Murray Edmond & Sue Fitchett (2000)

Anna Jackson, ed.: JAAM 14 (November 2000)

Murray Edmond. Laminations. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000; Sue Fitchett & Jane Zusters. Charts & Soundings: some small navigation aids. New Zealand: Spiral, 1999.

Sue Fitchett & Jane Zusters: Charts & Soundings (1999)

Reading these two books together is fascinating. What the one lacks, the other seems to make up for. That’s more of a paradox than might appear, I hasten to add. Murray Edmond’s Laminations is, after all, a dazzling affair. There’s an immense amount to learn from his use of language, and ideas, and rhythm, and time, and all those other things that poets concern themselves – and us – with. Sue Fitchett’s and Janes Zusters’ Charts & Soundings has simpler virtues. Its virtue is its simplicity, in fact. It’s a poetry of place, and love, and location (and no, I don’t mean the same thing by “place” and “location” …)

So what do the two books lack? I’d like to get any carping out of the way as quickly as possible, so let me illustrate by examining Edmond’s poem “Can That Mango”:

What do you require to renovate such a consummate liar?

A light foot, a stolen line, a competent singer,
and some place to sing withal

What’s that he says?

Kiss and ride, kiss and ride.

Where to?

Man, can that man go!

This is the seventh and final section of a poem which is, to put it mildly, a little difficult to fathom. There appears to be a dialogue going on in the first part:

‘The fall of a sparrow, the flight of a mango, each takes place
beneath the angel wings of our providence –’

‘I prefer the formal approach:
first write your title and your epigraph, then add the poem –’

There are indeed two epigraphs: one about lyre birds (“Not content with his own voice, the lyre bird soon launches into mimicry”), the other about liars (“I am a derivative poet” – Robert Duncan). Turning to the notes at the back for guidance – a fairly necessary procedure in reading Murray Edmond – we find the following deadpan explanation:

Two angels discuss a man and get him confused with a lyre bird.

Clear as mud. Of course, rereading the poem with this information in mind, one understands far better its punning inventiveness: “consummate liar”/ lyre; “can that man go!”/”the flight of a mango”/”Can that Mango”. One also gets some inkling of a possible subject: man’s mimicry – through language/plumage – of meaning, the bright squawk which conceals his lack of substance. “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen ?” [Who, if I shouted, would hear me among the angelic orders?]

Citing Rilke’s Duino Elegies – locus classicus for angel references – sounds warning bells, however. Is Edmond’s poem anything more than clever? I suppose what enables Rilke to get away with it is his compassion for the life and world around him: he invokes the angels; he doesn’t (and can’t) speak for them. Does Murray believe in angels? The colossal naïve effrontery of the question perhaps reveals to us a certain simplicity which has been banished from his poem. I don’t feel edified or harrowed by “Can that Mango,” though I’m certainly impressed by it. It’s a poem of dazzling surfaces, exclusionary angles (pun intended).

The book is, after all, called Laminations, and though it begins and ends with quotations from the Biblical Lamentations, there’s a sense in which it won’t surrender to raw feeling – it is (much of the time) plastic-coated, slick, slippery, hermetic, impenetrable …

What of Charts & Soundings, then? This sumptuously produced book of poems (by Sue Fitchett) and photographs (by Jane Zusters) has a charm which doesn’t have to work so hard to succeed. Zusters’ photographs of rooms, and houses, and faces, and women kissing each other or floating Ophelia-like in pools or rivers don’t need much commentary, and what editorialising there is – faces projected on big soulless buildings, etc. – is largely supererogatory. Similarly, Fitchett’s short poems of place – “Tiritiri Matangi,” for instance – give a precise sense not just of her own island but of the tides of life in general:

each dusk
as we draw curtains
come in cold
unbalanced by
winter’s dark ferry

But – “Everybody’s got a great big but,” as Pee-Wee Herman once observed – just over the page from “Tiritiri” we have the poem, “Mapping the Waitemata …” In the progression of de-Frenchification of island names from Noisettes to Noisies to Noises, Fitchett sees:

MururoaM ruroaMoruroahere’s hoping

Sermonising in verse is generally a mistake, I think, particularly if it concerns someone else’s experience rather than one’s own. Poetically, it tempts one to recycle shop-worn clichés rather than “making it new” (to recycle a shop-worn cliché). I’ve got nothing against engaged poetry as such, but you need at least an admixture of Swiftian passionate indignation to carry it off. “No Ordinary Sun” takes the subject of nuclear devastation seriously enough to succeed, but I don’t believe much is added by this kind of Masonic handshake of a poem (Are you right on? Do you have the right views about …? In other words, are you one of us?). There’s a bit too much of that in here: ritual invocations of Rwanda, Auschwitz … remote sites of suffering which should transcend casual mention.

In short, I’m fascinated by the glimpses of Waiheke island life, by the “queer face[s]” we’re shown, by the loving care that’s gone into making this volume so lively to read and leaf through. It’s a very accessible book, a glittering bauble which demands to be picked up. There is, however, a certain straining for effect at times which seems unnecessary. Fitchett’s poems (“New Angles”, “the thin men”) sprawl across immense white spaces to make very simple points. Zuster’s photographs juxtapose bodies and cityscapes to little discernible effect. Pictures like the cover photo (Amanda Rees – Wellington, 1971), and poems like “The Spirit of the Place” or “1981” make up for a lot, though. It would be pointless to claim it as a flawless book, but it’s undoubtedly a living one. Both artists have an engaging openness about where they’re coming from: psychic space and physical location.

The dominant feeling in Laminations is, by contrast, nostalgia. At its best, in poems like the “Rant for Mickey Joe” which opens the book, or the “Starfish Streets” which closes it, Edmond achieves a remarkable fusion between history, living experience, and its written overlay.

The first pleased me particularly for extra-textual reasons. To parody the wicked excesses of modern poetry, my father once composed a short verse which read:

A seagull
flies over the Savage Memorial.

It was therefore with a certain thrill of recognition that I saw the lines:

an arbitrary seagull dips east
into the bleating wind watched by the eye
of the savage sea …

(Nice pun there on Michael Joseph Savage). The interesting thing is that Edmond’s poem can survive the competition. I can never avoid feeling a certain reverent hush when I stand in front of that strange, truncated obelisk – “There is no fame to rise above the crowning honour of a people’s love” – but at first I felt that “Rant for Mickey Joe” was striving too much first to undercut (“Up here on Boot Hill”) and then to overlay (“as it did when Keir from Grafton laid concrete / blocks by day & ran The Fat Landlady / for those with minds that could not sleep at night / up in Symonds St 25 years ago”) the simplicity of the scene. The more I read it, though, the more of a muchness it seems:

Old mate, the kiss of talk awakes desire.
Supernumerous reasons swarm
to pull it down, stone by stone,
& begin again. Begin. Again.

There is something grand – and silly – and important about Bastion Point, and Edmond lends it the resonance of Yeats’s “Easter 1916.”

Other poems clamour to be discussed: the delightfully teasing “Curiosity of the First Water” (“You don’t call them shags. I do. You call them / cormorants”) – the double meaning of the word “shag” exploited here perhaps definitively; “Home Coming” – his elegy/tribute to the late great Kendrick Smithyman; the tender “Small Fry” or “Step and Wave”; but “Starfish Streets,” that extraordinary end-piece, must occupy most of my remaining space.

