The Age of Slaughter

Tracey & me

Tracey Slaughter's Booklaunch
[26/5/16]

So on Thursday Bronwyn and I drove down to Hamilton for the launch of Tracey Slaughter's latest book, deleted scenes for lovers.

Here's Tracey with her book (unless otherwise noted, all the pictures in this post have been borrowed from Mayhem Literary Journal's facebook page):

Tracey & books

The event was very ably MC'ed by Waikato University's own Mark Houlahan:

Mark Houlahan

It was very well attended:

The Crowd in the Gallery

The speakers included her publisher, Fergus Barrowman, of Victoria University Press:

Fergus Barrowman

Distinguished novelist (and Tracey's good friend) Catherine Chidgey:

Catherine Chidgey

And also me, making the official launch speech:

Me launching the book

And, for those of you who are curious, here it is:

Tracey Slaughter. deleted scenes for lovers. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2016.

There are many great New Zealand poets, novelists – and creative writers generally, but I still feel confident in claiming that the short story is the genre in which we’ve most distinguished ourselves.

To my mind, these are the four great epochs of the New Zealand short story:

First (of course) the Age of Mansfield: It’s fair to say that the atmospheric intensity of Katherine Mansfield’s fiction was helped by her reading of Chekhov, Flaubert and Maupassant. But I think her work would have developed that way even if she’d never encountered them.

Secondly, the Age of Sargeson: Again, there were outside, mainly American influences on the innovations pioneered here by Frank Sargeson. But his exploration of the literary resources of the New Zealand vernacular – breaking away from dialect as a kind of comic turn – remains revolutionary.

The chronology gets a bit more shaky after that, but the next great age, for me, is the Age of Marshall. Owen Marshall – still with us, fortunately – with his immense body of work exploring the New Zealand experience in all its multifaceted variety, built on the work of previous writers such as Maurice Duggan to present a more consciously symbolic reading of the landscape and mores of the country.

And now we come to the Age of Slaughter. This last category may rouse a bit more controversy. There are, to be sure, many fine practitioners of the art of the short story in New Zealand right now: Breton Dukes, Sue Orr, Alice Tawhai, to name just a few. What is it about Tracey’s work which gives it such extraordinary significance?

It’s not simply a matter of talent – though I would defy anyone to read Tracey’s latest collection, deleted scenes for lovers, which I feel so privileged to be here today to launch, and question the sheer magnitude of her ability as a writer: her ear for language, the mythopoeic intensity of her imagination. No, it’s more of a question, for me, of a paradigm shift.

This is one I’ve been sensing for quite some time, both in the work I receive as an editor, and the kinds of writing I see our students starting to produce – since Tracey and I both work as teachers of Creative Writing.

The Age of Slaughter, for me, has an Apocalyptic air. The authors born into it, or who inhabit it by necessity, feel at home with intense emotion. Unlike the schools of the laconic and the ironic that preceded them, they have no problem with excess, with big themes and extravagant linguistic tropes.

There’s a certain black humour about them, too: like William Faulkner, Tracey writes about situations so devastating that she almost forces us to laugh. Sometimes, as in the passage from a projected memoir with which she won the Landfall essay prize last year, she jets out passages of jewelled prose so intense and dazzling that we hardly notice the banalities of the seventies key party and ranch slider aesthetic that underlies them.

Both Sargeson and Marshall specialised in apparent simplicity: a straightforward surface concealing strange depths. Tracey, by contrast (I would argue), has taken inspiration from Mansfield’s late stories to use the full resources of a poet’s word-palette when painting her complex and devastating scenes. You always have to read a Tracey Slaughter story twice: even then some of its subtleties may lie in wait to ambush you later.

Courage, however, is the word which most frequently comes to my mind when I read Tracey’s work. She goes places others (including myself) are afraid to. The interrogation of the word “consent” in the story of that name, the sheer intensity of the wish for escape and freedom in “How to Leave Your Family,” the dark close of “The Longest Drink in Town” – there’s no holding back in any of these pieces. But neither is there any over-simplification, no failure – above all – to find the “right word, not its second cousin,” which Mark Twain defined as “the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

If you want to know where New Zealand culture is right now, read Tracey Slaughter. Buy her book; get her to sign it; you won’t regret it. I’ll go further. Even if many of you couldn’t care less about New Zealand writers and their various turf wars and attempts at self-definition (why should you, after all?), if you want to know how it feels to live in this country: to recognise the thousand small details that go to make up a sense of place: the feel of wet flannelette pyjamas on a child who’s wet the bed; how it feels to kiss a smoky mouth you shouldn’t, read Tracey Slaughter.

To say I recommend this book is to put it mildly. I think it’s an indispensable book. This is our Prelude, our That Summer, our The Day Hemingway Died. This is no drawing-room talent we’re talking here: this is Tracey Slaughter. And for better or worse, in all its beauty and complexity, but also its fears and devastations, its intimations of total eclipse, this is the Age of Slaughter.

Steven Toussaint, Catherine Chidgey, Catherine Wallace et al.

Congratulations, Tracey!

