flowering Like a Tree - 52

RELATIONSHIPS
[“No problem, but not easy” – different relationships, with their different beginnings, middles and ends].
Lauris Edmond: Scar Tissue - 46
A. R. D. Fairburn: A Farewell - 2
Michael Harlow: No Problem, But Not Easy - 98
Kevin Ireland: Cloud - 83
Vincent O’Sullivan: Before you go - 107
C. K. Stead: Between - 78

SEX
[It’s on our minds a lot, so it’s in our poems a lot, too].
Fleur Adcock: Smokers against Celibacy - 90
A. R. D. Fairburn: The Cave - 2
Brian Turner: One Night Stand - 135
Hone Tuwhare: cummings - 42

VISION QUEST
[Poems about journeys, long or short, and the things one sees on them, whether they qualify as “visions” or new perceptions of reality].
Allen Curnow: Any Time Now - 20
Michael Jackson: The Red Road - 119
R. A. K. Mason: Out from Sea-Bondage - 8
Brian Turner: Training on the Peninsula - 132

WAR, VIOLENCE, PREJUDICE
[“Sudan” can be a good corrective for students who find poetry bland and unmoving].
Peter Bland: the nose - 94
Michael Jackson: Sudan - 121
Louis Johnson: Words for Blair Peach - 56
David Mitchell: my lai / remuera / ponsonby - 124
Alistair Paterson: The dictionary of battles - 73

WOMEN
[Guys like talking about women; women do, too, it would appear.]
Peter Bland: Shopping with Brigitte Bardot - 95
Riemke Ensing: Love Affair - 109
Elizabeth Smither: Red shoes - 126

Classic NZ Poets by Region

The road goes through to somewhere else
– Kendrick Smithyman


Here's my preliminary attempt at a regional breakdown of the 27 poets in our anthology, Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance:

  • Place -- Name -- Dates -- Pages in Classic NZ Poets

AUCKLAND

  • A. R. D. Fairburn (1904-1957) 1-7
  • mainly Devonport and the North Shore, though he also worked at Auckland university and at ELAM.
  • Kevin Ireland (b.1933) 82-86
  • mainly Devonport and the North Shore, though he spent 25 years working as a journalist in the UK.
  • R. A. K. Mason (1905-1971) 8-13
  • born in Penrose, but lived later at a succession of addresses on the North Shore (including Mairangi Bay).
  • Keith Sinclair (1922-1993) 31-33
  • brought up in Pt Chevalier, he moved later to Takapuna, across the Harbour Bridge.
  • C. K. Stead (b.1932) 75-81
  • strongly associated with the Sargeson school on the North Shore, he subsequently moved to Parnell.

CHRISTCHURCH & CANTERBURY

  • Allen Curnow (1911-2001) 16-22
  • born in Timaru, and moved to Auckland in 1950. Much of his later poetry is set there, particularly on Karekare beach.
  • Denis Glover (1912-1980) 23-25
  • born in Dunedin, brought up in Christchurch, and lived in Wellington (writing memorably about its harbour).

COOK ISLANDS

  • Alistair Te Ariki Campbell (b.1925) 60-64
  • though he moved to New Zealand as a child, he has written a good deal (poetry & prose) about his Polynesian heritage.

DANNEVIRKE

  • Lauris Edmond (1924-2000) 45-49
  • brought up in Hawkes Bay and educated in Wellington, she is strongly associated with the Central North Island.

DUNEDIN & OTAGO

  • James K. Baxter (1926-1972) 65-70
  • also has strong associations with Wellington, Auckland and Jerusalem on the Whanganui River.
  • Charles Brasch (1909-1973) 14-15
  • lived in Britain for a long time, but came back to New Zealand to found and edit Landfall in the 1950s.
  • Janet Frame (1924-2004) 50-54
  • from Oamaru, though she lived in many different parts of the country, including Sargeson’s bach in Takapuna.
  • Brian Turner (b.1944) 131-137
  • lives in Central Otago, after many years of writing and working in Dunedin.

GREECE

  • Michael Harlow (b.1937) 98-102
  • born in New York, he has lived in Greece, Christchurch and (now) Central Otago.

HOLLAND

  • Riemke Ensing (b.1939) 109-112
  • moved to New Zealand at the age of twelve; she was brought up in Northland and subsequently moved to Auckland.

NELSON

  • Alistair Paterson (b.1929) 71-74
  • born in Nelson, went to university in Wellington, and is now living in Auckland.
  • Michael Jackson (b.1940) 119-123
  • born in Nelson, brought up in Taranaki, but has spent most of his adult life abroad (Sierra Leone, the USA, etc.)

NORTHLAND

  • Kendrick Smithyman (1922-1995) 34-39
  • though he moved to Auckland at the age of nine, he always retained strong links with the north.
  • Hone Tuwhare (b.1922) 40-44
  • also strong links with Dunedin and Otago, where he now lives (Kaka Point).

SAMOA

  • Albert Wendt (b.1939) 113-118
  • born in Apia, he was educated in New Plymouth and Wellington before returning to Samoa (now based in Auckland).

TARANAKI

  • Elizabeth Smither (b.1941) 126-130
  • born in New Plymouth, she has spent most of her life working there as a librarian.

UK

  • Fleur Adcock (b.1934) 87-92
  • born in Auckland and educated in Wellington, she has spent much of her adult life in the UK.
  • Peter Bland (b.1934) 93-97
  • born in Yorkshire, he moved to New Zealand at the age of 20. He is principally associated with Wellington.
  • M. K. Joseph (1914-1981) 26-30
  • born in Essex and educated in France, he moved to Tauranga at the age of 10, and subsequently moved to Auckland.

WELLINGTON

  • Louis Johnson (1924-1988) 55-59
  • born and brought up in Wellington, he later worked in Australia and New Guinea before returning to New Zealand.
  • David Mitchell (b.1940) 124-125
  • born in Wellington, he made his reputation as a performance poet there and in Auckland in the 60s and 70s.
  • Vincent O'Sullivan (b.1937) 103-108
  • born in Auckland, he taught in Wellington and Waikato before returning to the capital to live.


Classic NZ Poets Teaching Notes


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some of the places on offer:

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Dolan Departs

[photograph by Michaela Hendry, cover design by Sarah Maxey]

Well, it's official. John Dolan is leaving New Zealand after more than a decade spent on these shores. In that time he's published three books -- well, five, if you count two Academic works: Writing Well, Speaking Clearly (U of Otago Press, 1994) and Poetic Occasion from Milton to Wordsworth (Palgrave Press, 2000). The books I'm talking about, though, are two poetry collections put out by AUP: Stuck Up (1995) and People with Real Lives Don't Need Landscapes (2003), and, above all, his novel Pleasant Hell (Capricorn Publishing, 2005).

I must confess to having felt a little suspicious of Dr Dolan before actually meeting him (at Bluff, in fact, a couple of months ago). There seemed something just a little showy about that Doctorate on the Marquis de Sade, those slightly smart-arse-sounding reviews and articles one ran across in Glottis or Landfall from time to time. But then we started talking.

Wow. Was I ever wrong! Dolan is not only a fascinating and generous conversationalist, but a genuine polymath. We started on the American Civil War, then shifted to Science Fiction (Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun and Soldier in the Mist, Jack Vance, and -- of course -- the Master, Philip K. Dick), religion, regionalism, poetry ... You can see it's a bit of a blow for me that he's leaving.

