wholes in part^[1]

North is south (Anne Kennedy, 1988)

Are we really capable of expecting the unexpected? (Mervyn King, 2015)

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and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.[2]

Seductive as this viewpoint is, as time rolls on we have come to realise that the very lure of Eliot’s argument disguises a rhetorical sleight of hand: the unbroken wholeness it advocates is idealising and inherently prescriptive; it is applied retrospectively; and the relationship between its ‘historical sense’ and the particulars of production that it subordinates will be forever tenuous. In short, the hermetic view of culture that is promoted simply steps over the difficult work of connecting the disparate spaces involved in the written representation of human experience: in what sense are past and present actually ‘simultaneous’? In what sense is an ‘historical sense’ timeless? In what sense is a writer’s ‘time and place’ at once contemporaneous and traditional?

The focus of this Special Issue is New Writing in New Zealand in the period 1975-2000. That is its time and place, its chosen viewing platform. And it is immediately worth noting (vis-à-vis Eliot) that the essay contributed by Roger Horrocks presents a rather more complex, contested view of history: in this view the entire last century is encompassed within the modernist paradigm, with Eliot at its head, and the latest of the five successive ‘modes’ identified (realignments within an overarching paradigm) belongs specifically to our period and is inspired by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers out of America. What Horrocks also reveals is that such paradigms-within-a-paradigm can often enough behave quite antagonistically towards one another, as evidenced when in his Turnbull Winter Lecture of 1981 modernist Allen Curnow summarily dismisses Charles Olson’s postmodernism as already outdated. In our age of chaos and complexity sciences and other disconcertingly abrupt upheavals in various systems of thought, the very way in which we understand continuity and causality falls more and more into question. Unified theories such as Eliot advocates are difficult to sustain without running into considerable resistance. Indeed the quarter century explored in this issue is one in which the received view of historical continuity and cultural homogeneity in New Zealand is reconsidered as a period of prolonged fracturing and multi-levelled change. In contrast to Eliot’s settled ‘ideal order’, the contributors in this issue reveal a heterogeneity of activity and values within which order, while it may still be tentatively grasped at, comes under constant revision and is subject to fundamental realignment. Bewildering as this process is it is also the new reality, the new paradigm – for now at least.

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This introduction approaches its task from two distinct angles. From one it seeks to establish a broad historical perspective by which the individual essays are seen to share a common background. From the other it wants to establish a foreground based on the material provided by the essays themselves. Of course it is recognised that to approach our topic from these two contrasting directions is itself a simplification: such a select group of essays cannot aim at a comprehensive coverage of the literary production, or even of literary innovation, during the period; nor can it claim a superior vantage point from which to identify the truly outstanding achievements. Most usefully it can be taken as an effort to identify some of the under-acknowledged ‘hot spots’ of literary innovation, as well as to suggest some fresh responses to already acknowledged works of writers who were themselves responding to the tumultuous changes they were encountering. The issue doesn’t look specifically into gender politics, or postcolonialism (unless Robert Sullivan’s Moanan account of Hone Tuwhare and Keri Hulme is considered such), or gay and lesbian or other minorities’ writings; our discussion of the important field of fiction is limited to an emergent speculative genre and leaves aside consideration of reputable novelists including Frame, Gee, Stead, Wendt, Wedde, and Hulme, as well as several younger writers who were at the time establishing reputations locally and internationally; nor does it have the space in which to explore broader social-issue writing in such areas as the work-place, immigration, health, educational and welfare policy – areas of neoliberal transformation that taken together served to radicalise the architecture of citizens’ lives.

More pressingly, the essays signal a bottom-up approach. Makyla Curtis discusses some of the idiosyncrasies and initiatives that new print technologies (specifically the photocopier) brought to contemporary magazine and book production, traceable down to the aspects of design in her sampling of individual pieces of visual-writing texts. The same interest is shown to occur to an even more radical extent in Wystan Curnow’s analysis of Billy Apple’s language-based art work dating from his Art for Sale exhibition of 1981: Apple recontextualises ordinary objects found in the commercial world, such as receipts yet to be signed, in effect realigning their assumed borders of operation. Owen Bullock explores poetic individuation in the work of Alan Loney, specifically the process of identity-making whose recourse is to retrieved fragments of memories that must be further filtered through the fragmentary nature of language. On another scale, some of the profound shifts in the assertion of individual identity and social relations are insightfully revealed in Murray Edmond’s survey of contemporary dramaturgy and dramatic performance. The relevant irony here is that, while there was increased sponsorship and public support for the dramatic arts, the actual late-century drama produced was one preoccupied with a feeling of individual entrapment, an urge to flight and escape, disaffiliation. And the content of the plays, unlike earlier periods, hardly pointed to itself as a solution. Flight was in all directions at once to nowhere very special.