Movies about English Teachers

Peter Weir, dir. Dead Poets Society (1989)

The moment I'd posted the previous list, Bronwyn pointed out a whole lot of movies I'd left out. I still think there's a slight difference between inspirational English teacher movies and inspirational university Creative Writer teacher films, but I agree that there's not a lot in it.

Is there anybody on the planet who hasn't watched Robin Williams getting his students to stand on top of their desks, judging how they walk, and telling them to rip out the introduction to their poetry anthology? It's a pity that Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo" seems to be their poem of choice (though Shakespeare gets a bit of a look-in, too), but there's no doubt that this is the King Kong of English teacher movies.

John N. Smith, dir. Dangerous Minds (1995)

Michelle Pfeiffer as a poetry teacher, yes, I can see that (just). Michelle Pfeiffer as an ex-Marine - we-ell, that's a bit harder to swallow.

Much ranting about Dylan Thomas is how I remember her pedagogical approach ("when you can read poetry, you're loaded for bear!"). Oh, and the Dylan-Dylan challenge ... Great sound-track album, though, definitely (even before the Mad Al Yankovich parody).

Richard LaGravenese, dir. Freedom Writers (2007)

While it seems to have sunk without a trace, and was a little clunky in its construction, this movie really packed a surprising punch, I thought. And it really did preach the virtues of writing things down - if not to exorcise them at any rate to assert some sort of control over them.

In fact, looking through the page of quotes from it on the IMDB, I feel like watching it again. Here's one of the quotes from Hillary Swank's character, Erin Gruwell, who's just found a racist drawing by one of the students, Tito:

Maybe we should talk about art. Tito's got real talent, don't you think? You know something? I saw a picture just like this once, in a museum. Only it wasn't a black man, it was a jewish man. And instead of the big lips he had a really big nose, like a rat's nose. But he wasn't just one particular jewish man. This was a drawing of all jews. And these drawings were put in the newspapers by the most famous gang in history. You think you know all about gangs? You're amateurs. This gang will put you all to shame. And they started out poor and angry and everybody looked down on them. Until one man decided to give them some pride, an identity... and somebody to blame. You take over neighborhoods? That's nothing compared to them. They took over countries. You want to know how? They just wiped out everybody else. Yeah, they wiped out everybody they didn't like and everybody they blamed for their life being hard. And one of the ways they did it was by doing this: see, they print pictures like this in the newspapers, jewish people with big, long noses... blacks with big, fat lips. They'd also published scientific evidence that proved that jews and blacks were the lowest form of human species. Jews and blacks were more like animals. And because they were just like animals it didn't matter if they lived or died. In fact, life would be a whole lot better if they were all dead. That's how a holocaust happens. And that's what you all think of each other.

John Krokidas, dir. Kill Your Darlings (2013)

I suppose that this is more of an anti-English teacher film than one in praise of them. Nevertheless, at the end the pompous Walt Whitman-hating Professor ends up encouraging Ginsberg to keep on writing.

Some nice quotes from this one on the IMDB, too:

William Burroughs: Show me the man who is both sober and happy, and I will show you the crinkled anus of a lying asshole.

Gus Van Sant, dir. Finding Forrester (2000)

Ditto this one. The J.D. Salinger-like "Forrester" of the title encourages the young black writer despite all the put-downs he gets from his loathsome teacher F. Murray Abraham.

The best scene is probably the one where Sean Connery is telling his protege to really bash those typewriter keys: "Now you're cooking ... You're the man now, dog!"

No thinking - that comes later. You must write your first draft with your heart. You rewrite with your head. The first key to writing is ... to write, not to think!

I suppose films based on romantic images of J. D. Salinger would take us to Field of Dreams:

Phil Alden Robinson, dir. Field of Dreams (1989)

While "poetic mentor" films would take us to the more recent Set Fire to the Stars (based on John Malcolm Brinnin's tell-all 1955 memoir Dylan Thomas in America). You have to call a halt to the process sometime, though. In any case, the real - rather unexpected - star-turn in this Dylan Thomas bio-pic was Shirley Henderson playing horror novelist Shirley Jackson (though, strangely enough, she goes unnamed in the cast list, and the role isn't even listed on the actress's wikipedia page. Maybe something ... uncanny happened during filming. Maybe they all drew lots in some unspeakable ceremony. Maybe they all swore never ever to tell anyone anything about it ... on pain of death):

Andy Goddard, dir. Set Fire to the Stars (2014)

Movies about Creative Writing Teachers

Marc Lawrence, dir. The Rewrite (2015)

Bronwyn and I were watching this truly silly Hugh Grant vehicle the other night, when I got to thinking about the portrayal of Creative Writing teachers on screen - to date, at any rate. Strangely enough, there were one or two moments during the film when I got a faint intimation that its author (also its director) might know something about what he was talking about.

Hugh Grant was turning in his usual foppish performance as ineffectual-Englishman-abroad, but sometimes - such as the moment when he was forced to face the full horror of a Creative Writing class he hadn't prepared for at all - when it began to resemble reality for a brief instant.

