stunning debut^[1]

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Leigh Davis is fucked, he’s gone, but there is a new one.

These words, spoken by Leigh following surgery for removal of a brain tumour in 2008, are reported by Roger Horrocks in an appreciative review of Stunning debut in brief41. Roger relates Leigh’s subsequent resolve to remake himself both personally and as a poet, despite the aphasia that fundamentally disrupted his use of language and in the face of what must have been an uncertain and troubling prognosis. The poet’s re-make started with the jumbled notebook entries (headed: SIMPLE BROKEN BEAUTIFUL) that his artist friend Stephen Bambury encouraged Leigh to undertake following the operation and it has culminated in the publication of a substantial book, which includes photocopied notebook entries as well as over 100 open form sonnets, assembled with the help of close associates, including Leigh’s wife Susan. Stunning debut, in manuscript form, won the Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry and the irony of the title, when placed against the fact of his subsequent death in October 2009, is that it underscores Leigh’s resilience as a person and as a writer. It also serves to highlight a key concern that is explored in the writing: by what means can things that are very different be brought together in a way that somehow has them ‘belong’, whether they are objects, events, ideas or people.

Before going further, the first thing I should admit is that I’m not certain where the distinction lies between debuting the repair of a life and autobiographical writing, or even if there is one. This attractively presented book clearly includes aspects of both, in some places reporting real-life events in a straightforward manner, and in others linking these same events with things far from themselves, which has the effect of transforming their significance or even reconstituting them. The life lived reaches beyond itself, at times wistfully, at times thoughtfully, at times determinedly, until it comes to incorporate into itself the many occurrences that belong ‘out there’. Further, the text on a number of occasions deliberately obscures how this process of inclusion works, referring on more than one occasion to a ‘third’ element, something that is not physically included yet still belongs to the process. This ‘third’ (elsewhere ‘analogue’) is something I shall come back to, and it is mentioned at the outset because I think it provides a handy shorthand for the way in which Leigh is intent on altering the pattern of how lived experience is represented. In doing so I do not wish to render Stunning debut even more abstract or intractable than it may well already appear to be to the unprepared reader, but rather to encourage this reader to accept what seems immediately graspable while also allowing for a shifting significance in the ways that things come into contact with one another, which is never fixed.

The purpose here is not to elaborate the SIMPLE that forms part of the working title for the notebook entries, because that has already been most helpfully provided in brief 41. Rather, my aim is to investigate the relationship between the second and third words of that title: BROKEN, BEAUTIFUL. And the reason why I would like to do that – as well as giving credit to a fine literary achievement and acknowledging the human self-examination that that has necessitated – is to encourage a better and fuller understanding of a practice of writing that continues to be neglected and poorly understood by readers here. We, with Leigh, would agree that the act of reading is ongoing and therefore interpretation constantly extends and renews itself: the content of the text is reasonably stable, but its relationship with meaning is necessarily open and mobile. Leigh works to bring this openness and mobility closer to the material of the text itself, indicating that the concepts of stability and instability are built in to each other, and so depend on each other for support. As he puts it, ‘only what is in motion can rest’ – stillness and composure derive from an ‘inner concentration of motion’. Plato termed this possibility chora, presenting it as a spatial term which provided a ‘receptacle of becoming’ out of which form arises. Derrida went further, suggesting that chora is ‘irreducible to all the values to which we are accustomed – values of origin, anthropomorphism, and so on’ that as such proves unrepresentable. Each object is as much what is ‘between’ it and all else as it is in itself – if not more so. Leigh’s ‘third’, or ‘new one’, suggests a vastness of belonging that resides in the particularities of objects and utterance (‘eternity comes in time’):

                     I don’t want wit, or argument, pompous thought, but warmth,

                     speed, trances, voices, celebration, mystery, consolation, 
                     I want expansive, everlasting, continuous vehicles.