And why is he leaving? Because he can't get a job, that's why. No English Department will hire him. Because ... um, well, just because, actually. He shows up the others too much. He's too large and opinionated. Because he gets things done, perhaps.

Admittedly, it is true that he was "the subject of various voodoo death cults among the Dunedin med students, some of whom even produced a T-shirt with a highly unflattering caricature of Dr Dolan with the words 'BLAH BLAH BLAH' beneath it." That was as a result of having to teach a particularly onerous compulsory writing course to this particularly disaffected and mutinous pportion of the student body, though. When I had coffee with John the other day in the Alleluya cafe, we were accosted by a succession of his ex-writing students who wanted to tell him how much his teaching had meant to him -- I began to suspect him of planting them after a while, but no, they appeared to be sincere.

The blurb to People with Real Lives Don't Need Landscapes goes on to claim that "Cowardice and vindictive paranoia combine to form Dolan's crude blood-fingerpaint poetic style." He certainly has a number of recurrent themes: Huns, Barbarian Invasions in general, the last days of Byzantium, The Lord of the Rings (especially Elven maidens), the horrors of American suburbia, etc. etc.

All of which brings us to Pleasant Hell, Dolan's first (and to date, regrettably, only) novel. How exactly can one characterise this insane work? The main character is called "John," and seems to have had a more-or-less equivalent set of experiences to his creator: Californian upbringing, Academic job in Dunedin, curious passive-aggressive relationship with his parents (sulking for twenty years is, apparently, the only way of solving arguments in this menage) -- oh, and his surname's "Dolan."

It's appallingly funny. It begins with a long rant about the wondrous workings of providence, and how one particularly obnoxious Pollyanna called "Canny Scot"who used to write in to the Otago Daily Times about "God's plan" should be strapped to the front of a squid boat and made to "look down into that writhing, pulsing water and see in it God's plan for this antipodean Alcatraz. Let him see how much we matter in the grand scheme. Rope him tight to that light-pole and keep him out there facing the water all night, drooling half-frozen ropes of spittle ... A little fresh ocean spray will do him good. Taste God's cold pickled water. Smell God's cheap diesel fumes. Watch God's choppy waves for ten hours, spewing God's fish-and-chips into the chop at intervals."

There is much in the same vein until we come to the irrefutable conclusion:

"God created this place [Dunedin] as a critique of me."

The universe of Dolan's fiction is a solipsistic hell. The awful degradations suffered by his main character as he crawls through High School and on into College do, literally, have to be read to be believed. His ghastly malodorous Karate clothes, the leather biker boots which gradually strip his feet of most of their skin and all of their resemblance to normal human appendages, become characters in their own right. So does Max the attack-dog, a pathetic shit-smeared wreck from a pound, whose only remaining trait is the desire to kill (non-white) passers-by.

You may think you had it hard growing up (I certainly remember vividly lying supine on the floor by the lockers at Rangitoto College, as one boy kicked me in the ribs repeatedly -- he'd taken a dislike to me on sight, apparently, and made a point of coming up and bashing me every time we met thereafter -- something about the expression on my face, it must have been. I never consciously addressed a word to him [except, perhaps, "ouch!" or "no, please, mercy!"] so it can't have been anything I said). Your sufferings -- my sufferings -- were a fucking picnic compared to "John Dolan"'s.

I put in the inverted commas because I tried to console myself at first with the idea that he might have made some of it up -- exaggerated it a bit for effect -- but after a while I was forced to conclude that these awful things had indeed happened ...

Perhaps the most terrible, and the most sickeningly funny of all, is the scene where Corey the Klass Klown manages to intercept the note young Dolan tries to pass to the most Elfin of all the girls at his school, a note written in faux-Gothic handwriting (under the influence of that master calligrapher, and adept student of feminine psychology, J. R. R. Tolkien), which reads as follows:

"O Dearest Leigh -- Much have I wished to give to you some testimonial of my affections, yet I know not how. Willt [sic] thou meet me by the stream ere the sun touches the western pines?"

The response from Corey and his cohorts is brutal and complete. "I'm not still standing there, so logically it must have ended," Dolan muses, as one writhes with transferred embarrassment at the completeness of his humiliation. It's not really funny, I suppose, watching another human being suffer. What am I saying? Of course it's funny -- it's the only thing that is really funny (or so John Cleese asserted when trying to account for the popularity of Basil Fawlty).

There's a lot more. It's a pretty thorough denunciation. Nobody I can think of has ever gone further in dramatising his own hapless misery -- but the beautiful precision and effortless competence of the writing makes it funnier to read than P. G. Wodehouse.

The poetry's very good, too -- don't get me wrong -- but Pleasant Hell deserves to become a classic. It's the Catcher in the Rye of the Love Generation (or has someone already said that somewhere online?).

So many goodbyes there've been in my life lately. John and his wife Katherine (an accomplished critic and poet in her own right) are off to Vancouver Island. I hope someone there notices the extraordinary opportunity that has befallen them. The one we've missed.

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Four Last Songs


I was talking with a friend the other day, and she told me that she’d been so moved by reading Ken Arvidson’s poem “Four Last Songs” (full title: “The Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss at Takahe Creek above the Kaipara”) when she was a kid, that it actually came as a disappointment to her when she finally got to listen to Strauss’s music.

It’s funny. I had precisely the opposite experience. I’d always had a secret hankering to listen to Strauss’s piece called Tod und Verklärung [Death and Transfiguration] just because of the cool title, and I bought another CD with the Vier letzte Lieder [Four Last Songs] on it at the same time just as an afterthought.

Death and Transfiguration was pretty cool, I must say, but the Four Last Songs were just amazing. They were sung by Jessye Norman, and her voice seemed supernatural at times – like some of the soprano effects in the Ninth Symphony or The Magic Flute. I still get the shivers thinking about it.

It was a strange time for me. I’d just come back from the UK with my Doctorate, and couldn’t find any work except teaching tutorials at Massey, Palmerston North (oh, a friend of my father’s offered me a job cleaning her shop, but at the time I felt a little overqualified for it – now I suspect I’d feel a little underqualified).

I was recently married, so the two of us trekked off to Palmy, where I’d managed to rent us a very solidly bourgeois brick house on the outskirts of town. Having an actual salaried job for the first time meant that I actually had a bit of money, even after rent and bills, hence the splashing out on two CDs.

The other thing that happened just then was my discovery, in a little alcove cupboard of the house we were renting, of a huge library of Antarctic books gathered by our landlady’s uncle (I think – can’t quite be sure at this distance in time).

So that was our winter. Bicycling everyday to work through the park and over the traffic-clogged bridge. On the other side of the river I would branch off right towards Massey (where I kept a complete change of clothes in my little prefabricated hut of an office), and J-A would peddle off left to teach at the Japanese college on the hill (New Zealand studies, among other things – it seemed a curious thing for a multilingual European to be assigned to cover).

Then, when we got home, we would listen to music and watch drossy TV (no video – so we were at the mercy of the programmers) while I worked my way through Herbert Ponting and Frank Worsley and Ernest Shackleton and – above all – Douglas Mawson’s The Home of the Blizzard. The books were mostly huge double-volumed first editions with banks of photographs and endless appendices of observations and maps (pruned off for the cheaper “popular” editions, which he'd also taken the trouble to collect). Our landlady’s uncle had clearly been obsessed by the subject, and it came to obsess me more than a little too.

