Metamorphoses VI (1994): Marsyas

from "The Flaying of Marsyas"

by Robin Robertson

nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat
vi, 388

1

A bright clearing. Sun among the leaves,
sifting down to dapple the soft ground, and rest
a gilded bar against the muted flanks of trees.
In the flittering green light the glade
listens in and breathes.

A wooden pail; some pegs, a coil of wire;
a bundle of steel flensing knives.

Spreadeagled between two pines,
hooked at each hoof to the higher branches,
tied to the root by the hands, flagged
as his own white cross,
the satyr Marsyas hangs.

Three stand as honour guard:
two apprentices, one butcher.


2
Let’s have a look at you, then.
Bit scrawny for a satyr,
all skin and whipcord, is it?
Soon find out.
So, think you can turn up with your stag-bones
and outplay Lord Apollo?

This’ll learn you. Fleece the fucker.
Sternum to groin.Tickle, does it? Fucking bastard,
coming down here with your dirty ways ...
Armpit to wrist, both sides.Chasing our women ...
Fine cuts round hoof and hand and neck.Can’t even speak the language proper.
Transverse from umbilicus to iliac crest,
half-circling the waist.Jesus. You fucking stink, you do.
Hock to groin, groin to hock.That’s your inside leg done:
no more rutting for you, cunt.

Now. One of you on each side.
Blade along the bone, find the tendon,
nick it and peel, nice and slow.
A bit of shirt-lifting, now, to purge him,
pull his wool over his eyes
and show him Lord Apollo’s rapture;
pelt on one tree, him on another:
The inner man revealed.


3 ...

After Ovid: New Metamorphoses. Edited by Michael Hofmann & James Lasdun. London: Faber, 1994. 154-55.

from "Down Under"

by Ciaran Carson


... 2

I flipped the tissue-paper and took in the Christian
iconography.
Its daguerreotype-like, braille feel. The spiky instruments.
The pincers.
The man who’d invented the saw had studied the anatomy
of a
Fish’s spine. From bronze he cut the teeth and tried them
out on a boxwood tree.

That ancient boxwood flute of Greece will haunt him yet.
Through olive groves
Its purple aura bleats through dark and sheep. The dozing
shepherd
With his flute abandoned. Wrapped up in his mantle,
independent, fast asleep.

... 4

Fletcher cut the nib of a quill with a Stanley knife
and sliced the palp
Of his finger off. It quivered with its hinge of skin,
then rivuleted
On the parchment. He didn’t know where it was going.
It obscured
The nice calligraphy that looked definitive: like a
Proclamation or a Treaty.

In fact, he’d been trying to copy the Inquit page off
the Book
Of Kells, as if it were a series of ‘unquotes’. The way
you’d disengage
The lashes of a feather, then try and put them back together.

5

The place was packed with expectant academics, but my
marking slips
Had flittered away from the text. They’d been Rizla papers
in another
Incarnation, when I’d rolled a smoke between my thumbs
and fingers, teasing
Out the strands. I waffled on about the stet-detectors
in the library

Basement, security requirements, conduits, wiring,
laminates and ducts.
Up above, the floors and stacks and filing systems, the
elaborate
Machinery of books, where I materialized. I strummed
their rigid spiny gamut.

6

There’s a shelf of Metamorphoses. Commentaries. Lives.
The Mystery of Ovid’s
Exile. This is where the Phrygian mode returns, by way
of an Australian stamp
That’s slipped out from the covers, bearing the unlikely-
looking lyre-shaped
Tail of the lyre-bird. Printed in intaglio, it’s playing
a barcarole.

I think of it as clinker-built, Aeolian, floating down
the limpid river which –
Said Ovid’s people – sprang from all the tears the
country fauns and nymphs
And shepherds wept in Phrygia, as they mourned their
friend the fettered satyr.

7 ...

After Ovid: New Metamorphoses. Pp.157-60.

That's why I like this compilation so much. It's hit-and-miss, admittedly. There are some tiresome adaptations which whinge on and on for pages, but mostly they're distinct hits, I'd have to say.

It's great to have these two versions of the story of Marsyas to put side by side. The Robin Robertson piece is terrifyingly brutal: a couple of executioners joking like Shakespearean bullies as they divide up the carcase of this untermensch:

A man dismantled, a tatterdemalion
torn to steak and rind,
a disappointing pentimento
or the toy that can’t be reassembled
by the boy Apollo, raptor, vivisector.

Robertson is alert to the possibilties of medieval idealisation of the innocent songster Marsyas as a kind of proto-Christ, too:

Marsyas the martyr, a god’s fetish,
hangs from the tree like bad fruit.

I particularly like that last echo of the Billie Holiday classic "Strange Fruit," about lynch law in the Deep South:

Strange fruit hanging
from the poplar trees ...

Yet when we turn to Ciaran Carson, the poet of modern Belfast, we immediately become aware of a world of possibilites scarcely hinted at in the Scot Robertson's vicious little poem.

Carson makes a series of exploratory incisions into the body of the Marsyas story, seeing it in the fish-spine of a ringbound academic monograph, in an Irish postage stamp, in the tail of an Australian lyre-bird (hence, presumably, his title: "Down Under").

LIke a classical composer, he begins by stating the theme:

Then they told the story of the satyr who played the flute
so brilliantly
In Phrygia, he tried to beat Apollo. Apollo won, of course;
for extra measure, thought
He’d bring the satyr down another peg or two: stripped
off his pelt, ungloving it from

Scalpwards down. And could he play then? With his fingertips
all raw,
His everything all peeled and skinless? You saw the score
of veins
Externalized, the palpitating circuits. The polythene-like
arteries. The pulsing bag
Of guts you’d think might play a tune, if you could bring
yourself to blow and squeeze it.

Carson's ending is more vicious, even, than Robertson's. The cruelty of the gods is an immutable principle in the world of this poem, the world (one is tempted to say) of the Troubles:

So they tell their stories, of the cruelty of gods and
words and music.
The fledglings of the lyre-bird’s song. Its arrows.
They stare into
The water – ‘clearest in that Realme’ – and see the
fishes shingled,

Shivered, scalloped on the pebbles. The arrows of the
wind upon the water,
Written on the water; rolled like smoke, the fluted
breath that strolls
At midnight. They gaze into the stream’s cold pastoral,
seeing
Fossil ribs and saws embedded there, the flute player’s
outstretched fingers.

Stephen Dobyns retells the story of the flaying of Marsyas too, in his terrifyingly deadpan collection Cemetery Nights (1987). His Marsyas is a kind of hapless hippie goof, unable to resist the flattery of the crowd, even though he knows where it'll lead him in the end.

Perhaps that's the point of the story, in fact: bad things happen to nice people. Beware the radiance of the god Apollo, too: there's no room for clumsy emotions like mercy or forgiveness in the searchlight of his dispassionate intellect. He'll rationalise you as soon as look at you.

A little like the god Augustus with that nosey little gadfly Ovidius, in fact.

Metamorphoses V (1997): Arethusa

‘I was a nymph of Achaia.
None loved the woods,
And setting their hunting nets, as keenly as I did.
I was all action and energy,
And never thought of my looks.
Even so, my looks, yes, my beauty
Made others think of me.
The fame of my appearance burdened me.
The attractions
That all the other girls were sick to have
Sickened me, that I had them.
Because they attracted men, I thought them evil.