Here poem and notes complement each other perfectly. The latter tell us of a condition called “‘dissociative fugue’ in which the afflicted person will walk and talk in a state of amnesia,” but we have already guessed as much from the former: its weird dissolves from Rimbaud to Roebling to Artaud to Desnos are a thumbnail sketch of our poetic century:

death of the father by poisoned foot
death of the modernist by stepping into space

from Symbolism to Naturalism to Surrealism to … Totalitarianism. Here history is a nightmare from which we are very far from awaking. This is poetry on the grand scale, a poetry worthy of those bleak litanies, “Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Flossenburg / … after the film crew had left in August, the transports began again.”

To sum up, then. The sheer intelligence and skill of Murray Edmond’s book is beyond question, but its cleverness seems, at times, a little overdone. I don’t mean that in the usual way of defeating lazy readers – who cares about them – but more in the sense of a deliberate policy of exclusion. It is as if the writer were himself in some Steiner-esque crisis of language and silence. In “Starfish Streets,” this condition is dramatised and made alive, but it’s a dizzying altitude to inhabit.

One dreams of a book that could be as homely and sweet as Fitchett and Zusters’ and as grand as Murray Edmond’s at the same time. For the moment, I’ll settle for both.

Murray Edmond: Laminations (2000)

(28/5/2000)

JAAM 14 (2000): 99-103.

[1613 wds]


JAAM 14 (2000)


•

An Inside Narrative (2000)

John Geraets, ed.: Ab.ww/Loney 17 (September 2000)

An Inside Narrative

Alan Loney


The Languages of the Body
by Kathy Acker

1. The Languages of flux. Of uncertainty in which the ‘I’ (eye) constantly changes. For the self is “an indefinite series of identities and transformations.”
2. The languages of wonder, not of judgment. The eye (I) is continuously seeing new phenomena, for, like sailors, we travel through the world, through our selves, through worlds.
3. Languages which contradict themselves.
4. The languages of this material body: laughter, silence, screaming.
5. Scatology. That laughter.
6. The languages of play: poetry. Pier Paolo Pasolini decided to write in the Friulian dialect as “a mystic act of love . . . the central idea . . . was . . . (that) of the language of poetry as an absolute language.”
7. Language that announces itself as insufficient.
8. Above all the languages of intensity. Since the body’s, our, end isn’t transcendence but excrement, the life of the body exists as pure intensity. The sexual and emotive languages.
9. The only religions are scatology and intensity.
10. Language that forgets itself. For if we knew that chance governs us and this world, that would be absolute knowledge.

Then forget all of this. In the modes of silence: secrets, autism, forgettings, disavowals, even death. …

– “Critical Languages” (Bodies, 91-92).

Kathy makes two vital points in the preface to Bodies of Work (viii-ix):

• “to write down what one thinks one knows destroys possibilities for joy”
• “the mind is so powerful that what is thought comes to pass”

Her prescriptions for a new language for Art Criticism (listed above) attempt to sidestep these dangers – the perils of usurping Pluto (or Minos, judge of the underworld).

I can’t embody Alan’s poems by writing about them – they are, in their own right, and the only way to sidestep that would be to quote them, entire, on my allotted pages. I can make remarks about them, though, as if to a friend (an interlocutor would be someone who had already read them before the conversation began). I can describe them – for what that’s worth – and make certain speculations about them and their author. I postulate a working out of the myth of Orpheus in certain aspects of these three poems, but I won’t pretend that these are necessarily their author’s thoughts … nor especially mine. Rather, they’re a dramatic frame which allows us, as spectators, to participate in the (inevitable) psychomachia of all artists’ relation to their art.

•

An Inside Narrative:
Recent Works by Alan Loney

Over and over again, in our false acts of absolute judgment and criticism, we deny the realm of death. For its perverse head, Pluto, informs us that we cannot be authorities, that we will never know.

– Kathy Acker, “Critical Languages” (Bodies, 89)

The recent works are:

• Catalogue. California: Meow Press, 2000. (completed 10 Jan 98) [C: pp.1-27]
• Mondrian’s Flowers (written mostly 1996-97, revision completed 19/4/99) [MF: pp.1-25]
• Melbourne Journal (October 1998 – May 1999) [MJ: pp.1-44]

Before I talk about them, though, I need to establish some critical tools. Who am I to judge, for a start, and how do I propose to do so? (A warning from Kathy should always be taken seriously).

I begin, then, with two quotations:

Half a dozen of the hundreds of obscure poems he’d written had been published in obscure literary magazines subsidised by the arts grants, so he called himself a poet.

– Barry Crump, “Intellectual Bastard” (58)

That could be called an Outside View. Now for an Inside one:

… Sue tried to keep up her bright, nurse-like tone. ‘Another over-simplifying question, I’m afraid, Mr Potter: why do you write poetry?’
‘No, I think it really is a simple question. Or perhaps I just mean the answer I personally would give’s quite simple. I write poetry to be able to go on living at all. Well, not quite at all, but to function as a human being. ... When I was working in that timber yard, my life started being a burden to me. Not just the life in the yard, but the whole of my life. … Then, after about a month, some words came into my mind and straight away I felt a little better. I forget what they were, but they brought more words with them and they made me feel a little better still. By the time the words stopped coming I felt at peace. I wrote them down on the back of a delivery note – I do remember that – and it was only then I woke up to the fact that what I’d done was write a poem. The moment I’d finished writing the words down I started feeling bad again. Not as bad as just before the words started coming, but still bad. The next day I felt a little worse, and the day after that worse again, and so on for another three or four weeks until another lot of words started turning up. It’s been like that ever since.’

– Kingsley Amis, “Dear Illusion” (137)

•

The poem Catalogue is 27 pages long. Each page has 27 lines. It begins with an epigraph by A. N. Whitehead: “There are twenty seven categories of explanation.” The right-hand pages, Alan Loney tells us in his preface, have been extracted “verbatim” from An Illustrated Catalogue of Old and Rare Books (1902); the left-hand pages give an account of a bush-walk. The cover shows two branches: the bottom bare, the top – from Geofroy Tory’s Champ Fleury (1529) – leaved with the letters of the alphabet. The syntax of the last line of each page tends to match up (more or less) with the beginning of the next.

Some things are apparent here. Alan is of the opinion that the catalogue from which he has extracted half of his poem “can be read, if one wishes, as a condensed history of the intellectual and political life of the so-called civilisation of the western world” – that is, if one wishes to see that history as a tangle of discrete and unmotivated words and sentences:

An enquiry
into the electricity of bodies,
emblems of love, ethnick tales,
divine inspiration or diabolical possession,
a new dictionary of love
and a sure guide to hell.