His method of evaluating portfolios - consisting of checking out their respective author's profile pictures on facebook, rather than actually reading any of them - had a certain undeniable panache, but it was when I found I was actually taking note of some of his techniques and resolving to try them out next time I'm in class, that I realised that the movie was working for me, at least: despite the complete lack of any screen chemistry between Hugh Grant and Marisa Tomei; despite the floppy, rather pointless ending.

That's pretty sad, isn't it? Taking pointers from Hugh Grant. I must be desperate.

Curtis Hanson, dir. Wonder Boys (2000)

It got me to thinking, though. What are some of the other notable Creative Writing teacher performances in cinema history? I was very shocked indeed to discover, a few years ago, that none of my colleagues had ever even seen the Great-Grandaddy of them all: Wonder Boys.

I'm afraid that this film has been in my personal pantheon for so long that it is, for me, beyond all criticism. I know people say that Michael Douglas was miscast, that he's too old, that he doesn't look enough like an intellectual ... etc. etc. Blah blah woof woof - as Jessica Alba once memorably put it in an episode of Dark Angel.

Who the hell cares what he looks like? Whether there's even the slightest plausibility in any of the events of that long strange weekend in Pittsburgh, the weekend of Word-fest?

"That book of yours must have been one nutty ride," as one of the bit-players remarks to Grady Tripp, Michael Douglas's character in the movie, author of Arsonist's Daughter, "a little book I wrote 'under the influence,' as you put it, which happened to win a little thing called the P.E.N. award," as he points out pompously to Katie Holmes, who is trying to persuade him to edit out one or two little details ("the characters' dental records, the genealogies of their horses") from his latest opus.

I find myself quoting from it at least once a day: "As fit as a fucking fiddle" - Grady's description of Tobey Maguire's character, aka: "James Leer, Junior Lit major and sole inhabitant of his own gloomy gulag", whom he's just caught with a loaded gun out in the garden of the Vice-Chancellor's house; "Jesus, what is it with you Catholics?" - the "sensitive" response to James's latest story from one of his classmates; "Sometimes people just need to be rescued" - when Grady and his editor bust James out of his grandparents's house, leaving a dead dog behind in his bed to act as decoy:

"Spells? Jesus, James, you make it sound like we're in a Tennessee Williams play. I don't get spells." / "What do you call them, then?" / "Episodes."

I love the way that nobody uses anything but a typewriter to produce their various works, short or long, with somewhat unfortunate results when it turns out that Grady, for one, does not make copies. "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there," as Bob Dylan puts it in one of the two songs he contributed to the film.

"It's nice to know that the youth of America are in safe hands" is Robert Downey Jr.'s parting shot as he disappears into the Dean's office to attempt (with mixed success) to parley them all out of trouble.

Part of it is the excellence of the book it's based on, of course. Michael Chabon's second novel is yet another long love-letter to Pittsburgh, his "drug of choice," as Grady characterises Frances McDormand's taste for the written word. Whole sections and subplots of the book have been left out of the cinematic version. What is there, however, rings true enough to Chabon's semi-autobiographical tale of a writer caught in the trap of an unfinishable and uncomfortably vast second novel, after the breakthrough ease of his first, the Great Gatsby-like Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

Mostly, though, it's just that even though our professional (and private) lives could never bear the faintest resemblance to Grady's (perish the thought!), one can't help feeling at times that they should - that it should be as cool a thing to do as Michael Douglas makes it. For me, this is the closest thing to Holy Writ the profession has yet inspired.

Danny DeVito, dir. Throw Momma from the Train (1987)

When it comes to quotable quotes, though, this early effort by Danny DeVito and Bily Crystal is pretty impressive, too. The DeVito character's "short stories" - all of which run something like "He came into the room. He was carrying an axe. He hit her with it again and again and again. Until she was dead" - are quite effective, as are Billy Crystal's attempts to improve them a bit: "There's no real suspense. We don't get to know any of the characters, to feel for them, before they get killed - perhaps instead of killing her he could offer her a mint julep?"

Good, too, are Crystal's struggles with the first line of his new novel: "The night was ..." hot, sweaty, cold, dark, humid - culminating in the "Momma" character's suggestion: sultry. "I'll kill her myself," shouts Crystal. Maybe because she's a better writer than he is.

The term "criss-cross" certainly entered my vocabulary thanks to this film. For years, though, I was under the impression that it was an actual quote from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, which Throw Momma from the Train sets out to parody with such vigour. Not so, it would appear. It's all Danny DeVito (or, I suppose, the screenwriter, Phil Silver).

David Anspaugh, dir. Moonlight and Valentino (1995)

Finally, last and probably least, there's this little zircon from the mid-nineties. At the time I had a bit of a crush on Elizabeth Perkins, who plays an uppity poet forced to teach Creative Writing classes for a living after her husband dies in this otherwise forgettable rom-com. I can't quite remember who gets off with Jon Bon Jovi, who plays a hunky house-painter - but the plot summary on the Internet Movie Database says that he "profoundly affects" each of the four female star's lives.

I do remember a scene in class where Elizabeth Perkins is trying to explain to a student why the single repeated name of his girlfriend does not constitute a poem. He keeps claiming that to make any addition to the word would be pointless: it already expresses all the meaning in the universe. She keeps on arguing that his work cannot be expected to connect with an audience who've never actually met her. He says that he doesn't care.

