holy smoke!
@ sixes & sevens in the sixties & seventies[1]
The poem is the mind cut loose, alive, not imagination in the sense of having
invented some kind of imaginary world, but imagination as the mind itself alive in
words – the mind’s landscape, a mindscape, ‘fireflies dancing over a star midden,' a
world of sound and image in which sense has ceased to matter. (Edmond, 2021)[2]
This essay explores four key literary publications of the 1960s and 70s: Freed, eds Brunton, Edmond, Haley (1969-72); The Young New Zealand Poets, ed. Arthur Baysting (1973); Private Gardens: An Anthology of New Zealand Women Poets, ed. Riemke Ensing (1977); and Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960-1975, eds Brunton, Edmond and Leggott (2000).[3] At first glance, the combination may appear arbitrary, if not idiosyncratic. As we proceed, however, I hope the purpose will become clearer.
beginnings
At the outset, it is good to ask ourselves what drives literature through its periodic volte-faces? Or, to be more specific, does the same underlying dynamic operate on both sides of the biggest rupture in our local poetry scene, between the tradition-bound 1930s-50s and the counterculture 1960s-70s?
Elsewhere I have written about Brasch’s (Landfall, 1947-66) and Curnow’s (Caxton 1945/51, Penguin 1960 anthologies) claims to achieving a truly homegrown, self-dependent literary culture.[4] Indeed, a glimmer of national self-assertion was already present in the four issues of the Auckland University magazine Phoenix (1932-34), featuring those same elite young men who would become generational stalwarts: Brasch, Curnow, Bertram, Glover, Fairburn, J.A.W. Bennett, Blackwood Paul, J.C. Beaglehole. For these few, literature comprised a transcendent ‘imaginative order’. Indeed, Brasch’s ‘single scale of values’ encompasses simply everything.
However, from the late fifties, resistance increases among those groups at the periphery. Younger writers, women, intellectuals, literary progressives, Māori, and other minorities wanted to speak and be heard from within their own world views.[5] While fine in principle, in practice such dissent wasn’t going to wash within the Eurocentric construct promulgated by the Brasch-Curnow alliance. Something had to give, or else, inevitably, those alienated would instigate their own land grabs. What ensued was the sixties and seventies.
front & back door
‘History’ is the way such annexations are explained. The tumult gets written in draft form going forward and revised in retrospect. Literary theorist Walter Benjamin’s figure of the angel of history blown backwards into the future is a beautiful image that evokes the combination involved of banality (inadvertence) and tragedy (risk of annihilation), part and parcel of the trajectory we designate time. Of course, given Benjamin’s own dire biographical predicament – as a young German-Jew intellectual seeking refuge in a flight across wartime Europe[6] – the same angel whispers another cherished, if unlikely, wish: that an unforeseen supernatural agency should intercede to deliver sudden emancipation. This third voice constitutes Benjamin’s ‘weak Messianic power’. And seen in this light, historical change, in contrast to an ideal of orderly progression towards a better future, is characterised by distress and inordinate unpredictability.
The first thing that gets pushed back on is the past and what is supposed to be inherited from it:
the flowers that you gave, my love
have lasted up to now quite well;
they weren’t the freshest from the start
they’re fading fast –
(‘Poem’, Jennifer Levy, BS, 1966)[7]
Inevitably, elements of release and betrayal collide. Levy’s poem makes this clear in that her repudiation of the bouquet representing a failed relationship relies on the very same literary choreography that is spurned: syntactical inversion, images of romance, flowers, staleness.
The rejection of the past erupts most crucially, audaciously, ebulliently when, in 1969, Freed appears: floral scents, wrapping, sentiment – the lot, return to sender! Levy’s tepid ‘lasted up to now quite well’, while part of the new age, nonetheless gets shredded in this boys’ world of ‘NEW HEROES RIPPED INTO OUR WORLD OUT OF THE BELLY OF NOW’ (Freed/1). Out with the library of
the elders: Wordsworth, Shelley, Browning, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Thomas, Barker, Durrell; and, from the USA, high-minded formalists like Empson and Tate, intellectual modernists like Stevens, Moore, Bishop and Lowell. Shelves are restacked with early French innovators, especially Rimbaud and Apollinaire, along with adventurous, street-smart, emotionally direct USA contemporaries: William Carlos Williams, the Beats (Ginsberg in particular), Black Mountain Projectivists (Creeley, Olson, Duncan), O’Hara’s Personism.[8]
Just as Phoenix writers in the early 1930s were inspired by a period of Marxist resurgence, so too those in the sixties and seventies were inspired by an international phenomenon of youthful rebellion. The Vietnam War, Paris ’68’s ‘restoration of the Commune’, Dylan Baez & Woodstock ’69, San Francisco’s flower power: protests love-ins drugs freedom. All Freed issues, from ONE:THE WORD IS FREED to FREED AT LAST:ISSUE 5, are total shout-outs.[9] So, no contents list, rather a collective. The sacred word in Landfall turns demotic.