In sum, “An erotic / fairy story, handled in detail / by the bearers of walking sticks / & umbrellas.” [C: 13]

The other half parallels this forest of language with that vegetable creation, the New Zealand bush – also, perversely, a world of:

… words,
they’re scattered all over the wooden seat
there: bone, east, pain, blood, panik, skin,
suck, pass, want, broken, time –
almost
anything you need, with phone numbers [C: 8]

It’s a very formally constructed (constricted?) poem. Does this mean it’s about imposing order on disorder? It seems more the other way round – breaking down the codes of discourse which allow these books to “make sense” on their own ground in order to show their kinship with rioting, sullied, unclean nature …

•

Perhaps both of these are really Outside Views: Crump frankly despises the idea that a “poet” can be anyone who’s racked up the requisite number of journal publications, and the point of Amis’s story seems to be that Potter is, in fact, a fraud – not the great writer he’s touted to be. Sue, whom he asks to resolve the question, decides that his “occupational therapy” model is in fact the correct one, and that Keats, Milton and Hopkins, his alleged peers, are poets in quite a different sense:

‘… it’s all rather like that business they call occupational therapy, where people weave carpets to take their mind off themselves and their problems. The point there is that it doesn’t make any difference to anybody whether the carpets are any good or not. I’ve been wondering for over thirty years, on and off, if it’s the same with my poems.’ (Amis, 138).

Perhaps the reason Potter is no poet is because he’s prepared to be judged by Sue, to set her up as his own personal King Minos. Then again, perhaps that’s what tells us he is a poet – perpetual dissatisfaction with your own work, your own methods, your own claims to fame, might be the mark of the beast:

Once upon a time there was a writer; his name was Orpheus. He was and is the only writer in the world because every author is Orpheus. He was searching for love. (Acker, Bodies, 62)

“Do you fuck?” Potter asks Sue, shortly before the conversation quoted above. “Yes, but only my husband,” she replies, “with some approximation to the truth.” (Amis, 135).

“… it is hard to think clearly about emotional matters when the writer in one takes over at the drop of the first word” says Alan in his Melbourne Journal [39]. Potter would certainly love to fuck Sue, but killing himself to impress her is almost as good. ‘Bad poets mind about poetry just as much as good poets. At least as much” (Amis, 160), is how she interprets this, but I fear the merit or lack of it in his work is a little beside the point at that stage.

Is Alan Loney a “good poet”? The Outside View would say so – publications, prizes, fellowships and all the usual criteria. Is he a true poet? We could turn a Crump-like eye upon him and question certain austerities, distances, reticences – is he close enough to the people? Broad enough in his appeal? Well, who the fuck knows? That’s not for me – or anyone (minus Minos) – to say.

The Inside View seems the only one left worth pursuing, then; the only alternative to simply alternating quotations with occasional bursts of close reading.

The myth of Orpheus, Kathy’s “only writer in the world”, has three essential elements:

•

In a futurist manifesto the proclamation of hatred of woman (the feminine) is entirely justified. It is the Woman in Man that is the direct cause of the dominance of the tragic in art.

– Mondrian, Neo-Plasticism [1920] (Elgar, 122)

Mondrian’s flowers is in three parts. The first, “Lozenge” [MF: 1-7], is dedicated to the Christchurch poet Mary Ursula Bethell (1874-1945), and contains six poems lineated as prose:

• From a garden in the antipodes rearranges and interweaves phrases from Bethell’s book of that title (a key to the other poems?)
• An old song restrung keeps up the same tone of kunstprosa: “Amid the slaughter, marginalia & textual drift, he compiles what more than a dictionary of human movement”
• A few definitions: “Do I merely use the past for stuffing cushions …”
• From our correspondent introduces us again to Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), the addressee of Loney’s award-winning dear Mondrian (1976).
• The nothing poem makes something of nothing, because, after all, “nothing’s the matter.”
• Toward a true vision of reality speaks through the autobiographical eye of Mondrian.

The second section, “Flowery Trellis” [MF: 8-19], consists of eleven poems, averaging thirty lines each: “paintings of / paintings, temporizing / the template” [10]. They are all about Mondrian, whom the poet quotes, discusses, debates with, and finally addresses directly:

Pieter How are you? Are you healthy?
Longing to hear from you. We are well.
Are you still painting? [19]

The third, “Blue Dahlia” [MF: 20-25] (a reference to Raymond Chandler’s 1946 film noir classic?) groups four poems of varying shapes and sizes, each with the title of a picture:

• Landscape by Moonlight [1907-8?] from Mondrian’s Naturalist phase – clipped, gnomic, end-stopped phrases: “By minute’s echo, in quarto overtures, proofed.”
• Blue Facade [ 1913-14?] from his Cubist phase. The lines are now clauses, for the most part: “Classification exudes exclusion” – a motto for the critic?
• Checkerboard with light colours [1919] early Neo-plasticist period. A fanatically detailed 60-line description of a series of flowers and stems, lineated as prose, but page-centred.
• Checkerboard with dark colours [1919] early Neo-plasticist period. “He cut the tree to make woodcuts glorifying the tree.”

Between 1922 and 1925 … Mondrian agreed, rather reluctantly, to paint flowers in water-colour. … Having to earn his living by doing work he disapproved of must have made him hate all the flowers in creation. (Elgar, 160)

•

• “Apollo presented him with a lyre [liar], and the Muses taught him its use, so that he not only enchanted wild beasts, but made the trees and rocks move from their places to follow the sound of his music.” (Graves, 1: 111)


• He descended into hell to recover his wife Eurydice, stung by a serpent while fleeing from a rapist. After charming the king of the Underworld into letting her go, he broke the conditions of her release by turning too soon to see if she was following him, and thus lost her forever.


• Finally, he was killed by Maenads, whose wild cult of Dionysus he refused to honour. They dismembered him, and his head floated, still singing, down the river Hebrus to the sea (and thence to the island of Lesbos).

Power over natural things (animate and inanimate) is a part of the myth of the poet, then: power over death (though not, alas, over love); destruction – a welcome death? – through overreaching, scorning the greater powers of the god of misrule; lying, too.

“I am / probably the creepiest thing in here / this afternoon” says Alan Loney in Catalogue [12] – a statement which might repay a bit of unpacking. There is (of course) the pun on “creepers”; on being a creep (“voyeur!” [MJ: 20] – “Jeepers creepers, where d’you get those peepers?”, as the old song puts it). A creep is generally a loner, too: Alan / alone; Loney / lonely:

I wonder if I enjoy being alone, and more than I have ever admitted. I have spent so much time by myself in recent years that it must have answered some kind of need, or even preference [MJ: 33]

I hesitate to describe the city of Melbourne as the Underworld, but Alan’s journey thither certainly becomes the vehicle for some powerful mythologising in his Journal:

A story, say, of one who wished to die
and to do so by flying into a distance
and actually disappearing [MJ: 26]

The poem is dedicated to “Helena,” and contains oblique hints of a love affair. “[N]othing’s familiar. What shall I say / to her” [MJ: 1] could introduce Orpheus’s descent into the dark realms of the Mother as easily as Alan’s. (In Kathy’s version of the myth, Eurydice in the Underworld, she refers to the two principals as Or and You: the masculine pursuit of contraries (either/or), the feminine of identities (I/you)?)