I suppose what interested me about the scene was the way in which you could see the teacher gradually becoming more and more persuaded of the merits of his argument, while feeling unable to say so without letting the side down. A not too unfamiliar situation, I'm sorry to say.

Spike Jonze, dir. Adaptation (2002)

So what do you think? There are bound to be others I've missed. I suppose one should include Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, with its brilliant parody of Robert McKee - played by Brian Cox - and his (in)famous "story seminars."

Annabel Jankel & Rocky Morton, dir. D.O.A. (1988)

Then there's a minor thriller called D.O.A. (a remake of the 1950 film noir classic), starring Dennis Quaid as an English professor who is poisoned by a colleague who is planning to plagiarise a novel by one of Quaid's students, a young man who has just committed suicide by jumping off a building (though actually he was pushed - by the colleague in question).

It turns out that the drunken slacker Quaid never even read the student's novel, simply scrawled an "A+" on the front, and so would never have been able to detect the theft. By then it's too late, though: everybody dies or goes to prison and the book doesn't even get to see the light of day. No great advertisement for the profession, to say the least.

There are plenty of other films about writers stealing other writer's work: The Words (2012), with Bradley Cooper, would be a case in point - or the rather more amusing The Hoax (2006), with Richard Gere, about the faking of Howard Hughes' memoirs - but that's not really the same thing. There's no element of writing teaching going on in either film, so far as I can see.

The same goes for the excellent 2006 Will Ferrell / Emma Thompson film Stranger than Fiction, or the even better Love and Death in Long Island (1997), or the surprisingly entertaining Ruby Sparks (2012), or even Misery (1990) itself, for that matter - or any of the rest of those truth-gets-confused-with-fiction-in-the-screwed-up-mind-of-a-writer movies ...

Richard Kwietniowsk, dir. Love and Death in Long Island (1997)

Worried about the Illuminati?

Angels and Demons (2009)

No? Well, you probably should be!

There’s a wonderful scene in the film version of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons where Ewan McGregor, who’s acting as a kind of Vatican caretaker while the Cardinals are locked up in conclave to elect a new Pope, is attacked by a madman with a red-hot branding iron.

“Illuminatus!” cries Ewan, as his flesh burns. Yes, his assailant is indeed one of the Illuminati, fresh from the late eighteenth century (where we might have hoped they’d all be resting in peace).

As it turns out, there aren’t any actual Illuminati in the movie. Tom Hanks, reprising his role as Harvard Professor of “Symbology” Robert Langdon from The Da Vinci Code (2003 / movie 2006), manages to detect the subterfuge and discover that Ewan has actually branded himself as part of his complicated plan to subvert the Papacy.

Beyoncé makes a pyramid shape

It’s funny how those elusive Illuminati recur – mostly as villains, admittedly. My local fish ’n’ chip shop keeps a pile of tattered magazines to read while you’re waiting for your order. I think it was in the Australian Women’s Weekly that I learned that Beyoncé Knowles is one of the Illuminati. Apparently she’s been making pyramid shapes with her hands at recent concerts, which is a sure-fire sign of being an initiate (presumably this was before she took to dressing like a Black Panther instead).

Beyoncé as a Black Panther

The pop group Coldplay, too, has been displaying strange flower symbols on their drumkits of late. The author of the article thought there was a good chance that joining the Illuminati might well become the latest Hollywood craze, in succession to Scientology and Kabbalah. Rihanna’s “Umbrella” video, too, is apparently full of similar occult references to her dark master, the Devil.

Rihanna, too: Is nothing sacred?

Probably the most sophisticated treatment of this theme is in Umberto Eco’s great novel Foucault’s Pendulum. His two protagonists, Belbo and Casaubon, deliberately cook up the most outrageous mixture of Occultist conspiracy theories possible – complete with Templars, Rosicrucians, the Priory of Sion, and every other conceivable permutation on the general theme of Gnosticism – and then invent a fictitious rendezvous for the whole strange crew.

Sure enough, when the two turn up at the appointed meeting place under Léon Foucault’s famous Pendulum in the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, there they all are. Belbo and Casaubon’s fertile invention has somehow succeeded in creating the very absurdities it set out to parody. Casaubon manages to escape through the sewers, but his companion is hanged from the wire of the pendulum, changing (significantly) the arc of its world-defining rotation.

Eco’s multi-layered, multiple game-playing book can be seen, in retrospect (somewhat like Cervantes’ Don Quixote), to have predated many of the worst excesses of the genre it parodies. True, Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln’s The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982), with its theory of the descent of the French Merovingian Kings from Jesus Christ (via his common-law wife Mary Magdalene), was already a bestseller. The massive vogue of Dan Brown was yet to come, however, and public knowledge of these ideas was thus not yet universal.

Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum (1988)

It was a bit of a shock to me to discover just how far things had gone, though, when I when I found myself reading an online article on Illuminati symbolism in Australia. They're everywhere, apparently - not just in the old world, but here in the new world, too!

