Three Cool Cats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Ross Brighton]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Jill Chan]

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

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

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

•
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)]

New Zealand’s Next Top Model Speaks

New Zealand's Next Top Model
(March 13-June 5, 2009)

I’m trying to be flirty with the camera
& relax my eyes
What these other girls don’t realise is
I’m the tallest one here
I can learn to show emotion
Can they grow taller?
I don’t think so

Hosanna is a genius
We all laughed at her
when she started practising
12 hours a day
Walking
looking in the mirror
I’m going to do the same

I’ve got a good body
I’m not going home
I’ve got a future in this industry
Those other girls are bitches
5 of them said that I was going home
They’re going home, not me
I’m here to stay

Hosanna is an idiot
I’m going to New York
I’m going to be a star
If they tell me to eat myself
I’ll do it
I’ve dieted before
Nobody’s getting any sleep

until we’ve cleared this up

[Teryl-Leigh: Surprise]

Yeah, okay, I admit it. I watched it too. We'd taken a solemn vow not to, Bronwyn and I, but when we turned it on "for a look" it turned out to be just too fascinating to ignore.

It's not something I'm proud of, mind you.

And as for the poem, that just happened. Type-casting, you might say. After all, I have already written a poem called "Zen and the Art of America's Next Top Model" which you can check out on the nzepc if you like. I promise to try very hard not to do it again.

Anyway, that's my excuse - what's yours?