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Measurement only measures that which is specifically looked for – the rest, as they say, is accident. In a recent book from which one of my epigraphs is taken, the former Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, makes exactly this point when he addresses the turmoil of the 2008 financial crisis: ‘The lesson is that no amount of sophisticated statistical analysis is a match for the historical experience that ”stuff happens”’.^[3] Several contributors to this issue were participants in the ‘stuff happens’ of the last quarter century. Several have participated in more than one of the genres considered; a number have had important academic careers and have made contributions in areas well beyond their own professional expertise. Horrocks (MNZM; former Deputy Chair of the Broadcasting Commission) and Curnow were innovative teachers in the first course on contemporary American Poetry in New Zealand, a course that provided the kind of impetus that led to the later flourishing of such ventures – Creative Writing undergraduate and later postgraduate courses were established from the mid-1970s onward – and a culmination occurs in Bill Manhire’s International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University, inaugurated in 2001. Curnow is a significant figure in the art world over nearly 50 years.^[4] Over the same period Edmond has had a formidable presence in poetry, the dramatic arts, teaching, editorship and literary criticism. Jack Ross is an established editor, academic, creative writing teacher and anthologist who is widely published as a poet, prose writer and critic. At the other end of our short spectrum is Owen Bullock, a current PhD student preparing a thesis on contemporary innovative New Zealand poets, and Curtis, a postgraduate student at the University of Auckland and our single woman contributor.

Two notions that King explores in relation to the financial crash that can be applied to our materials are those of ‘heuristics’ and ‘radical complexity’. Heuristics suggests a hands-on involvement. Radical complexity points to the way that new writing began to explore aspects of non-inclusionism and diversity, discontinuity and the unpredictable, related both to techniques used and understandings applied and results obtained: it embraces trial-and-error as a working method. This is why the mainstream proved to a large extent to be unsympathetic to or ill-equipped to deal with some of the new initiatives. As seen in the essays by Horrocks, Curtis and Bullock, several participants in the literary arts were considered non-publishable or too obscure or wayward to be presented to wider audiences. Major long-running magazines like Landfall and Sport have been criticised by such writers of radical complexity as non-receptive to historical initiatives that the new writers, responsive to overseas influence and stimuli, regarded themselves as embracing. The same concept can be stretched further: Horrocks’s idea of paradigms-within-paradigms is one, and the proliferation of recognised new genres or interest groups in literature – women’s writing, indigenous or ethnic writing, gay and lesbian writing, as well as proliferating subsets within the genres of poetry and fiction and performance art, or within the visual arts and film and computer-generated work, comics, street art – were indications of a surge in diversification together with a greater specialisation that saw traditional genre forms and their audiences sub-divide and further sub-divide: heuristics and radical complexity.^[5] Consequently, on the one hand there was a new indeterminacy by which literature was an enabler of creative response, rather than a mere repository of the best that should be retained; and on the other hand there was a new heuristics, a provisional self-construction via means of the literary act. Heuristics is to do with making-do, making make-do, and these artists were intent on doing just that.