•

my senses of being poetically marginalised are deeply engrained in my social marginalisation – how I have never been able to survive in any normal fashion, or be a full member of the social body, or even belonging to a group, even if that group was the avant garde in New Zealand poetry … [MJ: 39]

Melbourne Journal has 44 pages of text. Short poems alternate with notes and longer prose comments, mainly of a critical and autobiographical nature. In that it resembles Sidetracks (1998), but with less distance maintained between the author and his text – or his audience.

is it possible, that this place, not
‘the land of my birth’
is where I might truly
come to be

‘at home’ [MJ: 20]

Not that this is Mon Coeur mis à nu [My heart stripped bare], exactly. The inverted commas above would suffice to tell us that. “[T]he woman … tells me I have no accent”:

That’s it
then – unidentifiable by sound [MJ: 44]

The author, sitting in his Melbourne cafés, beaches, parks, taking notes, book in hand (“each day I come to Browns Café, at Albert Park, I look for a thin book to bring with me” [MJ: 12]) seems to court this anonymity, and at the same time resist it:

writing as a form or mode of waiting

waiting as a mode or form of writing

and this ‘free-floating anxiety’ – did it come
from the womb of a frightened mother [MJ: 5]

Because, after all, nobody is “unidentifiable by sound” – “Am I an artist, or is this a fantasy designed to cover for life-long socio-economic ineptitude?” [MJ: 44]. One is tempted to reply “both” to this rhetorical question. Both are true. They’re not mutually exclusive. There’s a lot of honesty and courage in this book, no more so than in its last words, echoing Schwarzenegger as firmly as Beckett: “I’ll be back” [MJ: 44].

•

What does the myth mean? Orpheus represents order. He is Mondrian: the divine sky myth of control. If we can just get the colours, lines and rectangles in the right order, then all will be well forevermore:

Here, a millimetre too little or too much, a duller red, a less intense blue; there, a side of a rectangle slightly shorter, an intersection of straight lines nearer to or farther from the edge of the canvas, and the entire work would begin to totter like badly-seated scaffolding. (Elgar, 133)

all my writing life I have regarded poetry as heightened language, in every way. I want the writing to be technically sound – no, better than that, I want it technically brilliant whatever one’s imperfections. [MJ: 2]

… Immortality, purity, perfection … But on the same page Alan admits:

I am losing weight [MJ: 2]

Disorder, pain, untidiness are the return of the repressed – the forces which tear Orpheus limb from limb: das Ewig-Weibliche [Eternal Feminine].

Email from Max Gimblett tells me I am obviously stripping to whatever is yet to become essential – just me & god is how he puts it [MJ: 40]

And again:

what will come of this pain. Maybe
one just has it, and then
one has something else. Yet

it seems I have always
had it. [MJ: 26]

And again:

I am writing a kind of swan-song [MJ: 40]

And finally:

… this from the proto-poet himself (whose lyre was passed on to Sappho) –
Orpheus:

… give me at once cold water
flowing forth from the Lake of Memory [MJ: 15]

•

True Boogie-Woogie I conceive as homogeneous in intention with mine in painting; destruction of melody which is the equivalent of destruction of natural appearance; and construction through the continuous opposition of pure means – dynamic rhythm. I think the destructive element is too much neglected in art.

– Piet Mondrian (Elgar, 138-39)

Works Cited:

• Acker, Kathy. Bodies of Work: Essays. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997.


• Acker, Kathy. Eurydice in the Underworld. London: Arcadia Books, 1997.


• Amis, Kingsley. Collected Short Stories. 1980. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.


• Bethell, Ursula. Collected Poems. Ed. Vincent O’Sullivan. 1985. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1997.


• Crump, Barry. Bastards I Have Met. Auckland: Beckett Publishing, 1986.


• Elgar, Frank. Mondrian. Trans. Thomas Walton. London: Thames and Hudson, 1968.


• Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. 2 vols. 1955. Rev. ed. 1960. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.


• Loney, Alan. Catalogue. California: Meow Press, 2000.


• Loney, Alan. dear Mondrian. Taylors Mistake: Hawk Press, 1976.


• Loney, Alan. Melbourne Journal [unpublished (1998-99)].


• Loney, Alan. Mondrian’s Flowers [unpublished (1996-97)].


• Loney, Alan. Sidetracks: Notebooks 1976-1991. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1998.

How little, finally, one makes, of everything
– Alan Loney [MJ: 11]

•

Because he liked garbage, he wrote poetry by picking phrases out of the cultural garbage cans – newspapers, sex mags, tv coverage, great poems, everything else – and stringing these phrasings together according to inaudible musical rhythms. … The poet didn’t notice much outside him and he didn’t have opinions.

– Kathy Acker, “Lust: A Sailor’s Slight Identity” (Eurydice, 62)

I love this description. It seems truly heroic – even better than Auden’s The poet is Mr. Everyman; he goes to work every day on the tram. “He didn’t have opinions.” How futile – how admirable – how beautiful …

I took the title for my essay from Melville – Billy Budd: An Inside Narrative. Billy (another sailor) is the dying god, the youthful scapegoat. Like Orpheus, he is sacrificed – we hope for the salvation of the people, but, in any case, as a result of challenging the gods with his beauty. Does the myth of the artist, then, come down to this desire to reconcile Eros and Thanatos / love and death; kinesis and stasis / motion and stillness; the fecund disorder of the vegetable creation with fixed forests of type (as in Catalogue)? Mondrian, the ultimate masculine artist, is anxious to fix, and thus reject, his own femininity:

It is the Woman in Man that is the direct cause of the dominance of the tragic in art. (Elgar, 122)

(His biographer explains that “By tragic he means impulse, romanticism, sentimentality, mannerism, baroque, everything, in short, that he detested.”). Hence Alan’s question in Mondrian’s flowers:

Was that all she was, a businessman’s
wife, the pair of you off
to Belgium [MF: 12]

Hence, too, his pairing of Mondrian with Ursula Bethell, the poet of gentle loves and gardens, the poet who wrote (after the death of her “close friend and companion” Effie Pollen) “Now I am a tree struck by lightning – dead. I can think things but not feel them.” (Bethell, xi & xxi).

The plainest working out of the myth is in Melbourne Journal: here everything is dualism: Masculine / feminine (“What shall I say / to her”); Artist / fantasist; Dark / light (“/ can you hear the quiet [/] / can you see the dark” [MJ: 3]); “the options – [/] win / win [/] lose / lose [/] win / lose [/] lose / win [/] no deal” [MJ: 5]

In the battle with Nature, we will always lose. The thing, as Alan reminds himself, is to do so gracefully, be content with “cold water / flowing forth from the Lake of Memory”.

(17/8-31/8/2000)

A Brief Description of the Whole World 17 (2000): 70-79.

[3619 wds]

Ab.ww/Loney 17 (2000)


•

Necessary Oppositions? (2000)

Alistair Paterson, ed.: Poetry NZ 21 (September 2000)

Necessary Oppositions?
Avant-garde vs. Traditional Poetry in NZ

Lesley Kaiser

Stone is
more stony
than it used
to be
[ABDOTWW 6 (1997): 9].

In context – A Brief Description of the Whole World, the avowedly “oppositional” literary journal founded by Alan Loney – these words occupy an entire page. They are attributed jointly to Lesley Kaiser / John Barnett, who, according to the Contributors’ notes, “live in Auckland and have worked together since 1991 … They exhibit at the Gregory Flint Gallery.” [ABDOTWW 1 (1995): 69]. But how are we to read them?

