New Zealand's best unknown poet?

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. 

How to write New Zealand’s best poems

Post-contact New Zealand poetry has never been much to write home about, even when the first pakeha poets were doing just that – sending their creaking, stumbling verse about their antipodean experiences back to Mother England. Our sole world-famous-out-of-New Zealand author, Katherine Mansfield, abandoned the colonial backwater of her birth for the centre of the Empire at the age of 20 – before she had published any of her short stories or poetry – and never returned. The rest of our post-contact versifiers are all “L&P poets” (world famous in New Zealand), with James K. Baxter the only 2.25-litre bottle amongst them.

The man most responsible for setting back the cause of New Zealand poetry in the 20th century was Allen Curnow, who took it upon himself to tell the nation what New Zealand poetry was and how it should be written. His monumentally flawed Introduction to his 1960 anthology The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960) is excruciating to read. Curnow was a man out of touch with his times and his opinions on poetry would be laughable if they hadn’t been so crushing of poets who had the temerity to write as if they were living in the 1960s.

In the 21st century the “Curnow Curse” has evolved into the “Manhire Makutu” and New Zealand poetry is still having the life squeezed out of it by the poisonous poetics of one man. Bill Manhire’s crimes against poetry are so heinous and so numerous that when he finally shuffles off this mortal coil he will wake up in Hades, where he will be force-fed his artless and patronizing verses by the Muses for all eternity. Manhire conveniently showcased all of his most damnable faults in the unadulterated bullshit he calls “The Oral Tradition”, which has been roundly derided in these pages before.  

Manhire is director of Victoria University’s creative writing department which has the astonishing braggadocio to call itself the “International Institute of Modern Letters” – a name so pretentious that even Simon Prast would say, “You must be joking, you can’t seriously be calling it that.” Every year this meatless sausage factory publishes Best New Zealand Poems, which has the same effect on the development of New Zealand poetry as elephant tranquilizer on a toddler.

And this is where you, dear reader and budding poet, come in. What follows is a copper-bottomed guide to writing New Zealand’s best poems. In no time at all – and with minimal effort – you will be composing poetry so poetic that it will be selected for the International Institute of Modern Letters’ Best New Zealand Poems 2011.

While a different editor is appointed by the Institute each year, all of them have the same qualification for the job: a poetic sensibility that bears an incestuously close relation to Manhire’s. With this established, we can be absolutely certain that the poetic predilections of the 2009 editor, Robyn Marsack, will be shared by those who come after her (2010’s selection had not been posted online at the time of writing).

Marsack’s suitability for the job is obvious only to someone of Manhire’s Lear-like judgement. While she recently co-edited an anthology of 20 contemporary New Zealand poets she is not a poet herself; she was born in New Zealand but has since emigrated to Scotland where she has been director of the Scottish Poetry Library since 2000; she has translated French novels into English – with this pedigree how could anyone have their finger more precisely on the pulse of New Zealand poetry than her?

To write the best New Zealand poetry you must not stray beyond the following subjects:

1)      flora and fauna

2)      overseas experiences

3)      reminiscences of childhood

Indeed, Marsack’s selection of 25 poems reads for the most part like a humourless pseudo-verse summary of My Family and Other Animals padded out with unedited excerpts from undergraduate travel diaries.

The poems that are explicitly about animals ascend no higher up the slopes of Parnassus than the winning entry of an under-10 poetry competition. They are proof that the infantilization now spreading through all aspects of New Zealand society has not spared its poets and the poetry they feel compelled to write. Were it not for the fact that the editors of Best New Zealand Poems honour childishly naive poetry like James Norcliffe’s “yet another poem about a giraffe” year after year, this state of affairs would merely be sorry, not scandalous. Norcliffe concludes a note on his poem with “I thought it would be fun to imagine a giraffe in Russia.” My 5-year-old niece once thought it would be fun to imagine a giraffe in her bedroom but even she would think twice about composing a poem about such a fleeting fancy; within seconds she had moved on to imagining an entire zoo in her classroom and thus advanced well beyond the scope of Norcliffe’s poetic imagination.

Marsack endorses similarly juvenile excrescences about a deer (“a possible journey” by Kerrin P. Sharpe), a fox (“The Fox” by Bernadette Hall), a horse (“Dylan Thomas (b.2003), Coolmore Stud, New South Wales” by Gregory O’Brien) and trees (“Certain Trees” by Ashleigh Young, an effort so unashamedly childish it even copies Sesame Street’s “One of these kids is doing her own thing” format). It is impossible to imagine anyone over 12 getting anything out of reading these poems. They are so amateurishly conceived and so feebly executed that it is equally impossible to believe they were written by full-grown adults.