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So we see that 1975-2000 proved an unsettling of the norms of intellectual, social, political and economic organisation and behaviour. In terms of what we now understand about the imposed nature of tradition and the historical sense, it must be acknowledged that things actually do get quite messy and, even in writing this introduction, I have come to appreciate the problems faced in building a case that this particular quarter century can indeed be said to comprise a distinctive period of ‘our’ literature. Some essays are found to venture outside the given period in order just to better distinguish it; one invited essay – on writing by women – has not been included because, among other circumstances, its contents belonged almost entirely outside the given years. Perversely, something I have not been looking for and yet am faced with is that there is a degree of presumption in selecting this (or any) period of literature for special attention. And yet, again maybe perversely, to my mind that is precisely what can be considered this last quarter century’s real ‘discovery’. In terms of the importance of coming at things from chosen directions, as mentioned above, it is the resistance to the imposition of set forms and meanings (through identity fractures, the fraught dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, and non-alignment in expectations) that lies at the heart of the new writing. The critical realisation is that all identity-creation is profoundly provisional, imposed, makeshift, thought-based. In this key regard the years that have since passed continue to largely function as a footnote to the last quarter century. The literature of the period is thus not distinctive in the traditional sense of demonstrating an underlying unity and cohesion in intractable materials, or some kind of thesis-antithesis critique that makes reconciliation in human experience possible. The case made is that the actual distinction of the period lies in its recognition that meaning and identity are a function more of assignment than of recognition: ‘New Zealand Literature’ surrenders or loses its assumed cohesive quality. It’s not that it has died or was deliberately killed off, or simply disappeared; rather, much like its surrounding society, under scrutiny it has revealed itself to be fractious, atomised, a spiralling of constituencies within constituencies. Therefore, by way of another curious turn in the direction I have set out upon in introducing this issue, and without in any way wishing to appear merely clever or overly selective, I want next to kill two birds with one stone. I will take 100 Traditional Smiles by Anne Kennedy, her first book publication of 1988, in order to explore some of its strange distinctiveness as a quintessential text of the period and at the same time have it serve as a kind of proxy for the above-mentioned missing essay on women’s writing. Kennedy’s book falls pretty neatly into the middle of our period and is an irresistible example of a good-natured suspending of earlier assumptions of unity, direction and progress.^[6]

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A day went on a holiday; how it entranced everything there or the other way around; how it was entranced by everything apart from it, wearing an entranced jersey, adopting entranced mannerisms and bringing entranced children into this world.  (100 Traditional Smiles)

From the 1930s through 1960s Charles Brasch, Allen Curnow and Frank Sargeson were key protagonists set on identifying a distinctively New Zealand Literature. Landfall under Brasch (1947-66) is the place where anyone wanting to be anyone as a writer sought to appear.⁷ This is borne out in the statistics. Interestingly, in proportion to an individual writer’s total work published, Ruth Dallas is the journal’s single most represented poet, while women writers as a whole are substantially underrepresented (a small fraction of total contributions, though the ratio improved over time). This was less a fault of Brasch’s editing than a reflection of contemporary educational and gender expectations and opportunities. But what is of as much interest is that a number of prominent women contributors to Landfall presented themselves in a manner that underplays issues of gender or strong individuality. Dallas was the maiden name of Ruth Mumford’s mother. Janet Frame’s first contribution appears under the pseudonym (again her mother’s maiden name) Jan Godfrey. Paul Henderson is in fact Ruth France. Even the 1958 essay ‘Men and Women in New Zealand’, celebrating the emergence of women as a distinctive social identity, written by Phoebe Meikle, is signed off by a Leslie M. Hall.

Then 1975 arrived. Of course the shifts in the period’s social and literary fabric are various and interrelated, yet there are distinctive features: Riemke Ensing, an immigrant from Holland, provided one when she decided to put together a collection of women’s poetry to coincide with International Women’s Year. The anthology waited almost three years to appear and its title highlights a movement away from the received gender stereotype: Private Gardens.

Towards the end of 1974, sparked off with enthusiasm for the concept of INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S YEAR, and deciding to contribute my share to that event, I began this anthology.^[7]

The first cutting of the cloth was awkward: Frame (querying whether ‘a companion volume of New Zealand male poets was envisaged’) and Dallas (‘poetry should stand or fall on its own merits’) declined their invitations to appear. Deceased women poets were generally excluded, as by intention were living writers whose work was already readily accessible – although ironically the publication delay meant that several women poets who had in the interim produced well-received new volumes did in the end have their work featured. If the editorial rationale and ingredients are somewhat at odds,^[8] Private Gardens nonetheless brings focus to a difference in temper – by turn tender, strident, domestic, resourceful, tentative.