Its role as transcendental signifier gets ditched and, in its place, semantic usage delivers a potpourri of the quirky, idiomatic, querulous, showoffy, libidinal, comradic, real cool stuff. Grammar and syntax are likewise discombobulated through ad hoc use of CAPS and italics, wilful abbreviations, ellipses, loosened open forms, random typographical effects. Not least, striking monochrome graphics are ample, flamboyant, constructivist, lewd, Dadaist, cool. Academic writing, though sparce, is likewise revamped.[10]
In short, Freed constitutes the most strident biffing-back small magazine in this country’s literary history. Quite an eyeful. Like Phoenix, and the later And (1983-85), it’s a student initiative, a generational attack-dog. Also, like them, opting out early, it demonstrates no wish to self-stabilise or preside over its own future.[11] One would not wish it otherwise.
Dealing with Freed’s refusal to hang around constitutes something of a conundrum in Big Smoke – or, for that matter, in any ex post facto account, including this one – because it’s the revolution’s longevity that it sets out to secure – one might say, entrench. In effect, Big Smoke offers itself as the rightful destination point imputed to Freed and a range of other contemporary literary initiatives. In the process, it cannot help but recalibrate the disparate narrative strands that belong to its chosen sources into an idealising meta-narrative of its own. Intrinsic aesthetic rivalries, indulgences in disreputableness, gender-aesthetic-ethnocentric-ideological differences, personal quandaries, are bundled together in a manner in which they are obliged to honour a presumed future relationship with – and within – Big Smoke. Freed, Young Poets, Private Gardens (along with a plethora of other materials) are in consequence subjected to considerable exogenous and endogenous strain.
At the risk of doubling my own focus (hopefully without appearing merely cross-eyed), I want to acknowledge – albeit broadly, loosely! – their vital contemporaneity in light of the reprised role they are assigned in Big Smoke. I want to argue that, in this double-play over jurisdiction, backward and forward, Big Smoke identifies as the usurping archangel of the Levy bouquet, radicality’s new grundnorm.[12]
merry-go-round
Let’s elaborate a little on that contemporaneity. Sired by the remarkable Freed, Young Poets stands out as our premiere youth anthology. It picks up an initiative begun decades earlier in Landfall. Its first in its series of mini-anthologies gathered six ‘previously unpublished… under thirty’ poets in December 1948 (Lf8); then four more who were ‘likely to figure prominently among writers of the sixties’ in March 1960 (Lf53); and, finally, there was a group of promising ‘Poems of the Mid-Sixties’ in March 1965 (Lf73).[13] // Unlike Freed, Young Poets seeks legitimacy (for Freed revolutionaries!) in the established tradition, comprising a spitting image of Charles Doyle’s Recent Poetry in New Zealand (1965), which contains several recently featured Landfall poets (of whom, interestingly, only Bland and Doyle make it into Big Smoke, with a single poem apiece). // Eleven of 19 Young Poets had appeared in Freed.[14][15] Whereas that anthology is decidedly boyish, in the ratio of 18:1, Private Gardens is definitively girlish, 35:0. A ‘corrective’ to Young Poets, it features women of a common generation – well, relatively recent generations! – and sets about navigating an entirely different past and future, arguably an entirely different river. In Young Poets, 17 are NZ-born, 14 still under thirty. Private Gardens, published four years later, includes women of all ages (plus one deceased), and avoids men – except for Vincent O’Sullivan, who, like his Young Poets counterpart, Kendrick Smithyman (‘older than the younger’), provides the mandatory Afterword endorsement. Hence ‘patron’, hence ‘male’: the era’s bywords for beneficence, legitimacy conferred. // Nor are gender-divide and ageism the only points at issue between the two contending anthologies.[16] Physical design is as well. Like Recent Poetry, each of the Young Poets is allotted 10 pages of poems, prefaced with a self-written biographical statement: an equitable allotment, totalling a symmetrical 200 pages. In the lesser 160 pages of Private Gardens, an extravagant 35 contributors are allocated from a single poem fluctuating all the way up to 12.[17] The telling thing about unevenness in quantity – the epithet applies equally to quality – is the extraordinary contrast between its ambivalence and the cocksuredness of Young Poets. It is not clear whether this reflects an embryonic feminism’s dehierachicising or, more likely, Ensing’s pragmatic ‘classification of convenience’, unapologetic while loosely – very loosely! – juggling her preferences.[18] Indeed, unevenness in the anthology extends to critical pronouncements (which for some reason are restricted to youngish Adcock and oldish Rawlinson), as well as to highly selective biographical notes, random portraits, plus a scattering of other photographs, predominantly of domestic garden scenes – another modest, womanly preserve?