First of all, is it true? Is stone more stony than it used to be? Surely not. I would have thought that stone has always been as stony as it is now (at least since the earth cooled). What’s “stone,” though? Do our authors mean stone the substance; or our perception of it, coded into the word “stone”?

“What’s brown and sticky?” “A stick,” runs the old gag. That’s just a pun, you may say, but perhaps the purpose of puns is to point out possible areas of confusion within language. Coming back to Kaiser and Barnett, why is stone more stony? Why isn’t it less stony than it used to be? Perhaps both are equally true – or false. Perhaps the more you think about the word “stone,” the more “stony” it becomes. Does the opposite apply also? I wasn’t thinking about the subject at all until I encountered their pagework.

Their statement is, then, a kind of paradox, but not the logical conundrum kind [“All Cretans are liars, said Epimenides the Cretan”] dissected by Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica (1910-13). Those go round in circles to make us analyse the nature of knowledge. This, as I see it, is intended to make us question the nature of language. A quote from one of Loney’s editorials may illustrate what I mean:

I ever hope for words clear as these, on a sign on a lamp-post I saw last year – “Our cockatiel has flown away. We miss him” … a search for clarity among the literally unimaginable welter of words we live in, would be useful.

[ABDOTWW 1 (1995): 3].

Do Kaiser and Barnett have the same intention – clarity? Their statement is deliciously concise – but also teasing, as if questioning the basis of our reality. (They are, of course, also thinking of Shklovsky’s famous prescription for poetry: “making the stone stonier,” but if one disclosed that ironic act of homage first, any residual message might be muted).

My question, though, is does this kind of allegedly “thorny,” “academic,” “semiotic,” or “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E” writing occupy a significantly different space to so-called “mainstream” or “traditional” poetry?

Let’s go to some prominent spokespeople to find out.

In the introduction to his recent anthology New Zealand Writing: the NeXt Wave (1998), Mark Pirie claims that young people have been “discouraged…from reading, buying, and supporting poetry in this country” by “the often alienating and intellectually obscure high Modernist and postmodern poetry of C. K. Stead, Ian Wedde, Murray Edmond, Gregory O’Brien, Joanna Paul, Michele Leggott, Richard von Sturmer, John Newton, Leigh Davis, and Alan Brunton, and the semiotic and LANGUAGE poetry of Alan Loney, Paula Green, Roger Horrocks, and Wystan Curnow.” However, “youth culture icons and tele-photogenic poets such as Sam Hunt, Hone Tuwhare, James K. Baxter and David Eggleton” have, by contrast, “encouraged public interest in poetry and [enjoy] immense popularity among young readers and writers.”

Alan Loney, too, sees his own brand of poetry as more than just another “option on the menu:”

… there is only one Tradition, and everything whatsoever is in it, like it or not. But if everything is in this Tradition, what can being ‘marginal’ mean?
…. What is, for instance, ‘postmodern poetry’? By the mainstream it tends to be taken as a kind of ‘thing’, which one can have to deal with or not as one chooses. Postmodern poetry is then seen as a kind of poetry, a sort of style, as if it’s an option on the menu that we can click on or pass by, take it or leave it. But what if postmodernity is … the name of the condition in which we [as a culture] find ourselves?”

[ABDOTWW 8 (1997): 3-5].

It’s irritating (and probably falsifying) to have to rely on generalisations when characterising two schools or tendencies in poetry. “Those who specialise in generalist overviews that mention oppositional writing in passing lack the credibility that only published close readings can provide …” says Loney in ABDOTWW 4 (1996: 6), and I have to say I agree with him.

Nevertheless, it’s true to say that there is a kind of poetry which is uninterested in asking hard questions about the world – physical or intellectual – which it inhabits. In these poems (it’s not difficult to multiply examples) there is a world, it can include the quasi-autobiographical “I”, as well as cats, and vases, and lovers, and beloveds, and – while any or all of these details may be the purest fiction – they convey their freight of meaning by making reference to a cosmos where such things do make sense. These poems, then, are not about themselves (except in the narrow sense of making reference to their own process of composition), or language, but about a reality unproblematically external to their text. The world is the problem here, not world the word.

In philosophical terms – to borrow a distinction from Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (1987) – these poems may be interested in epistemology (“what is my place in the world I inhabit?”), but they take no account of ontology (“which of many possible worlds am I inhabiting at the moment?”).

Is ontology the answer, then? Will that suffice to make your poetry interesting? I fear not. When, above, I referred to Kaiser and Barnett’s page-work as “deliciously concise,” I must have betrayed the fact that my criteria for judgement of this or any other work are aesthetic, rather than intellectual. I may also like the messages I perceive in their text (and other texts in A Brief Description): existential doubt, a desire to call the boundaries of language and reality into question, but that wouldn’t keep me reading if I didn’t like what I read, if it didn’t (finally) amuse and delight me.

The same is true of poems in the more conventional (or epistemological) mode described above. They, too, rely on conciseness, precision, the unexpected, teasing detail – I may perceive in them a whole complex of imponderables which boil down, in the final analysis, to the somewhat limiting inquiry: “Don’t you, too, feel that …?” but their merit or lack of it cannot be decided simply in terms of what ideas they embody.

We come back to that question of Alan Loney’s:

what if postmodernity is … the name of the condition in which we [as a culture] find ourselves?”

If that is the case, then of course we must write and read accordingly – there must be a burning of the books, a purging of the unclean, referential. But can “postmodernity” be (in that phrase he attributes to the “art critic Lila Barrie … in The Listener some years ago”) the “name of the condition we as a culture find ourselves in?” The question begs the question, it seems to me. Q: “What is postmodernity?” A: “The name of the condition we find ourselves in.” Q: “What condition do we find ourselves in?” A: “Well, it’s a bit too complex to describe, so let’s call it postmodernity.” This kind of circular reasoning doesn’t get us very far.

It’s time for me to declare myself less equivocally. I agree with Pirie and Loney that one should put up or shut up: that is to say, a certain get real factor should enter any too protracted discussion of Art in the abstract. Sometimes “Who pays your salary?” is a more pertinent question than “What’s your dominant aesthetic theory?” Does your work has a social conscience? Can it be said to produce good effects? A smug, self-absorbed poetry bolsters up the status quo, just as hungry, obsessive writing cuts away at it. On the evidence, I would find it hard to say which of these two schools was more likely to produce such writing.

It’s perhaps too much to come to so bland a conclusion after all that: Each type of poetry has its own audience, its own possibilities for excellence … I should prefer to put it more combatively: if smugness is the crime, then outrage is the solution. It’s as well, though, to remember that (in certain contexts) Jane Austen can be more outrageous than William Burroughs. With this in mind, I reserve my right to scroll down the menu of poetry providers looking for something which transcends this, in the end, somewhat futile squabble. Other things matter more. You don’t need me to tell you what they are.

(22/9/99-3/4/2000)

Poetry NZ 21 (2000): 80-83.