The next substantial women’s anthology, Yellow Pencils (1988) edited by Lydia Wevers, appears the same year as Kennedy’s book. Private Gardens’ blend of excited possibility combined with reflective diffidence is displaced with an outspoken assurance of quality and ‘the move from private to public’:

An observable change in the way women writers see the function of poetry: a move from the celebration of feeling to an investigation of what it is to be a woman poet; a reconsideration of role and stereotype; an exploration of the various kinds of activity poetry can engage in.^[9]

Fast-forward to more recent collections and it is clear that women’s writing is not only no longer contentious but resides comfortably within multiple possible identities: independently distinctive it also appears on equal terms in the national discourse in various of its guises.^[10] In Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets (2009) eight of the 20 contributors are women (a strong showing considering that the first six of the chronologically listed poets are male) and in 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry (2010) there is a tell-tale gender balance in terms of contents.^[11] Both anthologies have a male-female editorial pairing. And featuring in both is Anne Kennedy, a writer who straddles any number of possible divergences, gentle yet quirky, effusive yet enigmatic, experimental yet headed for cover: ‘A day went on a holiday; how it entranced everything there or the other way around’.^[12] How does this book challenge conventional expectations? To begin with the tone is everywhere: the narrative voice shifts about, gratuitous, naïve, linguistically cheeky, sometimes heedless, sometimes intimate, sometimes carelessly repetitive: the noun-verb ‘entrance’ indicates a place one enters through as well as one’s getting carried away to somewhere else.

100 Traditional Smiles (the blurb calls it a ‘novella’, whereas Landfall reviewer Anna Neill refers to ‘short fragments […] patched together’,^[13] and 99 Ways co-editor Paula Green mentions ‘prose poems’) comprises a loosely structured ‘travelogue’ recounting an unnamed young woman’s (‘the woman’) visit to New York City where she stays with expatriate friends (‘the Hoboken couple’) in a building of the same name, across the hall from the 26-year resident ‘Italian couple’. The 133 numbered sections are of variable lengths and rather than form a sequential narrative they comprise a counterpointing of various of the traveller’s relationships and encounters and perhaps imaginings, past and present. It takes repeated readings just to start to organise the material and the elusive relationships, although that order is never finally settled. What does become ever more obvious is that our initial expectations, of continuities, progressions, the building up of meaningful character relationships within a context of personal self-discovery, are turned on their collective heads: ‘north is south’.¹⁵ The key motif is travel, and as well as focusing on the woman’s visit to New York (the Metropolitan Museum is ‘transplanted from Europe to Upper Manhattan’), comings and goings are literal as well as figurative: on arrival at the apartment she must travel back to the Bayonne Bus Terminal ‘at the end of the line’ in order to collect her ‘lost property’; her stay is with one immigrant couple across the hall from another immigrant couple; back in Auckland she had shared a flat with Irene, daughter of Eileen from Nottingham, who married a Kiwi soldier after the war and emigrated to New Zealand… and so it goes. It is a story of misfits, persons in transit, on edge, distracted, prone to say things like ‘Now I must disappear’ (variations occur among different characters in sections: 31, 41, 71, 77, 99, 101, 117, 118). It is also funny and appreciative: ‘New Jersey’ is the place adjacent to New York City as well as the new jersey being knitted (by ‘the woman’?) ‘for someone not yet thought of’ – which in order to complete (she realises the pattern’s prescribed 18 balls of ‘Flushed Apricot Caressa with 10 per cent mohair’ falls short at ‘10 rows to go’ and so it will require ’18-and-a-bit’ balls) she ‘has tried every wool shop in Auckland’ (86). PATH is the New York Trans Hudson transport system used by a number of characters, but it also finds its way (in upper case) into other sentences, such as those of the ‘young reporter’ Leslie in his private game of ‘Russian roulette’ stepping ‘without looking, into the PATH of cars’ (13) in what becomes later his ‘psychoPATHic obsession’ – even after he switches to ‘one-way streets’ where, crazily and death-defyingly, ‘On crossing he looks the other way’ (117);^[14] and, if a couple or more of the characters appear to contemplate personal dissolution (suicide?), sharing the ‘disappear into thin air’ phrase, other characters share the capitalised phrases ‘GOOD MORNING’ and ‘GOOD LUCK’ (36, 51, 98; either in caps or in reverse in mirrored caps). One character will literally transpose into the utterance or behaviour of another. At stake is the very prospect of orderliness: ‘The daily life goes along like this from day to day, generally very general, sometimes specific’ (52).