‘There came a day
I had exhausted myself
In the Stymphalian Forest. The heat was frightening.
And my efforts, harrying the game,
Had doubled its effect on me.
I found a stream, deep but not too deep,
Quiet and clear – so clear,
Every grain of sand seemed magnified.
And so quiet, the broad clarity
Hardly dimpled.
The poplars and willows that drank at it
Were doubled in a flawless mirror.
I waded in – footsoles, ankles, knees.
Then stripped,
Hung my clothes on a willow
And plunged.
As I played there, churning the surface,
To and fro, diving to the bottom,
Swimming on my back, my side, my belly,
I felt a strange stir bulge in the current –
It scared me so badly
I scrambled up on to the bank.
A voice came after me:
“Why leave in such a hurry, Arethusa?”
It was Alpheus, in the swirl of his waters.
“Why leave in such a hurry?” he cried again.
I saw my clothes on the willow across the river.
I had come out on the wrong bank.
Naked as I was, I just ran –
That brought him after me
All the more eagerly – my nakedness
Though it was no invitation
Gave his assault no option.
I was like the dove in a panic
Dodging through trees when the hawk
Rides its slipstream
Tight as a magnet.

‘The peak of Orchomenus went past,
And Psophis –
They were stepping stones
That my feet barely touched. Then Cyllene
And the knapped, flinty ridges
Of Maenalus, Erymanthus, and Elis –
The map rolled under me
As in a flight in a dream. He could not
Overtake me
But he could outlast me.
Over savannahs, mountains black with forest,
Pathless crags and gorges. But soon
The sun pressed on my back and I saw
That I ran in a long and leaping shadow
The very shape of my terror –
And I heard the stones flying
From his striding feet, and his panting breath
That seemed to tug at my hair.

‘In an agony of effort
I called to Diana:
“Help, or it’s all over with me.
Remember how I carried your bow,
Your quiverful of arrows. Help me,
Help me, Oh help me.”

‘The goddess heard and was stirred.
She brought up a dense mist
And hid me.
I smothered my gasping lungs. I tried
To muffle my heartbeat. And I froze.
I could hear the river-god, Alpheus,
Blindly casting about -
Twice he almost trod on me
Where I crouched under deep weeds.
“Arethusa!” he kept shouting, “Arethusa!”
As if I would answer!
You can imagine what I was feeling –
What the lamb feels when the wolf’s jaws
Are ripping the edge of the shed door.
Or what the hare feels
Peering through the wall of grass blades
When the circling hounds lift their noses.
But Alpheus persisted.
Circling the clump of mist, he could see clearly
My track that had gone in had not come out.
When I understood this
A sudden sweat chilled my whole body.
It streamed from me.
It welled from my hair. It puddled under my feet.
In the time it takes to tell you this
I had become a spring, a brisk stream,
A river, flowing away down the hillside.
But the river-god recognised me.
And he too dissolved his human shape,
Poured himself into his true nature
And mingled his current with my current.

‘But Diana helped me again. She split earth open.
I dived into the gorge
And underground I came to Ortygia –
This land,
Which bears the name of my own beloved goddess,
Brought me back to light. That is my story.’

Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid: Twenty-four Passages from the Metamorphoses. London: Faber, 1997. 68-71.

Ted Hughes included four pieces in the book After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, ed. Michael Hofmann & James Lasdun (London: Faber, 1994). I've suggested elsewhere that his subsequent book has tended to overshadow this anthology of different pieces in multiple voices unjustly, but that could hardly be said to be Hughes's fault. One might, in fact, argue that the immense success of his translation / adaptation of crucuial passages from the epic served as a kind of advertisement for the Hofmann / Lasdun book (it's a pity he makes no reference to it on his copyright page or in his preface, but them's the breaks).

Anyway, I think this story, the Arethusa story, shows the strengths of Hughes's method. He uses a vaguely iambic, free-verse line rather than the blank verse or loose hexameters which other, more conventional translators tend to employ. He also picks and chooses far more when it comes to the detail of each particular story. And, after all, if you really do want all the detail of an original, best to read it in the original - time spent poring over a translation might well be better employed with a Loeb classics crib ...



The story is one of those whose essential lines are recognisable long before it meanders to a conclusion. It's Apollo and Daphne, Scylla and Glaucus all over again. A nymph flees a god intent on raping her, until she's tranformed into some feature of the landscape, and thus escaping him forever - but also losing her human attributes at the same time.

I guess, in aggregate, the stories are a kind of parable of attraction / repulsion, those fundamental forces behind the universe, visible in the form of gravity and centrifugal force, but also - especially significant in the medieval and classical world - in the form of love and hate.

It's love which moves the sun and the other stars, says Dante in the Commedia, faithfuly repeating Aristotle and his other Classical sources. The (male) gods in these mythological stories of Ovid's seem instantly attracted by beauty, the (female) nymphs as automatically repelled. They're like magnets with reversed polarities, in fact. Nor is it masculine roughness or ugliness which repels them necessarily. Apollo could hardly be said to be unattractive in his human garb.

Rather, it seems to be an instant revulsion from the whole cycle of sex and preganancy and childbirth and child-rearing - mortality, in short - which sends them haring off. It's that they're punished for, perhaps. Not so much punished as fulfilled - given the stasis they were seeking (however unconsciously) all along.

Ted Hughes should know about all that, with his emotional history - not one but two women committing suicide after being involved with him.

Metamorphoses IV (1986): Daughters of Minyas

- Francisco Benitez, "Daughters of Minyas" (c.2002/3)

The daughters of Minyas impiously reject the cult of Bacchus. To pass the time as they work, they tell the stories which take up the first half of Book IV: one of Ovid’s ‘framing’ devices ... (Melville, 395)

The Daughters of Minyas transformed

The tale was done but still the girls worked on,
Scorning the god, dishonouring his feast,
When suddenly the crash of unseen drums
Clamoured, and fifes and jingling brass
Resounded, and the air was sweet with scents
of myrrh and saffron, and – beyond belief! –
The weaving all turned green. the hanging cloth
Grew leaves of ivy, part became a vine,
What had been threads formed tendrils, from the warp
Broad leaves unfurled, bunches of grapes were seen,
Matching the purple with their coloured sheen.
And now the day was spent, the hour stole on
When one would doubt if it were light or dark,
Some lingering light at night’s vague borderlands.
Suddenly the whole house began to shake,
the lamps flared up, and all the rooms were bright
With flashing crimson fires, and phantom forms
of savage beast of prey howled all around.
Among the smoke-filled rooms, one here, one there,
The sisters cowered in hiding to escape
The flames and glare, and, as they sought the dark,
A skinny membrane spread down their dwarfed limbs,
And wrapped thin wings around their tiny arms,
And in what fashion they had lost their shape
The dark hid from them., Not with feathered plumes
They ride the air, but keep themselves aloft
On parchment wings; and when they try to speak
They send a tiny sound that suits their size.
And pour their plaints in thin high squeaking cries.
Houses they haunt, not woods; they loathe the light;
From dusk they take their name*, and flit by night.

A. D. Melville, trans. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. The World's Classics (London: Oxford University Press, 1986). 86.

* take their name: ‘bat’ in Latin is uespertilio, from uesper ‘evening’; In ’flit by night’ Ovid also alludes to its Greek name, nykteris, from nyx ‘night’. In Nicander’s much more elaborate version of the story the sisters are changed into a bat, an owl, and another, unidentified, bird. (Melville, 399)

- Pablo Picasso, "Daughters of Minyas" (c.1930)

"In more recent years translations have appeared in the USA whose main value is as a warning of the difficulty of the task," [xxx] says A. D. Melville in his “Translator’s Note.” Bold words.
Presumably he has in mind Rolfe Humphries (1955) and Horace Gregory (1958), but it's hard to see just why he supposes his own pentameters so superior to theirs. I suspect Charles Boer had this remark in mind when he commented on the "pedantic and dull" nature of the several British attempts to represent the Metamorphoses in verse.
Melville's lines may be unexciting, though, but his book is clearly laid-0ut, engagingly annotated, and generally extremely accessible, especially for the first-time Ovidian.