[1290 wds]


Poetry NZ 21 (2000)


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Big Smoke (2000)

NZ Listener 175 (3146) (26/8-1/9/2000)

Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960-1975, edited by Alan Brunton, Murray Edmond, Michele Leggott. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000. [xii + 344 pp. ISBN: 1-86940-230-8. RRP $49.95]

Alan Brunton, Murray Edmond, Michele Leggott, ed.: Big Smoke (2000)

I wish I didn’t feel nagging reservations about this project. After all, if it’s the acid test of an anthology to tell you things you didn’t already know, Big Smoke is a winner. There’s nothing predictable about this line-up of poets – or poems. Murray Edmond explains the distinction in his introductory essay:

Big Smoke … is a collection of poems rather than poets. At least 29 of the poets here have never appeared in any other collection …

That’s quite a burden of novelty to put on any publication, but then, this is an ambitious book (two introductions, a detailed chronology, cartoons, drawings, manifestos – it’s more than one might have expected, though perhaps no more than the subject requires).

That subject is no less than New Zealand’s “decade of crisis” (as Alan Brunton calls the sixties in his own essay, “Restoring the Commune”). He defines its characteristic tone in terms of five crucial differences from a “deeply conformist and monocultural colonial society which had already created its poetry and its poetics, thank you.” (Edmond). They are, in order:

1. Race – “as misrepresentation, manipulation, and excuse”
2. Consciousness – “The normal state of mind was paranoia”
3. Sex – now achieving “autonomous status”
4. Politics – “the recognition that equilibrium was patriarchal, oppressive, and indifferent”
5. The Commune – “Beloved Community”

So far so good. Brunton’s analogies with the Paris Commune and the career of Rimbaud seem a compelling and original way to approach this sense of radical disjunction from a compromised past.

The real problem comes when we get to the poems themselves. Many of them are, I’m afraid, not all that good.

Take, for example, the poem “August 1974” by Nuru Jaya (presumably one of the 29 who have never appeared in any other collection – please bear in mind also that with so wide a choice, any singling out is bound to be invidious):

and in our sharing, we both know
who will drown, for you have
made me shiver into beingness –
impinging a thousand images of you upon me

That’s a nice sentiment, but rather underwritten, wouldn’t you say? “Beingness” strikes me as an unnecessary and infelicitous neologism, and “impinging a thousand images of you upon me” seems a remarkably round-about way to express that particular poetic cliché.

So what? So there are some undercooked poems in there – wasn’t the whole sixties thing about hanging loose? After all, as Edmond makes clear, part of the point of this book is to be the 1960 Curnow anthology’s evil twin: bigger, badder, and broader all round. Nuru Jaya is just one of many new voices unearthed from under the dead weight of patriarchy.

But many of the voices in this book are not new. We have Bill Manhire, we have Ian Wedde, we even have Hone Tuwhare (not to mention Edmond and Brunton themselves). And I don’t think that it’s just familiarity with their works that makes me say that their contributions are – for the most part – amazingly strong: sinewy, powerful poems which really do go a long way towards substantiating the grandiose claims made in those two prefaces (not to mention Michele Leggott’s rock-bio-intense chronology).

Who isn’t there is equally striking. When I think of the sixties in NZ poetry I tend to think of Baxter’s Jerusalem Sonnets (referred to here obliquely with the inclusion of Manhire and Brent Southgate’s “New Jerusalem Sonnets”), the first flowering of late Curnow, Smithyman’s self-reinvention as a Jamesian monologist. I have no trouble with leaving these mainstream voices out, but in that case why count Tuwhare in?

“Voices that first came to prominence in the sixties” answers that, I guess, and I do like the idea of not just confining oneself to the canon. Brunton and Edmond were, after all, there – and retain much street-cred as founding editors of The Word is Freed, not to mention continuously productive artists ever since.

Interestingly, the first thing I saw when I opened the book was the cartoon on the last page, depicting a schoolgirl called Judy discovering an old Freed in some landfill of the future: “Judy is going to make a discovery! Namely some poets about whom I’m very familiar in my capacity as university lecturer!” comments a tweedy old perv from a side panel.

This is fun, and succeeds in bringing back that romantic aura of witty freshness which must still hang around these faded magazines for those who were there. There’s an air of the campus rag about it, though – clever but immature: the kind of thing I used to admire so when I read Craccum as a beady-eyed youth.

Perhaps one could sum up by saying that’s the strength and weakness of this collection. It makes it possible to re-experience that Dylan mantra “the times they are a-changing;” but it also tries to perpetuate the myth that poetry can be made “by all not one.” There is a kind of poetry that can be made that way – it’s called living. However, Brunton, Edmond, and their peers are poets in a very different sense from, say, Nuru Jaya, and it’s disingenuous of them to pretend otherwise.

(11-12/7/2000)

NZ Listener 175 (3146) (26/8-1/9/2000): 40-41.

[877 wds]


NZ Listener 3146 (2000)


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Michele Leggott: As far as I can see (2000)

Mark Pirie, ed.: JAAM 13 (March 2000)

Michele Leggott. as far as I can see. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999.

Michele Leggott: As far as I can see (1999)

It’s always difficult to review books whose authors have undergone extraordinary or painful personal experiences. Wystan Curnow’s Cancer Diary springs to mind – or, going to a further extreme, the work of Paul Celan. I suppose, in the final analysis, it really highlights the dilemma of writing a review in the first place: the (inevitable) aching, raw, exposed nerves that characterise almost anyone who’s gone to that much trouble to communicate; the blasé indifference of the average reader. But a review is a reaction, really – description of a work, a reading in progress. The more magisterial it tries to sound, the less it does justice to the shifting moods and sensibilities which inform any reading of any book.

Michele Leggott is losing her “eyesight to the condition called retinitis pigmentosa,” she tells us on the back of this, her fourth book of poems, fourth in that stellar sequence running from Like This? (1988), through Swimmers, Dancers (1991), to DIA (1994). “Standard print is impossible, and I have found other ways to read.” On the personal level, the only possible reaction to this is sympathy: horror, too, at the prospect of losing one’s own access to the visual world. On the intellectual level, one wonders how the poet can deal with this in her work. Will her imagery shift from predominantly visual to tactile? Will memory take over where bibliography has left off?

The questions seem almost frivolous, but they have to be asked. I love Paul Celan, but the Nobel-Prize-winning Nellie Sachs, another concentration camp survivor, leaves me comparatively cold. Homer, Milton, Borges … and John Heath-Stubbs: there seem to be almost as many precedents for the sightless poet as there are ways of invoking the muse.

Do you see me? I am falling out of a blue sky where my days were as dancers in a maze, sure-footed and smiling. I stood in my garden pulling loquats off the tree and eating them to be full of spring.

These lines, from the sequence of prose-poems “A woman, a rose, and what has it do with her or they with one another?” are perhaps as good a place as any to start trying to read her new book. I say trying to read because I’m still not entirely sure how to read a Michele Leggott poem. To read these poems, at any rate. Nor have I found the other reviewers much help. Comments abut “exquisite sureness of touch” and “virtuoso command of language” may well be true, but they’re not really concrete enough to be useful.