The second major theme you will need to address in your poetry is “overseas experiences”. The best way to do this is to travel somewhere off the beaten track, like Mongolia (as John Gallas did before writing “the Mongolian Women’s Orchestra”) or Russia (as Tusiata Avia did before composing “Nafanua goes to Russia and meets some friends from back home”). Once there you will need to increase your sense of self-importance to such a degree that you can write as if no one had ever visited your destination before. Then you do one of two things: either appropriate the music and poetry of another culture like Gallas (half of “his” poem is made up of the lyrics to a Mongolian song) or, like Avia, ham-fistedly foist figures from your own mythology onto a society and culture you are making minimal efforts to understand.

Of course the easiest way to have an overseas experience is to get someone else to pay for it. “At the Villa dei Pini” was written by New Zealand’s most convincing cadaver impersonator C.K. Stead while “holding a Bogliasco Fellowship at the Liguria Study Centre in Bogliasco, near Genoa”. Now Stead cannot be lumped in with the kindergarten poets discussed thus far; he is on the cusp of 80 after all. He was one of just two youngsters to be included (and patronized) in Curnow’s Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse and at least took the trouble to study the craft of poetry before giving vent to his lukewarm talent.

The third and final theme you’ll need to nail is “reminiscences of childhood”. I have already drawn attention above to the plague of infantilization that infects every walk of adult society in New Zealand. It is unsurprising then that many of New Zealand’s best poems in 2009 were unmemorable trips down memory lane: Lynn Davison’s “Before we all hung out in cafés” bores you to death before you get to the end of the title; Marty Smith’s “Hat” is too threadbare to cover anything effectively; and Louise Wallace’s “The Poi Girls” is Mansfield without maturity.

The most important thing to take from the foregoing paragraphs is this: under absolutely no circumstances should you write a poem that addresses adult themes; reads as if it was written by an adult; or displays any awareness of poetic construction or devices.

Only two of the 25 poems – Stead’s and Michele Leggott's – display any genuine, as opposed to counterfeit, poetic imagination. The remaining authors couldn’t tell you how verse differs from prose if their lives depended on it. Most of Marsack’s poems are nothing more than chopped-up prose, displaying poetic effects no more dazzling than the tiresome splitting of a sentence across two stanzas. There is minimal sense of rhythm and an almost complete ignorance of verse forms (these poets seem unaware that “free verse” still needs to be formed with poetic imagination). Some of them might know who T.S. Eliot is, but all of them are ignorant of his advice: “No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.” In sum, all you need to do is arbitrarily decide on a line width, say five words or 4.5 centimetres, and chop up a few short sentences accordingly, remembering to split at least one sentence across two stanzas.

Every year Manhire’s State-subsidized hirelings reward writers who are the poetic equivalent of a bus driver who thinks he’s got all the skills necessary to race in Formula 1. These poetry-bludgers don’t want to work at their craft – and why should they when the State will not only support them financially but give them laurels to rest on as well? The end result is a perpetual bowel motion in which lazy pseudo-versifiers are lionized by lazy unqualified judges, all of whom are being paid by Creative New Zealand, i.e. you. Until this insidious status quo is altered, poetry will continue to be tortured by Manhire and his moronic goon squad. But all is not lost: thanks to New Zealand Gerald you can now score yourself a tax rebate by writing the best poetry in the country.  

Sonnet on Sonnets

A sonnet: fourteen pick-up lines in rhyme

From ugly-duckling poets to hot chicks.

The cygnet sonneteer cheeps it’s a crime

That Miss World’s not his but some other prick’s.

Petrarch wooed Laura, big-bosomed yet dainty;

Dante wanted Beatrice’s matchless calves;

Shakespeare, he craved both Fair Friend and Dark Lady –

The Bard was known to do nothing by halves.

Were ten syllables in five iambic feet

Really enough to impress a lady fair?

Did her heart pound to their pulsating beat?

Could fourteen lines like foreplay lay bare?

No – most sonnets to untouchable females

Went the way of unsolicited emails.

The End Is Nigh

Yesterday I bought the October issue of Metro magazine. If Dante was right, my purchase will have condemned me to his Seventh Circle of Hell, where I shall suffer eternally with those who were violent against themselves. But I have already paid dearly for my sin in this life – Metro now costs $9.75.