One bright day I found a brand-new, lavishly-illustrated edition of Mawson’s original expedition diaries in the bookshop in town (if you have to live in a small town, it’s always best to choose one with a university in it – there’s bound to be some good bookshops and a good cinema too: those are two commodities students (and their teachers) are always in need of).

This became a kind of Bible for me. It was incomparably more vivid and frank than the written-up account that actually reached publication, and seemed to take me to some of the same places in human suffering chronicled years later in the film Touching the Void. Eventually all this would grow into the Antarctic section of my first novel, Nights with Giordano Bruno (published by Bumper Books in 2000), but at the time I tried to express this complex of emotions and dislocations in a poem.

It’s never been published before (although I have tried it on editors from time to time in a half-hearted sort of way), and its faults are very obvious to me, but it still has (for me at least) an atmosphere of that strange period in my life, fifteen years ago, on the other side of a turbid creek of personal turmoil and upheaval.

I offer it here on the day of Leicester's funeral as an expression of good wishes for his own personal Death and Transfiguration ...




Tod und Verklärung

(for J-A)


Sir Douglas Mawson, the Australian explorer, was in Adélie Land between 1912 and 1914. It is probably the most inhospitable region of Antarctica (he called his account of the expedition The Home of the Blizzard). The idea was that he should survey one side of the continent, while Ernest Shackleton travelled to meet him from the other. However, Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, was crushed in the ice, so the crossing was never attempted.


[This is all completely inaccurate, by the way – but I’m leaving the poem here as I originally wrote it. While Mawson did have discussions to this effect with “the boss” in London, actually the two expeditions didn't coincide. It was left to another group of hapless souls to lay depots for Shackleton’s doomed Antarctic crossing]





I

Snow is so soft and deep
– Douglas Mawson, the Antarctic, 22nd January 1913


A terrible catastrophe happened soon after taking latitude ... I looked behind & saw no sign of Ninnis & his team. I stopped & wondered, then bethought myself of the crevasse ... Came back, called & sounded for an hour. Read the Burial Service
– 14th December 1912


Ninnis dead
24 miles back,
Xavier as well – buried in his bag.

Meanwhile, in Germany,
orchestras attack
the prick of Richard Strauss.

Rilke burrows deep
in drifts of office files
(ashamed of hymning war).

Futile to despair ­–
discord in the hut
as Whetter takes a rear ...

Whetter was sick last night, diarrhoea. He sleeps all day today though stating that he would get up and get ice this afternoon. Whetter is not fit for a polar expedition
– 11th June 1912




II

May God Help us.
– Mawson, 14th December 1912


No light from the Hut, it is difficult to tell when one is on top of it. Outside one is in touch with the sternest of Nature – one might be a lone soul standing in Precambrian times or on Mars – all is desolation and hard in the durest
– 9th April 1912


The landscape makes one think of Greece
(Mawson himself contributes a few lines):
sun-beaten cyclamen, unceasing
wind on coastal pines.
Here darkness, gales, a desert
without dunes – sastrugi,
bitter care, crevasses,
Ninnis and his dog-team.
The bursting sun of Wagner –
what to dramatise?
This lunar quiet, blind echoes
in a maze ... huts over the next rise?




III

It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man
– E. M. Forster, Howards End (London, 1910)


11.30 pm: … Will the hangar stick it? Will the screens stand the strain? It is indeed difficult to understand how air can flow so swiftly
– 17th May 1912


Let’s not blame Strauss – this landscape of the Moon
was not dreamed up by Ludendorff or Haig.
The wind cuts wires, wears down the planet’s skin.

Making a “beautiful noise” is not so easy
– the screech of amateurs offends the air.
(how can it move so fast ... relentlessly?)

Some day the guns will be silenced; not so the howl
of the “perpetual anticyclone” of Adélie ...
King George’s land – acceptance with a scowl.

The new land east of the Mertz glacier we have received his Majesty’s gracious permission to name King George V. land
– 1914




IV

Very soft shifting snow, or else I would have done better
– Mawson, 22nd January 1913


You see, my love, this disk of polished steel
and Mawson’s Antarctic Notes
aren’t far apart.
amongst those here at Commonwealth Bay are a number of the very type of men who have made Great Britain what she is, and Europe what she is, and will, I venture to think, – make Heaven out of Hell
– 3rd May 1912

Too late, now, for revision –
Four Last Songs composed
on the abyss.

What do you see when face to face …
with nothing? Who’s to say
except our pal?
The tent is closing in by weight of snow and is about coffin size now
– 25th January 1913

So let’s just listen ­– something there that’s
noble,
notes of a man
unbeaten,
refusing to lie down
in the soft snow.

Trust in Providence and my crampons
– 3rd February 1913



(5-9/8/91)

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

We Were Talking



David Howard writes in to say that this poem by Leicester appeared in the Press today. I guess that as joint literary executors we can jointly give permission for it to appear here. Please also check out the fine obituaries here and here on the Reading the Maps blog ...

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Leicester Kyle 30.10.37-4.7.2006

[photo by Simon Creasey]


Leicester passed away this morning at 1.28 a.m.

"The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house."
-- Philip Larkin, "Aubade"

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

for Leicester Hugo Kyle, b.1937




Persistence of tussock
maxed-out Mastercard


Well, I’ve had some rather bad news. My friend Leicester Kyle is in extremis, with terminal cancer, at the Bone Marrow Unit of Christchurch Hospital. He’s elected to receive no further treatment for it, and his partner Carol circulated an email on the 18th of June warning his close friends and associates that he wasn’t long for this world.

As I write, a week later, they’re administering the Anglican last rites, or “final anointing.” David Howard – who was able to travel up from Dunedin to see Leicester one last time – just rang to tell me that, and also that he and I have been asked to be literary executors. I wish I could be there too. Writing this instead is, it seems, the best that I can do.


Barns raise rooftops
in reverse


Leicester’s wife Miriel died of cancer, too, a year or so after we first met. It was at a poetry workshop in 1997, actually – rather an auspicious day: the day I met Lee Dowrick and Stu Bagby, also. We’ve been friends and allies ever since.

The first Leicester I knew, then, was the Auckland Leicester – the man who invariably went along to Poetry Live on K Rd and sat there looking avuncular with his long white beard and broad-brimmed leather hat, before standing up to read some wry and witty verses to the assembled hipsters.


The scenic guard-rail’s

whited out


After Miriel’s death I asked him if there was anything I could do for him, anything at all to make things easier. He said that there was one thing, rather a trivial thing – if I were to organise a regular gathering of friends, perhaps weekly or fortnightly, to talk about poetry, that might be a nice distraction.

Accordingly Richard Taylor, Scott Hamilton, Leicester and I began a semi-regular series of meetings in the London Bar, punctuated by visits from the likes of Hamish Dewe, Michael Arnold, Miriam Bellard, Kirsty and Andrew McCully, as well as the boys from evasion ... Those meetings still continue, at Galbraith’s tavern, under the nom-de-plume of the brief organising committee. Leicester got us onto a good thing.


Charming Creek
takes an awkward turn


Then Leicester left. He bought a house, sight unseen, in the tiny village of Millerton, in the hills above Westport, and drove off there in his red Land Rover. It seemed a bit of a leap in the dark. I felt quite worried about him at first. But when I heard he’d acquired a little cat called Cursor (because he kept pace with the lines every time you turned over a new page in a book), I thought he’d be all right. And he was.