For all this Steinian over-turning,^[15] the story is sympathetic to and replete with what was traditionally termed womanly virtue (responsiveness, openness, tolerance, emotional warmth and spontaneity, a feeling of protection towards the vulnerable). Yet wrapped deep within this fabric of feeling and a deceptive inconsequentiality of detail is a set of entrenched emotional disturbances. The end of the book spins towards disintegration: the protagonist is headed to the doctor to seek a ‘prescription for everything’ (125); the Hoboken couple is announced to be ‘married, though not to each other’ (116); Leslie has evidently taken his own life; Eileen has returned home with her husband to Nottingham where she continues to feel displaced, as does her daughter Irene who remains in New Zealand surrounded by her dyes and materials; the ‘unworldly couple’ is preoccupied with thoughts of their wayward son. Even the jersey knitting is abandoned by the woman, ‘not bothering to finish the last ten rows’ (131). Sentences themselves threaten collapse (see 125, 127, 130):

If the words being discussed had been uttered in the original New Zealand house with its grace [a pun on the name of her pet cat] before meals, something crystalline, a brittle mortar holding all matter together, would have shattered.  (132)

Just as the Italian couple and the expatriate Hoboken couple are together described as ‘closer to the American way than Americans’, the singularity of this text of Kennedy’s renders it less local than the local ‘norm’.^[16]

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International Women’s Year was celebrated in 1975. The same year witnessed the historic Whina Cooper led Māori Land March from Te Hāpua in the far north to Parliament buildings in Wellington and, under the Treaty of Waitangi Act, the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal. Ngā Tama Toa, a radical group starting out of the University of Auckland, had helped organise the Land March and represented an engaged activist and articulate Māori response, especially in matters of land confiscation and access to Māori language. The next decade saw the Māori Language Act passed (1987), giving Te Reo official language status (making three in 2006 when Sign Language was also recognised), and the Māori Language Commission was established. In his essay Sullivan, participating editor in two recent ground-breaking anthologies of Polynesian poetry as well as the Māori writing anthology Puna Wai Kōrero that trace indigenous ethnic adaptation and self-realisation,^[17] takes Māori poets Tuwhare (who made his first and only appearance in Brasch’s Landfall, with ‘Lament’, in 1958) and the newer Hulme as bellwhethers in these changing times.^[18] In the field of drama also, as evidenced in Edmond’s essay, including the ubiquitous Tuwhare there develops during this time a distinguishable Māori dramatic voice and themes, albeit more likely associated with a kind of proud coming home in contrast to the predominant Pākeha society theme of escape to elsewhere.^[19] In 1986 the Homosexual Law Reform Act decriminalising consensual sex between men was passed, another case where New Zealand was an early mover.^[20] Also in economics and politics, under Robert Muldoon in the early 1980s the government moved resolutely, if unevenly, to initiate large scale industrial projects under the Think Big policy.^[21] Nowadays Think Big is generally considered to have been either an economic failure or else to have had no lasting benefit – in any case it may to some degree have galvanised opposition to Muldoon and National and resulted in 1984 to a landslide victory for a Labour government led by the relative newcomer David Lange. In the years of Thatcher and before Tony Blair’s New Labour, financial management under new Finance Minister Roger Douglas set about deregulating financial markets, selling state assets, dismantling subsidies and tariffs, reconstructing education, social welfare and health policy and almost everything else, in a radical transformation that reached deeply into all aspects of social life. Under Lange and Douglas Think Big flipped into User Pays. The end-user provided the new locus and was expected to be properly informed and self-resourced, activist and obligated to carry personal responsibility for how services were to be delivered to him or her. Social process became pressingly individualised in its focus and expectations: individuals demanded that their ‘society’ provide suitably targeted services, and in return society demanded that its individuals be responsible for themselves: ‘north is south’. This is the neo-liberal legacy to which we are still in thrall. Everything was professionalised, not least the All Blacks in 1995.

As Ross demonstrates in his review of the nascent speculative fiction, the radical transformation of social life is sharply reflected in the response of local fiction – dystopian rather than utopian, revelling in dysfunction rather than seeking reconciliation, day-dreaming rather than calculating. Taking M.K. Joseph’s The Time of Achamoth (1977) as an archetype in this fictional response, Ross looks back on the political mythos in fictional responses dating from C.K. Stead’s anti-Muldoonism in his dystopian-realist Smith’s Dream (1971) and forward to the fiction of social fantasy that attracts younger (and some older) fiction writers like Harrison, Johnson and Mann. As Ross indicates of this new fictional genre, away was apparently the better place to be. We are back in Anne Kennedy space.^[22]