The trouble, of course, with all this heavy tongue-in-cheek irony, is that people have a tendency to take it straight. For the record, then, I do not believe that latter-day Illuminati have subverted all our democratic institutions and are secretly plotting to take over the world (though for that matter, they're welcome to have a go, as far as I'm concerned - it's hard to see how they could do a worse job than the present lot ...)

Revelations, Apocalipse [sic.]

What does interest me about them is that strange penumbra of omnipurpose, one-size-fits-all conspiracy theory they exhude: sometimes it's the Templars, sometimes the Cathars, sometimes the Priory of Sion, only too often (unfortunately) the Elders of Zion, but always (we're told) there's a bunch of idiots somewhere dressing up in strange robes and painting their faces with symbols and having wild parties to which none of us happen to have been invited (unless some of you reading really are members of the international Illuminatist Frater / Sorority, in which case apologies).

Red Peak

I suppose it's all harmless enough: I mean, is any conspiracy worthy of the name really going to centre on Beyoncé? No offence, and I suppose the name of her former girl-group Destiny's Child might be seen as a bit of a clue, really, when you think about it ... Huh? What's that? ... a scratching at the window ... that hand! ... what are they chanting? ... Ngaah, Nyarlathotep ... NOOOOOO! ... Aaaaargh ... [CRASH]

[We publish this blogpost just as it was found on the author's computer, complete with those last few meaningless lines. Of course, it can only be regarded as a coincidence that he was interrupted by some intruder or intruders unknown just at the moment he was recording the results of his own investigations into the Illuminati in New Zealand. To draw any other conclusion can only be regarded as absurd and baseless paranoia ... - Ed.]

Wake Up Kiwi!

U of Canberra VC's International Poetry Prize

University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize (2016)

I'm pretty chuffed to have been asked to act as a long-list judge for the 2016 University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's Poetry Prize (entries open from 2 November 2015 – 30 June 2016).

I suppose it would be somewhat cooler to have been asked to be the short-list judge, but given the person in question is mega-famous British bard Simon Armitage, my nose isn't too far out of joint. My two co-judges, Philippine-Australian writer Merlinda Bobis and Goan-Anglo-Indian poet Michelle Cahill, are also very dynamic figures. I've heard them both in action at various conferences, and they're pretty inspiring.

Here are some details of the competition:

• The winner will receive AUD$15,000
• The runner-up (second-placed poem) will receive AUD$5,000
• Four additional poems will be short-listed
• All poems entered for the prize will be single poems that have a maximum length of 50 lines (see the Conditions of Entry for further details)
• Each entry of a poem will cost AUD$15 if submitted by 29 February 2016 and AUD$20 if submitted between 1 March and 30 June 2016. There are discounts for students.

And here's the link to the How to Enter page.

It's true that you do have to speculate to accumulate - you have to pay to enter, but the prize money is pretty sweet. And it goes without saying that you can count on the very best of service from yours truly and the other judges ....

Judge Roy Bean

Why Tim Powers?

Tim Powers (1952- )

You know how it is when you have a long list of worthy books to read, and you find yourself instead obsessively following up every title by some hitherto neglected writer? True, I've been reading Tim Powers on and off for years, but this summer I found myself going through his entire oeuvre again in a rather more systematic way, book by book, rant by rant ...

Here's a list of my own collection of Powers books. It isn't quite complete, as there are a few missing novellas and limited editions - short story collections, mainly - but I have all fourteen of his novels, from The Skies Discrowned (1976) to Medusa's Web (2015).

1. Powers of Two: The Skies Discrowned & An Epitaph in Rust. 1976, 1986, 1989. Framingham, MA: The NESFA Press, 2004.
2. The Drawing of the Dark. 1979. London: Granada, 1981.
3. The Anubis Gates. 1983. London: Triad Grafton Books, 1986.
4. Dinner at Deviant's Palace. 1985. London: Grafton Books, 1987.
5. On Stranger Tides. 1987. New York: Ace Books, 1988.
6. The Stress of Her Regard. 1989. London: HarperCollins, 1991.
7. Last Call. Fault Lines, 1. 1993. New York: Avon Books, 1996.
8. Expiration Date. Fault Lines, 2. London: HarperCollins, 1995.
9. Earthquake Weather. Fault Lines, 3. 1997. London: Orbit, 1998.
10. Declare. 2001. New York: HarperTorch, 2002.
11. Strange Itineraries: Short Stories. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2005.
12. Three Days to Never. 2006. William Morrow. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2013.
13. Hide Me Among the Graves. 2012. Corvus. London: Atlantic Books Ltd., 2013.
14. Medusa's Web. 2015. Corvus. London: Atlantic Books Ltd., 2016.

So who on earth is Tim Powers, some of you must be saying by now? His work falls into the SF / Fantasy genre, certainly, but it's hard to be more precise than that - I've heard him described as a Steampunk writer, but I'm not sure that that label quite fits, either. He is, really, unique and sui generis.

Which is not to say that he's much of a prose stylist. One has to put up with some pretty clumsy phrasing at times, some clunky paragraphs - not to mention odd lapses of historical verisimilitude (and some truly dreadful attempts to translate bits of dialogue into foreign languages).