I visited Leicester in Millerton three times. The first time, in 1998, I flew down for ten days. The second time was after escaping that vast melancholy mud hole called the Gathering at the turn of the millennium. The third time, a few years later, I drove over in a rental car with David Howard for a week or so.


A naked tap
for Miner’s Dark


The lines I’ve been quoting above are from a poem called “Tips on Stress from Seddonville” which I wrote during my first sojourn in Millerton. We drove over there to buy some coal, after trying rather unsuccessfully to dig some out of one of the exposed coal seams that criss-cross the region (it looked bona-fide enough, but belched out acrid smoke whenever we tried to burn it).

The Tavern is, it appears, quite famous. We had a beer there, and then tried to compose some poems in each other’s manner. After a while the proprietor came over and remarked that there were two types of weather in Seddonville – if you can’t see the hills, it’s raining; if you can see them, it’s about to rain. Then he turned on the rugby. No poetry-scribbling drifters for him!

This is the poem I wrote that day, called “Kylesque.” I’m sure it doesn’t do him justice, though it later appeared in one of Tony Chad’s anthologies under the title “City Face”, so it must have touched some kind of chord:


Told yesterday
I had a ‘city
face’

this morning
I spent
practising
before the glass

insouciant sneers
atrocious leers
insolent stares

till I noticed
the espresso
had gone
cold

(9/7/98)

[As “City Face” – Valley Micropress 1: 11 (1998) 6;
All Together Now! A Celebration of New Zealand Culture by 100 Poets,
ed. Tony Chad (Wellington: Valley Micropress, 2000) 85].


After a while, as Leicester became more and more of an iconic figure on the West Coast (mainly because of his intense involvement in the fight to save the local environment from strip mining), I began to feel that someone should compile an anthology of the various poems and tributes to him which had begun to appear all over the place. Virtually everyone who visited seemed to want to write a poem about Millerton and his strange, old-man-of-the-mountain role in the community.

Tony Chad, David Howard, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Jim Norcliffe are just some of the writers I know who went there and wanted to record something of the extraordinary nature of the place.

So what will I miss most about Leicester? His wry sense of humour, above all, I suppose. In the very last letter he wrote me, just six weeks ago, he offers one parting reflection: “it isn’t really true that the quality of a poem has anything much to do with the beauty of the reader” – a typically sly and offbeat reaction to my own moonings over girls.

Also, his unfailing courtesy. He was a gentleman in the deepest sense of the term. When I heard how ill he was, a couple of months ago, I sent him an advance copy of the Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance anthology that I’d edited for AUP with Jan Kemp. I thought he might like it, hearing again the voices of Curnow, Glover, Tuwhare and the rest reading their iconic poems. Even from a cancer ward he took the trouble to ring up and thank me.

I was out at the time, so he had to leave a message. Is it sentimental of me to have saved it, and to play it back again now? The voice is thin and breathless – a shadow of what he used to sound like – but it’s so recognisably him:

Message recorded Sunday June the 4th, 12.27 pm:
“Hello Jack, this is Leicester. Just ringing to thank you very much for the poetry book. I think it’s a real triumph. The poems are so well chosen, and it’s really good to read New Zealand poetry all keeping such good company. So very thoughtful of you, and I’m reading it with great pleasure. Bye.”

I guess that’s the last time I’ll hear his voice. There are a thousand more stories I could tell. Maybe I will tell some more of them later on, but for the moment I just want to put on record my love and respect for that wise and complex man – priest, poet, conservationist – the Reverend Leicester Kyle.

Monday, June 26, 2006

for Leicester Kyle (2)

A Preliminary Bibliography


Longer Poems:
Koroneho: Joyful News out of the New Found World (1996)
[In A Brief Description of the Whole World, 6 (1997) – 9 (1998)]

Options. Mt Eden: Heteropholis Press, November, 1996. [& Maria (July, 1997)]

State Houses. Mt Eden: Heteropholis Press, June, 1997.

A Voyge to New Zealand: the Log of Joseph Sowry, Translated and Made Better . Mt Eden: Heteropholis Press, October, 1997.

Heteropholis. Mt Eden: Heteropholis Press, February 1998.

A Machinery for Pain. Millerton: Heteropholis Press, 1999.

A Safe House for a Man. Millerton: Heteropholis Press, 2000. [republished: Auckland: Polygraphia Ltd., 2000.]

Five Anzac Liturgies. Millerton, Buller, 2000. [republished: Auckland: Polygraphia Press, 2003.]

A Christmas Book. Millerton, Buller, 2000.

The Great Buller Coal Plateaux: A Sequence of Poems. P.O. Box 367, Westport: MAPPS [The Millerton and Plateaux Protection Society], 2001.

King of Bliss. Millerton, Buller, 2002.

Things to Do with Kerosene. Westport: Heteropholis Press, 2002.

A Wedding in Tintown. Millerton, Buller, 2002.

Dun Huang Aesthetic Dance. Millerton, Buller, 2002.

8 Great O’s. Millerton, Buller, 2003.

Panic Poems. Westport: Heteropholis Press, 2003.

Living at a Bad Address. Millerton, 2004.

Anogramma. Westport: Heteropholis Press, 2005.

Breaker: A Progress of the Sea. Illustrated by John Crawford. Millerton, Buller: Heteropholis Press, 2005.


Publications in brief (1995-2006):
[the magazine formerly known as: A Brief Description of the Whole World / ABDOTWW / description / ABdotWW / Ab.ww / brief. &c.]

Koroneho: Joyful News Out Of The New Found World / 6 (1997): 10-19
from Koroneho / 7 (1997): 35-40
from Koroneho / 8 (1997): 62-67
from Koroneho / 9 (1998): 49-54
Comparative Atmospheric Pressure; On Forest Culture / 10 & 11 (1998): 43-47
Marlowe overwritten / 13 (1999): 36-39
On The Principle Of New Zealand Weather / 14 (1999): 57-62
Errata / 15 (2000): 86
Mr. Buller To... / 16 (2000): 84
A Voyge to New Zealand / 18 (2000): 12-21
On The Great Buller Coal Plateau / 19 (2001): 38-40
Sign-off/ 20 (2001): 66-67
Mr Muir and Mr Emerson / 24 (2002): 75-77
from Dancing in the Cave / 25 (2002): 58, 60, 62
On Birchfield Fen / 27 (2003): 55-56
Spawning Galaxis / 29 (2004): 57
Death of a Landscape / 31 (2004): 83-92
Peninsula Days / 32 (2005): 61-64
A Letter from Buller/ 33 (2006): 44-45


Longer Prose:
The Abbot and the Rock [32 pp.] (c.1970s)

I Got Me Flowers: Letters to a Psychiatrist [54 pp.] (c. 1975)

Deosa Bay: A Pastoral [47 pp.] (c.1970s)

The Visitation; An Account of the Last Diocesan Visitation of John Mowbray, Bishop of Calcutta; Largely Compiled form His Journal and His Letters [68 pp.] (c.1970s)


Shorter Poems:
There were at least 475 of these, when I attempted a preliminary census in 1999. Heaven knows how many have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the seven years since ...

untitled

rustling
says Jack
and tentative

is the wind

that blows

over dead hills
on the Manukau


[© Leicester Kyle. Spin 31 (July, 1998): 31].

Der Berggeist



‘If there were no small pines in the fields,’ he murmured to himself. Such a fitting reference, I felt; far better than any new poem of mine could have been. I was most impressed.
– Diary of Lady Murasaki



[Monday, 3rd January – 10.55 a.m.]