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Looking back at the previous quarter century, our 21^st century selves can in some ways be seen as emptied out: disturbingly the human element in our affairs has come to verge on the intrusive, something needing to be further regulated. As indicated by Curtis in her essay exploring reproduction and literary design, advances in technical capability anticipate our current embrace of and requirement for technology to provide an instant faultless finish, only to be immediately superseded: early literary adopters of the new reproductive technologies seem to have sensed this in advance and, as Curtis in her chosen examples demonstrates, it is the element of the unintended (or interference or indiscretion) that tilts the axis of technology back towards the human. It is as if magnification and miniaturisation occur in the same moment or can be thrown momentarily into each other’s territories. In a telling way it is the return from New York to New Zealand that marks the transformational re-launch of the career of Billy Apple the creative artist. And, as Curtis intimates, the very reaction against received systems of power can readily assume the same authoritative air they oppose, and this is true of the rebellious magazines of the early 1980s: ‘And is set apart from other self-published photocopier publications by its sense of authority. It achieves this through “existing as an institution”’.

Just as ‘habitus’ becomes, for Sullivan, a continental concept that can be reasonably applied across histories and cultures to the Pacific’s indigenous peoples, literature has become enmeshed in a dizzying range of alternatives both in terms of production of content and its dissemination. ‘The historical sense’ has lost the backing of tradition as a source of justification and wellbeing: its role as arbiter is threatened in face of a system of recalculable exchanges, so that each historical or aesthetic claim comes tagged with a batch number, place of production, and ‘use by’ date. It used to be that literature was regarded as a humanising ideal, something uniting individuals and benefiting society as a whole. But of revelation we have had enough and are inclined almost by reflex to recoil from, in an age when the very possibility feels like a further imposition. The compass needle upends: north is south.

notes

[1]  ‘Wholes in Part: Late Century Forays’, in ‘New Writing: 1975-2000’, JNZL 32:2 (2016), ed. John Geraets, pp. 8-32.

[2] T.S Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), p. 44.

[3] Mervyn King, The End of Alchemy (UK: Little, Brown, 2016), location 1809.

[4]   Curnow’s Essays on New Zealand Literature (Auckland: Heinemann, 1973) marks what might be considered a first substantial impetus towards a new, non-insular perspective of the country’s literary activity.

[5] The late 1970s through the 1990s saw an unprecedented proliferation of papers introduced into university courses, leading in some cases to the creation of entirely new programmes and departments. These were years of profound transformation in universities, structurally and professionally. To take only the English Department at the University of Auckland, a Film Studies paper was first introduced by Roger Horrocks in 1981. This evolved into Film and Television Studies by 1989 and, in 1996, into the full-fledged Film, Television and Media Studies Programme (all under Horrocks’ guiding hand). Approaching the 1980s, contemporary Special Topic papers began to be offered at either senior undergraduate or postgraduate levels: ‘Women Writers of the 20^th Century’ (from 1979); ‘Australian [later also Canadian] Literature’ (from 1982); ‘Novels from the Post-Colonial World 1950-1980’ (from 1983); ‘Creative Writing’ (from 1983); ‘Literature from the Old and New Commonwealths’ (from 1985); ‘The Sublime’ (from 1990); ‘Shakespeare on Screen’; ‘Women and the Medieval Devotional Tradition’; ‘Feminist Literary Criticism’ (from 1991). By the end of the latter decade boutique offerings included ‘Subjectivity, Sexuality and Transgression in 17^th Century Literature’; ‘Medieval Narrative: Gender and Violence’; ‘Two Poets: Robyn Hyde and H.D.’; ‘Alternative Sensibilities, Homophile Inscriptions and Interpretations’ (all 1998). Meanwhile new programmes or even departments were established: Pacific Studies in 1987; Theatre Studies in 1992; Women’s Studies in 1993; Comparative Literature in 1995. These were exciting academic advances, but they arrived hand

[6] A sidebar reflection: cross-relations. Kennedy writes across a range of genres, script writing, art writing, language-art-text, children’s writing, general criticism, fiction and poetry (the latter two often in unison). She is the wife of Robert Sullivan, a contributor to this issue and a prominent Māori writer and anthologist of Polynesian writing. Sally Rodwell, friend to Kennedy and Red Mole collaborator with her partner Alan Brunton (who died in 2002 and who figures in essays on poetry by Horrocks and on drama by Edmond), illustrates Kennedy’s text. Indeed one can easily imagine 100 Traditional Smiles performed by Red Mole. 7 See Geraets ‘Landfall under Brasch: the Humanizing Journey’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Auckland University, 1982).