The current incarnation of Metro is clearly suffering an identity crisis. The advent of the cannily conceived MiNDFOOD in 2008 must have knocked Metro’s minders silly. “It’s like six magazines in one” claims MiNDFOOD’s advertising. It’s really more like six half-arsed magazines in one (giving it three arses?),  but its owners know exactly what they are doing, unlike ACP.

In March this year it was reported that Metro’s circulation was just 9,680 and that it was likely running at a loss. Former editor Bill Ralston wondered whether ACP would soon be forced to combine it with North & South. Meanwhile MiNDFOOD was described as one of the few titles that were not haemorrhaging readers, and its website puts its current circulation at 30,758 (NZ Audit Bureau of Circulation data). Based on the same data, MiNDFOOD is the fastest-growing magazine in the country. Ralston’s speculation could well come true, sooner rather than later.

But one certainly doesn’t get the impression that Metro’s current editor, Simon Wilson, can hear the wolves baying for his publication’s blood. Reading one of his editorials is like having your brain rubbed with an oil called “Essence of Smug”. Wilson was presumably on holiday for most of September; his October editorial certainly reads like it was written while he was out to lunch.

Just how little effort Wilson puts into his editorials becomes obvious when you read Nicola Shepheard’s excellent cover story, “Shark Attacks Granny”, in which she expertly covers The New Zealand Herald’s tabloidization under the deputy editorship of Shayne Currie, NZ’s tinpot William Randolph Hearst. Wilson doesn’t feel under any pressure to lead from the front in his editorial: he simply rehashes Shepheard’s best lines and steals some of her considerable thunder. On the rare occasion that he actually tries to write something off his own bat, he falls flat, just like this sentence, which has too many rhymes for “prat”. How about this for a paragraph, which begins with a relative clause, no less:

    Which means if you want to blame anyone [for the tabloidization of the Herald], blame all of us. We’re the ones buying, or not buying, the paper.

This kind of blarney makes a Woman’s Day editorial look profound. We’re all to blame; we’ve all sinned. Thanks for that, Simon Magus. In the rest of his editorial Wilson tells us who his heroes are, like a 5 year old listing his favourite superheroes. Along the way he manages to misspell the surname of one of them twice, “as you do” (to quote him on Steve Braunias’ taking of his daughter to the races).

Mention of Braunias, who has been peddling his unique blend of Scroogery and schmaltz for so long that he has become a national institution (surely a fate worse than death for a writer with subversive pretensions), brings me to the issue’s special feature, “One Big Day in Auckland”. Braunias headlines “24 other top writers and photographers” who together attempt to chronicle the events of Saturday, September 4, 2010 in Auckland, “the city we love”. It’s hard to describe the result.

The birth of twins (who problematically didn’t arrive until the 5th) is documented in graphic detail. There are two poems, the less said about which the better. Tessa Duder goes for a sail. Emily Perkins makes lamingtons. You get the idea.

Apart from Nicola Shepheard’s cover story, which shines out like a light when all around is dark, the October Metro will do nothing to improve the mag’s ailing circulation. Utterly ignorant of Dylan Thomas’s sound advice, Metro is going gentle into that good night.

The "P" word

There’s no shortage of problematic “P” words in the English language  – "pope", "paedophile", "patriot", "psychotic" . . . the list goes on. But the most problematic of all is “poetry”. It’s fair to say that the word “poetry” – what is it? what does it mean? – strikes more fear into the hearts of both the general and particular populaces than the thought of Anne Tolley in the nip. But how can this be?

This woeful scenario is too often blamed on Poetry (the verbal art) or poetry (examples of that art), when really it is the Western Poetry Establishment that is committing the most heinous crimes. Now most of you will have seen a poet before – some of you may even have met one – and for most of you the kind of “establishment” affordable by the poetry industry would look more like a trapper’s hut than an ivory tower. Alas, if only it were so. The Poetry Establishment is actually housed in a luxuriously appointed and heavily guarded fortress, whose only claim to supporting good poetry is the graffiti sprayed on its walls.

I am about to show you the kind of thing the Poetry Establishment tells us is Poetry; if you don’t like it or don’t understand it, the fault unquestionably lies within you, not the Poem, because this Poem has been written by a Poet, whose claim to the name in this case has been endorsed by that peerless arbiter of literary taste, The New Yorker. The following appeared in the issue dated 30 August 2010:


“Men at Work”
 by Julie Bruck

I said, “Do you speak-a my language?”
He just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich.
                                                            —“Down Under.”