Leicester has found a strange orchid, which he wishes to collect. Time for an orange-break.


Sunlight gleams

the leafy spot
we passed on the track

foaming, tannin-brown stream

miraculously green rock


“The weather’s not doing what it should be – I don’t have it properly trained” – Leicester Kyle in the Fisherman’s Rest, Granity.



Der Berggeist


Tom’s words laid bare the hearts of trees
– J. R. R. Tolkien



Bush-lawyer glow-worms
in the garden butcher’s
shop ground to stone
slabs Dracophyllum
Mountain Neinei Dr
Seuss Trees the yellow
orchid like
Aladdin’s cave a pothole
in the moors with water
flowing by
the Christmas
bush so long
as no-one mentions
anything to do
with Christmas

green like that stone
you picked up last
time from the Gentle
Annie



[Jack Ross, Chantal’s Book (Wellington: HeadworX, 2002) 95-96].

In the Ngakawau Gorge




Plastic arrows broken
off, DOC plaques
erode to
native yellow.

Detour, they said,
back on that
tramline
fuelled by gravity.

Irrupting from fern-
bush: creek, stream,
rill, foam-
berged, peat-

stained. No further
forth – no rain
(as yet). We sat,
said:

What does one do
with this? Cite
Rilke? Prate about
milady’s favours? Fail to

(9/7/98)


[Spin 32 (1998): 37].

A Clearer View of the Hinterland:

Leicester at Millerton


Absence of rapids on Ngakawau stream.

Big Ditch and Little Ditch Creek – impious hand bisects the ‘D.’

Cobweb of raindrops in dragon sun.

“Down, down, down from the high Sierras ...”

Electrical storms: intensity of affect.

Fund-raising at the Fire Depot.

Grey & white kitten, black robin, and black fantail.

Huffing into an Atlas stove.

“If you can see the hills, it’s going to rain.”

Jack said: “A succession of inner landscapes.”

Kiwis peck through sphagnum moss.

Leicester said: “A community devoted to male play.”

Millerton speaks – A Cannabis Landslide.

Nature tips – gorse is choked by bush.

Other landrovers get one wave.

Proud grey donkey; manure in a sack.

Quarrelling over the Fire Service.

“Rain has a persistency of grades, much noted by the locals.”

Siren: “I’m always free on Wednesday nights.”

Twin side-logs set for smoke-alarms.

Utopia St, Calliope Rd.

Village hall stained with camouflage paint.

White-packaged videos, too frank a stare.

X of three rocks marks one rare tussock.

“You have to say: Great! Awesome! Choice!”

668 – Neighbour of the Beast.


(7-10/7/98)


[Spin 36 (2000): 51].

[This alphabet poem, written during my first stay with Leicester at Millerton, was described by the one reviewer of that particular issue of Spin as "languid and oddly-themed" (Wayne Edwards. Small Press Review 334-5 (November-December 2000): 18). I've always taken that as some sort of backhanded compliment, though it may not have been meant that way at all ...]

for Leicester Kyle (1)

Here's the full text of an article I published in our lamentably shortlived print journal the pander early in 1999:

Leicester H. Kyle
Prophet without Honour


Are you the kind of reader who goes for the fattest, glossiest, most shameless paperback on the bestseller shelves? Or are you the sort who snoops through ratty old second-hand bookshops looking for the esoteric and elusive: the promise of the unknown masterpiece?

Ezra Pound chanced upon Andreas Divus’ Latin translation of the Odyssey on an bookstall in Paris; D. G. Rossetti found Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in a remainder bin in Charing Cross Road. If we wait long enough, eventually someone may pick up a copy of Leicester Kyle’s Heteropholis in the stacks of one of our larger public libraries (defenders of the obscure, God bless them), and be similarly transfixed by this strange work of the modern sensibility. Why wait, though?

Heteropholis is a complex, multi-faceted narrative poem, not predominantly lyric in inspiration – which at once condemns it in the eyes of most readers of contemporary poetry (the only sin more heinous being what Milton calls “the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing”). It concerns a fallen angel, who has descended to earth in the form of a small green native gecko (species: Heteropholis gemmeus). This gecko has been caught by an apartment-dwelling Aucklander, and makes observations on his habits, on the weather (a subject of particular concern to angels, who are used to looking down), and on sundry other matters. Some of the matter is lewd, some liturgical[1]. It is, nevertheless, a profoundly serious and, indeed, partially autobiographical work. No commercial New Zealand publisher will touch it with a barge-pole.

Leicester Kyle, like his lizard protagonist, has been caught. Poetry snared him late, after a long and successful career as an Anglican pastor. He had written short stories before that (notably for the Listener and the London Magazine), but his poems began to appear in New Zealand magazines midway through the nineties, and have now become almost inevitable features of any local publication. Like other late-flowering converts to poetry (Thomas Hardy, say, or Herman Melville), he is prolific, and could undoubtedly present us with a collection or two of lyrics which would take their place with the others so routinely reviewed in these pages.

Instead, he perversely insists on writing erudite, book-length works in an experimental mode (Zukovsky and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets are acknowledged influences). His shorter poems have tended to be wry, ironic reflections on modern New Zealand life, which explains their ready assimilation into the bland modernism-without-tears of our present literary milieu. The longer works, though, defy ready characterisation. They display a darker, more rebellious gift.

In order, we have Koroneho: Joyful News out of the New Found World (which has been appearing serially in Alan Loney’s journal A Brief Description of the Whole World from issue 6 onwards). A series of descriptions of – misidentified – native orchids compiled by the missionary and botanist William Colenso are here versified and complicated by Leicester into a work combining the scientific and literary vocabularies (a continuing preoccupation in his writing). This is perhaps the most austere and “difficult” of his works to date.

Next comes Options (1996-1997), available only through Leicester’s own Heteropholis Press (now removed from its former location in Mt. Eden to the wilds of Buller). This set of four poems examines, with a wickedly satirical eye, a series of religious and mystical vocations. We have Evagrius, the fourth century ascetic; Jeremy Taylor, the seventeenth-century Anglo-Catholic Jeremiah:

Always look for death.
Every day knock at the gate of the grave.
… Consider the tomb
At your triumph; the skeleton
At the revel; the bones
At the banquet …

(Leicester comments, perhaps tongue in cheek: “It was my intention to make better use of Taylor’s humour, but I found this oddly difficult to do. It is here, but unexpectedly dark”); Fran, a thirteenth-century Franciscan mendicant transported to contemporary Northland; and finally Maria, the celebrated nineteenth-century dancing prophetess of Kaikohe. The disjunction of cultures and epochs might seem extreme, but that’s how its author likes it.

As a whole, Options is a delightful and witty work which deserves a wider audience, and which might have great value as a corrective to the mouthings of the New Age prophets who surround us in these last days of the millennium.

State Houses (1997) is more personal, interweaving tragic family history with the history of the first state houses in the Christchurch suburb of Riccarton. Leicester explains that his “dream-like recollection” of childhood “is set against the ideology of which the state houses were part” (hence the Bauhaus epigraph, and the various diagrams and maps), but that “progress is provided by a ritual house-blessing, an alternative ideology, which moves the family group from room to room, part to part, of reality.” This is an intense and moving poem, whose total effect can perhaps be best summarised by repeating the quotation (from Lorine Niedecker’s correspondence with Louis Zukovsky) on the dedication page:

“Yes I know you’re moving – in a circle, backward with boxes –”

The “moving” pun is intentional.