Fresco from Pompeii

And why the daughters of Minyas? What is it that interests me about them? Is it the fact that they are turned into bats as a consequence of scorning Dionysos, the god of wine? Dionysos / Bacchus, of course, was the son of Zeus and Semele, conceived before she was burnt to death by seeing the god in his full glory, and rescued from her corpse to be gestated in his father's thigh.

They reject the god in his several aspects as maiden, bull, lion and panther, and as a result one of them, Leucippe, tears her own son Hipassus to pieces and feasts on his flesh.

This idea of the necessity of losing control and submitting to the judgements of the god of intoxicating drugs offers an interesting contrast with our own culture's desire to maintain rationality at all costs.

Whether they became bats or (as other authorities have it) a mouse, a screech-owl and a barn-owl, it's clear that they are guilty of preferring their own ontological certainties to the expanded horizons offered by the god.

Semele was punished for her presumptuous attempt to attain immortality by seeing her lover, the god, as he truly was. The Minyades appear to exemplify the opposite fault, lacking (as they do) the attention-span even to pay heed to their metamorphosing visitor.

Landfall 214

When the Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky stumbled across Byednie Lyudi [Poor Folk], Dostoyevsky's first novel, he was so overwhelmed with admiration that he ran through the snowy streets to the writer's flat and threw snowballs at his windows. (Unfortunately Fyodor's second effort, The Double, a laborious piece of Gogol-esque fantasy, enraged the critic almost as much as the first one had inspired him; he immediately expelled him from the ranks of socially-concerned writers).

Beware, in other words, the enthusiasm of critics. You never really know what axe they have to grind, and there's a good chance that they'll go off you as quickly as they picked you off the heap. Having said that, I myself feel very excited by some of the poetry and (to a lesser extent) fiction I've been reading lately -- partially in pursuit of my gig as guest-editor of Landfall for issue 214.

The main instruction I was given was that this was not to be a "themed issue," but rather a gathering-up exercise for all the contributions which had piled up for one reason or another because they didn't really fit the specific rubrics of previous issues. Fair enough. We used to do the same thing with brief, only there the ratio of non-themed to themed issues was far higher -- less of a captive audience, I suppose.

But, do you know, I've ended up feeling very inspired by the whole experience! There are some really interesting writers out there. A lot of them, admittedly, I knew about already, but there were quite a few were new to me, too.

Anyway, I thought I might use this blog entry to reprint some relevant sections of my proposed editorial for the issue:

I’ve tried to read ... the – very many – contributions for this issue with as much objectivity as I could muster. Anything, in theory, was grist to my mill. In the end, though, I do have my own views. I have invited certain authors to contribute pieces who might otherwise not have thought to do so. I’ve also tried consciously to introduce new faces, which has led me, in some cases, to put in only one or two pieces each for poets (in particular) who would really merit a more comprehensive selection.

Do the results sound piecemeal, fragmented? Up to you to judge, but I feel that there’s a spirit in much of the writing I’ve encountered lately which does succeed in giving unity to this disparate-by-design assemblage of pieces.

Many of our younger writers wear emotional extremism as a kind of badge of honour. The best of them seem intensely aware of contemporary literary theory and linguistic philosophy – the heartbeat of postmodernism – but they’ve gone beyond it into a world of private concerns and fragilities.

Take Amy Brown (“Siamang”), for instance, who sees a captive monkey in a zoo as “tailor-made to comfort / someone as sorry as me.” It isn’t that she’s unaware that the monkey is suffering more than she is – it’s because of that he can serve as her ambiguous double.

Then there’s Thérèse Lloyd, whose Levin kids:

… drag race
their souped-up Ford Escorts
leaving thick black stripes
that come to abrupt endings.

Both Brown and Lloyd are recent graduates of Bill Manhire’s International Institute of Modern Letters Masters programme in Creative writing, but their work shows little of the ironic distance generally seen as characteristic of the Wellington school.

Actually I’d say that the strength of writing programmes such as Victoria's can be seen in the fact that these two writers, fresh from its workshops, do not sound at all homogenised or smoothed out – rather, individualised in a way which fits larger tendencies in New Zealand writing.

It’s easy to mock the desire of every editor to detect new trends and incipient literary movements. “Jack says that if you’re depressed, over-educated, self-absorbed, and anxious to go on about all three then you’re on the right path …” It’s not as simple as that.

My selections for this magazine may well have ended up privileging a personal impression of what is most pointed and relevant in contemporary writing. But some of the poems and stories included in this issue move me in quite a new way. I feel intensely curious to read what these new poets and fiction writers will produce next. If any of this excitement communicates itself to you, the whole venture has been worthwhile.

The interesting thing is that this editing job has turned into a kind of test-case for some of the sweeping generalisations I've made in my essay "Irony and After: New Bearings in NZ Poetry," which has just come out in Poetry New Zealand 35 (2007): 95-103.

The title is a reference to John Russell Taylor's classic Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama, published in the year of my birth, 1962 -- as well (of course) to F. R. Leavis's no-less-famous New Bearings in English Poetry (1932). I guess the point of that was to satirise a little this identification of new trends in everything. On the other hand, it's not worth going on about it if you don't believe it. So anyway, here goes:

Irony and After:
New Bearings in NZ Poetry

1 – The Anxiety of Influence

This is progress.
For instance, it is nearly dawn.
– Bill Manhire

For a long time now I’ve been wondering what the next big upheaval in New Zealand poetry was going to be.

The hero-saga of New Zealand poetry (in Allen Curnow’s version, at any rate) tells us that our first few derivative colonial bards (Thomas Bracken, Alfred Dobell, Edward Tregear) were succeeded by a group of pastoral Georgians, many of them women (Eileen Duggan, Jessie Mackay and – to a somewhat lesser degree – Ursula Bethell and Robin Hyde) who were in their turn displaced by hardheaded Modernists such as Curnow, A. R. D. Fairburn, Denis Glover and (of course) R. A. K. Mason.

This triumph of the sons over their predecessors fitted in very nicely with the theory of literary revolutions promulgated by the young Harold Bloom in his seminal critical text The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973). In the Oedipal drama described by Bloom, each poet’s relation to his predecessors became a source of acute anxiety. In short, poetry is one more manifestation of the Freudian family romance: sons plot to kill their father, the elder of the tribe, in order to monopolize the attentions of their mother, the Muse:

Every poem [says Bloom] is a misinterpretation of a parent poem. A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety. Poets' misinterpretations of poems are more drastic than critics' misinterpretations or criticism, but this is only a difference in degree and not at all in kind. There are no interpretations but only misinterpretations …

“A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety.” Note that last point as we begin to descend to cases. Let’s take, for example, the Bill Manhire poem “On Originality” (from his 1977 collection How to Take Your Clothes Off at the Picnic):

Poets, I want to follow them all,
out of the forest into the city
or out of the city into the forest.

The first one I throttle.
I remove his dagger
and tape it to my ankle in a shop doorway.
Then I step into the street
picking my nails.

Everything in these few lines is significant, is coded to make sense to other sufferers from this singular anxiety called influence (or “influenza,” as Bloom himself calls it: “an astral disease”). Our speaker wants to “follow” all poets, whether their genre be Virgilian pastoral (“out of the city into the forest”) or Juvenalian satire (“out of the forest into the city”). After killing the first of them, he steps “into the street / picking my nails” – a clear reference to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) where the ideal modern artist is described as “within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible … indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

A clear reference, that is, to those in the know – to other readers of the great Modernists, with Joyce as their ultimate avatar. There’s an ironic wink here over the heads of a less learned audience, distracted by the serial-killer details of Manhire’s sinister protagonist’s pilgrim’s progress.

I trail the next one into the country.
On the bank of a river I drill
a clean hole in his forehead.

