Launching Leicester Kyle's Collected Poems

Leicester & his trademark fire-engine-red Land Rover
(Buller, 2000)

It's five years to the day since poet, priest and ecological activist Leicester Kyle (1937-2006) died in Christchurch hospital. I doubt that he'd recognise the city of his childhood if he could see it today. That former Christchurch is now a thing of the past ...

The main purpose of this post, though, is to advertise the Leicester Kyle website which has been set up by his literary executors (David Howard and myself) to make his writings more accessible in the future - both to those already familiar with his poetry, and those who've never heard of him or it. My model was Kendrick Smithyman's online Collected Poems 1943-1995 site, edited by Margaret Edcumbe and Peter Simpson, and designed expertly by Brian Flaherty.

There are eleven books (at present) listed under the name "Leicester Kyle" in the NZ National Library database, together with another earlier prose pamphlet indexed under "L. Kyle". My present intention is to put all of these up on the website. We'll be supplementing them with another eleven or so works which are not presently available in any public collection, though.

I certainly can't rival the snazzy production values and (very useful) search engine facilites on the Smithyman site. This will be another attempt on my part to make free space on the internet work for us as well as the corporate giants. What I've done, then, is to set up two linked websites:

• The first site - Leicester Kyle - is basically confined to bibliographies and indexes. It aspires to provide complete listings of all primary and secondary material by and about Leicester. It gives details of each of his works, together with notes, and a table of contents hyperlinked to:
• The second site - Leicester Kyle Texts - which will provide complete texts of each of the major books, together with a selection of the shorter poems.

The first site is as complete as I can make it at present, without further information and research. The second site is more of a foretaste at present, with only a few of his books up in full.

Basically, if you just want to read through one of them, you can go straight to Leicester Kyle Texts, and scroll down reading it page by page (I've also included a jpg illustration of each page, in order not to obscure any details of the original formatting. If you click on these pictures individually, they will enlarge).

If, on the other hand, you want to see the table of contents for a particular book, together with any notes or details from letters about it, you can go to the Leicester Kyle index site and click on the relevant link.

The list below will tell you which works are available already, and which ones will be going up over the next few months. I'll try to keep it continuously updated as each website grows:

•

Contents

[* = listed in the NZ National Library Network]

Accessible online:



1. Koroneho: Joyful News Out Of The New Found World (1996-2001) [A4: iv + 96 pp.]

   This work, a kind of Zukofskyan verse epic about the life and times of William Colenso ("Koroneho" in Maori) has never before now been published in full, although four extracts from it appeared in Alan Loney's magazine A Brief Description of the Whole World between 1997 and 1998.




2. A Christmas Book (2000) [A5: 26 pp.]

   After moving to Millerton, an old mining town on the West Coast of the South Island, in 1998, Leicester developed the habit of producing a small book of poems every Christmas to send to his friends and family. This is the first of them, and one of the most charming and accessible of all of his works.




3. * The Great Buller Coal Plateaux: A Sequence of Poems (2001) [A5: 31 pp.]

   Despite its unpretentious packaging, this little chapbook is one of Leicester's most important publications. It was an attempt to harness deliberately the propaganda power of poetry and the Arts in general against a large-scale commercial mining company. Of course we're constantly being told by every authority in sight that this is wrong, that Art should not be "political", that it's concerned with "higher things" etc. etc. But are there any higher things than the systematic despoliation of an untouched environment? The destruction of any joy or profit that any of us or our descendants can ever take from it in the future? This is an important book, and I'm glad to be able to make it accessible here to more people than were ever able to read it in Leicester's lifetime.




4. Dun Huang Aesthetic Dance (2002) [A4: 10 pp.]

   One of Leicester's shorter poetry sequences. This was posted to me by him as a separate pamphlet, or else I might simply have included it in the "Shorter Poems" section of the site. It reflects his strong interest in syncretic religious traditions and in their bizarre and excessive linguistic registers.




5. * Things to Do with Kerosene (2002) [A5: 34 pp.]

   Another one of his Christmas books, this one compiled from Aunt Daisy's depression-era household hints. One of the most entertaining books he ever put out, its publication was partly funded by the Buller Community Arts Council. It was launched by the Mayor, and got a great reception from the West Coast locals (by all accounts).




6. * Panic Poems (2003) [A5: 39 pp.]

   Another Christmas book, this one concerned with the mechanics of his life in Millerton. His move there from Auckland was motivated (at least to some extent) by the death of his wife Miriel in 1998, so there must have been a lot of issues for him to work through. Others in similar circumstances may well find this book very helpful.




7. Living at a Bad Address (2004) [A5: 38 pp.]

   The last of the full-scale Christmas books. This one is an anthology of shorter poems with brief introductions. Some of them are very moving to read, particularly those concerned with his daughter Anna's funeral.




8. * Miller Creek (2004) [A5: 22 pp.]

   This is a beautiful gem-like little book of poems and pictures designed to draw attention to the ecological devastation caused by rivers poisoned by runoff from the mines. Joel Bolton's sketches are colourful and deft and the whole production deserves a wider audience, I think.




9. Pamphlets & Ephemera

   This section includes the first and last of his Christmas letters and pamphlets, sent to various correspondents - principally Richard Taylor - between 1996 and 2005.




10. Miscellaneous Prose

    A preliminary gathering of Leicester's reviews and critical introductions to the various publications he edited or contributed to in the last ten years of his life.




11. Secondary Literature

    Articles, poems, reviews and tributes by a variety of people, among them Stu Bagby, Tony Chad, Scott Hamilton, David Howard, James Norcliffe and Richard Taylor. Again, this is a preliminary collection which will undoubtedly grow in the future.




12. Bibliography

    As complete a listing as I can make at this point of his published works.

•

Not yet available:



1. * Options (1996-1997) [A4: 63 pp.]

   Leicester's first long narrative poem: "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 ...; Fran, a thirteenth-century Franciscan mendicant transported to contemporary Northland; and finally Maria, the celebrated nineteenth-century dancing prophetess of Kaikohe." [Jack Ross, "Leicester H. Kyle: Prophet without Honour." Pander 6/7 (1999): 21 & 23.]
   
   [posted online Monday 19/12/11]




2. * State Houses (1997) [A4: 43 pp.]

   This is a more personal piece: "interweaving tragic family history with the history of the first state houses in the Christchurch suburb of Riccarton. Leicester's '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'.” [Pander 6/7 (1999)]
   
   [posted online Monday 12/12/11]




3. * A Voyge to New Zealand: The Log of Joseph Sowry, Translated and Made Better (1997) [A4: 117 pp.]

   This is an actual nineteenth-century emigrant's journal, which has been "teased ... 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'.” [Pander 6/7 (1999)]
   
   [posted online Tuesday 20/12/11]




4. Heteropholis (1998) [A4: 52 pp.]

   Some readers see this as Leicester's masterpiece. "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. ... It is, nevertheless, a profoundly serious and, indeed, partially autobiographical work." [Pander 6/7 (1999)]
   
   [posted online Friday 16/12/11]




5. * A Machinery for Pain (1999) [A4: 37 pp.]

   This is his first book written entirely at Millerton: "a ... sequence on pain management, prompted by close personal experience" - the death of his wife Miriel, in particular.
   