[19] // Twenty-five years on, and in keeping with its own milieu, Big Smoke goes some way towards rectifying perceived historical imbalances. Slipping through or around the various areas of contention, it effectively re-marks the playing field, showing scant inclination to tackle internal controversies head-on. On this occasion, 18 contributors identify as female, 38 as male, three with initials-only – half-way to gender parity, at least. In fact, rebalancing extends further, with the more capable poets required to shove along the bench in order to make room for those less capable (Levy et al), all-and-sundry appearing in chronological order, akin to ‘a level playing field’. Strict chronology is matched by scholarly thoroughness. The Magazines bibliography lists 67 sources, exceeding the aggregate of contributors! And yet, despite the accommodative, even-handed setup, there are other, less obvious, revealing ways in which Big Smoke‘s editorial preferences become apparent. On closer examination, we notice that 33% of males (12 of 38) are former Freed poets, contributing overall higher individual tallies plus a preponderance of longer pieces.[20] Taken together, the group Brunton, Mitchell, Haley, Edmond, Manhire and Wedde (all Freed stars) occupy some 110 of 263 pages of poetry, that’s 40% plus.[21] // Not unusually, all four publications also include their editors as contributors. Ensing, modestly, has three poems; Baysting, less moderately, 11.[22] Nor is over-representation a seeming concern to Freed and Big Smoke fellow editor-poets, Brunton and Edmond, who together occupy some 32 of 110 pages in Freed (30%); 22 pages of poetry in Young Poets (considerably above 10%); and, in addition to 33 pages of prose introduction in Big Smoke, a combined 15 poems (35 pages): in all 68 pages or nearly 20% of the anthology.[23] In short, they control the game.
In another shrewd move, Big Smoke’s patron turns out to be, not a seasoned Smithyman or O’Sullivan, but a younger woman writer pal, third editor Michele Leggott. In the Afterworder possie near the end of the anthology, she compiles a ‘chronological sampling’ of contemporary news reports to match the arrangement of poems. In this clever turnaround, a verbatim account of sustained socio-cultural activism is used to authenticate the poetic-prosaic close relationship – an astute adaptation of the celebrity-endorsement used in earlier days to usher the still-unproven into the Parthenon. Conspicuously, Leggott’s ‘sampling’ has historical journalism double as literary reification, altogether a delicate balancing act. Her inclusion in Big Smoke also handily resets the editorial gender ratio at 2:1.
forever young
Words serve, in literature, as intermediary to a material reality that cannot be immediately present. So doing, language takes on a life of its own. And, in this respect, the strangely quintessential poet of our period is Mark Young, who, incongruously, appears only in an afterwards manner in Big Smoke and is missing from the other three publications.[24]
Indeed, his absence renders his presence more astonishing. His pre-period ‘Lizard’ (composed 1958) and his (effectively) post-period ‘A Season in Hell’, which first appeared as a broadsheet in Sydney in 1975, are lauded as seminal by Big Smoke’s editors. The title of the anthology – as harbinger – is adapted from the earlier poem. Ironically, its persona is an old man looking back on his life:
It is near the end for me now. Perhaps it is best to rest instead of cramming in all those little things I would like to have done. I wanted to see the big city. Still, there is an even bigger one waiting for me now, waiting for me in the shadow of the rock of ages. Leaves Lizard, put your halo on. (my italics
Young represents several of the era’s pervasive themes – laddish discontent, aimless restlessness, itinerancy, penury, an urge to escape. Published sixteen years later, ‘A Season in Hell’ (named in honour of Rimbaud, the presiding totem in Freed and Big Smoke)[25] provides a back door, the escapee persona having grown irredeemably immoderate – lusting for adventure, fraught, crossing more Arabian sands, debauchery (brutality, bestiality, bhang):
Sold some guns / bought bhang / drank absinthe / fought camels / got fucked by the local chieftain. Young boys came down on donkeys, de sade came down with his prick up the arse of a male goat, rimbaud came down with malaria & raved for days….
In truth, Big Smoke‘s retro use of Young points to and happens elsewhere, as if only later on do we realise what was important earlier on. In a telling way, Young serves as the ideal absentee apogee for his peer incumbents in Freed, Young Poets and Private Gardens, outperforming them all – perforce at a considerable remove in time and place.[26] Like ‘Coming out’, another Young poem, written on his release from a brief stint in Mt Eden prison in 1968 – away is the most alluring place for the disaffected. Yet even escape must earn, and pay for, its keep, as we shall see.[27]
halving Jan Kemp: Janet Mary Riemenschneider-Kemp
Things are themselves, a fruit, a flower, a chair, a song – each says all it is by being it. A poem is what and how it says itself: if it can be itself, then that is it.
