Traffic

We all know Auckland traffic is appalling -- and it's getting worse. One of the main reasons for living and working on the Shore (at Massey Albany), in fact, is avoiding this sort of thing: the grind across the bridge. Or at any rate having the opportunity to choose one's moment to take the plunge.

So what do you when you do get stuck in traffic, creeping along behind some bozo whose idea of fun is stopping twenty or so yards behind the car in front and then gradually drifting up on them, leaving you unable even to stop and cogitate in peace?

I guess I tend to wish I was somewhere else -- either snouting around some musty time-soaked secondhand bookshop, or lying supine on a sun-baked beach (Mairangi Bay, for instance ...)



So the question is, how do you get from one to the other: traffic-jam to state of inner peace? Well, the obvious solution is to listen to the radio, but there's only a limited number of times you can hear John Tesh dispensing "wisdom for your life" without wanting to strangle the smug bastard, or to those announcers on the Concert Programme who go on and on about every detail of the composer's life before they actually allow you to listen to any music.

Bringing along your own tapes or CDs, and listening to those, is probably the best idea -- if you're organised to remember to keep the supplies stocked up. But here's my own original extra suggestion for mellow, tension-free motoring ...

[I should probably add at this point that everyone to whom I've so far mentioned this solution has reacted to it a bit like Jim Jones's congregation when they got their first big satisfying slug of Kool-aid ... but you never know, you guys might be an exception. It works okay for me, at any rate ...]

What I do is listen to poetry in the car.

"Gaaah!" I hear you cry. "No, no, have mercy -- anything but that."

But wait a second. Jan Kemp and I have spent an awful amount of time over the past few years collecting soundfiles of NZ poets reading their own work (most of which now reside in the vaults of Auckland University Library and the Turnbull in Wellington). We even put out a text/ sound anthology of Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance through Auckland University Press last year (and very successful it's been, thank you very much).



But when can you actually find time to put a bunch of poets on the CD-player during an average day? I mean really, not just that one dutiful listen you give it before packing it away on a shelf forever .... In my case the answer is: in the car.

Not just our anthology, of course (though I've listened to that an immense number of times -- not to mention its sequel, Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance, covering the baby-boomer poets, roughly from Sam Hunt to Michele Leggott, and due out later this year).



I guess my particular favourites for traffic jams or long drives in the country are very long epic poems: The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Aeneid. I have a number of versions of each, and it's agreat way of comparing the different translations.

Too intellectual? Too pretentious. Well, as the immortal Blackadder once put it, there's nothing intellectual about wandering around Italy in a nightshirt trying to get laid. That's pretty much the essence of most of these epics -- sex, sadism, family feuds, and lots of drinking. Life, as Homer sees it, is a grim struggle punctuated with moments of brightness, and it doesn't seem to make much difference whether you're a mortal or a god.

I like listening to other poets too, the Moderns: Ginsberg is great to crank up loud when you're cruising round campus trying to disillusion people with the life of the mind: "Moloch! Moloch!" Auden has a kind of dry charm. I like the mellifluous blarney of Irishmen such as Paul Muldoon or Seamus Heaney. And it's not long before you find yourself getting to know their poems far better than you ever did when they just sat in front of you on a page.

It's depressing to think that I can still sing the jingles of most of the TV ads which were on when I was a kid ("We are the boys from down on the farm / We really know our cheese ..." "They're going to think you're fine / 'Coz you got Lifebuoy ..." "Kiss me Cutex / Kiss me quick ..."). Wouldn't you rather din into your head the immortal cadences of Homer or Beowulf, or find yourself intoning "April is the cruellest month / Mixing memory with desire ..." instead? Okay, maybe not -- but it's got to be better than bitching about the traffic or (worse) listening to talkback.

[Editor's note (May, 2008): And here's the cover of the latest in our series, New New Zealand Poets in Performance, due out from AUP on Poetry Day (July 18) this year]:

I like Mike

This is the text of the speech I'm intending to give at Mike Johnson's sixtieth birthday party / launch for his new book on Waiheke island tomorrow (fingers crossed):

Everybody knows that Mike Johnson’s one of New Zealand’s foremost writers of fiction. If you didn’t know you really haven’t been keeping up. His strange, futuristic debut Lear (1986) matured into the dark Faulknerian vision of Dumb Show (1996), but there are a host of other fascinating novels and stories to be enjoyed along the way – and I hope there’ll be plenty more to come.

The success of his fiction may have had the effect of obscuring to some extent the fact that Mike actually began publishing as a poet, and has kept up this side of his oeuvre with almost equal intensity. His 1996 AUP volume Treasure Hunt, for instance, is woven around the tragic 1993 death of the Chinese poet Gu Cheng, who committed suicide after killing his wife here on Waiheke island.

The book that we’re here to celebrate today, then, The Vertical Harp: Selected Poems of Li He, represents the coming together of a number of strands both in Mike Johnson’s own work and in recent New Zealand culture.

It’s a obvious truism that, like it or not (personally I like it a lot), New Zealand is moving ever faster towards becoming a multicultural society. The trend is clearest in Auckland, because it’s the biggest population centre, and thus plays a kind of Ellis Island role in our cultural melting-pot.

It’s evident on our streets, our shops, and (above all) in our schools. As a tertiary teacher, Mike Johnson has experienced this evolution firsthand (as have I in my own teaching jobs at local Language Schools and at Massey Albany).

For writers, of course, this is truly priceless material – an “international theme” to parallel the New World / Old World divide of Henry James. And what better way to signal this than by publishing this book of poems from the works of that classic Chinese poète maudit Li He (who some of you might know better under the earlier Anglicisation Li Ho)?