   [posted online Monday 14/11/11]




6. * A Safe House for a Man (2000) [A4: 86 pp.]

   The blurb copy I provided at the time read (in part) as follows: "The landscape of Leicester Kyle's long semi-narrative poem ... will be familiar to most of us: separation, self-analysis, acknowledgment of loss. There's little that's recondite or difficult about this poetry, and yet the craft and subtle intelligence of its author come through in every line. The title poem is accompanied by two others: The Araneidea - an oddly disturbing account of how to 'make good-looking, sightly cabinet objects' from live spiders; and Threnos - a moving elegy for the poet's wife Miriel."
   
   [posted online Saturday 10/12/11]




7. * Five Anzac Liturgies (2000) [A4: 45 pp.]

   Calum Gilmour, whose Polygraphia Press published both this and A Safe House for a Man, wrote of it at the time: "This set of poems contains five pieces addressed to the South Island towns of Hawarden, Waikari, Rotherham, Culverden and Waiau respectively. Each poem is based round the theme of Anzac Day and how it affects each place addressed. The focus is on Anzac, on the people involved, on the significance of the remembrance in each place."
   
   [posted online Tuesday 29/11/11]




8. King of Bliss (2002) [A4: 46 pp.]

   This book contains Leicester's thoughts on the subject of psychoanalysis, prompted by his experience of various therapies for clinical depression which he underwent while still living in Auckland in the 90s.
   
   [posted online Thursday 1/12/11]




9. A Wedding in Tintown (2002) [A4: 36 pp.]

   This is a portrait of a place, revealed through a blow-by-blow account of a wedding celebration. Leicester wrote to me about it: "The wedding is one I took here in Millerton, and this is a faithful account of its proceeding; I've set it in Tintown, a now vanished mining village on the Plateau ... My aim was to describe the events, with little overt interpretation, and by means of a low tone to - by contrast - heighten and clarify the colours of the day. ... My hope is that the peculiar culture of the occasion just might make it interesting enough to be a good read."
   
   [posted online Tuesday 15/11/11]




10. 8 Great O’s (2003) [A4: 46 pp.]

    This is a set of interlinked pieces connected by themes of religion and ritual. Leicester's preface specifies that the main text "is an adaptation of the last page of a pious biography, ‘The Life of St. Mary tbe Harlot’, written by her uncle, Ephraem, deacon of Edessa, around the year 370. ‘The Word' is a family story. 'The Great 0 's' is a term taken from the Advent liturgy."
    
    [posted online Friday 18/11/11]




11. Anogramma (2005) [A4: 64 pp.]

    An amusing and lighthearted piece of autobiography, which records Leicester's first job after leaving school: as a "horticultural apprentice at the Christchurch Botanical Gardens ... All apprentices were required to attend monthly meetings of the Christchurch Botanical Gardens Horticultural Apprentices Mutual Improvement Society" and much of the text is devoted to an account of these meetings, together with some details of the 50 year reunion of the apprentices.
    
    [posted online Saturday 10/12/11]




12. * Breaker: A Progress of the Sea (2005) [A5: 78 pp.]

    Leicester's last book, and one of his most ambitious, "suggested by the Catalogue of Armed Forces in the second book of the Iliad. I read it in Pope's translation, and was fascinated by the whole idea and the poetry of it. The fascination led to a desire to do something of the kind myself and, casting about for a local battle, I hit on the idea of our self-defence against our eroding coast." says Leicester in his preface. The illustrations, by John Crawford, are very fine.
    
    [posted online Sunday 20/11/11]




13. Collected Shorter Poems: 1 (1983-1998) [A4: 428 poems & sequences / 568 pp.]

    This is a list of all the poems and sequences included in the first of the the two large "Collected Poems" fileboxes which David and I inherited from Leicester's estate, and which contained (in approximate chronological order) all of the individual poems (outside published books) he wished to preserve. I'll be putting up a bare selection of these poems to start with - more over time, if demand warrants it.




14. Selected Shorter Poems: 2 (1998-2006) [A4: 318 poems & sequences / 387 pp.]

    This includes all of the poems written after Leicester's move to the West Coast, mostly contained in the second of the the two large "Collected Poems" fileboxes. I'll be putting up rather more of these poems than the ones in the first box, as befits their superior quality (in my opinion, at any rate).




15. Five Millerton Sequences [A5: viii + 48 pp.]

    This is a preliminary selection from the Millerton poems, chosen in consultation with David Howard, and intended both as an advertisement for this site and (hopefully) to revive some interest in Leicester in general. Few people have ever had the chance to read any of these poems before, after all. I hope you enjoy them. The book will be launched sometime next year - details to be announced on this blog (and hopefully elsewhere as well).
    
    [posted online Friday 16/12/11]




16. Prose Fiction
    • * I Got Me Flowers: Letters to a Psychiatrist [A5: 56 pp.]

    Leicester began as a prose writer, in the 1970s, and had some success with this and some of his other stories before switching to poetry in the early 1990s. This "excessively Jungian" (as Leicester himself described it) novella from the mid-70s is the finest of his extant works of fiction - or at any rate that was my impression when I read through them all while staying with Leicester at Millerton in 1998.
    
    [posted online Sunday 13/11/11]




17. Chronology

    As complete a listing as I can make of the known events and dates of Leicester's life.
    
    [posted online Saturday 12/11/11]

•

So there you go. I know it's a bit crazy to entrust all this material to the tender mercies of blogspot, but you can be sure that I'll be keeping sedulous backups and printouts of everything as well.

•


The view from Leicester's verandah at Millerton
[photographs: Jack Ross (2000)]

Reading tomorrow

[& no, I won't be looking anything like this ...
from a booklaunch in 2006]

I've been asked to fill in at Poetry Live (presently based at the Thirsty Dog, K. Rd.) tomorrow - Tuesday 28/6, from 8 pm onwards - as the scheduled poet has had to cancel.

I guess the fact that Bronwyn is away all this week visiting her mother in Christchurch (Chilean ash-cloud willing, that is ...) makes me a bit more prone to drive out into the moody, stormbeaten city of an evening, so I've said 'yes'.

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to be reading yet. One idea was to intone some bits from my version of the Oresteia in an attempt to flog some copies of this innovative and fascinating work ...

I do feel that I should dedicate the evening to Dave Mitchell, though. He died last week, on the 21st June, after a long and protracted illness, and though he could no longer speak or read with any ease, he must been pleased to see Run Away Boy, his selected poems (edited by Martin Edmond and Nigel Young) finally out and getting reviewed.

He was, after all, the guy who started off the whole thing, back in the 80s. It seems truly extraordinary that it's been running ever since ...

Here's a little suite of photos from the last time I saw him, in Sydney last year, sitting to one side of the Poetry Symposium at the University of Technology, and getting a hug from Michele Leggott:

[Dave Mitchell]

[Michele Leggott]

[a great big hug]

Fifth Anniversary (Wood)

[Pollinating bee log]

I started this blog on the 14th of June, 2006, so this is The Imaginary Museum's fifth anniversary. I'm afraid that the traditional material for a fifth anniversary present is wood (though modern gift-givers have replaced that with silverware, apparently). For myself, I'm sticking with the wood.