Moved by poetry
I put his wallet in a plain envelope
and mail it to the widow.

“Moved by poetry …” To Manhire, like Bloom, the poet is a killer. His art can only flourish in the dead body of his predecessors (in this case, presumably, Curnow and the other New Zealand expressive regionalists: Baxter, Louis Johnson, Kendrick Smithyman). I don’t know if he had particular originals in mind for the three poets he throttles, knifes and shoots in the course of the poem, but it wouldn’t much matter even if he did. The greatness of Manhire’s poem resides in the simplicity and pain behind lines such as:

It is a difficult world.
Each word is another bruise.

Of course the poem is a gag. Bill Manhire isn’t really a killer. His “originality,” here, consists of mixing the high art form of lyric poetry with the pop culture tropes of the hardboiled thriller. To us, now, that might seem a postmodern cliché, but one can see the overwhelming effect it must have had on the hothouse rhetorical earnestness of his elders when Manhire’s work first began to appear in the seventies. This was a new voice and a new attitude. Bill Manhire was cool in a way that no previous New Zealand poet had ever been. It was as if John Coltrane had suddenly stood up and started to play hot licks at a hootenanny barn dance.

And so it began, the birth of the cool. The Oedipal drama had moved into another act, the new Miles Davis / Manhire had arisen to dispatch old Satchmo / Curnow.


2 – The Birth of Soul

I like typewriters because they are always turned on.
– Will Joy Christie

And yet, how tedious it has started to sound, this revolution of the ironic and knowing over the ponderous and crafted. Curnow came back with a vengeance, like a roaring lion, with his own version of the postmodern aesthetic (most notably in An Incorrigible Music (1979), but actually in the whole mass of his later work). After all, if cool, postmodern irony was the new ideal, how easy it was to produce!

It’s salutary, in this respect, to compare the crystalline reserve of early Manhire, a mask covering unspeakable depths, with the more facile playacting of James Brown’s “Loneliness” (from Favourite Monsters, 2002):

I was just sitting there, wandering lonely as a cloud, when
– honest to heaven – looking out of the window
I saw Elvis. I know I know, but honest to heaven
it was him – or my name’s not James Brown.

The Wordsworth reference segues easily into the Elvis / James Brown joke, and, yes, there’s still anguish there, but one can’t help feeling that it’s ever-so-slightly put on for the occasion. Whatever shock-value and impetus this poetic movement once possessed, it appears to have left the building. Which leaves us all sitting by the microphone waiting for the next big thing, the new Moloch before whom we can all prostrate ourselves. Is it Glenn Colquhoun? Bill Direen? Who will it be?

Meanwhile Harold Bloom himself had become unhappy with his old critical pontifications, and had written a preface to the 1997 reprint of his most famous book in which he lamented its failure to account for the protean genius of poetic shapeshifters such as Dante and Shakespeare …

And, really, it does seem very dated, this Freudian primal myth of emasculation and cannibalism performed by each new greedy generation on the last. It seems very male, among other things. Where are the daughters of the tribe in this scenario? When Michele Leggott revived the submerged voices of Bethell and Hyde in her 1994 text DIA, where was the anxiety? Was she trying to eat them, replace them? Was she Electra to Manhire and Wedde’s Oedipus?

Many questions, few answers.

*

What I’d like to do now is to recount my own poetic displacement myth, designed not so much to supplant the Colonialist / Modernist / Postmodernist map we’ve hitherto accepted as the true face of New Zealand poetic history, as to supplement and perhaps complicate it a little.

The recent Hollywood film Ray popularized the idea of the musical revolution accomplished by blind bluesman Ray Charles when he set out to combine the emotional intensity of Gospel with the sexual raunch of Honky-tonk. The Devil’s music had met up with the Lord’s, and the result was Soul – a new, overarching genre designation which continued to dominate successive generations of Funk, New Jack Swing and Hip-hop artists. Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Mary J. Blige and (yes) James Brown were all, according to this paradigm, soul artists, nourished by this strange fusion between the church and the dancehall. Pop and Jazz continued to flourish on either side of Soul, albeit with innumerable cross-overs and connections, but there was nevertheless a distinction which had to be felt rather than described. There was a reason why Whitney Houston was pop whereas her mother’s old friend Aretha Franklin had soul.

Is it impossibly pompous of me to claim that for some time now I’ve been observing the growth of a similar trend in the most distant provinces of New Zealand poetry, far from the corridors of cultural power?

So what are the characteristics of this new poetry? Who are its high priests and priestesses? To whom do they owe allegiance? These are complex questions, to which I have (as yet) only provisional answers. All I can say is that of late I’ve observed a strange metamorphosis taking place among the “despised students of the Humanities” (to quote from Troy Kennedy Martin’s classic 80s thriller, Edge of Darkness).

On the one hand we have a generation of graduate students trained in the austere uncertainties of deconstruction – bookworms to whom Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Žižek and Baudrillard are household names. This, I suppose, might be described as their gospel, their source of intellectual rigour and intensity.

On the other hand we have the emotional realities of being “doomed – bourgeois – in love” as Whit Stillman’s preppie comedy Metropolitan (1990) put it. Some of the writers I have in mind are a country mile from being bourgeois, but you get the general idea: no money, no prospect of making any, a crippling student debt, and far too much education for their own comfort.

Out of these two elements has come the most extraordinarily passionate and disturbing poetry of our time. Some of the these writers who’ve already published books – and whose work can therefore be conveniently accessed – include Olivia Macassey (Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Titus, 2006), Will Christie (Luce Cannon, Titus, 2007), Jen Crawford (Admissions, Five Islands Press, 2000), Thérèse Lloyd (many things happened, Pania, 2006) and Tracey Slaughter (Her Body Rises, Random House, 2005).

Among the men, I might mention Scott Hamilton (To the Moon, in Seven Easy Stages, Titus, 2007), and possibly that revered elder statesman Richard Taylor (Conversation with a Stone, Titus, 2007).

You mustn’t take my word for it (I wouldn’t want you to, in any case). Who, after all, is their Manhire, their Curnow? Do they gather under anyone’s umbrella? I think the whole point is that they don’t. There is no school. They’ve all come independently to the same conclusions: “My rigorous poststructuralist schooling tells me to distrust emotion and enthrone the intellect, to detect aporia [gaps] in all simple statements of feeling., and yet – I hurt. I hurt so much, I’ve been hurt so much that I have to cry about it. I crave the simplicity of childhood yet know that I can never go back to it. That was horrible, too, a lot of the time.”

In “Outhwaite Park,” for instance, Olivia Macassey invites:

… three tears
for the people we used to fuck
for backbones scraped on the washing machine
for the strangers who slept outside your bedroom door
and the schoolgirls and drag queens playing table tennis
and the cockroaches breeding in the microwave;
and the four am trains and six am busses,
mint icecreams, roofs of carparks, moulting hedgehogs
lit by the phonebox, the grass overrun by wirewoves
and rotting cardboard, my summer clothes, my love

But isn’t this just the same old Romantic cult of childhood all over again, you ask? Is this the revolution? “Token wonder girls and one trick ponies, and … wooden clothespegs made into hard unhappy dolls.” (Macassey, “Outer Suburb”) Not so. Let’s take another example, Scott Hamilton’s “1918,” a prose poem about the great influenza pandemic:

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

Scott’s a Marxist and (some would say) an ideologue. But in this case it has the effect of making him value individual experience of world-historical events above the facile paradoxes of postmodernism. His work reverses the cliché about R. A. K. Mason, that his conversion to the Left made it impossible for him to write more poetry. For Scott, it’s precisely Marxism that enables his poetry – a complex realm of abandoned loners and doomed explorers heading for the frontier. It’s as if he’s decided to show us once and for all that Auden’s Orators (1932) holds the seeds of a new poetic, rather than being the “fair notion fatally injured” its own author called it.