… each face remains constant only to that face, as each moment exists only for that moment / if you are there then & then – live in totality then & then you can recall the stimuli of the time & use it in the making of another face…
Ironically, Jan Kemp is the one person who appears in all four venues. The upper statement above derives from Private Gardens, the lower from Young Poets. Between them, in context of this essay, I tentatively suspect a gender difference. In the female context (PG), essence is emphasised: wholeness, repletion, atemporality. In the male context (YP), individual integrity: separateness, expression, facetedness. Common to both statements is their conveying that a successful poem achieves timeless or non-derivative autonomy, ultimate self-sufficiency. Itself, true romance. For all the ways in which she may waver as an engendered poet, Kemp gives an early indication of the time’s pressing concerns around temporality and gender.
The awkwardness is that she, like Levy, is caught between giving and taking. It’s as if she quite comfortably adopts either gesture, proclaiming feminist revolt against males in a voice of personal naiveté and feminine trustingness. Perhaps such amorphism derives from former or future times?[28] The following keynote poem, which appears in Private Gardens (originally in Broadsheet), is surprisingly androcentric in its combativeness (‘become like him’):[29]
Against the Softness of Woman Vagrant woman, pawn your Piscean flood don’t wave your flower, keep your blood dry as the gaze behind your eye; let the resilient bitch rise in the belly of your skies & front it without your usual vacillation … become like him wear your other heart on your other sleeve keep this one boned down fine. (PG, 80)
For all the call to arms that carries a string of virulent imperatives, the imagery is surprisingly traditional. Also, curiously, the popular poem does not appear in Big Smoke.
sexual flora
The male-female divide, stretched throughout the period to the point of perplexity, receives partial redress in Big Smoke, where our attention now turns. Even ‘partial’ implies a compromise between retrieving a troublesome bygone and feeling the need to exonerate it. Consequently, Big Smoke gets wedged between a rock and a hard place. On its male side, machismo persists. We see this in Hunt’s, ‘I would not try the ancient move / for fear I would destroy / what only time and silence prove’ (‘A Song About Her’, 1969); and it lingers in more percipient poets like Wedde and Mitchell, as these lines reveal:
in the amber warmth
of her deeper dreaming
I will assert my seasonal self
living again
the rain and mist of her smile
(‘Night Through the Orange Window’, 1963)
There are exceptions, including Barry Southam, whose sympathetic treatment of extra-marital matters in ‘Married Lover With No Television To Watch Lets His Eyes Stray During His Christmas Vacation’ and ‘Married Lover Surveys Certain Battlegrounds’, as well as towards male intimacy in ‘Homosexual Lover Seeks And Finds Some Shelter’, suggests a broadening tolerance (allowing for the fact that these poems actually appear in Young Poets rather than Big Smoke).[30] However, for the most part, the testosterone-driven young kiwi male poet continues determinedly heterosexual.
Females, on the other side, are shown to be preoccupied with forging a new voice. Beyond Ensing’s and Kemp’s equivocality (the sheer breeziness of voice in ‘Against the Softness of Woman’ undermines the feminist complaint), other Big Smoke poets are variously tender, combative, bitter, ruthless. Vanya Lowry’s early ‘You Summer, Singing Come’ uses nature imagery to evoke experience of female sexual arousal: ‘be sweet / on my tongue. open me, / your little passionflower’ (1964).[31] There are poems in celebration of lesbian love, like Val Smith’s, ‘Her hot flesh sank through to me / … bloodlight / … We plunged into endless dawn’ (1974). However, as bold as they are, such forays produce unexceptional poems that are often arbitrary in tone and clumsy in construction, relying on motifs inherited through a long line of male progenitors.[32]
Sometimes aversive language is preferred. The expression of sexual disgust and hurt suffered can be extreme, spurning all inhibition:
stinking sperm
ran down my legs
mingling with gutter sewage
and pavement spittle
as the animalman
limped off into this inflamed infested world
I picked
my torn and battered
vagina
up from the red earth
(Miranda, 1974)
‘Servitude to speedysperm’ is starkly unpoetic (compare Mitchell’s romancer above). However, for the most part, sexual intimacy, whether heterosexual or same-sex, continues to be couched in conventional poetic terms:
In all your cavities I fit. My breath flowers through your flesh, my heart beats in your rib. My fingertips have felt you and my hands, my tongue knows taste of you & tastes your taste – & what white ecstasy blooms here to disappear (‘How can I tell you love’, McPherson, 1971)
my cunt is burning for you
i am lying dark
i am lying savage
my cunt is burning a wild animal
its fur electric
my cunt is a wild flower
a wild flower for you
(Beer, 1974)
Again, imagery of ‘white ecstasy blooms’ and the repeated ‘wild flower’ betrays the struggle experienced by this interregnum generation as it searches a means to articulate innovative and/or disruptive individual, communitarian, and imaginative alternatives. Strains in the poetic language, in support of an emergent liberating agenda, is the price paid.[33]
Big Smoke both accentuates and deflects this predicament. In elevating social activist content (message) over poetic means, it can’t help but highlight the discrepancy between them. This is seen in the way that socially progressive statements, like those of Levy, McPherson and Beer, are prone to didacticism, weakening them as poems. We are again bound to ask, as was suggested at the outset, what reliable ratio exists, if any, between social utility and poetics? That’s a tough one. For all its admirable depiction of the period’s topsy-turviness, Big Smoke is stuck because, in lauding counterculturalism as veridical form, it is constrained to social veracity, tacitly demeaning poetic quality as elitist in the process. The poet-editors, like Benjamin’s angel, caught facing one way while headed another, must find other, less obtrusive, ways to tilt the idealised scales of social utopics back towards the poets and poems they prefer – because they are superior poets.[34]
two sides one coin
It’s complicated, and we proceed with caution. On occasion, Big Smoke wants to tap several issues in a single poem. For example, Ngahuia Gordon’s ‘Pukeroa’ speaks to youthful protest, feminism, naturalism, historicism, ethnocentricity, colonialization, renascent Māoridom:
Still, he has come, the white man
– Has come, and has conquered
Wiped from beneath us
That base we knew so well
So that it should exist no more
But be replaced, our glorious heritage
With muskets, fire and bricks
With industry, with progress
With 1966.