Why? On the one hand, because it's rather shocking to look at all those posts and see just how much time I must have spent typing away in these little blogger text boxes. What a woodenhead! On the other hand, though it's nice to think how much wood-pulp I must have saved by not printing it all out ...

This blog is only part of the story, though. From the very beginning I saw this as a project space: somewhere where I could try online text experiments. The very first thing I did with it, in fact, was to put up a bunch of topographical poems about Auckland, Roadworks, linked to a game-board with twin axes of time and space (okay, maybe that one wasn't all that successful, but I was looking for a three-dimensional way of arranging texts outside the conventions of the book-codex ...)

Quickly, though, I realised that the best way to use a single centralised site, like this one, was as a crossroads to other websites, each one of which could be adjusted to display different techniques and materials. The sidebar over there will testify to the sheer number of these experiments I've done over the past five years. Basically, though, they've boiled down to one big project per year - I'm not quite sure why. Every time I complete one of these things I tell myself Never again ...

So here they are, the "big five", in rough chronological order:

2007:



1. (November 6-December 3, 2007) Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive: Bibliographical Aids for the Use of Those Consulting the Waiata Archive (1974) and the AoNZPSA (2002-2004) - Audio Recordings available in Special Collections, University of Auckland Library and in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.



This website serves as an index to the contents of the:



Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive. Compiled and edited by Jan Kemp and Jack Ross, with assistance from Edmund King and Mark King. Materials collected by Jan Kemp, Elizabeth Alley, David Howard with Morrin Rout, and Richard Reeve with Nick Ascroft. (Special Collections Dept, Auckland University Library). [40 CDs Audio / 2 CDs Texts].


which is a project I worked on pretty intensively from 2002 to around 2008, when the last of the three linked audio / text anthologies I edited with Jan Kemp (Classic, Contemporary and New New Zealand Poets in Performance) was issued by Auckland University Press. We still get quite a lot of hits. There are 200-odd poets' pages included on the site, and I update it periodically with new information (on request).





2008:



2. The R.E.M. [Random Excess Memory] Trilogy (2000-2008):
   • (January 19-30, 2008) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 1]: Nights with Giordano Bruno: A Novel.
   • (January 20-February 13, 2008) [[The R.E.M. Trilogy, 2 - The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis]: Who am I? Automatic Writing.
   • (January 20-February 13, 2008) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 2 - The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis]: Where am I? Cuttings.
   • (August 15, 2006-September 3, 2007) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 3 - EMO]: EVA AVE– Inheritor of silence / shall I be? / Black mass below us / above us / only sky …
   • (August 16, 2006-September 3, 2007) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 3 - EMO]: Moons of Mars – Welcome / to the new reality / Nothing’s stranger / than the will / to survive …
   • (August 15, 2006-September 3, 2007) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 3 - EMO]: Ovid in Otherworld – Wild geese draw lines / across an amber sky / fish bask / in frozen rivers / generators die …



Between 2000 and 2008 I published a trilogy of novels, which are now available in their entirety on these six linked sites: one for Nights with Giordano Bruno (Wellington: Bumper Books, 2000), two for The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Auckland: Titus Books, 2006), and three for EMO (Auckland: Titus Books, 2008). Of course, they're still a lot easier to read in their original print copies, but one must continue to experiment with new formats (I suppose).





2009:



3. Academica (1984-1995):
   • (April 14-August 22, 2009) John Masefield: Early Novels 1908-1911. MA Thesis (University of Auckland, 1984-86).
   • (April 14-July 22, 2009) Versions of South America: An Elusive Identity: Versions of South America from Aphra Behn to the Present Day. PhD Thesis (University of Edinburgh, 1986-90).
   • (August 22, 2006-September 26, 2007) Scheherazade’s Web: The Thousand and One Nights and Comparative Literature.



This is an obeisance to the amount of time I've spent bumbling around in Academia: a complete online version of my MA & PhD theses and my post-Doctoral research (respectively: Auckland University, 1984-85 / Edinburgh University, 1986-90 / Massey & Auckland Universities, 1991-95). Since most of this stuff was composed in the transitional period before the digital age (the Masters thesis on a typewriter, in fact), it had to be scanned and re-edited before I was able to put it up online. Was it all worth it? Who knows? At any rate, there it all is, awaiting the curious ...





2010:



4. (June 1, 2009-July 4, 2010) A Gentle Madness: A Catalogue of My Book Collection: Geographical by Locations & Indexed by Categories.



It may not sound like much when you put it like that, but this was definitely the most laborious of these projects. It does seem worth all the time and trouble it took now, though - it's awful not to be able to locate a book you know you own when you really need it ...





2011:



5. (February 17-June 11, 2011) Leicester Kyle: An Index to the Collected Poems of Leicester Hugo Kyle (1937-2006).



And, last but not least, a work in progress: the online edition of my old friend Leicester Kyle's Collected Poems which I've been engaged on since the beginning of this year. It's just a tease at present, as the site is not yet complete. All you can access for the moment is the overall index, which lists all the works which will you eventually be able to consult in their entirety. This portion of the site does include a bibliography and reprints of all the secondary literature on Leicester I've been able to locate to date, however.

At times I despair at the magnitude of what still remains to be done on this project, but I suppose I can just continue to chip away at it gradually. Watch this space, though. I'm hoping to put out a limited edition of some late poems of Leicester's later this year, and the full text site should be online - albeit only in part - by July or so (I hope).

(By the way, any help in identifying the other person in this photo of Leicester Kyle in Auckland in the mid-90s - and the venue, and the photographer - would be greatly appreciated:)

At the Sign of the Unicorn:

i.m. Richard Wasley
(died 19th May, 2011)

Unicorn Bookshop (Warkworth)

I'm afraid I missed the funeral. Carli had left a message the night before, mentioning that the service would be held at Snells Beach on Thursday afternoon. Unfortunately that's one of the days I teach, so I couldn't make it. I sent a card, but I doubt even that arrived in time.

I've been going to his shop for nearly twenty years. It seems incredible, but that would appear to be the case. I remember stopping in Warkworth for a coffee sometime in the early nineties, and asking the waitress just as an afterthought if there were any nice bookshops in town.

"Oh yes," she said. "Just down that sidestreet, in the little building with the unicorn mural on the side." (That was in the days when Richard conducted his operations from a strange little wooden annex just down from the medical clinic - before shifting round the corner to the brighter, more modern premises pictured above.)

We wandered up, had a look around, bought a stack of books. Richard (I didn't really know him at all then, or for some time afterwards) seemed to have some kind of secret source of new and nearly-new literature and poetry books: there were bright Penguins, stately AUP biographies and histories, masses and masses of anthologies, slim volumes, novels ... everything except Mills & Boons or Readers Digest Condensed Books: those he would have scorned too much to give them shelf-room.

[Richard Smallfield: Richard Wasley]

Here he is in better days. The last few times I saw him, he was far more haggard than that, and terribly thin - still recognisably the same person, though. Richard could be quite a bolshie customer at times, to be perfectly honest. I remember once overhearing him denouncing some random suit who'd come in to take shelter from a rainstorm outside and who was talking loudly and inconsiderately on a cellphone in the middle of the shop:

"D'you think this is a telephone booth?"