3 – The Law of Attraction

Maybe I have spent too much time these last 40 years thinking about Celan & translating his work, & maybe Celan's work has been too essential for my own writing for me to have a detached view on this, but the association of PC with Britney Spears makes me shudder...
– Pierre Joris

When I posted my poem-sequence “The Britney Suite” (first published in 2001) on The Imaginary Museum, my online blog, a couple of months ago, it was actually in response to a number of people who’d demanded to see it, presumably intrigued by the conceit of engineering a meeting between anguished concentration-camp-survivor poet Paul Celan and blonde pop goddess Britney Spears.

I was a little disconcerted to see that the point of this jarring juxtaposition escaped Pierre Joris. But I was far more surprised to see how many people rose to my defense. They could see what I was talking about. They understood the idea of trying to bridge the gaping abysses cutting across our culture.

Recently I watched a documentary called The Secret, which purported to offer the answer to all of life’s problems in the (so-called) “law of attraction.” The universe, claimed the various snake-oil salesmen and hokum-peddlers in this made-for-TV-but-gone-straight-to-DVD movie, will supply you with anything you call to yourself. If you expect a flat tyre and a bill in the letterbox, that’s what the universe will send you. In effect, anything you receive you’ve asked for in advance.

Of course this is a simplistic way to go about explaining the inconceivably complex gestalt of life, the universe, and everything, but it’s so dumb it’s almost wise. If only it could be so! “Thinking positive” and “having a good attitude” may be irritating clichés, but the placebo effect indubitably works sometimes. Your mental attitude does affect your physical health.

If this double-mindedness, this fusion of extreme intelligence and New Age moron-fodder repels you, you’ll probably be happier with a more comfortable range of poetry. If, however, your attraction to it is stronger than the repulsion, then you’re probably already of the Devil’s party without knowing it. In short, you have soul.

I’d like to finish by quoting from “The Uncanny Truth about Abelard,” (published in brief 25 (2002): 39-41), Olivia Macassey’s charting of the permeable membranes connecting her two worlds.

12:37 am on Oct. 4

“We deplore the disappearance of the real under the weight of too many images. But let’s not forget that the image disappears too because of reality”

– Jean Baudrillard c2000 (do you believe it? My lonely twin.)


9:16 pm on Nov. 16

for example I have no thought now of what you look like, except
that saints have your eyes. When they are dying.

Excisions. Elliptical scar around the nothing, and those dark thighs.
she could push her fingers in there, it is an eye
under the window, thinks a woman who thinks


1:23 am on Dec. 8

Yesterday I saw you (me) for the first time (for the hundredth time). You
told me that you have been reading those same letters etc; these coincidences no longer bother me. I can see where I have been thinking: my ghost on every page.

Already the quote marks are fading; they will be my things,
it will become my dream; you will afterwards believe – because you will only be me
You will no longer read me, it is beginning,
embraces me in the water, limping and howling,
follows me everywhere, saves for (me) the last card. I cover everything. I arrive.

Abelard had gotten it wrong – I was Abelard; I am him all along

all of the words will be mine.

Heloise, “a woman who thinks,” and Abelard, “my lonely twin” have been so chewed up, dispersed, mythologized and distanced by our histories that they’ve come to seem, finally, unapproachable. Macassey can see that, but she refuses to admit defeat. Her own levels of experience speak more strongly the more mediated they are by puppets and lonely quotes.

“Let’s not forget that the image disappears too because of reality …” Our nostalgia can be as much for the lost certainties of the intellect as for the simplicity of the unclouded heart.

Macassey’s poem, like so many others by the poets I’ve mentioned above, laments our incapacity to learn how to live in this strange dystopia we’ve built in the midst of plenty.

Can’t we all learn to get on? To understand each other? To stop being so goddamned horrible so much of the time? That is what the new poetry I’ve been seeing sprouting up, irrepressible, all around me, is about.

I’m afraid you didn’t realise what you were doing when you funded all those PhDs, imported those books of French theory, when you allowed those souls to grow up, angst-ridden and dispossessed, in the dark corners of your kingdom.

This is my nest of weapons.
This is my lyrical foliage.

So Bill Manhire, thirty years ago. I see no need to replay all those Bloomian fantasies of overthrowing the elders of the tribe, conducting a palace coup in the centre of culture. Can’t we embrace our elders instead of excommunicating them?

All the new poets want to do is to teach you how to feel again. However difficult that may be. If you don’t get it first time (thinking, perhaps, that you’re too smart), they’ll persevere. They’re patient. They’ve got soul.

Smarter than Jack

Well, I guess it's true: cheeky animals are smarter than Jack. It kind of goes without saying, really. But I'm not entirely sure that I welcome the advent of a whole series of books reinforcing the fact.

Basically it started out as a book of cute animal stories compiled by animal-lover Jenny Campbell, which enjoyed so much success that it's now spawned a whole slew of sequels: Cats are Smarter than Jack, Dogs are Smarter than Jack, Aardvarks and Crocodiles [for all I know] are Smarter than Jack ...

What I'm curious about, though, is: Who is this Jack? I mean, I've looked in vain through the publicity material accompanying the series for the least reference to the original Jack. Is it simply meant to be a generic masculine appellation: Jack & Jill, Jack the Giant-killer -- the ubiquitous hero of so many nursery rhymes and folktales? Or is he some actual person (or animal, for that matter? Probably not, given the fact that so many other animals have been proclaimed to be smarter than him).

One thing's for certain -- he's male, and he's constantly being outsmarted. Which brings me to the real subject of this post.


I was all set to go along to the beach to read out my poem from the volume above, Poetry Pudding, edited by Jenny Argante and published by Reed earlier this year. There was a big launch party planned on Long Bay beach, with kids and party games and (I hoped) parents waiting in the wings to control their unruly offspring.

All set to go -- but then I checked the time. Not Sunday afternoon, but Saturday afternoon, 28th July 2007. So I missed it. Animals really are smarter than Jack.

So I've decided that the least I can do is to repent in this public forum, remind you that it 's now on sale in bookshops (or, alternatively, from the Reed website here), and to reprint, as a kind of teaser, my own poem from the book. Sorry, Tania:

Noughts and Crosses

My name is …
John Carter, Warlord of Barsoom X
I live in …
The Fortress of Solitude X
My father is …
a barbarian chieftain from the Plains of Leng X
My mother is …
a slavegirl from the Mongolian steppes X
I have 100 sisters and no brothers
save for the heads impaled atop my tent X
This summer I …
set out to pillage all the known world X
It was …
very easy X
My teacher is …
a dog whose last words will be screams of pain X !!
My best friend is …
my mighty two-handed battle-axe X
My classmates are …
dust beneath my chariot-wheels X
I like to …
ride like the wind on my 8-legged steed Thorondor X
When I grow up I want to be …
a vengeful ghost X

0
12

This silly work is becoming increasingly typical of you, I’m afraid. You know you could do far better if you tried.

[Poetry Pudding, ed. Jenny Argante (Auckland: Reed, 2007) 28-29].