Again, one experiences a poem of this kind (as with Beer’s et al) as advocacy – warranted for sure, but the terms of engagement reduce complex issues to binary reckonings in literary form (‘white man’ vs ’our glorious heritage’) – if not propaganda, then at least polemic. This is not to deny the pain, but the tenor, diction and attitude are fixedly ethnopolitical.[35] And this highlights the internal tug-of-war in Big Smoke between poetry and the societal other. Chronological time pitches against poetic time and they tug against each other, at times bewilderingly.[36] In subjugating literary form to extraneous ‘radical’ resources gathered from diverse places, in an implied otherness of integrity, the relative merits of many of the poems dissipate within a half-resolved pointedness.
A similar idealising occurs in places where certain material is clustered together. ‘Pukeroa’, for instance, is preceded by two Jim Nepia pieces titled simply ‘Poem’ (‘shit on the fates’), and immediately followed by Tuwhare’s ‘Who is testing today?’ (‘The Ascension is complete. // But this is no dream’) and Hunt’s ‘Ngawhatu’ (Māori in name only). Rowley Habib appears 14 pages earlier (71-73), plus 20 pages before that are three Kuki Kaa poems (47-49), like prescient tremors.[37] Indeed, to the extent that celebration of Māori culture and anti-Pakeha sentiment are corelated themes, that strategic flag is raised at the outset. The anthology opens with Rangi T. Harrison’s ‘Waikaro te Awa’, followed by Kitty Leach’s translation and Tuwhare’s famous ‘No Ordinary Sun’ (dated 1958, the same year Young’s ‘Lizard’ was written, a full two years before the period’s commencement date).[38] The inference is that the Māori renaissance and anti-colonial, anti-war, anti-status quo, anti-aesthetic attitudes are part and parcel of one shared enterprise. But surely there is undue risk in conferring onto unrelated materials unquestioned homogeneity in purpose and design? Otherwise, the theme of implicit allegiance to a communal stake in purported opposition (adumbrated in Brunton’s introductory five differences) simply advances the revisionist program advocated by the editorial trio, no questions asked.
Less self-obviously, though similarly telling in terms of advocacy, is the unspoken correlation in Big Smoke between poetic attainment and the limited photographic selection. Images of Gordon and Sue Kedgely welcoming feminist icon Germaine Greer to Auckland (1972); the same two in attendance at Ladies’ Day at Albert Park (1971); not to mention a large group of arms-linked women participating in a Jumping Sunday event at Albert Park (1970), together confabulate a choreographic identity between feminist activism and feminist poetics. In the end, Gordon’s slight tūrangawaewae poem is reinforced and magnified in validation of its viewpoint on race, political history, feminism, camaraderie and youthful grievance.[39]
aesthetics of grievance
Once again, we are reminded of Benjamin’s angel, pulled between past and future, but caught in the present. Understandably, if questionably, Big Smoke curates a re-envisioned past from the perspective of a rightful future, our now. This may reassure us concerning the ‘correctness’ of our view, but surely at a cost, as Benjamin realised for himself only too late in his own life, and catastrophically. To speculate further, might we not ask the following: had the resuscitated Young not matched the theme of youthful disillusionment (as arguably he doesn’t, or at least not without significant qualification), or had he not been designated a strong poet (as undoubtedly he has since become), would he not have been all too easily filtered out, gone unnoticed, unmissed?[40][41] And might not the same be observed of the remembered feminist and Māori renaissances? The past’s and the present’s view of the past are never the same thing. That none of us can know the precise future – or past – of this moment confirms Benjamin’s notion about how unintended consequences play out over time. Weak Messianism. The genie of historical reconstruction is always half way out of the bottle. Who, then, really gets to rearrange the bouquet?[42][43][44][45][46]
The problem with the back cover’s ‘poetry will be made by all not by one’ is that it blunts critical discernment: poetry provides a shield for poems, no matter their deficiencies. ‘All’ pegs an early instance of cultural wokeness in proclaiming a rampant individuality in universal perpetuity.