"Excuse me?"

"You can't talk on your cellphone in here."

"I was going to buy something, but now I won't."

"Good. I don't want you in here anyway. You're barred!"

It certainly put you off haggling about the - very reasonable - prices he charged for his books, but I have to say I liked his attitude. The comfort of real booklovers always mattered far more to him than currying favour with the hoi polloi ...

In fact, the very last time I met and talked with him, he was about to walk down into town to have it out with another local bookdealer who'd put in a complaint about Richard's prices on TradeMe. The prospect obviously filled him with glee. He wasn't too steady on his feet, and his voice was going, but the idea of going downtown and having a good old barney with some interfering neighbour was clearly the kind of thing that was keeping him going, long past the predictions of his doctors. That, and the love and patience and unstinting care of Carli Clark, of course ...

[Masonic Hall (Warkworth)

It sounds like a cliche to say that going to Warkworth will never be the same again. There are other bookshops there, nice cafes, shops, but nothing could ever replace that strange metropolitan haven of a shop, the little kingdom Richard built.

The regular poetry readings he held in Matakana will be missed too (we read there together, in the little church, on one occasion a couple of years ago). Poetry was one of his principal passions, in fact: writing it and reading it aloud. He'd always intended to put out a book, he told me, but somehow in those last months it didn't get done - there was time for it at last, but somehow not the energy, the passion you need. He leaves behind a good deal of work, though, a lot of memories of those curious evenings when he held court with Henry Reed's "Naming of Parts," poems by Charles Causley, Stevie Smith ...

I'll never drive north from the Bays again without thinking of him and missing him, missing that little bookish haven he built for me and others like me, people for whom a rummage through an old bookshop has something paradisal about it, the joy of discovery, the imminent prospect of something extraordinary waiting just for you ...

Go in peace, Richard. I guess the best thing might be to adapt Dean Swift's epitaph: "He has gone where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart no more - depart, wayfarer, and imitate if you are able one who to the utmost strenuously championed liberty" - albeit the liberty Richard championed was the freedom of booklovers and poetry fans to enjoy a moment's peace in the midst of their stressful days ...

[Swift's Epitaph (St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin)

Cultural Amnesia & the PBRF

[Clive James: Cultural Amnesia (2007)

James, Clive. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from Culture and the Arts. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.

I picked up some pretty impressive-looking tomes at the Auckland Public Library sale this year, and one of them was the above.

I did think twice about it, since the respect I once had for Clive James as a cultural commentator and "metropolitan critic" had long been eroded by his foolish performances on TV as a kind of pompous self-parodying Kolonial Klown, not to mention his execrable fiction and worse poetry (Brilliant Creatures would actually be up there as one of my candidates for worst novel ever published - along with David Lodge's How Far Can You Go? and Iris Murdoch's The Book and the Brotherhood).

Those early essays - and even some of that TV criticism - was pretty good, though, so I thought it was worth betting five dollars or so that he might have regained some of his earlier fire.

About fifty pages in, Bronwyn issued an ultimatum forbidding me from reading another word of it (in her presence, at any rate). The amount of snorting and cursing coming from my direction was affecting her digestion, she said.

I mean, the premise seemed sound enough. James had been meditating this "big" book for over forty years (he said). All through those international jaunts and photo-shoots, every time he found a congenial cafe he was taking notes for the great Summa Journalistica which was to justify his life and peripatetic ways.

Earnest debates with himself over a possible form for this huge gallimaufry of honed opinion and rapier wit resulted, eventually, in a kind of biographical dictionary of the forgotten: all the significant figures who'd been wiped from our cultural history by the instant amnesia of the brainwashed pop generation ...

So far so good. I certainly hadn't heard of quite a few of those obscure Viennese intellectuals and litterateurs whom James seemed determined to unearth and restore to centre stage. How can you quarrel with so inherently worthy an objective?

[Walter Benjamin: Work Card (1940)

I guess the first big alarm bell rang when I started reading James on Walter Benjamin. What a turkey! All these years I'd been thinking that Benjamin was something special, when actually all he was was wilfully obscure ("eloquent opacity" [p.48]; "With Benjamin, 'strain' was the operative word" [p.48]; "What was unique about Benjamin was not his readiness to take a side track, but the lengths he would go to when he took one" [p.49], etc. etc.) No wonder he was just too dumb to smuggle himself over the Pyrenees in advance of those Nazi hordes! Good riddance, actually ...

Hmmm. Well, that did seem a little harsh as a final judgment on the man (not to mention a bit on the - how shall I put it? - stupid side), but judging an alphabetical book by its treatment of the early "B's" might be seen as a trifle unreasonable, so I soldiered on.

Then, however, I reached Jorge Luis Borges. Now I'm the first to admit that Borges is not for everyone. You either like him or you don't. I happen to be an admirer of his poetry as well as his prose, but that again is a minority opinion (I've even had to take out "The Garden of Forking Paths", my favourite short story of all time, from the Stage One Creative Writing course I teach, since so few of the students seemed able to work out what the "fork" was going on - or to care that much, once they had worked it out). So, yeah, there's nothing intrinsically criminal - or intellectually indefensible - in disprizing Borges.

But how did James go about attacking him? By calling him a mediocre linguist:

His dialogues and essays can be recommended as an easy way into Spanish, a language which every student of literature should hold in prospect, to the extent of an elementary reading knowledge at least (Borges's own, and much vaunted, knowledge of English was really not much better than that.) [p.63]

Thank you, Professor James. There's a certain toplofty tone here which sounds like typical autodidact's schadenfreude ("I may not be a card-carrying Academic, but I can sound just as dry-as-dust as one of you over-paid, underworked bastards ...") But was Borges's "much-vaunted" command of English "really" as "elementary" as all that?

[Saka Freeman: Jorge Luis Borges has a posse (2009)

Another one of my recent purchases - from Amazon.com this time - was a CD of recordings of Borges giving a series of lectures on poetry: This Craft of Verse: Borges, In His Own Voice. The Complete Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard University. Set of 4 CDs. 1967 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000) - if you want to check it out.

I've played this through a couple of times now in the car, which (as I mentioned in a previous post) is my venue of choice for listening to books and epic poems. Borges was almost completely blind at the time he gave these lectures, in 1967, so they had to be delivered entirely from memory, which, since they consist mostly of analyses of particular poems and lines of poems in English, is no mean feat. Or, rather, would be no mean feat even in one's own native tongue.

All I can say is, if, with a "not much better than elementary" reading knowledge of English, this blind man was capable of giving six hour-long lectures in a foreign tongue, at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, then I'd really like to meet someone with a "good" command of the language. Who might such a person resemble? Shakespeare? Milton (another blind poet with a lot of linguistic chutzpah, presumably)?

