Showing posts with label Landfall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Landfall. Show all posts

Friday, April 01, 2011

Reviews of Alt


Lisa Samuels
[photograph: Tim Page]

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


briefers
[photograph: Michael Arnold]

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

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

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

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

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


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

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Landfall in the news



So it's official. Landfall 214 is in the Weekend Herald's list of 88 "Christmas Cracker" must-reads for the holiday season.

But just a second, if it's so thoroughly "creepy" and disturbing ("like reading a crime report in the paper"), what exactly is the attraction? There isn't one, it appears:

None of that this Christmas (or any time of year).

The amusing thing is that the assembled ranks of the Herald's book-reviewing team have found something nice to say about every other single book in the entire list! (Check it out for yourself if you don't believe me: Canvas, 8/12/07, pp. 12-20).

Even Kate's Klassics, despite Linda Herrick's hatred for "that double 'K'", gets a cautious thumbs-up: "Kate Camp's engagement with 10 literary classics will hopefully lead you to read them yourself." No! You don't say! You mean, I too could read these classics, with the astute guidance of Kate Camp? It's too much -- I can't believe it ...

Well, no, I guess it was a bit too good to be true, but even if you just read Kate rather than Homer, Tolstoy, Austen et al., "it's added something substantial to your knowledge and enjoyment."

I mean, fine - setting aside the heavy sarcasm, I do realise that it's the goddamned NZ Herald we're talking here. It's no revelation that it's a bit on the anti-intellectual side. "This must mean you're the best poet in New Zealand?", as Michele Hewitson guilelessly asks Michele Leggott in the laureate interview on the back page ...

But honestly, do we all have to take a vow of brain-death for the whole of the holiday season? Not just then, the little thumbnail review implies: "any time of year." Correct me if I'm wrong, but the fact that Keith Westwater's chilling little "inter-generational abuse" poem reads "like a crime report in the paper" is surely a good thing, no?

Doesn't that mean that this kind of shit is continually going down in our fair land? And, yes, people do abandon their pets from time to time, too.

Forgive if I'm wrong, Linda, but if I actually cranked round to reading War and Peace and all the others, wouldn't I run into a few unfortunate events such as the Battle of Borodino and the retreat from Moscow? Wouldn't The Odyssey remind me of the sack of Troy and the massacre of the suitors? What about Heathcliff hanging a set of puppies in Wuthering Heights? Vanity and greed rear their ugly heads even in Jane Austen, for God's sake!

I don't know that I'll actually be dashing off to read what Kate Camp has to say about these "Klassics" (personally I kind of like the ridiculous Teutonic affectation of that initial "K" -- is The Trial in her line-up, too?), but I very much doubt that her main point is that a quick read of them will bolster up the smug stupidity of the New Zealand haute bourgeoisie. Good on her for trying to stir the pot a bit.

Shame on you, though, Linda, for being such a dolt. Whether it's a "klassic" or a contemporary, the purpose of literature is to harrow the heart and remind us what it is to be human. That's also, I thought, the function of any periodical, whether in the arts, politics, or any other field. If, on the other hand, we want to get lessons in how to be subhuman, we can always turn to that good old reliable New Zealand Herald.

Friday, August 10, 2007

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.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Nouvelle vague





Who is Wendy Nu?

Wendy Nu is a dreamgirl. Literally. She came to me in a dream, up near Spirits’ Bay.

Or rather, in the dream I heard other people talking about her – she never actually appeared.

That morning, when I woke up, I got two poems: not in my manner, I thought, but hers.

Later, I began to get some images of her: dark, perhaps Chinese? – serious, successful, driven – an artist drawn to extremities, and kitsch. Her obsession with pop-cult campiness (The Partridge Family, Peter Pan) is a bit out of my vein, though I can see where she’s coming from.

She came into this poem, jostling for space with Britney Spears.

Only Celan proved too tenacious to dislodge.



ISBNs should not be given to ephemeral printed materials such as diaries, theatre and concert programmes, prospectuses, etc.
– NZ Standard Book Numbering Agency Fact Sheet


Nouvelle vague





whenever &take spirite hottest
peep showeverywherebrothers and sisters
we the workersin townwe can
oobs buttsmeet ourand the poor
best friendwilld something
in betweennaturedestroy to
createnbelievabletake a
magic momentsgrip ofunlock the labs
steeringopen doorpeeps






Ah l’aThings are more alive than peoplel’Islam
rabesquesack rolling in frontn’est pas
le nuof trafficune religion
sans lasqueegee twirled aroundde doute
volupthe cassette that kept turningcomme la
till you’d had enoughnôtre

il y a
de la
certi
tude



[first published in Landfall 202 (2001): 111].