Each of the major T’ang poets has his English adherents. The great rivals Tu Fu and Li Po are probably the most frequently translated (by Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound intially, but then by a host of other more-or-less inspired amateurs or experts), but then there’s the beautifully contemplative landscape poet Wang Wei as well, and then – probably somewhere quite far down the list because of his perceived personal and poetic intransigeance – we eventually encounter Li He, the so-called “Chinese Baudelaire” (perhaps Lautréamont might be a better analogue, considering the fact that he died at the age of 26).

In my case it was in a Penguin book called Poems of the Late T’ang (still one of the great titles, I think), translated by a guy called A. C. Graham. I found the whole thing completely entrancing, and spent far too much time reading it the summer I was supposed to be studying for my end-of-school exams (which is one of the many reasons I bombed out so badly, I suspect. I don’t think the English examiners appreciated being bombarded with platoons of quotes from obscure Chinese poets).

I first came across Mike’s own translations when working on collecting texts for the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, an immense collection of 171 New Zealand poets reading their own work, on 40 audio CDs, collected between 2002 and 2004 in all four of the major centres (and now housed in Auckland University Library and the Turnbull in Wellington, if you’re curious to check it out). I was very intrigued by the way Mike seemed able almost to ventriloquise through this 9th-century Chinese poet.

I had, however, encountered something similar with Kendrick Smithyman’s translations from the Italian. In Kendrick’s case, it was as if the necessity to incorporate an ideal of the Mediterranean – amore, pane e fantasia – somehow liberated him from late twentieth-century irony, the corner his exquisite art had ended by painting him into.

In Mike’s case, however, Li He appears to have liberated a kind of inner barbarian, a wilder, crazier poet than traditional Kiwi mores really allow us to be (perhaps he’ll prove me wrong later in the evening).

I don’t want to quote too many examples, as I know he’ll soon be introducing and reading from the poems himself, but I’d like to make just this one citation from “occult strings” – a poem about a female shaman exorcising demons:

on her passion-wood lute, the gold-leafed phoenix writhes
as she mutters and mumbles, face twisting to the harsh sounds
picking note for word, word for note

descend stars and spirits! come
taste meat!

That doesn’t sound like Arthur Waley. It doesn’t even sound like Ezra Pound (whom T. S. Eliot referred to as “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time”). It’s time for some new inventors now, I think: both of Chinese poetry in English, and of New Zealand poetry itself. Mike Johnson is among those brave, outward-looking pioneers.

[This is what came up when I first googled Li He, trying to find a representative image. It’s hard to feel that either poet would really disapprove]:

Pania Press and the quality known as "wu"

... Here is a piece of metal which has been melted until it has become shapeless. It represents nothing. Nor does it have design, of any intentional sort. It is merely amorphous. One might say, it is mere content, deprived of form.’

Childan nodded.

‘Yet,’ Paul said, ‘I have for several days now inspected it, and for no logical reason I feel a certain emotional fondness. Why is that? I may ask. I do not even now project into this blob, as in psychological German tests, my own psyche. I still see no shapes or forms. But it somehow partakes of Tao. You see?’ He motioned Childan over. ‘It is balanced. The forces within this piece are stabilized. At rest. So to speak, this object has made its peace with the universe. It has separated from it and hence has managed to come to homeostasis.’

Childan nodded, studied the piece. But Paul had lost him.

‘It does not have wabi,’ Paul said, ‘nor could it ever. But—’ He touched the pin with his nail. ‘Robert, this object has wu.’

‘I believe you are right,’ Childan said, trying to recall what wu was; it was not a Japanese word — it was Chinese. Wisdom, he decided. Or comprehension. Anyhow, it was highly good.

‘The hands of the artificer,’ Paul said, ‘had wu, and allowed that wu to flow into this piece. Possibly he himself knows only that this piece satisfies. It is complete, Robert. By contemplating it, we gain more wu ourselves. We experience the tranquillity associated not with art but with holy things. I recall a shrine in Hiroshima wherein a shinbone of medieval saint could be examined. However, this is an artifact and that was a relic. This is alive in the now, whereas that merely remained. By this meditation, conducted by myself at great length since you were last here, I have come to identify the value which this has in opposition to historicity. I. am deeply moved, as you may see.’

‘Yes,’ Childan said ...

[Philip K. Dick. The Man in the High Castle. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. 161-62.]

The quality known as wu. Pania Press books partake of that feeling also, I believe. They, too, are handcrafted from what might otherwise seem insignificant materials – a few pieces of thread, some sheets of paper – and yet each one is unique, with a unique and individual cover design.

Philip K. Dick’s Japanese businessman goes on to explain to the American Childan that ‘it is a fact that wu is customarily found in least imposing places, as in the Christian aphorism, “stones rejected by the builder.’” (The context gives this dialogue particular poignancy, but if you haven’t yet read his 1962 classic, where he imagines a world where German and Japan won the second World War, I’ll have to leave that up to your imagination).

Anyway, this post is just to signal that Pania Press’s first two commercial publications are now available for purchase. You can read more about them, and read sample poems, at the Pania Press blogsite, but I’ll just say here that:

many things happened, by Thérèse Lloyd, is a delightful and moving first collection of ten lyrics by a poet who will soon be jetting off to Iowa on a scholarship set up by Bill Manhire’s International Institute of Modern Letters.



Love in Wartime, by yours truly, is -- for me –- an unusually direct sequence of poems about love and loss. It seems a rather timely subject for meditation just now. Enjoy.