The Pretentious Poet #3: Cilla McQueen

New Zealand Gerald's third Pretentious Poet is Cilla McQueen, our second poet laureate (2009-2011). A three-time winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry and recipient of just about every other NZ poetry award going, McQueen's achievement is extraordinary for all the wrong reasons. Her writing displays no discernible awareness of how poetry differs from prose. To mask this fundamental ignorance, McQueen writes "poems" that are described by critics as "elusive of definition" (read: lazily formless) and as exploring "a space between prose and poetry".

The extent to which McQueen has managed to pull the wool over the eyes of the NZ Poetry Establishment is best evidenced by the fact that she brazenly describes one of her writing projects as poet laureate as a novella, which is of course a prose narrative. Called Serial and divided into eight chapters of a few hundred prosaic words each, its word count is barely that of the average short story. To disguise this, McQueen peppers the narrative with well over a hundred photographs she creatively found in the National Library of New Zealand archives.

So in McQueen we have a poet who refuses to do the hard work that every poet of substance knows they must do in order to discover what poetry is and then create it. There is of course nothing wrong with writing that inhabits no fixed genre, but when something like Serial is deemed "poetry" in the sense of a work produced by a poet who has been honoured as the country's poet laureate, there is something very wrong indeed. Postmodernism and its attendant academic laziness have created a situation where the Poetry Establishment no longer knows or even cares what poetry is. Hence the super-saturated irony of the recent establishment of the position of New Zealand Poet Laureate. Going by McQueen's Serial, which she calls a novella and is barely as long as a short story, the position should be renamed "New Zealand Writer Laureate".

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"After 'Timepiece'"

I got home from work and Jeez it was such
a long day I can tell you and I looked at the
kitchen clock and it said Ten to eight and I
thought Wait a minute that means I haven't
been at work because Ten to eight is the time
I go to work so I quickly cooked some eggs for
breakfast and did the dishes and I looked at the
clock and still it said Ten to eight, so I thought Jeez
I better get going if I'm gonna catch that bus
but then I remembered I hadn't fed the cat
so I gave Molly her biscuits and then I thought
Hell I'm gonna be late but then I looked at the
clock again and it still said Ten to eight so I
breathed a huge sigh of relief and ran out the
door just as the bus came round the corner,
but I didn't catch it, I thought What if I just
RUN UP INTO THE SKY? I did in fact run up
into the sky, into the clockless, catless,
workless cloud-canopies where I hide,
and it is silent, silent.