Finally we come to A Voyge to New Zealand: the Log of Joseph Sowry, Translated and Made Better (1997). “Made better” is a description cribbed from Talmudic commentaries, but this is more ludic, a bit of fun. The author has taken a real nineteenth-century journal, and teased it into strange shapes on the page and in the imagination. It reads as an affectionate tribute to the spirit of our pioneers, a fin-de-siècle version of Curnow’s “Landfall in Unknown Seas.”

As I mentioned earlier, Leicester Kyle has moved from Auckland to the West Coast of the South Island, where he can scribble, observe, explore and botanise to his heart’s content. The samples I have seen of recent work (including sections of The Machinery of Pain: a new sequence on pain management, prompted by close personal experience) promise some extraordinary new directions. My own hope is to see, eventually, a single volume, a little like the Black Sparrow Press collection of Jack Spicer’s poetry books, which will showcase his work for a larger public.

Jack will have his heroes, you may say. Regular Pander readers have already observed me constructing “hagiographies” (Danny Butt’s word, Pander 3:6) of Kendrick Smithyman (1: 10-13) and Kathy Acker (5: 26-27). But saluting the unorthodox is a principal reason for this magazine to exist, it seems to me.

There is nothing inaccessible about Leicester’s mad, funny, eccentric verses, seen in their proper context, but perhaps they do sound like a barbaric yawp next to the anaemic pipings of our other bards.


Now pursuing truth
I make new moves
and am more business-like …

I must learn more

I’ll take to interstices

I’ll live in the wall that divides

I’ll watch with my bespectacled unblinking eye

I’ll see all sides

It’s a strange thought, but I’m uneasily aware that in this strange flowering of Leicester Kyle we may be seeing genius.


[Pander 6/7 (1999) 21 & 23].

[1] For an example of the former, see Pander 3: 19.

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Bluff 06


Next stop, Rakiura ...




"laborious days sharing the life and hardships of their people in the simplicity of Christ" -- rather an inspiring sentiment.

Berlin Storkwinkel 12




- Yang Lian -


Hilary Chung made this word for word rendering from the Chinese for our Words and Places poetry workshop.

Micromelismata

[Michele Leggott, DIA (Auckland: AUP, 1994) 7].


Michele gave permission for us to use this poem in the Words and Places poetry workshop.

Words and Places (Bluff 06)

Poetry Workshop
(Saturday 22 April, 9.30 am-12 noon)

el original es infiel a la traducción
[the original is unfaithful to the translation]
– Jorge Luis Borges

Preliminaries

When Michele Leggott asked me to write a short report on the poetry workshop we did at the Bluff 06 Poetry Symposium a couple of months ago, I agreed blithely enough. It’s been hanging over me ever since as a kind of uncompleted obligation. Nevertheless, it’s worth remembering that nothing in the literary field is ever really complete until you’ve written a spiel pointing out what an unqualified success it was – or, rather (as one might say), the proof of the pudding is in the assertion.

So I’m sitting in my office here at Massey Albany, staring at a pile of scribbled-on pieces of paper: annotated interlinear translations, ballpoint drafts of poems, battered sheets of A3 with curious designs drawn on them in multi-coloured felt-tip … I bundled them all together at the end of the exercise (I almost wrote “class”), and have hardly had a moment to go through these rather inscrutable relics since.

The original plan, I must confess, was simply to get the assembled poets to produce some creative transcriptions of foreign-language poems with the help of annotated cribs. Extensive discussions with Michele, however, modified and broadened the idea significantly. “Why not translate out of English as well?” she asked, and I had to admit she had a point.

Why privilege English as a kind of conceptual default? Even if we haven’t been intending to stay on the Te Rau Aroha Marae, the multicultural complexion of our projected line-up of poets would no doubt have brought the issue to the fore.

The request we finally sent out to all the guests at the symposium was accordingly for English-language poems as well as dual-text interlinears:

In the tradition of the collective poem and online anthology put together during FUGACITY 05 in Christchurch, you are invited to attend and contribute to the opening workshop of the BLUFF 06 symposium.

Components

There are various components to the exercise we’ll be doing. The first two are:

  1. a poem in a language other than English, with interlinear literal translation and notes.
  2. an anonymous poem in English.

For the rest, you’ll have to wait and see. Please bring along pen, paper and anyone else you think might like to spend the morning writing and talking.

Results

The end result, by Saturday noon, should be one or more poster-poems for display and impromptu reading. After due consideration, you may wish to type up your poem to be posted to the nzepc online anthology being launched next day in Oban, at the final reading of the symposium.

How can you help?

You can send us a poem.

Either one of your own, in which case you would have to agree to allow other people to play variations on it.

Or, alternatively, those of you who are fluent in – or have studied – another language (or languages) could email me a poem laid out as an interlinear text, with the original above and an English translation under each line (as in the example below). Footnotes on contentious points, double-entendres etc. would also be helpful. Please provide a phonetic transcript if it’s written in a non-Roman script.

What kinds of poem should you choose? Well, up to you. Fairly short ones, up to a page in length. Poems which interest you, or which you find challenging in some way.

The greater the variety, the more entertaining the workshop will be.

I made a few comments about it on the Leaf Salon website, but here goes with a much fuller report:


The Day of the Workshop

Saturday morning dawned grey and overcast, the perfect weather for a good long writing session. I’d brought down enough poems for (I hoped) ten or twelve groups, but a number of people approached me with new materials there in Bluff, so I ended up with enough pieces of paper for an army.

(Poor David Howard was kept very busy ferrying poems to and from the photocopier; Martin Edmond and I had had an interesting time the day before trying to find poster-sized paper in Invercargill).

We ended up with seven groups. Each one was issued with a poem, an interlinear translation, and a stimulus (we’d brainstormed these on the blackboard before the exercise got underway):

o Ancestors
o Bluff
o Oysters
o Ferry to Rakiura
o The view out of the window
o The weather
o 100 years from now

I debated for a long time whether or not to post the original materials on this site, but I can’t really see any harm in it. Some of the adaptations were extremely subtle, and it’s hard to get their full flavour unless you know the ingredients each group started from:


Group 1

Letter to a lost friend

Participants:
Rob Allan, Michael Harlow, Cilla McQueen, Emma Neale

Original Poem:
The Mooring of Starting Out

We walk into what we’ve made already: Zapiski
iz podpol’ya
– underground; red spot on the right cheek,
then the left, flecked off. More spacious gestures,
opening to wide boulevards, the cars (Daihatsu, Hyundai),
Nikkei index – minutiae of day.
The renovations here fall into legend; we plot their progress,
waiting, day by day.

Dürer’s self-portrait in the Prado: “Can self-love
go any further?
” intones canned Kenneth Clark. Self-loathing,
rather – through the frame dry summer, Central
Otago moon-landscape – six huhus rubbing together.
A lake though, not these bomb-craters of metal,
light-blue and red t-shirt over hipster slacks, skewed platforms.
One more line completes it,

your breasts rhyme with the cloudlessness of day.