Guess what? It doesn't matter. Even though many admirers of Byron and Shelley would shudder to read what he's made of them in The Stress of Her Regard (for instance), or of Coleridge in The Anubis Gates, there's a mad exuberance about both books which keeps one reading on, and which ends up constructing a pretty plausible series of alternate universes largely controlled by magic and the hermetic sciences.

I once read an interview [Brad Katz, Brow Magazine (21/2/96)] with Powers where he said that he'd been much influenced by Fellini in his early writing. He liked the way that there's almost always something going on behind the main action in a Fellini film: a couple of extras trying to carry a church bell, a bunch of kids getting into a fight. He's been trying ever since, it seems, to get that effect in his fiction - a sense of teeming life going on behind his protagonists' mad preoccupations: to revive the dead Fisher King of Northern California, to stop a bunch of alien spiders from taking over the universe, to exterminate the rogue genies who've infested Noah's Ark ...

Tim Powers: Powers of Two (1976 / 2004)

This rather handsome hardback collects Powers' first two books, The Skies Discrowned and An Epitaph in Rust (both 1976). He writes in his entertaining 2003 introduction to this reprint:

the publication of these two books ... had effectively deflected me from wanting to be a college literature professor; I didn't go back to graduate school. ... if it weren't for K. W. Jeter and Roger Elwood, and the heady experience of seeing those first two books in print, It'd today be teaching "Twain to Modern," and "Analysis of Literary Forms," and maybe - with a wistful air, I like to think! - "Creative Writing."

Bravo, Tim! I like that "wistful air." As one who himself teaches Creative Writing (and various survey courses not a million miles from the ones described), I know what he's talking about. I remember once confessing to John Dolan how much I'd prefer to be a Sci-Fi pulp writer than any kind of "intellectual" or "experimental" writer. He stared back at me. "Of course!" he said. "If we only had the talent!"

Who wouldn't prefer to be Gene Wolfe than Virginia Woolf, or - in this case - a kind of maverick hybrid of pulp fiction, period pastiche and perverse historicism like Tim Powers rather than a staid old English lecturer? Never mind, we give what we can - the rest is the madness of art ...

The books themselves are promising but a little embryonic: with quite a lot of Jack Vance mixed into their basic substratum of Philip K. Dick.

Tim Powers: The Drawing of the Dark (1979)

This book gives us the first glimpse of Powers' protean, Fellini-esque self. Loaded with detail (much of it referred to glancingly, in passing), it takes us through pre-Enlightenment Europe to Vienna in 1485 during its siege by the Turks. Merlin and Arthur are the principal protagonists, though in their latter-day avatars Brian Duffy and "Aurelianus": the stakes are no less than the soul of Europe itself.

It's a break-neck, rollicking yarn, and very entertaining to read, but not - in retrospect, at least - quite there yet. The essential parts of the Powers recipe are present, but the brew is still a little chunky and dark.

Tim Powers: The Anubis Gates (1983)

Not so this book, which still has a claim to be considered Powers' masterpiece - the central exhibit of his early manner, at least. I was once stranded in Frankfurt airport by a snowstorm for a couple of days. I couldn't leave the hotel, and I only had one book: this one. I read it twice through in that time and it never palled. I could, in fact, pull it out and start reading it again right now. It's bloody good.

The story introduces Power's favourite Romantic faux-poet, William Ashbless, to the reader for the first time, and is endlessly, tirelessly inventive in its details. It ain't Shakespeare. Nor is it Dickens or any other high culture piece of fine writing. It has a punk soul, but it's also a kind of apotheosis of that page-turning trashiness that makes those of us brought up on them adore pulp paperbacks so much. What else can I say? Read it.

Tim Powers: Dinner at Deviant's Palace (1985)

This is a little out on a limb in Power's oeuvre. It reads, at times, more like his friend Phil Dick (Dr Bloodmoney, or Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said) than Powers himself. But that's not to say it isn't good. As post-apocalyptic narratives go, this one is excellent. It's the kind of book his first two novels were aspiring to be (he admits in his introduction to them that he was already writing a book with this title before rattling them out in a hurry: two paperbacks in the same year). Nevertheless, I think he was right to complete it and get it out of his system. It is, in effect, a kind of alternate Powers: a slightly more predictable but every bit as accomplished writer.

Not really, then, quite, Tim Powers, though it did (like its predecessor) win the Philip K. Dick Memorial award.

Tim Powers: On Stranger Tides (1987)

This one had a recent vogue when it was used as the basis for the fourth film in the Pirates of the Caribbean series. Students of the book could not have been blamed for not noticing, though: the resemblances are few and far between (coming down mostly to the presence of Blackbeard in both stories). It's a fine yarn (far better than the film, alas), with another of Powers' plucky and resourceful - but not omnipotent - protagonists, and a guest appearance from Ponce de Leon and his Fountain of Youth.

There are one or two interesting aspects to the historical research in the book, though. At one point (p. 140 in my paperback edition) there's a reference to the "murder of James 1st a century ago." This seems a little odd, since King James was not, in fact, murdered (he died of dysentery after a stroke), and introduces the possibility that this is supposed to be set in an alternate history analogous to Joan Aiken's in her Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. If so, he doesn't really follow up on the idea. Perhaps it's a fossil from some earlier, longer state of the book?