The text is full of contradictions, deficiencies, things remembered which may be historical or may be fabrications (a note of caution here: it can seem a bit rich for Leigh to be seen cosying-up to the really huge names of history, evinced by thetwo capitalised section headings KNOW GOD and ODYSSEUS: ‘graduations of a reclamation’); everyday family reminiscences keep company with the gods and famous writers who co-inhabit these pages; moods swing from feelings of spiritual validation, to frustration disappointment and despair, to fondness for others, to sexual exhilaration (at one point ‘carnal’, at another ‘conjugal’). Transgressions abound but these lead to and are integral to the work of repair, by which the contents of the book are seen to continually re-form forwards and backwards, simultaneously circling and leading to a culmination of the journey: part I ends ‘At the end of my history / I have to take my voice’ and in part II Odysseus/Leigh ‘finally came home’. Debut and finale embrace: ‘dramatis personae is arrested by the stage’. If there is a destination for the progression of repair, such is not considered an absolute. The book does not make final judgements, whether of the self or of others or of historical events; indeed it regards judgement to be a kind of arbitrary enclosure, preferring as we are told in the same introductory couplets quoted from above ‘unfinished and unfinishable reflections’ and ‘chaos… as the source of prophesy, / of rejuvenation’. In terms of its scope, then, Stunning debut presents itself as an encompassing act of renewal of the stuff of intellectual inheritance and literary process.

So what of the manner and aesthetic modus the book espouses? Already, we have mentioned the open-endedness, the relish for adventitious details, the shifting circumstances of life. In my view the narrative framework, mentioned already, is as much a function of convenience or afterthought as it is critical to any direction taken in these serial sonnets, whose dates are jumbled and whose contents criss-cross rather than lead forward in a cumulative manner. The tone suggests a giving and taking account, in the mode of St Augustine spiritually (‘My life is full of faults’ and ‘Humbly my tongue confesses’), Homer/Odysseus historically, and Pound/Eliot (‘I am a hollow thing’)/Stevens et al among the practitioners of modernism. Leigh, as he did in his first published text, Willy’s Gazette, aligns himself with the big names; albeit here Bob Dylan (‘Aaa a long thi wa a tch tow er r’) is displaced by Aquinas/Augustine and Homer (not to mention the old hymn ‘A a a m A-a- a z z z   ing  Gr Eh-hc e’), and Paris Match and Barthes by what is termed ‘the name of anarchism’ – a kind of advanced or renovated classicism, as Roger informs us in his review. Leigh disdains the indulgence of lyric modernity, the tendency to ego-centrise reality, in favour of history as a process of alignments.

The introduction of a ‘third’ element is what I take to be a new aspect in Leigh’s protest against and push beyond the ego-centrism of the modern. This protest does not occur in a declamatory or argumentative manner: instead the voice is gentle and reflective, developing a dynamic interplay of images and tones. Eye and voice are insisted upon throughout this sequence of sonnets, themselves reminiscent of the form used in Willy’s Gazette, a form which has proved itself endlessly adaptable and fundamentally endless – the anarchic implicit in Leigh’s classicism. References to seeing (‘You is light, a look in the eye, lights of halls, accumulated visual albums, visual each and each this day, colour has an infinite number, colour and monochrome, open your eyes under water, lifetime // in a mirror, partial blindness, like seeing and again not like’) and hearing (‘vocal murmur, my speech, this is a simple sound, re-sound, collection of these voices, voices of silence, sudden remembrance in unaccustomed sound’) abound. Less important than the actual objects seen or heard is the sensuousness in sending (‘transmitter’) and receiving (‘receiver’) entailed in the exchanges, as full of uncertainty as they are of possibility (‘open your eyes under water’): the preciousness of these primary senses becomes very precious indeed, especially when we remember the stark circumstances under which Stunning debut was composed. In this context, the dignity of the life-process is highlighted, transfigured, becomes sublime, mysterious, encompassing, eternal, sanctified. Things seen and heard become extensions of the tactile awareness of the speaker-poet, who is (literally) touched by each and every strand of sensual experience; indeed, touch itself, which is the most immediate and persistent of the senses, proves the ultimate destination for all sensually instigated experience: ‘and she came to your bed now and colour I had her bed’ ‘what rose rose’.

It is appreciated that what Leigh is doing is unusual and perhaps discomforting for our conventional reading habits – why not state plainly what one wants to say, rather than obscurely and cleverly, especially when the values espoused are clearly deeply felt and are quite in keeping with the tradition of humanism? For my part, it has helped when reading to put to the side expectations of statements that are straightforward in terms of logic and consistent in terms of time and space. In this world of strange attractors, significance resides in influence, desire, consonance, more so than in physical relationship or proximity in time. One looks for image and tone networks, reverberations, echoes, deviances, dalliances, dispersals – and it is in the relations between these on an emotional and personal level that one is better able to grasp the kind of ‘world’ that is portrayed. Critics will no doubt dig about and over time identify the specific references to people places and events; however these actual representations will prove to be mere adjuncts to the poems rather than vital to their impact or importance as writing. Indeed, if we can grasp the subtler level of intellectual inheritance and musical imagery on which the poems operate, we will more quickly and more accurately understand what interests Leigh and the values with which he responds to that which he encounters. It is the range and quality of this manner of relating that I will now explore in closer detail.