[Jack Ross]

Transcription from Chinese:
Yang Lian
Berlin Storkwinkel 12

[word for word rendering by Hilary Chung]


Group 2

Nevada’s dead white face

Participants:
Jeanne Bernhardt, Martin Edmond, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

Original Poem:
Some More of Your Friends from Nevada

In a corner of the old Capitol cinema
Balmoral

(Now an indoor rock-climbing centre
track-suited, trussed-up straight arrows

working their way up the walls)
they’ve left up one poster

Wes Craven’s
The Hills Have Eyes

a black cut-out hillside (you guessed it)
studded with lidless red eyes

Of course it’s too late to convince you
it’s always that friend of a friend

Who hoons off downriver
veers off the state highway

ends up getting fucked like a pig
or mown into road-spoil?

[Lorraine West]

Translation from Latin:
Theodorich of Saint-Trond, near Liege (12th century)

‘Flete, canes, si flere vacat, si flere valetis;
Weep, dogs, if there is time to weep, if it suits you to weep;
flete, canes: catulus mortuus est Pitulus.’
Weep, dogs: the little puppy is dead, Pitulus.’
‘Mortuus est Pitulus? Pitulus quis?’ ‘Plus cane dignus.’
‘Pitulus is dead? Which Pitulus?’ ‘More worthy than a dog.’
‘Quis Pitulus?’ ‘Domini cura dolorque sui.
‘Which Pitulus?’ ‘The love and sorrow of his Master.
Non canis Albanus, nec erat canis ille Molossus
Not an Albanian dog, nor was he a Molossian dog
sed canis exiguus, sed brevis et catulus.
but a tiny dog, but short and a puppy.
Quinquennis fuerat; si bis foret ille decennis,
He had been five years old; if he had been twice, ten years old ,
usque putes catulum, cum videas, modicum.
when you saw him, you’d think he was just a tiny puppy. .
Muri pannonico vix aequus corpore toto
Scarcely equal to a marmot with his whole body
qui non tam muri quam similis lepori.
not so much like a mouse as a hare.
Albicolor nigris facies gemmabat ocellis.’
His white coloured face was jewelled with little black eyes.
Unde genus?’ ‘Mater Fresia, Freso pater.’
‘From whence his tribe?’ ‘Mother Fresian, father Fresian.’
‘Quae vires?’ ‘Parvae, satis illo corpore dignae,
‘What strength?’ ‘Little, enough to match that body,
ingentes animi robore dissimili.’
huge spirits with dissimilar physical strength.
‘Quid fuit officium? Numquid fuit utile vel non?’
‘What was his work? Was it anything useful or not?’
‘Ut parvum magnus diligeret dominus.
‘So that the big master might take delight in the small. ’
Hoc fuit officum, domino praeludere tantum.’
This was his work, only to play around for his master.
‘Quae fuit utilitas?’ ‘Non nisi risu erat.’
‘What was the use?’ ‘There was none unless by laughter.’
‘Qualis eras, dilecte canis, ridende, dolende,
Such you were, beloved dog, to be laughed at, to be mourned,
risus eras vivens, mortuus ecce dolor.
living you were laughter, dead behold grief
Quisquis te vidit, quisquis te novit, amavit
Whoever saw you, whoever knew you, loved
et dolet exitio nunc, miserando, tuo.
and laments your death now, which must be mourned.

[trans. Bernadette Hall]


Group 3

Trafiggere

Participants:
Brian Flaherty, Lisa Williams

Original Poem:
1918

At the edge of Temuka the road is blocked by three bales of hay, a black flag, and the last two O’Shaughnessy kids, who take turns holding the rifle their cousin brought back from the Somme. Outsiders get sent back to the city: Maoris have to keep to Arowhenua, on the far side of the creek we dive in to wash the sickness away.

When Queenie got the cramps we took her to the small house behind the marae, and laid her out on a clean sheet, and fetched a bucket of creekwater, and cooled her stomach and hips, and washed the mushrooms under her arms. The younger kids giggled beside the bed, expecting another baby cousin. First her fingernails then her hands turned black; her breasts swelled, popped their nipples, and dribbled blue-black milk. We couldn’t straighten her arms in the coffin, so we folded them across her chest. She looked like she was diving into herself.

[Scott Hamilton]

Translation from Italian:
Salvatore Quasimodo
Ed è subito sera
And it’s suddenly evening

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
Everyone is alone on the heart of the earth
Traffitto da un raggio di sole:
Transfixed by a sunbeam:
Ed è subito sera.
And it’s suddenly evening.


Notes:
the verb ‘trafiggere’ means to run through, stab or pierce – here I’ve gone for the sonic equivalence of ‘transfix.’

‘raggio’ means ‘ray’ – I’ve gone for ‘sunbeam’ for the assonance / slant rhyme it offers with evening, specifically because Quasimodo’s original has the significant full rhyme of ‘sera’ and ‘terra’, as well as the internal half rhyme of sole and solo.

[trans. Cliff Fell]


Group 4

rhapsodia autographia

Participants:
Maureen Dillon, Murray Edmond, Bernadette Hall

Original Poem:
New Leaf
for Alan and Miriam

Such a green song
so full of light sings
in the palm of your
hand, cave walls
have it, the first high-
five to say hello:
that shout of green,
love you could go
crazy for, and all
mind’s tendernesse
to the heart, take hold

[Michael Harlow]

Translation from Russian:
Osip Emilyevich Mandelshtam
Za gryemuchuyu doblyest’
For the sake of the resonant

Za gryemuchuyu doblyest’ gryadushchikh vyekov,
For the sake of the resonant valor of ages to come,
Za v’isokoye plyemya lyudyei
for the sake of a high race of men,
Ya lishilsya i chashi na pirye otsov,
I forfeited a bowl at my fathers’ feast,
I vyesyel’ya i chesti svoyei.
and merriment, and my honor.

Mnye na plyechi kidayetsya vyek-volkodav,
On my shoulders there pounces the wolfhound age,
No nye volk ya po krovi svoyei,
but no wolf by blood am I;
Zapikhai myenya luchshye, kak shapku, v rukav
better, like a fur cap, thrust me into the sleeve
Zharkoi shub’i sibirskikh styepyei, –
of the warmly fur-coated Siberian steppes,

Chtob nye vidyet’ ni trusa, ni khlipkoi gryazts’i,
– so that I may not see the coward, the bit of soft muck,
Ni krovav’ikh kostyei b kolyesye,
the bloody bones on the wheel,
Chtob siyali vsyu noch’ golub’iye pyests’i
so that all night the blue-fox furs may blaze
Mnye v svoyei pyervob’itnoi krasye.
for me in their pristine beauty.

Uvyedi myenya v noch’, gdye tyechyet Yenisyei,
Lead me into the night where the Enisey flows,
I sosna do zvyezd’i dostayet,
and the pine reaches up to the star,
Potomu chto nye volk ya po krovi svoyei
because no wolf by blood am I,
I nyepravdoi iskrivlyen moi rot.
and injustice has twisted my mouth.

[trans. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 1973 (New York: Vintage, 1990) 280-83.]