Metamorphoses IX (1994): Iolaus

… Making clear
that this was a one-time favor, she had been on the point of swearing
that never again would it happen that an old person be made
young again, but Themis, the Hours’ mother and Mistress
of Seasons and Years, prevented this ill-considered gesture.
And now we get Themis’ list of myths in which time stands still,
moves around, plays tricks. . . not stories but only allusions,
some of them clear, and others oblique or coy. Our attention
wanes, as the voice — of Themis? Ovid? — falters and drones.
Tired perhaps? We strain to follow its murmur and feel
frustration, even annoyance. Why has he thus betrayed us?
Is this a place he’d have fixed had the gods not sent him away
(or, to keep to the pattern, turned him from darling to exile,
the victim of Caesar Augustus’ whim)? But there is a way
to read this passage and turn time back. We are children again,
hide in the hall at the top of the stairs and strain to hear
the phrases that float up from our parents’ conversations.
Greedy for what we can catch, we hold our breath to listen
and to comprehend their words and the world’s unpleasant secrets
from which they have tried to protect us as long and as well as they could.
The question is one of trust, which Ovid invites or tests.
Have we learned in these pages to yield to his moods and moves, to read
with that mixture of love and awe we felt many years ago
in the upstairs hall? The subject, at any rate, is the business
of youth and age, how the gods can turn back the clocks—not often,
but every now and again. We get Amphiarius’ story,
and Callirhoë’s, who prayed that her young sons might be made
mature to avenge their father’s death. ...
… We’re back on track now. This story, a somewhat mannered performance,
is one of those nice rhetorical set pieces Ovid loved
to dazzle with. He could put his lawyer’s training to use
as he made up elaborate speeches for his characters to declaim.
We’re all ears now, or they are sharper for having been jangled
a while, as if, in a concert hall, a composer had scored
a tune-up, white noise to get us into the proper expectant
mood. There’s even a warning, a moral (not quite on target,
but, if it were, the story would be otiose and redundant).
Byblis, he says, is a warning that girls should be careful to keep
their passions in check and direct them only to lawful and licit
persons — and this is a rule it’s difficult not to agree with. ...

The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. David R. Slavitt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 183-85.

Well, that really is a rather remarkable passage to come across in the middle of a verse translation, isn't it? Fine if you call it a verse commentary or rewriting, sure - but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Slavitt is straining the boundaries of the genre here.

That's what Bernard Knox thinks, anyway. In an article in The New York Review of Books he remarks of this section of text:

Slavitt speaks eloquently in his introduction of the reader's (and the translator's) reaction to the poem as a "leap of sympathy, intuition, understanding, and, finally, collaboration." But this seems to go beyond collaboration; it is in fact editorial intervention, or perhaps intrusion would be a more accurate description.

Of course, it's true that Knox's article was written mainly to justify the appearance of yet another version of the Metamorphoses, this time by Charles Martin, and that Slavitt (along with Ted Hughes, the only other translation Knox considers) is really just being set up as a straw man against his pentameter-wielding hero. (In fact, Knox's article was reprinted as the introduction to the 2004 publication of Martin's translation.)

Is Slavitt justified in taking such liberties with the text? Who can say? My own feeling is that this is one of the more impressive passages in his book. I wish he'd done it a bit more often, to be perfectly honest. There's something daunting about endless ranks of advancing hexameters in any language, but especially in English, used as we are to the swift movement of the pentameter.

Contemporary NZ Poets by Theme

Come along with us, they say
There are one or two questions
We should like to ask you
– Bill Manhire, “The Old Man’s Example”

Here's a thematic breakdown of the 87 tracks in our Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance anthology (Auckland: AUP, 2007). The categories are pretty subjective, and could undoubtedly be improved on. Maybe that’s not such a bad starting point for discussion, though: what's the poem really about?

ADOLESCENCE & EDUCATION

Janet Charman: injection
David Eggleton: Teen Angel
Graham Lindsay: Playground

ANIMALS

Anne French: Trout
Sam Hunt: Hey, Minstrel
James Norcliffe: planchette
Peter Olds: Elephant
Bob Orr: Ballad of the Great South Rd

ELEGY

Murray Edmond: Voyager
Anne French: Uncle Ron’s last surprise
Roma Potiki: For Paiki
Ian Wedde: Earthly – Sonnets for Carlos 35

FLATTING

Geoff Cochrane: 1988
Peter Olds: Waking up in Phillip Street
Bob Orr: The X

FOOD

Paula Green: greek salad
Paula Green: oven baked salmon

FRIENDSHIP

Bernadette Hall: Amica
Sam Hunt: Rainbows and a Promise of Snow

HISTORY

Alan Brunton: from Waves
Geoff Cochrane: Atlantis
Bernadette Hall: Famine
Bill Sewell: Breaking the quiet
Bill Sewell: Jahrhundertwende
Apirana Taylor: Parihaka
Apirana Taylor: six million

LANGUAGE & WRITING

Graham Lindsay: Life in the Queen’s English
Bill Manhire: On Originality
Bill Manhire: Valedictory
Iain Sharp: Two Minute Poem
Ian Wedde: Barbary Coast

LANDSCAPE & LOCALITY

David Eggleton: Poem for the Unknown Tourist
Paula Green: Two Minutes Westward
Jan Kemp: Sailing boats
Graham Lindsay: Cloud silence
Bill Manhire: The Old Man’s Example
Bill Manhire: Visiting Mr Shackleton
Cilla McQueen: Living Here
Stephanie de Montalk: Northern Spring
James Norcliffe: at Franz Josef
Peter Olds: Doctors Rock
Bob Orr: A Country Shaped like a Butterfly’s Wing
Vivienne Plumb: The Vegan Bar and Gaming Lounge
Roma Potiki: Exploding Light
Bill Sewell: Riversdale

LIFE, THE UNIVERSE & EVERYTHING

Keri Hulme: from Fisher in an Autumn Tide
Bill Manhire: A Song about the Moon
Vivienne Plumb: The Tank
Ian Wedde: Earthly – Sonnets for Carlos 31

LOVE

Michele Leggott: cairo vessel
Jan Kemp: The sky’s enormous jug
Jan Kemp: ‘Love is a babe . . . ’

PAIN

Geoff Cochrane: Zigzags
Anne French: Acute
Roma Potiki: Riven

PARENTS & CHILDREN

Alan Brunton: The Man on Crazies Hill, 1 & 3
Janet Charman: cuckoo in the nest
Bernadette Hall: Party Tricks
Sam Hunt: My Father Scything
Sam Hunt: Plateau songs
Graham Lindsay: Chink
Bill Manhire: Miscarriage
Bob Orr: Eternity
Vivienne Plumb: A Letter from my Daughter

PEOPLE

Bernadette Hall: The Lay Sister
Stephanie de Montalk: Tree Marriage

POLITICS & POLEMICS

Fiona Farrell: Instructions for the consumption of your Humanitarian Food Package
Anne French: The new museology
Cilla McQueen: Fuse
Bill Sewell: Censorship
Apirana Taylor: Sad Joke on a Marae
Ian Wedde: Earthly – Sonnets for Carlos 32

RELATIONSHIPS & SEXUAL POLITICS

Alan Brunton: The Man on Crazies Hill, 2
Janet Charman: but she wanted one
Janet Charman: ‘they say that in paradise’
Fiona Farrell: Anne Brown’s Song
Sam Hunt: Bottle to Battle to Death
Jan Kemp: Against the softness of woman
Jan Kemp: Jousting
Bill Manhire: Domestic
Apirana Taylor: Hinemoa’s daughter

SPIRITUALITY

Paula Green: afternoon tea with Virginia Woolf
James Norcliffe: the visit of the dalai lama
Richard von Sturmer: Dreams

SUBURBIA

Janet Charman: ready steady
Geoff Cochrane: Spindrift Sunday

WORK

Janet Charman: from wake up to yourself
Iain Sharp: Amnesty Day

Contemporary NZ Poets by Region

Parts of the island are disappearing.
– Geoff Cochrane, “Atlantis”

Is it where you were born, where you were brought up, or where you live that defines you best as a person (or as a writer)? Bill Manhire was born in Invercargill, but is generally thought of as a Wellington poet; Janet Charman was born in Wellington but now lives and works in Auckland … I’ve been influenced more by where people were born than where they live now in compiling this list, but I have made some exceptions where the results seemed just too paradoxical.