Would that person look like Clive James, by any chance? Well, no, unfortunately. There are a number of apologetic asides on the subject in the early pages of his massive tome, where he explains that, while "English is this new world's lingua franca ... Born to speak it, we can view the whole world as a dubbed movie, and not even have to bother with subtitles", he too has deigned to wrestle with the odd foreign language (or, as he puts it, "savour the tang of alien tongues" [p.xxi]:

There was a time when I could fairly fluently read Russian, and get through a simple article in Japanese about my special subject, the war in the Pacific ... I hope they return as easily as they went, but I remember how long they took to arrive in the first place. [p.xxv]

It's not that great a tragedy, though, because "a complete picture of reality is not to be had. If we realize that, we can begin to be realistic. .... Stalin and Hitler both thought that they could see the whole picture, and look what happened."

In other words, if James had been better at languages, it might have turned him into a Stalin or a Hitler, and "look what happened" to them! (Apologies if I've misinterpreted this passage, since it did seem at first sight to be entirely meaningless, but that's what I've finally deduced from it ...)

The question remains, though, could Clive James give a series of lectures in one of those easier languages he claims an "elementary reading knowledge" of - in French, say, entirely without notes, at (say) the Sorbonne? I kind of doubt it, though I may be wrong. If he could, though (I certainly couldn't), then I would have no hesitation in calling his command of the language "excellent", rather than elementary.

You can see why Bronwyn forbade me to read on. The issue was not that James was ignorant (though he was, egregiously and unrepentantly so), it was the hasty snap-judgements peppered through every page, generally based on little information except a kind of knowing contrariness - a desire to contradict received ideas with cunning paradoxes, to deflate allegedly "overblown" reputations - which were the problem.

The thing was, he was just too fucking lazy and egotistic to carry it off. He clearly hadn't done any serious research for these little four to five-page essays on forgotten figures (Borges? Benjamin? Forgotten!) His great big tome, I was forced to conclude, was just a great big waste of time. "Books like these," as the Classical scholar (and occasional poet) A. E. Housman once remarked, "are mere interruptions to our studies."

[Clive James (2008)

So what's all this got to do with the PBRF, you ask? What is PBRF when it's at home?

If you already know what it is, it's probably because you have some kind of association with NZ Academia (other nations have their own - loathsome - parallel systems). PBRF stands for "Performance Based Research Funding" and it's the way the New Zealand government awards money to tertiary educational institutions based on the (alleged) "quality" of their research.

It's a way of quantifying quality, in effect, by bean-counting "expert assessments" of research across all the innumerable fields included in contemporary Academic institutions, according to pre-set criteria, with crude comparative tables for those on the outer fringes whose work is expressed in "performances," "exhibitions" or (for all I know) "be-ins" and "happenings." (Musicians, dramatists and creative artists generally, in other words).

Fair enough. It's a dirty job but it has to be done (allegedly, at any rate). How else could you possibly know who's been naughty and who's been nice? Who does deserve a big bucket of cash, and who's just been sitting around spinning out bullshit to no good effect?

I guess a dispassionate observer might point out that University Departments, Schools and Colleges already scrutinise their colleagues' research with a good deal of expertise and zeal - but it's true that they may lack the necessary international and discipline-wide perspective to know who's "excellent" and who's simply "average" in the work they're doing. A giant bean-count is therefore required (or so the government informs us) to make sure that nobody gets away with cushioning themselves a nice safe little featherbed with the help of their cowed, compliant colleagues ...

As a result, every "research-active" academic in New Zealand will be handing in a portfolio of research to the central PBRF authority on April 1st next year (how appropriate, I hear you say ...)

Before that magic date, though, each of us will be preparing "draft" and "mini" portfolios to make sure that we're telling the "story" of our research in the best possible way, that we're hitting the right key-words, that we're putting our best foot forward. And squads of glorified spin-doctors and other research "experts" have been hired to make sure that everyone succeeds in doing precisely that.

It doesn't sound all that complex, on the surface: a bit onerous to collect all the data, to blow one's own trumpet in precisely the right key, but - hey - anyone who's ever written any kind funding application (or a CV, for that matter), knows that one has to bow down in the House of Rimmon at least some of the time. Just for the sake of peace and all getting along.

There are, however, some uncomfortable facts that keep on obtruding on this colossal enterprise ("a golden opportunity to assess yourself and your own career as a researcher," as Massey's own Head of Research kept assuring us at the series of rallies she held to tell us where we were with the process this week). It's a little like the problems with Clive James's great career-crowning book.

In that case, the real difficulty is that you can't trust a word James says because he's too ignorant, cocksure and self-serving to be a reliable witness or an acceptable judge of the prowess of great artists and scholars whose boots he isn't worthy to lick (I stopped reading before he got to that poor, sad, noble soul Paul Celan, as I was afraid that I would want to tear out the pages one by one and shove them down his throat ...)

In the case of PBRF, the problems are, unfortunately, just as obvious. Of course it's a fine idea, much thought and care has gone into balancing out the competing demands of all those different disciplines, etc. etc. BUT ...

1. Who's going to read all those thousands and thousands of pages of portfolios? Subject panels of "top academics", of course. But just how much time do they have to devote to the task? How long is each panel going to meet for? A thousand years? In practice, each portfolio will be given (at most) about two minutes of the panel's attention. It'll be a bit like one of those old School Certificate marking committee meetings: "C" - "Next!" - "B+" - "Next!" - "Next - next - next." I'm sure they'll all do their best, but how seriously is one expected to take this snap judgement of a few senior colleagues on the value of your life's work? Not very, I'm afraid. It's still just glorified bean-counting, I'm afraid.


2. Who will win? How will the various universities stack up against each other? Well, believe it or not, Massey University's grand plan is to stay in precisely the same place. We don't want to sink back past AUT, and we don't - given the almost inconceivably vast array of academic and vocational subjects taught here, internally and extramurally - have the slightest chance of "beating" more traditionally focussed establishments. Why should we? We do what we do very well already. What's the point of trying to become another Auckland or Otago in order to win more PBRF funding? Students can already choose to study at those places if that's what they want. What Massey offers is something different - a whole range of subjects and approaches that nobody else can match.


3. What's the point, then? Why are we running so hard in order to stand still? Well, because everyone else has upped their game just as much as we're hoping to. Therefore we have to perform better to make up for the fact that they're all going to perform better, too. It's a kind of Academic version of the Arms Race: We need an H-bomb because if we don't make it then the Russians are bound to.


4. Who will it benefit in the long run? That's a complicated question. The threat brandished over our heads to make us comply with instructions is (as always) "redundancies." Any university that gets significantly less PBRF funding will have to fire a whole lot of people to make up for it. Who? Well, I guess the bureaucrats whose job it is to regulate all the bean-counting. I don't see any great point in firing me since most of my work is in teaching anyway. I'm not a full-time academic (point 7 of a fulltime load, in fact), so a good deal of the writing and research I do is on my own time (in case any of you were worrying that the taxpayer was funding my work in composing aberrant novels that nobody wants to read ...) Also, the government has other ways of funding us for the students we teach, so PBRF is only part of the complex equation anyway (albeit an extremely important part).


5. Individually, it makes very little difference to me how well I do in this PBRF round. There are a whole lot of complex rules surrounding who gets to see the results, and universities are specifically forbidden to use them as a pretext for letting anyone go (or for internal discipline, for that matter). Of course we all want to do well, because everyone likes to be told how good they are, but the big gains and losses are all on the institutional level, not the personal.