As previously mentioned, Leigh disavows the standardised life-telling and lyrically self-centred, truth revealing verse that continues to dominate New Zealand literature. This stance has been clear and consistent since he appeared as a writer in the early 1980s in Alan Loney’s ground-breaking journal Parallax, in his own coediting with Alex Calder of the innovative magazine And, and just as strikingly in his first (and for a long stretch only) book of poems Willy’s Gazette (1983). The focus of and techniques used in Stunning debut exhibit this same impatience with the status quo, albeit in a manner that is less cocksure and combative. The Willy who wanted ‘to get the “literary”, as a concept, robust again’ remains very much in evidence, but the tumescent Willy watching out and surging in his ‘tow er r’ has chilled out, has become a more accommodating, sympathetic auteur. A strong case can also be made that the thoroughgoing deconstruction that was initiated in Willy’s Gazette is continued in this later book of Leigh’s. Another thread that ties these two books together (and this is the one aspect of both texts about which I do continue to have misgivings) is that, for all the ‘deconstruction’ that happens, it is clear that the figure of the poet-speaker remains firmly placed at the centre of the enterprise, terming the terms, calling the shots. While the self-awareness and self-appraisal may have shifted markedly between the texts, both ultimately stake their authenticity on the kind of self-treatment and self-projection of this persona.

That said there is more than enough in what this poet-speaker is capable of articulating to reward and excite his readers for generations. Leigh mobilises language; he shifts its function away from the representation of discrete situations to a medley of interweaving images and sounds, operating within a flexible range of connectives, that together feed thought and reflection and are in turn invigorated by them. Beyond sound and ‘silence’, between sight and the ‘half-blind/sunblind/partial blindness’ or between the solidity of objects and ‘transparency’, there are clusters of terms that recur and emphasise the mobile way in which things link together: ‘loops, criss-cross, crossing, cross-road, cross away, navigation, circumnavigation, forwards, backwards, emptiness, form, round and round and round, speed without progression, hungtime, circumscription’. Disparate experiences can merge or fuse, experiences diverge from within, never open or are forever open, depending on the underlying something, Leigh’s ‘analogue’. He can incorporate Eliot’s sensibility, and aspects of his verbal expression, in lines like

                     And the perception of a change in aspect 
                     is the expression of a new grasp
                     and, at the same time, of a grasp unchanged and 
                     for that reason like seeing and again not like.

Another incorporating image which shows this is in a sonnet that verbally re-enacts Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase. A woman viewed ‘on Park [Avenue] / in spring blue New York’, whose movement as she walks in heels transfixes and enthrals the viewer-poet, becomes a representation of the idealised ‘nude’ (analogue) figure that Duchamp had painted almost a century earlier; her movement fuses into a suspended moment of animation: ‘a stranger’s stalling heels above the ground arrayed / portraying speed without progression’. Very beautifully, Leigh deepens the effect of this image by having two consecutive sonnets (both dated 15 October 2008) present the same scene by way of a verbal re-take or reconfiguring that renders them at once different and the same.

This is the substantial achievement of Stunning debut: the fearlessness strikes me as real, in the kind of facing-up-to that the poem as a whole represents. There is acknowledgment of things having gone wrong (‘I have fear, and change, and fear, and change and love’), of un-undoable transgressions and past foolhardinesses, of present inadequacies, of poignant care for friends and family and remembered special places in New Zealand and elsewhere – these strike one as true and humanly very attractive (‘Luminous, not radiant. The light does not just / penetrate… but mills’). There is more work to appear later, we are told. One comes to realise that ends only end beginnings that are made possible by earlier endings and will in turn lead to further endings and beginnings:

                         At the end of my history 
                         I have to take my voice,

                         the     analogue     of     something 
                         familiar to me.

note

[1] ‘Stunning debut: Willy’s Return’, brief43 (October 2011), ed. Hamish Dewe, pp. 13-21. See Leigh Davis, Stunning debut of the repairing of a life (Dunedin: University of Otago, 2010).