Her phrasing fills me with questions. Why are dancers in a maze especially “sure-footed and smiling”? I suppose because they can see where they’re going (“Can you see me?”), so the cramped hedges don’t impede them. I don’t, myself, eat loquats to be “full of spring” – scrubby little yellow things. That reads like a cliché to me: imprecise and Tennysonian. I have to say, though , that those are the kinds of phrases the book is full of. They tumble out of the “book of tears”:

“the grasses of summer … together we make morning” (p.56)

“In their faces were our faces all dewy at the centre of the world.” (p.53)

“An afternoon flight. Hot rain. I spent months getting that right.” (p.54)

“All dewy”? It’s not so much Biblical – “the sons of the morning shouted together for joy” – as pseudo-Biblical: reminiscent of Thus Spake Zarathustra, or (more to the point) Robin Hyde’s pseudo-Nietzschean Book of Nadath. Why is “I spent months getting that right” in italics? Is it a quote (or “sampling”) from the Iris Wilkinson [Robin Hyde] papers at the University of Auckland (a procedure foreshadowed on her acknowledgements page)? DIA, too, was full of quotes, but more integrated into the texture of the poems. I take it, actually, that “I spent months getting it right” is a stepping outside the frame by the author, a way of getting us to look more closely at “An afternoon flight. Hot rain.” But it’s difficult to know.

So what? Do we have to know? This book of tears is undoubtedly full of things that are easy to understand (even in discussing it it’s notable how one’s critical vocabulary gravitates towards metaphors of sight: “vivid flashes” – “precise imagery” – “exact vision”):

At the ticket office my documentation was examined. Are you blind? The fuller’s boy asked. He was in charge of the fare. Yes I said I am. In the change was a small silver leaf.

This comes at the end of a long list of little-known constellations (Tucana, Vela, Volans) addressed to a “second person so recently singular”. Is this someone else who is bereaved, separated? Or is the poet simply speaking to herself? I worry, too, about that “fuller’s boy”. No doubt he was rude, insensitive, but he was hardly to know that he’d got it so terribly wrong. I feel a little sorry for him, despite the pain he undoubtedly caused. A terrible scene, but it’s described with such serenity, such poise. The silver leaf seems more personified, really.

Perhaps I’m making difficulties for myself where there are none, but I find myself curiously uninvolved in Leggott’s world of apples, beautiful children, boats, stars and sea. It seems, yes, imprecise and over-poetic. “The poet,” Hermann Broch tells us in The Death of Virgil, “is heeded only if he extols the world, never if he portrays it as it is.” I don’t really feel I meet many other people in there. The other characters are mostly reflections of some mood of the author’s (“second person so recently singular”). Sometimes there are word invocations which I recognise: “take me to the river” from a Talking Heads song, or “dance me to the end of love” from Leonard Cohen, but even then the point isn’t obvious to me.

“Much of what I have written here is an effort to remember seeing, something to put against the dark while I searched for other ways of understanding where it has put me,” she tells us, but the anguish of this experience seems masked, distant. That Fuller’s story has more the tone of anecdote than parable. Leggott, then, is no Borges the memorious, deep in the library of Babel, no Homer losing himself in gods and bright-greaved heroes, no Milton waiting in his armchair to be milked. Does she have to be? Of course not. She’s chosen to write this way for a reason – perhaps in order to sidestep the long twentieth century Modernist reaction to Romanticism. I can’t say for sure, but I think that Leggott is a natural Modernist (all those years spent poring over Zukofsky?) trying to construct a Romantic from within herself. Which is presumably where Ursula Bethell, Robin Hyde, and Mary Stanley come in – as important precedents.

Undoubtedly that’s an interesting project. But I’ll not resort to describing these as women’s poems, though they are obviously the poems of a woman. This heightened diction, combined with her usual formal complexity and inventiveness don’t really fit into any clear category of classification. She is aiming, I suspect, at no less than a new voice of feeling accessible to all.

I am a dream best left to the ache
and space of letters virtual
upon a screen

is how the first poem in the book begins. “Letters virtual” to me is like fingernails on a blackboard – that unidiomatic inversion of noun and adjective (“No poetic inversions!” thundered Ezra Pound in his famous letter to Harriet Monroe). What’s the point of a book, though, if it only tells you what you already know? Michele Leggott’s book challenges my notion of poetry to the limits – not by being hard but soft, not by being anguished but decorous.

That poem concludes:

yes wake

Perhaps this is our long-promised awakening. I would like to end more confidently, but questions remain. I feel a little distanced still, kept at arms-length; and yet there is so much here – sharpnesses of phrase, ingenuities of texture – that compels admiration. I’m afraid the reading has only begun.

(12/99)

JAAM 13 (2000): 158-60.

[1358 wds]


JAAM 13 (2000)


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Spin 36: Editorial (2000)

Jack Ross, ed.: Spin 36 (March 2000)

Editorial

Angela Carter

Although it does not have the word ‘fuck’ in it,
I hope you will find this poem
acceptable for inclusion in SPIN 36
– Contributor’s letter (10/11/99)

“Maybe it’s a haiku,” was my first thought. But no, there are eleven syllables in the first line, eight in the second, thirteen in the third, which makes thirty-two. A tanka, then? (No: 5 + 7 + 5 + 7 + 7 = 31.) But excessive formalism can be a mistake. Perhaps I should be scrutinising the content instead.

Well, yeah, I guess I have used the word “fuck” a few times in poems (poems included in Spin, too!) Certainly more often than, say, the word “miaow” – or, for that matter, “leafy.” But, you know, it does come up. In the circles I move in, at least. I’m sorry if that’s a shock.

Angela Carter put it rather amusingly in the preface to a collection entitled Expletives Deleted (1992):

I am known in my circle as notoriously foulmouthed … I blame my father … who bequeathed me bad language and a taste for print, so that his daughter, for the last fifteen-odd years, has been … conscientiously blue-pencilling out her first gut reactions – ‘bloody awful’, ‘fucking dire’ – in order to give a more balanced and objective overview.

In this case I must except my parents from any blame. Perhaps it’s my environment that was at fault. I am from Auckland, after all … Seriously, though, another subscriber (8/6/99) made the following complaint about Spin 33:

… your “from Evenings in the Blackout” is no different to the type of pornography that I read when I was a teenager. That kind of stuff was tremendously damaging to me as a person and warped my view of women ...

Sorry, I disagree. Obviously, or I wouldn’t have first written the poem, then printed it in the magazine. I think it revelatory of a real frame of mind, and therefore of potential value to readers. Not all readers, by any means, but some.

Nevertheless, I’m glad you wrote in and told me so. Other correspondents were very positive about the issue, but I don’t take such reactions lightly (despite the clowning above). I mean, bugger it, we’ve just had a nation-wide controversy about that word – do we have to worry about a few “fucks” here and there?

Basically, I’m still sticking by my rule of thumb from issue 33 [“If someone says: ‘That could never be a poem,’ that’s what your next poem should be”]. Some of the poems in this collection terrify me – Alice Hooton’s very grim “Angels are Weeping,” for example, or Raewyn Alexander’s walk on the wild side – but they were included because I thought them beautiful … in one or other sense of that word.

The idea of three issues of Spin, each with its own individual character, per year, has so far seemed to appeal to the people I’ve spoken to, but the nature of the magazine will remain the same: a publication devoted to good poetry in as inclusive a sense as possible. That means I have to respect the views of those who like traditional tropes and closures, and they in turn will have to put up with my own taste for dislocation and disorder.