So, anyway, here's my preliminary attempt at a regional breakdown of the 27 poets in our anthology, Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance (AUP, 2007):

Place -- Name -- Dates -- Pages in Contemporary NZ Poets

AUCKLAND & NORTHLAND

• Paula Green (b.1955) 115-18
educated at Auckland University, now lives on the West Coast.
• Sam Hunt (b.1946) 26-33
born in Castor Bay, but now lives north of Auckland.
• Richard von Sturmer (b.1957) 141-45
born in Devonport, lived abroad for more than a decade in the USA, and now lives in Remuera.

BLEINHELM & MARLBOROUGH

• Ian Wedde (b.1946) 46-52
born in Bleinhelm, travelled extensively as a child, but is now based in Wellington.

CHRISTCHURCH & CANTERBURY

• Alan Brunton (1946-2002) 17-25
born in Christchurch, educated in Auckland, but is most strongly associated with Island Bay in Wellington.
• Peter Olds (b.1944) 1-6
born in Christchurch, but is generally thought of as a Dunedin poet.

DUNEDIN & OTAGO

• David Eggleton (b.1952) 94-97
educated in Auckland, he is now based in Dunedin.
• Fiona Farrell (b.1947) 53-57
born in Oamaru, she is now based on Banks Peninsula.
• Bernadette Hall (b.1945) 7-11
born in Alexandra, Central Otago, she now lives in Christchurch.

GREECE

• Bill Sewell (1951-2003) 88-93
born in Athens, and brought up in parts of Southern Europe, he studied at Auckland, taught German in Dunedin, but then moved to Wellington.

GREYMOUTH & THE WEST COAST

• Keri Hulme (b.1947) 58-62
born in Christchurch, but is now based on the West Coast, at Okarito.
• James Norcliffe (b.1946) 42-45
born in Greymouth, but lives in Christchurch.

HAMILTON & WAIKATO

• Murray Edmond (b.1949) 63-68
born in Hamilton, now lives and works in Auckland.
• Jan Kemp (b.1949) 69-73
born in Hamilton, now lives between Torbay, on Auckland’s North Shore, and Frankfurt, Germany.
• Bob Orr (b.1949) 79-83
born on a farm in the Waikato, lives now in Auckland’s Point Chevalier.

INVERCARGILL & SOUTHLAND

• Bill Manhire (b.1946) 34-41
born in Invercargill, now lives and works in Wellington.

TARANAKI

• Michele Leggott (b.1956) 134-40
born in Stratford, she now lives in Devonport on Auckland’s North Shore.

UK

• Cilla McQueen (b.1949) 74-78
born in Birmingham, she now lives in Bluff, after many years living and working in Dunedin.
• Iain Sharp (b.1953) 104-07
born in Scotland, he now lives and works in Auckland.

WELLINGTON & THE HUTT VALLEY

• Janet Charman (b.1954) 108-14
born in the Hutt Valley, she now lives in Avondale, West Auckland.
• Geoff Cochrane (b.1951) 84-87
lives in Wellington’s Island Bay.
• Anne French (b.1956) 128-33
worked for many years in Auckland, but is now based in Wellington, where she grew up.
• Graham Lindsay (b.1952) 98-103
born in Wellington, he lived for many years in Dunedin, then Christchurch, and is now living in the UK.
• Stephanie de Montalk (b.1945) 12-16
based in Wellington.
• Vivienne Plumb (b.1955) 119-22
based in Wellington.
• Roma Potiki (b.1958)146-50
lives on the Kapiti Coast, outside Wellington.
• Apirana Taylor (b.1955) 123-27
lives on the Kapiti Coast outside Wellington.

Contemporary NZ Poets Teaching Notes

[cover image: Richard Killeen / Cover design: Christine Hansen]

Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance
Edited by Jack Ross & Jan Kemp
(Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2007)

So it appears that I'm down to give a public lecture (in the "Chancellor's Series," no less, alongside the likes of Nicky Hager and Cindy Kiro), on the subject of this series of anthologies: NZ Poets in Performance.

It's at 12 noon on Wednesday, August 1st, in the Study Centre Staff Lounge of Massey University, Albany. If you happen to be passing. Free entry -- free tea and coffee, too ...

That got me to thinking about the bunch of teaching notes I put up on this blog when AUP published Classic NZ Poets in Performance last year. I hope they’ve been handy to someone, at least. I haven't heard much about them either way. In any case, I thought I might continue the tradition and do the same thing for this sequel, Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance.

I guess the philosophy behind our selection of poems all along was to choose those which didn't require a great deal of background knowledge to like. We’ve tried to choose poems about very concrete, accessible topics, by poets who are used to reaching out to a general audience. That’s not to say that there aren’t subtleties and complexities in all three books (these two and the projected New NZ Poets, scheduled for publication next year), but the idea was never to compile an anthology purely for poetry-lovers -- though of course we hope they’re being catered for as well.

The plan, at least, was to try to put in something for everyone in the books, as I’ve attempted to demonstrate in the breakdown of poems by theme which follows this entry.

Once again, I know that some of the poems could be listed under more than one heading, but all I’m doing here is indicating what I think is the predominant subject-matter or thematic direction in each. If you don’t agree, that might be a good starting-point for discussion:

• ADOLESCENCE & EDUCATION
• ANIMALS
• ELEGY
• FLATTING
• FOOD
• FRIENDSHIP
• HISTORY
• LANDSCAPE & LOCALITY
• LANGUAGE & WRITING
• LIFE, THE UNIVERSE & EVERYTHING
• LOVE
• PAIN
• PARENTS & CHILDREN
• PEOPLE
• POLITICS & POLEMICS
• RELATIONSHIPS & SEXUAL POLITICS
• SPIRITUALITY
• SUBURBIA
• WORK

As with the Classic NZ Poets, our new book is arranged in chronological order of birthdates, beginning with Peter Olds in 1944 and ending with Roma Potiki in 1958. The preface to the book explains that:

This second volume, Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance, is our overview of the poetic generation which came to maturity in the 1960s and 1970s, that turbulent era of social, sexual, musical and artistic experimentation.

(Some might call them the baby-boomers, though I doubt it’s a term which appeals much to the people in question. )

Many of the poets in the book have associations with many different parts of New Zealand; others (such as Bob Orr or Keri Hulme) are very strongly identified with a particular region, and constantly revisit it as subject-matter in their work.

Here are some of the places on offer:

• AUCKLAND & NORTHLAND
• BLEINHELM & MARLBOROUGH
• CHRISTCHURCH & CANTERBURY
• DUNEDIN & OTAGO
• GREECE
• GREYMOUTH & THE WEST COAST
• HAMILTON & WAIKATO
• INVERCARGILL & SOUTHLAND
• TARANAKI
• UK
• WELLINGTON & THE HUTT VALLEY

Further information may be accessed at the following websites:

• Authors. The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre.
(A select but valuable list of major NZ poets with pictures, recordings, and critical reactions).

• Homepage. Auckland University Press.
(Details of books and other publications by a number of the authors in the anthology).

• New Zealand Literature File. University of Auckland Library Website.
(This has thorough – though not always entirely reliable – bibliographies for many major New Zealand writers).

• Twelve Taonga. The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre.
(A brief account of the creation of the 1974 and 2004 recorded poetry archives, which were the main source for this sereis of books).

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

Metamorphoses II (1993): The Crow

[The Metamorphoses of Ovid: A New Verse Translation by Allen Mandelbaum. San Diego: Harcourt, 1993. 60-61.]

