Last week I stumbled upon something extraordinary in the Ellerslie Book Exchange. This fine establishment always rewards the patient browser, and as I scanned the NZ poetry shelf my eye was drawn to a thin duodecimo volume clad in worn red leather. My first thought was that I was in the presence of an errant copy of the little red book, Quotations from Chairman Mao. As a fumbling undergraduate I had bought this atrocity because I was under the impression that reading it was vital if one wanted to know what the “C” word was all about. My faith in the book’s seminality was so strong that I didn’t even flick through it before purchase, and it was only on dipping into it at home that I realized that it had been written by a man who made Baron Munchausen look like Honest Abe. Here, for example, is Mao on the masses:
To link oneself with the masses, one must act in accordance with the needs and wishes of the masses . . . It often happens that objectively the masses need a certain change, but subjectively they are not yet conscious of the need, not yet willing or determined to make the change. In such cases, we should wait patiently . . .
“The United Front in Cultural Work” (30 October 1944)
Mao presumably felt he was acting in accordance with the needs and wishes of the masses when he orchestrated the deaths of roughly 55 million of them during his regime. Wait patiently indeed.
My historical relations with little red books not being what you might call cordial, it was with some relief that I found that the diminutive spine of the one in front of me read “I.A.M. POEMS”. And indeed it was.
“I.A.M.”, I learned upon opening the volume, stood for Imogen Amelia Marsh. The book was a collection of her poetry and had been printed in Hawera in 1951. No publisher was given and the printing and binding had a very bespoke look about them. Underneath the year, set in smaller type, appeared “3 of 10”, which convinced me that the book in my hands was one of an edition of only ten, and that it had been privately printed and bound, possibly at the instigation of I.A.M. herself.
How did this 60-year-old little-read red book from Hawera come to be in the Ellerslie Book Exchange? Who was I.A.M.? What was her poetry like? Of these questions only the last seemed to be in any way immediately answerable, and so I licked the old index finger, turned over the title page, and was confronted with this:
"The End of Nothing"
The leaves fell like so many lead balloons
That autumn; his crime of the century,
His litany of lies, left truth marooned
Like the naked trees in a leafy sea.
She didn’t need spring to feel creative,
She made a papier-mâché effigy,
His happy smiling face looked elated
Atop a pyre of leaves. The liturgy
Of his poems she then glued to his skin.
The flames rose, destroying his lying art,
His words changed into confessions of sin,
The sweated nothings grunted to his tart.
She left him forever, to die and smoulder;
A leaf landed unfelt on her cold shoulder.
It was in sonnet form, yes, but it was a sort of anti-sonnet. Sonnets of course were originally written by a man to a woman and sang the praises of the addressee in the hope that they she would admit the man into her favour, as it were.
I will not record any more of my own reactions to “The End of Nothing” at this juncture. Instead, I’d like to ask my sextet of loyal readers what they think of the poem. I am currently pursuing all avenues in an effort to find out more about I.A.M., and will of course post any details as they come to hand. Should “The End of Nothing” be considered the start of something by you, dear readers, more of I.A.M.’s poetry will follow.