Of course, one could argue that it's actually a reference to the historical murder of King James the 1st of Scotland rather than James the 1st of England, but since that took place in 1437, it's a bit hard to see it as only a century before the present of the book (c. 1718). I bequeath this concundrum to more profound Powers scholars than myself.

Tim Powers: The Stress of Her Regard (1989)

Now this one is something special. So dense is the narrative, centering on Byron and Shelley's haunted summer (during which his wife's great novel Frankenstein was conceived), that one can hardly follow it at times. Nor is Powers' prose style quite up to the task he has set himself at times, but it remains a kind of masterpiece: a genuinely frightening and thought-provoking novel with enough inventiveness to power ten conventional plots. What isn't in there? I'd rather reread The Anubis Gates anyday than venture into this one again, but I have to admit that it scared the shit out of me, and persuaded me that readers really could take a lot of disruption in their fictional fare without giving in (hence, I suppose, some of the more intractable elements in my own first novel, Nights with Giordano Bruno).

Tim Powers: Last Call (1993)

This is the first in a trilogy and (I would say) by far the most attractive in the series. It takes on the folklore of Las Vegas in a really big way, and almost succeeds in creating an American occult mythology to rival those of old Europe. It was the first of his books to win the World Fantasy Award, and it certainly deserves it.

Tim Powers: Expiration Date (1995)

There's something monstrous about the picture of LA, full of hungry, talkative ghosts, portrayed in this novel. It reads more like the transcript of a nightmare than an amusing piece of derring-do. Re-reading it this summer, though, I found that there is some benefit in reading the whole of his "Fault Lines" trilogy in order. What seemed merely bewildering and repetitive the first time seems far more planned and deliberate in retrospect.

Tim Powers: Earthquake Weather (1997)

The poet John Masefield called one of his own adventure novels One Damned Thing After Another (or ODTAA). there's something of that in the endless (and mostly futile) attempts to bring Scott Crane (the Fisher King of the Western states) back to life in this culmination to Powers' trilogy. He does succeed in knitting all the loose ends together, but at a certain cost to the narrative pleasure principle.

Tim Powers: Declare (2001)

This one I didn't like at all when I first read it. It seemed almost perversely incomprehensible, and trying to link together too disparate a mass of material. On rereading it, though, I wonder what I was thinking about. I see it now as a brilliant fusion of spy fiction and Dan Brown-ish antiquarianism. I suppose reading more about Kim Philby in the meantime has helped me see the inventiveness and intelligence of Powers's portrait of the modern era's greatest double agent. Winner (again) of the World Fantasy Award, I'd now recommend it highly, but that earlier adverse reaction does remind me that certain aspects of it may be an acquired taste.

Tim Powers: Three Days to Never (2006)

This is a good, solid piece of Powers-iana. The characters are attractive and well-drawn, the action compelling. To someone not used to his style, it might be quite difficult to follow in parts, but to a Powers fan, this is pretty mainstream stuff. After all, there was a time when even Haruki Murakami seemed incomprehensible to most readers. In a way, I hope such universal acceptance never happens to Powers. Part of his edge comes from that sense of inhabiting a private universe with only occasional connections with everyone else's ...

Tim Powers: Hide Me Among the Graves (2012)

Wonderful. This sequel to The Stress of Her Regard (with many of the same monsters) allows Powers to go to town on the Pre-Raphaelites. Great stuff throughout, and very visual in its appeal.

Tim Powers: Medusa'a Web (2015)

Which brings us to Power's latest work, set (again) in LA - this time in Hollywood - and with a slight overtone of Shirley Jackson (both The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle - fans of either of those would find much to attract them here, I feel). There's something a little Dr. Who-like, too, in some of the action.

To be honest, I don't quite know what to think about this one yet. I like it, but it didn't grip me to the same extent as Three Days to Never. What is certain is that it shows no diminution in Powers' skills after almost forty years of scribbling - and 14 major novels. Thank God he didn't become an English Professor instead sticking to what he does best: benefiting poor suffering humanity as a spinner of wondrous tales.

Tim Powers: Strange Itineraries (2005)

Sacha Jones: One Woman's World

Sacha Jones: The Grass was Always Browner (2016)

A long time ago, in a galaxy not too far away from this one, I had a student in my Creative Writing paper at Albany called Sacha Jones. It takes most students in this course quite some time to get into the frame of mind where they can critique and analyse each other's work without fear of possible social repercussions. Developing that group rapport is an important part of teaching the paper.

Sacha, however, had strong opinions, and was not afraid to express them. Her ideas about form and structure seemed impressively astute and advanced, too, so I wasn't entirely surprised to find out from her midway through the course that she was in fact completing a PhD in Political Studies at Auckland Uni at the same time as attending this beginners' writing class. Let's just say that she stood out from the first.

Sacha Jones

She must have enjoyed it, though, because she went on to enrol for our stage two course in Life Writing (broadly speaking: Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, Genealogy and all variants on same). I usually only give a couple of guest lectures in this paper, but this year I was teaching the whole thing as one of my colleagues was away on leave.