We middle-aged sense them immediately:
four brittle pop stars sprawled across
the rigid fibreglass chairs at the airport gate.
It’s not just that they’re Australian, that gorgeous
thunk of English, the stacked electric-guitar cases
draped with black leather jackets, or their deep
tans on this Sunday night in midwinter Toronto

that holds everyone’s attention, drawn as we are,
pale filings to their pull. Even their rail-thin
lassitude attracts us, as it must Doug, the portly
Air Canada gate manager in his personalized jacket,
who arrives to greet the band, cranking hands
and cracking jokes. Doug, who must live in

Mississauga with the wife and a couple of kids

and who insists the boys come back to play Toronto

next year, when we clutchers of boarding passes
will have abandoned our carry-ons for tickets
to a midsized arena and a resurrected band
whose lyrics never did make sense but
which are laced to a beat that won’t let go—
propelling us down the carpeted ramps
of late-night flights on feeder airlines, hips
back in charge of our strange young bodies,
now shaking down runways in rows.
Answers on the back of a Men at Work album cover to . . . seriously, yes seriously, this is Poetry in the 21st century. Julie starts well by using the name of an exotic Australian (imagine!) band for her title and filching a couplet from their most famous song. You would think Julie would be somewhat deferential to both the band and their work after such shameless appropriation, but no. Julie is a Poet, which means she can say with impunity (except within the pages of New Zealand Gerald) that Men at Work's lyrics "never did make sense". Speak for yourself, dear.

And so we come to two more problematic "P" words: "patronizing" and "pretentious". The New Yorker seems to go out of its way to publish the most patronizing and pretentious poets practising  (lots of "P" words there, aren't there?) – they've been doing it for years. In this example, Julie can't seem to stop herself from condescending to everyone she populates her "poem" with.

How about "portly" (now that's a poetic adjective, isn't it?) Doug, who has a personalized jacket (bless) and "crank[s] hands" as if he's trying to start a Ford Model A. He does this because he's "cracking jokes" at the same time – if you look carefully both verbs begin with "cra", a sure sign that this is Poetry (not The Electric Company). Julie feels particularly superior to cuddly Dougly: he "must live in Mississauga". Why? Is Julie clairvoyant as well as condescending? But wait, her crystal ball is clearing: "with the wife and a couple of kids" (my emphasis). Whatever this is, it isn't poetry. It's pretentious, patronizing piffle.

The rest of "Men at Work" is heavy-handed "observation" on middle-age, lost youth and – wait for it – resurrection, all couched in the tritest "poetic" language imaginable. If you're still with me, I hope this little exposé has helped some of you realize you have nothing to fear from Poetry. And remember: if you're having trouble understanding poetry that's printed in esteemed literary publications like The New Yorker, the fault is more likely to be on the side of the so-called poets than yours.   

Re: "Lyrical Poetry in Popular Music"

Popular published collections of poetry in the modern age are not as common as they were a century ago. But we are still finding a way to express ourselves, and to enjoy others' poetic writings through the medium of music. Timeless tales of love, longing, betrayal, and electric passion are woven into lyrics of the songs we listen to on the radio and download onto iPods.

So true, stephhicks68 from Bend, Oregon, so true. This opening paragraph hits all the buttons prescribed by the more reputable how-to-write guides, and its sentiments, while dabbling in human conditioning, are scarcely objectionable. No doubt 16th century balladeers were the poetic rock stars of their time, writing timeless tales of wenching and quaffing with a profligacy more than equal to Messrs Jagger and Richards'. stephhicks68 is indeed weaving timeless truths into her own writing -- but what comes next?

Obviously, the most successful artists and the songs that climb the charts are those that provide insightful observations of human nature that connect with the audience on an emotional level.

Whoa Nelly! Leaving aside the fact that our author goes on to profile the lyrical genius of Alanis Morissette, Sir Elton John (despite acknowledging that he doesn't write his own lyrics), Sting and Sade, what's all this about the most chart-dwelling artists and songs all "provid[ing] insightful observations of human nature"? Presumably stephhicks68 has in mind the lyrics of Des'ree's chart-topper "Life", which includes the oft-slammed, all-too-mortal lines:

I don't want to see a ghost
It's the sight that I fear most
I'd rather have a piece of toast
Watch the evening news

Of course it was this lyrically poetic song's ability to "connect with the audience on an emotional level" that saw it reach No. 1 in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain in 1998. Hopefully most of Des'ree's fans in those countries were not cursed with enough English to comprehend her timeless insights into human nature. Equally hopefully, the notion that all popular (i.e. widely read/heard) poetry (what this is exactly will be covered in 100 subsequent posts) is insightful (this adjective has been misused so often that it should be proscribed) will one day be abandoned, instead of blithely evangelized by the likes of stephhicks68.