Let us illustrate this point by examining Ensing’s ‘Peeping Tom(asina)’, nestled within the ‘feminist’ cluster, and accordingly elevated beyond its merits.[47] The persona, in her bedroom, gazes out of her window at the moon – conventionally, the man in the moon. Because he ‘defies the feminine equation’, there is a gender-transitioning from ‘Tom’ (‘Peeping’ has its own worrying connotations) to a less-threatening ‘Tomasina’ (convenient if not especially feminine). Following, a list of ‘heavy with import’ contemporary feminists is recounted (‘figes, greer, friedan, fred, the rest’). However, the gesture jars, because it is left to the reader to reconcile these battle-hardened feminists with the aforementioned sentimentalised [‘peeping’] ‘woman in the moon’. Further, this odd juxtaposition links with the poem’s opening allusion to the lyrics of the popular love song ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’, romantically a silliness.[48] Then, leaving the feminists, attention shifts to poet Robert Graves, the mid-century androcentric author of The White Goddess, with the orphic line: ‘Surely Graves felt it too?’ Graves, who historically represents a patronising, outdated feminisation of poetic inspiration, hardly belongs in this arch-feminist company (the conflation of his White Goddess with ‘Tomasina’ is another oddity). Overall, the poem muddles poetic inspiration, ‘the moon’ as male prerogative, which it somehow approves, with radical feminism, which it admires, resolving neither. One wonders whether the veneer of feminist insurrection, rather than the underlying lack of resolution, may have endeared this poem to the Big Smoke editors? Again, the concern is that it relies for its importance on external exigency rather than intrinsic merit, which it has in only a limited amount.
This returns us to our inquiry into allegiance and purpose at the heart of literary production, mentioned at the start. In answer, let’s again take all four publications into purview, where we see marked divergences in their aesthetic stances. Baysting characterises ‘a poem’s inherent nature’:
Poets write, directly or indirectly, from their own experience. If not, they
place themselves before obstacles they will be hard put to overcome. But
a New Zealand poem does not necessarily need to contain specific
geographical references or to be in local dialect. A New Zealander is
subject to the influences of his physical and intellectual environment, and
his writing cannot help but reflect this conditioning. However unfamiliar the
style or syntax, the final criterion of a poem is whether it works. (3)[49]
Accordingly, men occupy their own realm: Counters pragmatist Ensing:
The majority of the verse submitted by women was reasonably competent but of a two-dimensional quality – too often cliched or overly sentimental. Those who did manage to communicate genuine emotions showed little control over their craft; the poetry often seeming to be a cathartic – at times almost an exorcistic – process. (my italics, 4)
Towards the end of 1974, sparked off
with enthusiasm for the concept of
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S YEAR, and
deciding to contribute my share to the
event, I began this anthology….
Basically any anthology is no more
than a select-ion of poems from a
particular area or period or group of
people, and as such is simply a classif-
ication of convenience. (my italics, 10)
Muted in her pushback, Ensing crimps her claims. O’Sullivan helps her out – albeit by further delimiting her crimped position – when he explains that plenitude in one domain (i.e. timely feminine expression) offsets deficiency in another (i.e. aesthetic prowess), producing in consequence ‘the limited poem’:
It is when a voice strikes through from experience to expression in a
manner which can carry what is personal, yet set it down as a free and
public fact, that we have a poem worth preserving… the edge… we call
the abyss [‘cathartic… exorcistic’, says Baysting]… lest it seems that I think
all this is peculiarly feminine… the limited poem may have its place (143-
45).[50]