6. Will we all do well? I guess that's where the Clive James-ish self-contradictory cloth-headedness comes in. We're told that we have to demonstrate the (peer-acknowledged) "excellence" of our research profile. We must all be "excellent", in fact. But not everyone can be excellent all of the time. If they are, then you need another word, since "excellent" means "standing out from the common run." (as D. H. Lawrence once put it in a review, "If we use words like 'brilliant' and 'genius' for Miss Snodgrass's new book, then what words are left for Shakespeare or Homer?).

You know, the whole thing just doesn't worry me that much. I accept that you have to ride herd on Academics and what they actually do all day from time to time. Fair enough. I accept that I'll have to spend a lot of time entering research data into a particularly clumsy, inflexible and antiquated computer programme (there's no dispute about that, even from the professionals who oversee said programme). Them's the breaks. The chances that the data from this exercise will actually be available on time in usable form are roughly even-steven, I'd say, as it's quite possible that the whole lot will be lost in some immense meltdown on April Fool's Day next year. Them's also the breaks. Not even blogspot.com is infallible.

What I do kind of object to, though, is having my time wasted with briefing meetings from bureaucrats who can't answer a single discipline-specific question; who seem to feel that we should thrill to having take huge amounts of time away from our actual research to fill in complicated forms for the benefit of a bunch of people who won't (in turn) have time to read any of them in any detail; who, finally, expect us to turn off our brains and ignore all the fine distinctions we try to inculcate painstakingly in the lecture-room between fatuous doubletalk and actual information (the universal "excellence" required of our Academic population being only one and not the most egregious example) when it comes to compiling said forms.

Let's just get on with it, in other words. It has to be done. It'll be interesting to see if the Senior Leadership thugs at Canterbury actually get away with insisting that all of their earthquake-shocked Academics have to submit portfolios on research many of them are unable even to access physically at present. Seems a little harsh, no?

[Vanda Vitali (2010)

It'll be even more interesting to see if Big Chief McCutcheon at Auckland gets away with the mass redundancies he's threatened as a disciplinary measure against those Academics who are threatening not to submit PBRF portfolios as part of their industrial action against his ongoing threats to Academic freedom. I'd have thought that one redundancy at Auckland would solve that problem neatly and with minimal fuss - the Vanda Vitali solution, one might call it.

For myself, I love my job at Massey because of the students I get to meet there, because of my fine friendly colleagues, and also because of the physical beauty of the Albany campus. As a recent student survey revealed, the fact that you can always get a car-park was listed as reason number one for attending this august institution. That may be why they come, but I doubt that's why they stay. I hope to get back to concentrating on teaching (not to mention my own research!) just as soon as this colossal turkey-shoot is over. In the meantime, the less disruption it causes to everyone, the better ...

[ibikenz: Massey Albany from the Royal Albany Trail (2011)

The Cricket in the Lecture Room

Maria Tatar: The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales (2002)

My colleague Mary Paul forwarded me this invitation to a public lecture at Auckland University the other day. I suppose I should try to get back on their mailing list myself, but so much random spam seems to come in every morning already that I no longer sign up to anything if I can help it. It does mean you sometimes miss out on hearing about quite interesting events, though:

Fairy Tales in an Age of Electronic Entertainments
Professor Maria Tatar, Harvard University

Can fairy tales survive in the age of Kindle, Twitter, and Facebook? How have stories from times past, once told around the communal hearth, managed the transition into an age of electronic entertainments? Professor Tatar will turn to "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Bluebeard" to explore how tales with a whiff of the archaic have been revitalised with expressive intensity, even in cultural spaces that have been secularised and disenchanted.

Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard, where she chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology and teaches courses in German Studies, Folklore, and Children's Literature.

• Tuesday 29 March, 6pm
• Library Theatre B10
  The University of Auckland

Kind regards,
Faculty of Arts

I don't know quite what I expected of the event: something about the digital frontier, perhaps: video games and virtual reality worlds. It's a subject that interests me a good deal, as I think I've made clear in previous posts.

That wasn't quite what happened, though.

[Professor Maria Tatar]

The name "Maria Tatar" was not unfamiliar to me. I have a number of her books, not just the beautiful editions of "annotated" fairy tales she's been putting out through W. W. Norton (I've got the Classic Fairy Tales, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Andersen volumes), but also some of her more scholarly works.

Her analyses are not exactly world-shaking, but she's undoubtedly well-informed. She certainly makes a nice change from Jack Zipes, whose books used to dominate the field in the eighties and nineties of last century: his doctrinaire denunciations of patriarchal and bourgeois values now sound a bit quaint, curious relics of a revolution that never quite happened. Sometimes a little bit boring is not the worst thing to be.

[Red Riding Hood: The Movie (2011)]

So anyway, Bronwyn and I dutifully trooped into town and got to the university wildly early and sneaked into the lecture theatre with the film crew way ahead of time to make sure of getting good seats where we could actually see the speaker.

This seems a bit weird, in retrospect, as the room was only ever about half full, but we were motivated by having heard how Tariq Ali had packed out three whole lecture theatres a week or so before - his words of wisdom being beamed from auditorium to auditorium by video link. I suppose that fairy tale experts are somewhat less topical, but then we New Zealanders are such slaves to the overseas reputation ...

In any case, there we sat, two rows from the front, like a couple of nerds, notebooks and pens at the ready, as Maria and her Auckland Uni minders swept in to check out the room and test the sound system.

That's when I first saw the cricket.

[Pinocchio kills the cricket]

I should explain that we were in one of the big lecture theatres under the university library, dug deep under ground, with no actual exits to the open air. The only way in and out was through the doors at the back - though there must be some service doors down at the front of the auditorium, since that's where it was.

Where he or she was, rather. I immediately conceived a fellow feeling for that cricket. He (or she) looked lost. And, really, one can hardly think of a worse place for a cricket to be than at the front of a concrete room full of hard-booted humans.

He was moving slowly, but with a certain determination, towards the podium, "as if he had something to say" (to quote from a poem by my old friend John O'Connor). Maria hadn't yet started to talk, but zero hour was imminent.

"Should we go down and rescue him?" muttered Bronwyn. (We generally know what the other one is thinking on these occasions).

"I don't think we've got time ... And what if he runs away?" I answered timorously. I guess I was afraid of being tackled to the ground by Auckland Uni security if I made what seemed like an unmotivated dash for the front of the room. Mainly, though, I didn't want to look like a fool in front of an entire audience of Auckland culture-vultures ... "Where would I take him, anyway?"

"You could carry him out to Albert Park," she persisted, but I think we both knew that it wasn't going to happen.

In any case, Misha Kavka had now stood up to make her introduction, and the event was underway ...

I hadn't seen the cricket for quite some time, so I'd begun to hope that he'd found some microscopic egress, invisible to mere humans. Now, though, he hove back into view, limping manfully past the podium in the opposite direction from the one he'd been going in before.

Maria was going on about how beautiful New Zealand was, how the air smelt so much better than the air in Boston, how friendly and welcoming everyone was (especially her hosts, whom she repeatedly invoked by name, as if to convince them that they really must have her to stay again ...)

After these polite opening noises, she swung into her real subject, which appeared to be (somewhat disappointingly) various recent literary and cinematic retellings of classical fairy tales - particularly Little Red Riding Hood.