[7] Private Gardens: An Anthology of New Zealand Women Poets (Dunedin: Caveman Press, 1977), ed. Riemke Ensing, p. 10. The responses of Frame and Dallas are disclosed on the same page.

[8] Vincent O’Sullivan, in a practice not uncommon at the time, provides the reputable outsider’s Afterword that, if not wrapt, is at least encouraging of these emboldened beginnings. The inclusion of O’Sullivan was also a useful antidote to the poisonous dismissal of women’s poetry as ‘too often clichéd and overly sentimental’ by Arthur Baysting in his Introduction to Young New Zealand Poets (1974), itself afterworded by Kendrick Smithyman, another male writer who expresses skepticism concerning ‘the advances which women poets have made’ (both are referenced in Ensing’s Introduction, p.13). Lydia Wevers was prepared to be kinder, if no less candid, in her assessment of Private Gardens: ‘It is an unadventurous poetic’ (Introduction, p. xx).

[9]    Yellow Pencils: Contemporary Poetry by New Zealand Women, ed. Lydia Wevers, Introduction (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. xxi. On the same page she notes: ‘Research for this collection revealed a surge in publication by women in 1974-1975, which has since increased’.

[10]    Somewhat surprisingly, as late as 1992, the respected mainstream critic and academic Mark Williams, in an evaluation of the previous decade (see ‘Main Currents in Recent New Zealand Literature’, Sport 9 (1992), 144-57) expressed his uneasiness at the increasing differentiation in ways of responding to local literature. He concluded that he did not expect ‘greatness is any more likely to issue from Wellington or from Victoria University’s creative writing course than from the welter of Polynesian, Maori, Pakeha, feminist, postmodern, post-structuralist, post-whatever voices that we find in Auckland’, p. 152. Against such an abundance of hard-to-assimilate identities, Williams aligns himself with Eliot’s position whereby New Zealand literature is thought best approached as a single homogenous body: ‘Poetry by Maori and women does not need protectionism; it is no frail flower to be nurtured behind closed walls’, p. 155. His call for ‘an anthology that sets out to see the poetry scene whole’ (p. 155) was answered some five years later by Williams himself, along with fellow editors Gregory O’Brien and Jenny Bornholdt, in An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1997). Subsequent events have not well supported Williams’s position.

[11]    Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets: An Anthology, eds Andrew Johnson and Robyn Marsack (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2009); 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry, eds Paula Green and Harry Ricketts (Auckland: Vintage Book/Random House, 2010). Interestingly, the latter’s Poetic Identities chapter includes a section entitled ‘Women’s Poetry’.

[12]    Anne Kennedy, 100 Traditional Smiles (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1988), Section 1. Subsequent references to section numbers are given in parentheses.

[13]    Neill seems to be at a loss with what she encounters. Unconvinced, she asks ‘whether the lack of cohesion and the collapse into wordplay lead this novel to say less than it might do’ and the review closes with her misgivings about ‘confusion’ in the portrayal of a ‘problematic of “home”’ (Landfall 172 (1989), 516-18). 15    In her ongoing career, even as her work has become less overtly adventurous, Kennedy remains ensconced within an upturned world. In her most recent novel The Last Days of the National Costume (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2013), the same phrase recurs: ‘South was up, north was down’, p. 280. Perhaps this has become an interesting national predicament: in his discussion of a Keri Hulme poem set in Greymouth, Robert Sullivan notes that ‘By the end of the poem, the narrator has decided to relocate to this coast from the north “and go south to the top of the world”’.

[14]    PATH appears also in Last Days when the narrator accompanies her student husband to New York and they reside in the same area: in this story Hoboken provides the opportunity for the narrator to learn her garment repairing skills at ‘Rip Burn Snag’ – right through ‘retniW, nmutuA, remmuS, gnirpS’, p. 106. Two points to note: familiar material recurs in quite different forms of narrative and meaning; and it provides a microcosmic world of the changes besetting Auckland and New Zealand in the 1990s. Among the changes that the novel identifies as spelling ‘complete disaster’: ‘Tomorrow’s Schools was all part of the gigantic divesting of responsibility which had begun with selling off the state assets’, p. 122.