In fairness, O’Sullivan deserves credit for attempting to explain an aesthetic impasse that Big Smoke essentially steps round. Its downplaying of aesthetic considerations is especially clear in Brunton’s ‘Restoring the Commune’ essay, which focuses only on the sixties.[51] His five differences of ‘otherness’ (violent anti-racism, social paranoia, sexual liberation, anti-authoritarianism, communalism) are explicated at the level of body-politic, largely ignoring poetic form. Traditional society’s transgressions are flagrant, he explains, obliging new poems to serve as ‘first-responders’. And following, part-tracking part-diverging from Brunton’s account of societal breakdown and the necessity of youthful counter insurgence, is co-editor Edmond’s ‘Poetics of the Impossible’. This encompasses the entire 15 years (actually 17, in order to accommodate crucial poems from nearing-forty Tuwhare and nearing-twenty Young). Edmond elaborates four specific chronological stages of poetic response: ‘individual poems’ (1959-64); ‘diversification’ (1965-68); Freed (1969-71); ‘contradictory tendencies’ (1972-75).[52] True, more emphasis falls on individual achievements, with less attention given to Brunton’s overriding theme of shared political conviction. Indeed, Edmond’s word-choice – ‘individual’, ‘diversification’, ‘contradictory tendencies’ – acknowledges a seesawing fractiousness in contrast to Brunton’s universal camaraderie:
For New Zealand, the 1960s was a decade of crisis as the nation
anxiously declared independence, a crisis that provoked questions
which were primary: What was the nation? What was its originating
moment? Who owned it? What imagination guided it? Independence
promises a future but, because its origin is the past, it is also a
movement back into history, a demand for a genealogy. (Brunton, 2)
The shared aim was ‘immediate participation in a passionate abundance
of life’.… The core of the vision was not to make an alternative reality, but
to disturb this one. (Edmond, 29, 32)[53]
Yes, ‘passionate abundance of life’ is what poetry is measured by. Yet, internally, the poems – beyond their rebelliousness – often speak in quite vexed ways, with conflicting voices. Lurking behind Edmond’s ‘abundance of life’ is an unacknowledged aesthetics of aimlessness, disintegration – understandably enticing to a generation feeling betrayed by their forbears’ promise of a redeeming ‘imaginative order’. Still, disintegration and ennui are unspeakably painful.
turning the tables (pleasuring aesthetics)
Now I am feeling grief
I have received these flowers
Triste I am, triste
Heaven gawps
Please believe that one
(‘The Clown at the Death of his Wife’,
Manhire, 1967)
I am a man half in love with time Tonight I present my back to my future I wear my body sideways and only my third eye has an epicanthic fold. (‘Turtle Time’, Haley, 1969)
Receiving an unwanted bouquet, Levy turns her back. Manhire, in similar receipt under different circumstances, likewise recoils (‘I am feeling grief’), although his tone is anything but disconsolate. The flowers, presumably given out of kindness, elicit dissimilar responses. It’s Manhire who breaks the mould of predictable emotional (more aptly aesthetic) response, intimating a break from the display of emotional authenticity to something closer to playacting or not caring less? The same can be said of Haley’s ‘Turtle time’. On this occasion the stance of Benjamin’s angel (‘my back to / my future’) is adopted literally. The poet ends up, if not exactly cross-eyed, then at least gazing vacantly from ‘my third eye’.
In contrast to the resounding certainty of Brasch’s ‘single scale of values’, the more innovative poets in the sixties & seventies brush normalisation aside in favour of a celebration of discordant human uniquenesses. This is the real revolution of the time and, as much as any assumed social revolution on behalf of the genuine, it invites an equal measure of playfulness, mistrust and anguish. Mores around truth, relationship, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ethicity, fashion, drugs, the law, the just war, home-making, friendship, love, health, normalcy, materialism, conformity – everything’s tossed in the air in an interminable lolly-scrambling:
In hospital they check my brain
& ask me precisely
what time it was I first went mad?
I can’t tell them
(of course we can’t)
so I’m allowed to have some tea
with some other men
who don’t know what time it was either.
(‘Maps & People’, Peter Olds, YP, 149)
Canonical hierarchy succumbs to temporal disarray.[54] To this extent, to continue the playground metaphor, the Manhire-Haley-Olds poems spin like tops, dizzyingly. Mischievousness starts at their riddling titles and extends to diction: ‘triste’ alongside ‘gawps’, ‘half in love’ alongside ‘back’ and ‘sideways’, ‘what time it was’ followed by ‘what time it was either’. In short, exhilarating as it might be to be headed out onto new terrain – it’s just out, there’s no assured way of getting back. It’s scary. The pressing question becomes how are these poets to give focused attention to an immediate temporality, abjuring the construction of godly imaginative orders, without sounding merely inconsequential, jejune?[55] Beyond messing up the times, or telling them what they should be doing, how does poetry achieve an inhabiting-time, especially on behalf of a generation of discombobulates? How does an aesthetic thrust towards lightness get to shine through in a thwarted age?
configur it!