From where I was sitting, to the right of the lectern, quite a bit of the stage was blocked from me, but now, suddenly, I saw the cricket again. Having traversed the room twice, first left, then right, he'd apparently decided that there was no escape this way. Instead he'd started on the long perilous journey to the exits at the back of the room, over all those leagues of carpet and dozens of stairs. He at least had the sense to cling to the wall, and it was there I saw him, climbing step after step, the little cricket that could.

Then he disappeared again. By now I'd lost any concentration I'd ever had for Maria Tatar's lecture (which was winding to a close, in any case). Instead I was lost in memories of singing, dancing Jiminy Cricket ("Always let your conscience be your guide") from the Disney version of Pinocchio ... In Carlo Collodi's original book there is a talking cricket, but it gets sconed by the terrifyingly amoral wooden puppet pretty early in the piece. It seems characteristic of contemporary sentimentality that his Disney avatar ended up as a kind of ubiquitous talking head for public service cartoons ...

As we filed out of the auditorium to the waiting "reception" (a bunch of tables laden with glasses of wine and nibbles, positioned to one side of the library foyer) I kept my eyes open for the cricket, but I couldn't see him.

"Let's get out of here," said Bronwyn. And that was that.

Kan Muftic: Her Scent

I think about that cricket sometimes. I hope he managed to get out too. But I suspect he didn't.

Manuel Augusto Dischinger Moura: The Wolf

The Puppet Oresteia

[Cover Design: William T. Ayton]

Sorry for any of you who've been disappointed by the lack of action on this blog over the past few weeks. I really have not been idle, but there are just so many things to keep up with mid-semester.

The most fun thing I've been doing lately, though, is collaborating with a US-based British artist, Bill Ayton, on an ilustrated version of my Puppet Oresteia play.

[back cover blurb]

The vicissitudes this text has been through since I first came up with the idea a couple of years ago - writings, rewritings, overhauls etc. - are probably not at all surprising for those of you who move in theatrical circles. After a while it became clear to me, though, that the only meaningful existence this text could ever have (for me, at any rate) was as a text - rather than as some kind of viable script for performance.

Bronwyn had made an entire puppet theatre, complete with backdrops and little puppets, in the meantime, though. Never mind. It still looks great in the photographs:

Scene One: a bedroom off the garden
[photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd]

Young Iphigenia (Gene) is explaining to her brother Orestes (Rusty) exactly why her wedding ceremomy is planned for the harbour at Aulis instead of at the palace at Mycenae as per usual. Is it because her betrothed, Achilles (aka Col. Killer), is anxious to get away to the Trojan war? Or are they cooking up something else for her down there ...

[Scene Two: in front of the jacuzzi (Mycenae)]
[photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd]

Clytemnestra (Mummy) has rather a hard time acccounting for just what she and her longtime boyfriend Aegisthus (Uncle Al) have been doing to Agamemnon (Daddy) and his new girlfriend Cassandra (Candy) when Rusty stumbles in on them unexpectedly. Is revenge really always a dish best eaten cold?

[Scene Three: in front of the shrine at Tauris]
[photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd]

Rusty's a junkie, haunted by demons, when he just happens to get shipwrecked by the very same shrine where Gene's been living all this time. But will she recognise him in time? The local custom is to sacrifice all strangers to the angry goddess, after all ...

It's not the most elegant of retellings, really. In fact it's as rough as guts in parts. But then that's kind of the point. The young girl whose puppet play this is is far more interested in her own family dynamics than she is in Ancient Greek tragedy ...

[William T. Ayton: A Strange Nest]

The wonderful thing about working with Bill has been watching a whole new dimension of the text swim into being as his various ink illustrations morphed and evolved. There are now twenty-four of them, accompanying twenty-odd pages of text, so there can be no question of calling this mere "illustration" - on the contrary, this has been a true collaboration.

[William T. Ayton: The Seashore at Tauris]

If you'd like to see what I mean, you'll have to go and check out the whole thing at lulu.com. This is my first venture into listing a book on that site, which has been another very interesting learning experience. I'm afraid that it's not yet on general sale, but I'll put up a link here as soon as it's available.

You can sample some of the choruses (all spoken by Cassandra / Candy) here.

[Update 20 May, 2011: I'm glad to be able to report that the book is now live on lulu: you can find it here, where it can be ordered for the pretty reasonable sum of $US 15 (plus postage).

Alternatively, you can order a copy from me for $NZ 20, and I'll even throw in the postage free (within New Zealand, that is) ...]

4 Poets & Dave

ADAM ART GALLERY
WEDNESDAY 13 APRIL 7 PM

4 POETS
& DAVE

POETRY AND FICTION
FROM THE IOWA WRITERS'
WORKSHOP VIA VICTORIA

ALAN FELSENTHAL
ALICE MILLER
DAVID FLEMING
LEE POSNA
THERESE LLOYD

Unfortunately I'll be stuck up here in Auckland and won't be able to make it, but for any of you who are in Wellington, I'd really recommend this reading.

I understand that Bill Manhire will be kicking off the intros, after which we'll go into the four poets and one fiction writer.

Alice Miller won the Landfall essay competition a couple of years ago, and I believe she's won the Katherine Mansfield short story competition too, which is a pretty impressive achievement. She's clearly as much at home in the realm of prose as that of poetry.

Thérèse Loyd was her successor as the winner of the IIML fellowship in Iowa. She is (in my opinion) a fantastic poet and performer. She's also my sister-in-law, but my admiration for her work did long predate the family involvement, I assure you. Any of you who want to follow up on her work will find a selection in New New Zealand Poets in Performance (AUP, 2008).

Her husband, Lee, also a very fine poet, is one of my favourite people on this planet - a truly gentle and dedicated soul. Lee and Thérèse met at Iowa, and it'd be great to hear them reading together again (I hosted a reading at Massey a couple of years ago with Lee, Thérèse, Sarah Broom, Michael Steven and Jen Crawford - a pretty stellar line-up, in retrospect), so I have some idea what it may be like.

I don't know the other two readers, so I can't comment on their work, but I'm sure they're of equal calibre. Any of you who know more might like to write in and tell us about it.

And, for any of you who don't know, the Adam Art Gallery is right in the quad at Victoria University. Yes, it's that one surrounded by rubble and construction equipment -- still open for business, though.

Good luck to all, then! I'm sure it will be a great occasion (and good on you Bill for continuing to lend your support to such events ...)

Reviews of Alt

Lisa Samuels
[photograph: Tim Page]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

briefers
[photograph: Michael Arnold]

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Not Writing Disaster Poems

[Earthquake / Tsunami (Japan 11/3/11)]

I was walking down the corridor yesterday when one of my colleagues stopped me to ask, "Written any poems lately?"

Rather a surprising question, I thought. Practically unprecedented, in fact.

"No, not really," I replied.

"I'd have thought there'd be quite a lot to write about at the moment," she continued.

"Yeah, I suppose so."

It was only then that I understood what she was getting at. "Disaster" = "disaster poem" / "Multiple disasters" = "suite of disaster poems".