"My father was a king, the famed Coroneus
of Phocis; and I was a lovely princess
with many suitors (do not laugh at this!).
My beauty was my ruin. For, in fact,
while I was walking on the shoreline sands,
as I still do, the sea-god saw me and
grew hot with love; his pleas and honeyed words
were useless; he made ready to use force.
He chased me; as I ran, I left behind
the hard-packed sands and staggered wearily
along the soft and yielding shore -- in vain;
then I invoked both gods and men. My voice
could reach no mortal. But, a virgin, I
did stir the virgin goddess with my plea.
And as I stretched my arms out toward the sky,
they started to grow darker, sprouting feathers.
I tried to free my shoulder, flinging off
my robe; but it, too, had become a cloak
of feathers, rooted deeply in my skin.
I tried to beat my bared breast with my hands:
but I, by now, had neither hands nor breast.
I ran, but now my feet no longer sank
into the sands; I skimmed along the ground,
then I flew off, on high, into the sky:
there I was taken by Minerva as
her stainless, blameless comrade.

But by now
to what does all my serving her amount?
I am supplanted by Nyctimene,
one who became an owl because of her
outrageous sin. Have you not heard men speak
of what is known to all of Lesbos -- how
Nyctimene defiled her father's bed?
And as a bird, yet conscious of her crime,
she flees men's eyes and flees the light: she hides
for shame among the shadows; she has been
cast out by all and exiled from the sky."

The crow is flying along with the raven, Phoebus Apollo's bird, who is anxious to tell his master about his mistress Coronis' adultery. They're gossiping to pass the time away. The number of stories within stories and stories melting into other stories at this point in Ovid's epic is literally beyond exact computation: speakers quoting speakers quoting speakers.

Two points might repay investigation here:

1/ Mandelbaum's translation, "fluid, readable, and accurate" according to his fans -- clunky and uninspired to his rivals, is justified by its author as follows:

... all that is here is not all that semes [sic]. Ovid's fictions form a bacchanalian narrative revel, in which each element may be drunk or delirious, but which -- in its endless deceptions -- provides truth. (Ovid read not only his Gorgias but his Hegel carefully.) [558]

I'm an ignorant man. I'll grant you that. But what precisely does that mean? I guess he intends to say that Ovid's as interested in the facts as he is in the delirious "revel" of language, but it still seems (or semes) an extraordinarily opaque way of putting it. Perhaps that's the point.

To me, I'm afraid, the translation seems a bit clunky: too many internal rhymes and limping pentameters: "on high, into the sky" ... or "And as I stretched my arms out toward the sky." It's a fantastically difficult and finicky task to convert so much verse into other verse, though, so I wouldn't want to overstress such deficiencies. The real worry is when Mandelbaum goes on to quote some verses of his own composition:

Ovidius-the-Garrulous,
The-Copious, the Ever-Swift,
Amir-Of-Metamorphosists,
and Sad-Seigneur-of-Scrutinists ...

"Prelude" to The Savantasse of Montparnasse (1988) [555]

Fucking hell! I thought that kind of thing went out with Lionel Johnson and the poetes maudits of the 1890s. It raises that old issue about whether indifferent poets can make good translators. To some extent, of course, this whole set of meditations on the Metamorphoses is designed to look at that question from a number of different angles.



2/ I guess, however, I mostly chose to reproduce the crow section of Ovid's epic because of my interest in Crow the trickster figure. Not just the one in Ted Hughes' book Crow (1970), nor even the version in The Crow (1994), that dodgy proto-Emo movie Bruce Lee's son Brandon got killed making, but (above all) that Anansi / Maui / Brer-Rabbit-like antihero of the Inuit and other northern cultures.

Crows are battlefield scavengers, cunning and resourceful rather than brave and forthright. The constellation "Corvus" is supposed to be named after one of Apollo's crows who decided to wait for some figs to ripen, rather than hastening back to his master with the water he was supposed to be collecting. He blamed his dilatoriness on a watersnake, but the god saw through the ruse at once.

One wonders if there's some connection here with Noah's raven, sent out from the ark to test the reappearance of dry land. The snake, too, seems to suggest certain Biblical parallels.

Montana Poetry Day (July 27)

Poetry Central
Montana Poetry Day

Friday 27 July, 6 pm

Auckland City Libraries
nzepc
& Auckland University Press

Present

The dual-launch of
Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance
edited by Jack Ross & Jan Kemp

The Pop-up Book of Invasions
by Fiona Farrell

& the nzepc 6th birthday celebrations

MC: Iain Sharp

Readings by Fiona Farrell, Jan Kemp, Michele Leggott, Jack Ross, Bob Orr, Janet Charman, Martin Edmond and others

+ the announcement of the winner of the

Great New Zealand Digipoem competition !

Be there for a good time ... Drinks and snacks will also be served.

Metamorphoses I (1997): Chaos

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
Corpora. Di, cœptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)
Adspirate meis: primaque ab origine mundi
Ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.
Ante mare et tellus, et, quod tegit omnia, cœlum,
Unus erat toto Naturæ vultus in orbe,
Quem dixere Chaos; rudis indigestaque moles,
Nec quicquam, nisi pondus iners, congestaque eodem
Non bene junctarum discordia semina rerum.
Nullus adhuc mundo præbebat lumina Titan:
Nec nova crescendo reparabat cornua Phœbe:
Nec circumfuso pendebat in aere tellus
Ponderibus librata suis: nec brachia longo
Margine terrarum porrexerat Amphitrite.

[Ovidius. Metamorphoseon, I: 1-14. In Gulielmus Sidney Walker, ed. Corpus Poetarum Latinorum, 1827 (Londini: Apud C. Knight, 1835) 325.]

These are the opening lines of Ovid's epic, taken from a bizarre old book I bought years ago in Edinburgh, which contains the complete works of all the principal Latin poets, printed in incredibly small type on an unwieldy mass of dogeared pages.

Saturn devouring his own children

Here's my attempt at a translation / transmutation, from a poem I wrote in the mid-90's called "Jack's Metamorphoses." The idea was supposed to be to construct a narrative out of bits of other texts, manipulated and retooled in the best postmodern manner. The pieces I chose included the Border Ballad "Thomas the Rhymer," Rilke's "Orpheus, Eurydike, Hermes" and three poems about Theseus and the Minotaur by Jorge Luis Borges, as well as this bit of Ovid.
It still seems like an interesting idea, though possibly carried out on too condensed a scale to do justice to all the meanings (personal and poetic) I wanted to code into it:

In new moves Jack’s muse mutated to tell forms
of bodies. Gods, starts (since by you changed, and others)
inspire me with: first & from birth of world
to my perpetual spin-out era song.

Before sea and earth, and, which covers all, Sky-tower,
united was all Nature’s face in sphere
called Chaos; raw & undigested mass
nor naught which wasn’t weight inert (Les Mills),
not well joined-up discordant seeds of things.
Nor as yet Auckland offered light the Titan,
nor new by growing swelled her horns Marina,
nor circum-harboured hung in air the earth
weight balanced by its: nor arms along long
stretch of shoreline edged out Rangitoto.

- "Jack's Metamorphoses"
[included in brief 15 (2000): 57-62 and brief 19 (2001): 70-79]

Kathy Acker (1948-1997)

The method of translation I was using echoed Kathy Acker's word-by-word transliterations of Sextus Propertius from her classic Blood and Guts in High School (1978):

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
In new moves Jack’s muse mutated to tell forms
Corpora. Di, cœptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)
of bodies. Gods, starts (since by you changed, and others)
Adspirate meis: primaque ab origine mundi
inspire me with: first & from birth of world
Ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.
to my perpetual spin-out era song …

For Rilke I used the aural, sound-for-sound techniques of Zukofsky's Catullus (1969), and for Borges the more traditional method of straightforward verse translation.

I've found these three approaches useful for teaching poetic translation workshops ever since. For more on that, see my entry on the Bluff O6 poetry festival from the earlier pages of this blog.