Group 5

The Moral is the Swan

Participants:
John Dolan, Talia Smith, Robert Cooke

Original Poem:
Pong

between classes I play this computer game called Radial Pong
originally there was Pong
which was just a square with two rackets on either side and a ball going between them
Radial Pong is the same concept in a circle
the rackets are curved like brackets
it takes a bit of getting used to working in this way
because the ball goes off at all these wacky angles
when I’m teaching my students are always looking at their digital dictionaries
or compact mirrors or out the window
so I’m always trying to intercept their line of vision
like I’m playing Radial Pong
it’s a funny job teaching
you have to become a kind of all-pervasive presence
darting around the classroom
breaking them up
raising your voice
you’re not really real
you’re a hologram
they call you Teacher

[Gabriel White]

Translation from French:
Un Gâteau Bilangue

Les mufliers me rappellent l'Américain
The snapdragons remind me of the American
qui s'est approché de moi dans un café
who came up to me once in a coffee bar
en s'exclamant d'une voix forte,
exclaiming loudly,
– Madame, vous mangez comme un serpent!
– You eat like a snake!
J'ai posé mon gâteau.
I put down my cake
– Pardon, Monsieur?
– I beg your pardon?
– Un serpent. Vous qui êtes tellement petite!
– A snake. And you're so small!
C'était vrai.
It was true.
La tranche avait été grande –
The slice was very tall,
il a fallu ouvrir très grand la bouche pour l'accommoder –
I had to open wide to get it in.
il a fallu faire sortir presque tout à fait les mâchoires des gonds.
Unhinge my jaws.
Et moi avec de la crème au menton,
Cream on my chin,
j'avais été absente, invisible,
I had been oblivious of my surroundings,
sur une planète inconnue.
invisible, on a foreign planet.

[from Firepenny ©Cilla McQueen]


Group 6

net a little to land...

Participants:
Hilary Chung, Jacob Edmond, Cliff Fell, Paula Green

Original Poem:
Micromelismata

[Michele Leggott, DIA (Auckland: AUP, 1994) 7].

Transcription from Chinese:
Bei Dao
Shēng huó
Life (two characters: “to be born” and “live”)


wang = net, network, web (including www web)
one character-looks like a net: 网

[word for word rendering by Jacob Edmond]


Group 7

gyres of moaning poppies

Participants:
Michele Leggott, Jack Ross, Helen Sword

Original Poem:
from A Satire Against Reason and Mankind

The senses are too gross; and he'll contrive
A sixth, to contradict the other five;
And before certain instinct will prefer
Reason, which fifty times for one does err.
Reason, an ignis fatuus of the mind,
Which leaving light of nature, sense, behind,
Pathless and dangerous wandering ways it takes,
Through error's fenny bogs and thorny brakes;
Whilst the misguided follower climbs with pain
Mountains of whimseys, heaped in his own brain;
Stumbling from thought to thought, falls headlong down,
Into doubt's boundless sea where, like to drown,
Books bear him up awhile, and make him try
To swim with bladders of philosophy;
In hopes still to o'ertake the escaping light;
The vapour dances, in his dancing sight,
Till spent, it leaves him to eternal night.
Then old age and experience, hand in hand,
Lead him to death, make him to understand,
After a search so painful, and so long,
That all his life he has been in the wrong.
Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies,
Who was so proud, so witty, and so wise.

[Henry Wilmot, Lord Rochester]

Translation from German:
Rainer Maria Rilke
Sonette an Orpheus – I, ix
Sonnets to Orpheus

Nur wer die Leier schon hob
Only [he] who the Lyre already raised
auch unter Schatten,
even among shades,
darf das unendliche Lob
may the infinite Praise,
ahnend erstatten.
when sensed, render.

Nur wer mit Toten vom Mohn
Only [he] who with the dead of poppies
aß, von dem ihren,
ate, those which were theirs,
wird nicht den leisesten Ton
will not the softest note
wieder verlieren.
again lose.

Mag auch die Spieglung im Teich
Though even the reflection in the pond may
oft uns erschwimmen:
often dissolve before us:
Wisse das Bild.
Know the image.

Erst in dem Doppelbereich
Only in the dual realm
werden die Stimmen
will the voices
ewig und mild.
be eternal and gentle

[from The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century German Verse, ed. Patrick Bridgwater, 1963 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) 47].


Conclusions

I guess, from my point of view, the most interesting thing was that each of the seven groups took a completely different tack on what they were “supposed” to do. It would have been a bit odd if such a stellar group of talents hadn’t come up with some pretty interesting poems, but I hadn’t expected quite such a range in the results:

  • Group 1 composed a gentle, allusive lyric.
  • Group 2 wrote a stanza each (Martin the first, Jeffrey the second, Jeanne the third, if you’re curious).
  • Group 3 chose to emphasise the clash of languages.
  • Group 4 condensed their materials with Zukofskyan precision.
  • Group 5 ended up transcribing the vagaries of their own writing process.
  • Group 6 made a concrete poem.
  • In Group 7, breaking down the wordy materials we’d been given into bite-sized phrases inspired us to make a kind of collage – which doubled as a reading score.

I suppose the real point of this postmortem on our poetry workshop is to suggest that poetry is a more robust art than even poets often assume. Once you’ve chanced upon something interesting, something from left field, by going along with an exercise like this, I hope you’ll feel more inclined to get wiggy with it more often in the rest of your writing.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis


[poster design by James Fryer]

It's two days now since that strange booklaunch in the English Department common-room at Auckland University. I've always thought it a pretty odd space, even before the carpets were all dyed slaughterhouse purple. Once we'd turned off all the lights and arranged little lamps around the window-ledges, though, it turned into a kind of Orphic cavern: the temple of the mysteries.

I think there had been a film preview in there before we arrived, so there was still a huge white screen in the middle of the floor. We didn't dare to try and take it down without instructions, so it stayed there behind the podium with the speakers projected onto it, like the chained-up captives in Plato's parable of the cave.
Michele Leggott had kindly agreed to introduce the speakers, and did so valiantly despite having hardly enough light to make out her notes.

Scott Hamilton went first. He's already given a spirited account on is own blog of the talk he gave introducing Bill Direen's J. G. Ballardesque novel / Apocalyptic text Song of the Brakeman. Brett Cross of Titus Books (the publisher of both novels), comments about the reading Olwyn Stewart then went on to give from it, that "it got quite surreal and trancelike there for a while, with hazy music in the background, the low lights, and words tumbling over the top ... I don't think I'll ever get those nodules of Tyrian purple nosing out of thinning fur out of my mind ..."

Then came Gabriel White, introducing my book The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis. "Jack has a cold front," he said. "Jack puts his worst foot forward." He went on to compare me to Plato -- or Plato's more subversive side, at any rate. He sure got a laugh at that! I despair of doing justice to all the extravagant stuff Gabriel had to say -- it was a pretty goddamned impressive performance, though, I reckon (though I say it that shouldn't). For a video-clip of part of Gabriel's speech, click here.

The wine flowed freely and bread & cheese went down by bucketloads. Strange shapes loomed up in the semi-darkness, insisting on sharing their own views on Atlantis. "Perhaps some of their descendants are here in this room," speculated one poet. "Perhaps we're all Atlanteans," I riposted.

Andrew McCully's mood music was the other unique feature of the evening. He played on heroically as evening turned into night and the stars and citylights came on. He was still playing when I left. I hope he and all those others got safely home.

If you didn't manage to get there, I'm afraid that you missed an experience. Both books are now on sale, though, and can be ordered from the Titus website. I'll finish with some of the plaudits my own book has earned already:

· The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis. ISBN 0-9582586-8-6. Auckland: Titus Books, 2006. RRP $NZ 27.95

"… after having read some of the contents, maybe it just wasn’t meant to be printed …"
– Marian Reeves, Massey Printery

"… rather rude …"
– Bronwyn Lloyd

"… women don’t always respond well to girl-girl erotica written by a bloke."
– Martin Edmond

I think that says it all, really. You owe it to yourself to check this novel out.