[15]    The narrative strategy in this book is vintage Stein and, while publications subsequent to Musica Ficta are progressively more conventional in treatment, Stein remains a presiding spirit. Musica Ficta is Kennedy’s most audacious and I consider her most exhilarating novel to date with again the preoccupation: ‘(Gertrude Stein wrote, What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?)(And a soul in a church makes the sound of a soul in a church, said John Cage)’ (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993), p. 63. In A Boy & His Uncle the anti-modernist mother and artistic-wannabe Honour, nemesis to the Kennedy-like daughter Heeney, honours Stein in rejecting her: ‘Gertrude Stein was a hoax’ (Sydney: Picador, 1998), p. 195. Even in Sing-Song, Kennedy’s first auto-biographical book of poems, the naming of the daughter has its poetic forbears: ‘Hadn’t they even called her, sort of / after a poet? / (No, only for the sound of the name. / They would never have called her Gertrude / or Djuna or H.D.), ‘Prayer Replacing Sleep’, (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003), p. 51. Stein pops up again in Last Days, which can be read simultaneously as a satire on the intellectual 1990s in New Zealand, with its abundant references to ‘in’ words and names, including Derrida, Kristeva, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, ‘po-mo’, ‘They must have been crazy back in 1985’, p. 90. The battle waged is between ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’: doing wins (kind of). The book in its entirety might serve as a useful footnote to this special issue. As too might Musica Ficta: ‘the society of sameness where difference flourishes’, p. 128.

[16]   I am also aware that a ready case exists for Kennedy’s inclusion in the tradition of New Zealand women’s writing, in particular that associated with emotional daring and poetic vision, spanning earlier writers such as Bethell, Hyde, Dallas and Frame, as it does newer writers such as Michele Leggott, Judi Stout, Anna Jackson, Stephanie Christie and others: women especially conducting an examination into how singular personal identity is to be represented in terms of voices. When Eileen in 100 Traditional Smiles constructs her post-war wedding gown out of the various scraps she can find, the narrator remembers ‘the things women do in secret under their outer clothing’ (57).

[17]   Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English, ed. by Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan, (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003); Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English, ed. by Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan (Auckland: Auckland University Press,

[18]   In an interesting reflection from the vantage point of 2015, Sullivan indicates a firming of the view that minorities should – at least hypothetically – be the ones voicing the experience of minorities, whatever form these minorities might take (something akin to Horrocks’ multiple paradigms idea, along with the attendant predicament that the very notion of such minoritisation stretches potentially to infinity): ‘So if the editors aren’t Māori they won’t be focusing on Māori poetry, I’m afraid. And if they’re not Pasifika or they’re not Asian New Zealanders, or they’re not women, they’ll tend to see what they want to see. And I think that’s what’s happened in the past with our big anthologies’ (Jack Ross, ‘An Interview with Robert Sullivan’, Poetry NZ Yearbook 2: 50, (November 2015), 23-38, (p. 33)). That Sullivan takes the notion ‘habitus’ from the French social philosopher Bourdieu is another tricky indication of thought’s thirst for inspiration – and its proliferation – from disparate cultural sources, from wherever.

[19]   Curiously, and significantly, in contrast to writing by non-Māori during the period which is marked by fragmentation, disharmony, disintegration, Edmond shows the advent of a Māori dramatic writing that, though couched within a sense of grievance, is distinguished also by a feeling of shared identity, collectivity, affiliation.

[20]   I recall the day in 1977 when then Prime Minister Muldoon ‘outed’ Labour’s Colin Moyle in what came to be known as the ‘Moyle Affair’. Muldoon accused Moyle in Parliament of having been questioned by the police on suspicion of homosexual activities, which were then illegal in New Zealand. In a 1990 interview, Moyle said that the scandal had made him a ‘sadder and wiser person’ <http://en.wikipedia.org.wiki/ Robert_Muldoon#Moyle_Affair> [accessed 7 June 2016]. A further sad irony is that it was considerably later when in 1999 the first substantial anthology of gay writing Eat These Sweet Words: The New Zealand Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Poetry appeared.

[21]   The term was first coined in 1977 and referred to major industrial initiatives like steel and LPG production which the government believed would bring major national economic and employment benefits <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Big&gt; [accessed 6 June 2016]

[22]   Art, husband of GoGo in Last Days, has been years working on his PhD dissertation ‘Settler Literary Ephemera’, p. 106. A stretch at Columbia University in New York is considered a part of the research package. Kennedy’s irony concerning the commodification of history (as all else) is palpable: ‘Life is strange, and unfair’, p. 271. I’m not sure to what extent Art’s dissertation title is a pun that ribs at studies such as Alex Calder’s The Settler’s Plot: How Stories Take Place in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2011).