"Where," she was asking (in effect), "is your Christchurch poem? Your Japanese earthquake poem? Maybe even your Libyan insurrection poem?"

There aren't any, I'm afraid.

I certainly don't want to legislate for other people, since a brief sampling of the blogosphere would reveal a number of Canterbury & Japanese earthquake poems already out there, and who am I to say if they're good or bad individually? "It's all just a matter of your opinion," as my Creative Writing students keep on reminding me. I do think it's an interesting matter to discuss, though.

I remember on the morning of 9/11, waking up to the news of the fall of the Twin Towers with the somewhat shamefaced realisation that I'd actually been at a poetry reading the evening before. Counting back through the time difference, I was glad to work out that I hadn't actually been intoning stanzas at the moment of the calamity - not that that would matter at all to anyone else - but had been asleep instead.

Who cares what I was doing? But somehow it mattered to me. I felt almost physically nauseated at the thought of standing there smugly self-promoting while other people were dying in flames. Irrational, really, but there you are ...

The only 9/11 poem that sticks in my mind is Amiri Baraka's ("Someone Blew Up America"), and not entirely for good reasons. It was those lines "Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion / And cracking they sides at the notion" which caused most of the problems, as I recall - though my memory had transformed the last bit into "laughing they asses off" ... Never mind. The point of his poem is clear enough.

For weeks and months afterwards, though, you couldn't go anywhere without a shower of 9/11 poems dropping around you like confetti. Somewhat perversely (or so it must have seemed), I determined not to write any. I know such decisions are generally futile - one is immediately struck with an idea for a verse epic on the subject. In this case, though, they've mostly faded on the page.

It seems obvious in retrospect that there was something spurious, second-hand, video-linked about the whole idea of writing verses about 9/11. I felt even at the time that one would need some exceptionally cogent personal link or angle to attempt it at all. Amiri Baraka's certainly fulfilled that criterion - with a vengeance. It was undeniably heartfelt, whatever else it was.

How can I explain what probably sounds like a rather pointless set of prescriptions about when (I think) one should and shouldn't write poetry (or, rather, publish it - an important distinction)? There's a fine section in Huckleberry Finn where Huck (or, rather, Mark Twain: the authorial mask wears pretty thin at this point) is describing the poetic efforts of one Emmeline Grangerford:

She warn't particular, she could write about anything you choose to give to write about, just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her "tribute" before he was cold. She called them tributes. The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker - the undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person's name, which was Whistler. She warn't ever the same, after that; she never complained, but she kind of pined away and did not live long. [ch. xvii]

[Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn (1884)]

And what were Emmeline's poems like? The one Huck quotes, "Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd", is certainly a stirring piece:

... Despised love struck not with woe
That head of curly knots,
Nor stomach troubles laid him low,
Young Stephen Dowling Bots.

O no. Then list with tearful eye,
Whilst I his fate do tell.
His soul did from this cold world fly,
By falling down a well.

They got him out and emptied him;
Alas it was too late;
His spirit was gone for to sport aloft
In the realms of the good and great.

All I can say is that you would have to go a lot broader nowadays for this to stand out as conspicuously bad poetry. Emmeline understands metre and rhyme better than most. She has a certain tendency towards the bathetic, but then that's hard to gauge at the best of times.

If you want to see a lot more of this sort of stuff - far less accomplished technically, far clumsier and more naive in subject-matter - go to the obituary page of the NZ Herald (or most other daily newspapers). The funny thing is: I adore the poems I read on the back page of the Herald. I love the way that the people who write them often stop looking for rhymes after a while and just stop any old where. I admire the way in which they always go for the half-remembered scriptural / hymn-tune phrase rather than any concrete or living expression.

There's a sort of blunt-force trauma behind the words they seem to have literally wrenched out of themselves to express the sheer depth of their passionate feelings of loss. Very few of them resort to quotation from more accomplished bards. Most appear to feel they have to go it alone, through the shaky quagmire of five or ten lines of rhymed (or vaguely rhythmic) verse.

What Twain deplores in Emmeline, I feel, is her slick facility with words. She may not be entirely in control of her medium yet, but you can see that she had a great future ahead of her compiling the nineteenth-century equivalent of greeting-cards.

So what's all this got to do with 9/11?

I remember a few weeks afterwards seeing a TV interview with one of the survivors, who'd actually managed to get out of (I think) the second building just before it collapsed. The most striking thing about the whole event, for this woman, was the fact that she'd been personally rung up by Bruce Springsteen, who'd spoken to her for almost twenty minutes on the subject of her sensations and impressions during her journey down those smoke-filled stairs.

Twenty minutes talking to the Boss! What a thrill! And, sure enough, a few months later a Springsteen album was duly churned out, replete with husky, breathy phrases about "stairways filled with smoke / can hardly breathe / how'm I gonna get out?" Nice to see how the Master is able to achieve these striking effects ...

Now, I'm sure all the proceeds were donated to charity, and I don't doubt Mr. Springsteen's honest good intentions, but I just can't bring myself to take his "9/11" album very seriously. Why? Because he's just a bigger, slightly more professional version of Emmeline Grangerford, so far as I'm concerned. Shutting up would be the best thing he could do about 9/11, and that goes for most of the rest of us too. If you were trapped in there and got out, or know someone who was, or lost a friend, those might (to me) constitute legitimate prompts (or excuses) for penning some verses on the subject. If not, don't waste my time. I can watch the TV as well as you can.

One of the first pieces of writing preserved by the youthful Eric Blair (later to become famous as George Orwell) was an Ode on the Death of General Kitchener, drowned when his warship was sunk by a mine in 1916. He was not alone. Just about everyone in Britain seems to have found this watery death sufficiently striking to deluge the newspapers with similar poems (mostly along the lines of "we will fight on to avenge you ...")

I don't think Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen bothered, though - they had more important things to write about. Or perhaps one should say that they had more to think about. Facile verses full of patriotic cliches were, in that year of the Somme and Verdun, the last thing that anyone needed to hear. Similarly, a few less "Yahda yahda yahda 9/11 yahda yahda yahda I'm so angry yahda yahda yahda & kinda blue at the same time" poems might have provided a bit more room for thinking about whether it would be such a great idea to ... start a new war in the Middle East. Don't you think?

Perhaps it's foolish of me to think of poems as having any particular importance for anyone anytime when it comes to "serious" issues of politics and history (or natural disaster, for that matter). But, foolish or not, that's what I believe. It's for that reason that I'm not particularly into people churning out the equivalent of "Lord Kitchener is dead / the mighty warrior lies cold / with the coiling fishes / every hair of his moustache we shall avenge / on the dastardly foe" poems every time some new sensation comes up on the evening news.

It's not in the least that I have no sympathy for the tragic events in Japan and Christchurch (or NY in 2001, for that matter). It's just that I have nothing to say about them beyond what's being pumped out nineteen yards to the minute by every news medium known to man - until the next disaster sends all the reporters jetting off somewhere else. It's perhaps a little exigent of me, but I'm afraid I really do judge people as much by what they don't write as by what they do.

Second-hand emotions are, by and large, easy to access and not particularly difficult to express. Getting across something of how you actually feel about your life in this world is on a completely different order of complexity.

[Bruce Springsteen: The Rising (2002)]