It was, I have to say, a very stimulating experience. I recall some fascinating debates on the longterm legacy of the Women's Movement on writing and (indeed) society in general, where I tried to stress the immense value of that "the personal is political" mantra, and all the other ideas so hard fought-for then and so taken for granted (often, alas, in their absence) now.

This was very much Sacha's territory: part of the subject of her PhD (now completed) in fact - and she had a lot of light to shed on it.

After the end of the course, I didn't see so much of Sacha: a couple of meetings at the Society of Authors, and - of course - the stimulation of following the postings on her blog One Woman's World. This blog very much exemplifies the idea of exploring all the ramifications of - yes - one woman's life in the early twenty-first century, complete with "Poetry, prose, politics and parenting; photography, pirouetting, pruning and prattling on: a few of [her] pleasures, predilections and predicaments."

And now Sacha's memoir, The Grass was Always Browner, is being published by Finch Publishing (Sydney, Australia)! It's due out in New Zealand a little later this year: in May, if I'm not mistaken.

Now I always think it's extremely uncool - not to mention completely inaccurate - to claim any credit in the successes of one's former students. People's achievements are their own, and any help you may have given along the way is likely to loom larger in your imagination than theirs. That doesn't mean, however, that I'm not extremely proud of her and very chuffed to hear about this happy event.

Nevertheless, the fact that she was already well advanced in her Doctoral studies when we first met means that I'm unlikely to have exerted too much influence on her development as a writer. Never mind: I'm pleased to celebrate my colleague's book here and to recommend it to you strongly.

The book has many resonances for me, as my mother grew up in Sydney (though at a somewhat earlier date), so I grew up on tales of bull-ants and the blueness of the Blue Mountains. We made several trips over there during my grandparents' lifetime, so I retain quite a vivid memory of the family house in Chatswood (immense it seems to me in memory: with great wooden verandahs where I lost my favourite Matchbox toy, a little police car, and had to be comforted with the gift of a little koala bear).

If you'd like to sample some more of Sacha's writing, you could look at her fascinating piece Hunger, included in our online anthology of students' writing from the Life Writing course. It gives you some idea of the territory she covers: ballet, bulimia, body issues, but - of course - many of life's brighter aspects as well.

The best of luck with the book, Sacha!

Indexing Poetry NZ

Joseph Severn: Shelley at the Baths of Caracalla (1845)

“Now my summer task is ended,” wrote Shelley, as he reclined in a rowboat, having just completed his massive 12-canto epic Laon and Cyntha (1817).

My summer’s task has been somewhat less creative - though I have to confess that at times it seemed every bit as arduous - compiling a comprehensive online index for the journal variously known as New Zealand Poetry Yearbook (1951-1964), Poetry New Zealand (1971-84), Poetry NZ (1990-2014), and – now – Poetry New Zealand Yearbook (2014-?).

Over the past 65 years, 67 issues of this magazine have been issued by publishers including A. H. & A. W. Reed, Pegasus Press, John McIndoe, Nagare Press, Brick Row Publishing, Puriri Press, Massey’s School of English and Cultural Studies, and – now – Massey University Press.

These 67 issues, edited by 16 editors, contain 6784 pages of material: editorials, essays, reviews, and – of course – many, many poems, reviews and essays by 947 authors (but who's counting?).

And what have I learned from this extremely laborious exercise? Well, I suppose it’s given me a renewed appreciation for the sheer coverage achieved by this journal in its two-thirds of a century of existence. Who, among New Zealand’s canonical poets and writers, isn’t there? Adcock, Baxter, Curnow, Doyle, Glover, Hyde, Manhire - you name them, chances are they're there (as you can readily verify by visiting the Author index page).

And then there are the overseas contributors: Charles Bernstein, Charles Bukowsky, Robert Creeley, August Kleinzahler, Les Murray - again, the list goes on.

How should you use the index? Well, the quick answer is to go here, where I've given some brief instructions on the subject.

If you're curious, though, I'll just remarks that it is – in conception, at least – as simple as I can make it. There’s a separate page for each issue, with images of the Front and Back Covers, Title-page and Copyright details, and the Table of Contents: together with any details I can find about such matters as the Contributors and the Subscription Details - on average, ten separate images per issue.

If you want to know about a particular issue, you can either link to it from the right sidebar of the site, or – alternatively – from the Contents or Site-Map pages.

If, however, you want to know what a particular author has published in Poetry New Zealand over the years, you can go to the Author Index page, which provides a numbered list, alphabeticised by surname, together with chronological details of each writer's contributions. You can imagine how much fun it was putting that together!

No doubt there are still many typos and other errors left, though I've tried to proof-read it as carefully as I went along. 1,000-odd A4 pages of material provides scope for a good many mistakes, however. I’d appreciate it very much if you would alert me to any lacunae you detect, and promise to correct them as soon as I can. You could start by checking the details of your own contributions to the magazine over the years, perhaps.

For the rest, I’m not really proposing that anyone should try to read this monstrous compilation for pleasure, but hopefully future researchers into modern New Zealand poetry may find it of some use. It’ll certainly be a great help to me as the present editor of the magazine.

Enjoy!

James Ko: "Jack" (c.1996)