As long as we accept that these are not frivolous choices but deeply held convictions, there seems no reason why we shouldn’t get on. As William Burroughs so sagely remarked:

Language is a virus from Outer Space

Unravel that, and all will become clear.

(10/11/99-9/2/2000)

Spin 36 (2000): 3-4.

[595 wds]

Spin 36 (2000)


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Here After: Living with Bereavement (2000)

Jack Ross, ed.: Spin 36 (March 2000)

Here After. Living with Bereavement: Personal Experiences and Poetry, edited by Stu Bagby. Antediluvian Press, 9 Daphne Harden Lane, Albany, Auckland, 2000. ISBN 0-473-06399-9. 104pp. $19.95.

Styu Bagby, ed.: Here After (2000)

This is an anthology of personal testimonies and poems about the experience of bereavement. Stu Bagby, a well-known poet who doubles as a cemetery assistant on Auckland’s North Shore, hopes (as he remarks in the preface) that it “will provide solace and encouragement to some, and confirm the validity of life being lived, and of lives now past.” There’s a certain amount of aesthetic distancing in some of the extracts: well-known pieces by Elizabeth Smither (“A Cortège of Daughters”), Vincent O’Sullivan (two poems from Brother Jonathan, Brother Kafka), and Lauris Edmond (herself now, alas, gone to the shades). Others are heartbreakingly – if at times clumsily – real. Like the bereavement column at the back of the newspaper, they exert a somehow extra-literary power. The justification for the book is primarily pragmatic, then. It aims to help out, as well as providing some appropriate texts for meditation or reading aloud. It fulfils both these purposes very well, though I have to confess that I found parts of it almost too painful to read.

(2/2000)

Spin 36 (2000): 60.

[197 wds]

Spin 36 (2000)


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Jeffrey Paparoa Holman: Flood Damage (2000)

Jack Ross, ed.: Spin 36 (March 2000)

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman. Flood Damage: Poems. Nga Kupu Press, 4/22 Alexandra Street, Otautahi (Christchurch) 8001, Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1998. ISBN 0-473-05225-3. 36 pp. $10.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman: Flood Damage (1998)

The cover image on this, Jeffrey Holman’s second book of poems (the first appeared in 1974) emphasises divisions. A group of people are standing on the end of a bridge, looking down at the raging flood waters which have demolished its central span. We are separated from them by time – the overcoats and hats seem to come from the fifties – but also by the camera angle. We stand on the other side of a gap, with the supports beneath our feet obscured.

… this was
once the Blackball Bridge. Was. Once. One full
Westerly too many, the Mother-to-end-all-floods …

The title poem reminds us “… this river’s a socialist: everybody gets / the same treatment. Ask for water, you / get water: death, death.”

Holman’s book, too, seems principally concerned with time, and division, and distance. The poems have been written in a number of different places, with many different personae, and lack any clear sense of unitary design. This is a strength when it results in the surreal, death-camp imagery of “moving house”:

we clung to the walls
of the greasy shaft
until we saw doors

into abandoned offices
where the last of the workers
were burning files

stripping wristwatches
from corpses

However, there are moments when the reader can feel a little bewildered by Holman’s multiplicity of masks (“Ontological Fish,” for example, does little more than reprise Rupert Brooke’s “Fish, fly-replete, in depths of June”; “On Walthamstow Marshes” could be a hundred other grim-faced visions of London; “The Coaster” is a ballad evocation to which we somehow lack a key).

Overall, though, the individual merits of many of the poems outweigh any lack of continuity in the collection. I would single out for special mention the precision of “Nowhere in the year of the Horse,” the floridness of “Rebuilding St George’s,” the solidity of “Inferno (Strongman Mine 1978):”

I was a man, my death not yet.

What links these poems above all is their author’s strong sense of social injustice. Some may fail as verbal artefacts, but they have much to teach us nevertheless.

(4/1999)

Spin 36 (2000): 60-61.

[369 wds]

Spin 36 (2000)


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Leicester Kyle: A Safe House for a Man (2000)

Jack Ross, ed.: Spin 36 (March 2000)

A Safe House for a Man, by Leicester Kyle, Millerton, c/o Postal Agency, Ngakawau, Buller, 88pp, January 2000.

Leicester Kyle: A Safe House for a Man (2000)

The familiar gets
Exceptional when you like it.

It’s difficult to be objective about your friends’ work. Or rather, it’s difficult to say exactly what one thinks about it without either hurting their feelings or being accused of running a mutual admiration society. Leicester Kyle and I are good friends, and I’ve praised his poetry in print in no uncertain terms (most notably, in Pander 6/7 (1999) 21-23).

Having made this preamble, I feel that A Safe House for a Man is his very best work to date. There’s nothing recondite or difficult about the diction of this long semi-narrative piece. The intricate processes of separation, self-analysis, and acknowledgement of loss are sorted through with beauty and precision. Everyday events recur at once casually and hauntingly in the patterning. This is, I feel, a wise poem, which might provide solace – or at least companionship – to many men in similar circumstances. I say “men” because part of the intention of the piece seems to be to providing ideological models for his own sex. This is not really to confine its intended readership, though. We all have certain experiences of loss in common, and how can one achieve empathy without understanding?

The long title poem is accompanied by two others: “The Araneidea” – a rather creepy account of how to “make good-looking, sightly cabinet objects” from live spiders – and “Threnos” – a moving elegy for the poet’s wife Miriel. They are thematically associated with the title piece, and flesh it out into a book which reminds us what this whole poetic enterprise is about – just how much can be achieved, here and now, by dedication and ingenuity.

(2/2000)

Spin 36 (2000): 62.
[Available at: Leicester Kyle: Index (2011)]

[291 wds]

Spin 36 (2000)


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When The Sea Goes Mad at Night (2000)

Jack Ross, ed.: Spin 36 (March 2000)

Theresia Liemlienio Marshall, ed. When The Sea Goes Mad at Night: Poems by Alison Denham, Robin McConnell, Theresia Liemlienio Marshall, Jade Reidy, Jack Ross & Apirana Taylor. Christian Gray New Zealand, PO Box 34293, Birkenhead, Auckland 1310, Aotearoa / New Zealand, 1999-2000. ISBN 0-473-06460-X. 122 pp.

Theresia Liemlienio Marshall, ed.: When The Sea Goes Mad at Night (1999-2000)

This anthology showcases poets who have been published by Theresia Marshall’s Pohutukawa Press, or its offshoot, Christian Gray New Zealand. “TPP,” Theresia explains, “provides space for Maori and South Pacific Islands authors. CGNZ is open to all writers.” In putting together this collection, she goes on to say, “I have had to sequence each cluster of contributions into significance (McConnell’s and Marshall’s); or discern for wider audience accessibility (Ross’s); or leave it in the order the poems first arrived (Denham’s, Reidy’s and Taylor’s).” As this preamble would suggest, there’s not a great deal of consistency in the styles or poetics presented here, but for anyone interested in the work of these individual poets, sufficient space has been given to each to put forward a substantial selection from their recent work. The production standards, as usual, are high.

(2/2000)

Spin 36 (2000): 63.

[183 wds]

Spin 36 (2000)


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