Knowing ‘what time it was either’: Olds | Young[56]| Loney.[57]
legacies (Leggott-sees)
We return to Benjamin’s view of the application of time in the work of art. ‘Ordinary, unimportant detail ’, he explains, is embedded ‘within the interstices of the artwork, and encounters a kind of degradation over time’ only for it to ‘become more striking while the truth content retains its original concealment’. His ‘basic law of literature’ states that ‘the work’s truth content is the more relevant the more inconspicuously and intimately it is bound up with its subject matter’. While they are ‘united in the work’s early period’, he continues, ‘truth content’ and its sources
come apart during its afterlife… only now can the critic ask the basic
question of all criticism… whether the work’s shining truth content is due
to its subject matter or whether the survival of the subject matter is due
to the truth content…. In this sense the history of works of art prepares
their critique, and this is why historical distance increases their power.[58]
From this perspective, there is the prospect that something significant is happening in the seeming aimlessness of the Manhire, Haley and Olds (and Loney) poems. There is internal resistance to expectation (‘I present my back to / my future’). In a meaningful way, poetry is concerned with more than fidelity to subject matter, even as it exercises that fidelity.[59] The trick is to charm transitoriness out of its own casing, to erase date-stamp and place of origin – knowing that that’s not possible, and without really wanting to. That the present moment does not self-subsist and is dependent on outsideness (‘past’ and ‘future’) to exist at all is intuited in these poems:
when that happens
we laugh
(together
we laugh
& it is no learned thing
(‘Summer Is In’, Loney, YP, 100)
Poetry is insubordinate and disputes societal and behavioural stereotypes, which are inherently confining. History’s adage ‘we learn from the past so as not to repeat its mistakes’ hardly applies. Nor is self- or institutional improvement the half of it. The poems referred to don’t straightforwardly embrace commonplace humanism of the kind proclaimed in Big Smoke. Nor is their view commensurate with any traditionally religious one that locates purity in a long distant past, so that the present performs a ritual re-enactment in a desired return to that state. Against history’s promised future, against the retrieval of the bygone in religion, poetry looks inquisitively both ways. Or in Haley’s case – three!
Young, Manhire, Haley, Olds, Loney – with Olds, South Island inaugurees in Young Poets – ask how representational time might coalesce into aesthetic time, whether fooling around or not (‘Triste I am, triste’; ‘a man half in love with time’; ‘I… we… don’t know what time it was’). The reason I pick these few poems (others might equally serve) as exceptional – actually, exemplary – is because their tussle with duration is not explained away with reference to their everyday surroundings to the extent that is the case for the bulk of the poetry. Ways that poems do not belong to their times proves no less interesting than ways that they do. Big Smoke’s misstep is that it underestimates the impact of a discordant aesthetics by subjecting it to a regulated chronological rationale of prescience. The reason such discordance cannot be brought more fully into the open on its pages is because to do so would invalidate its commitment to ‘truthfully’ (i.e. literally) represent the socially determined without falsely elevating (i.e. aestheticizing) it. Big Smoke, by predilection, is a closet aesthete caught in a knot of facticity that resists undoing.
According to Benjamin, the importance of source material is not its perpetuation but its contribution to what is termed an inverse ratio.[60] The ratio sublimates constitutive material into a form of transtemporal meaningfulness, which, in return, enhances those very constituents. Over time, rather than cause the artwork to be recognised, subject matter comes increasingly to exist within the artwork.[61] In a sense, we can say that the artwork resets time and materiality. The way objects, relationships, activities in the present are grasped using poetic language is never wholly amenable to explication. Ironically, art is de jure its capacity to endure as a present perpetual refiguration (‘inverse ratio’). Origin is not a place but a visitation. This is poetry’s beauty.
Of course, such beauty can never be entirely free of a means of containment. Therefore, critics like Benjamin agree that categorisation of information is necessary, albeit always provisional, as we have found in this brief study of our four texts.[62] Selections, editorials, the theses of their introductions, this essay I am writing, all partake in the same hypotheticality, attempting to achieve a certain intransience. Literary history constitutes series of such events that continually seek to reformulate the whole, aware that each new whole is composed of smaller wholes, much like a fractal image or, before Mandelbrot, a Russian doll, each new formation self-contained yet containing iterations inside and out… ad infinitum.
Bossle the boatman talking about
about about told me what about
about was about with a
swagger who kept swaggling spittany
(to all our great and inquiring doubt)
on about about about 20ty
times too, too, too many.
(‘About About’, Dennis List)
The nonsensical List (the pun is invited) reaches beyond foolhardiness into a daunting predicament: a realisation that the dictum ‘make it new’ is in the end a fetishizing of obsolescence. Poetry knows intimately the paradox of emptiness it is subject to.
now then
‘About about’ provides us an opportunity to bring this periphrastic excursion back to its place of departure, or somewhere nearby. From different vantage points, we have seen that each of our four texts stakes a rival claim on the treasury of our local literary history. In so doing, their attempts at history-making are revelatory of their respective aspirations and contingencies. Literature, too, is historical.
By way of closing, allow me run a final measure over things as I’ve piled them together and pulled them apart. Private Gardens, whilst a notable fresh departure, gets entangled in the very thing it seeks to avoid, offering newness in a rather old-fashioned, stodgy manner, muffling its cry against androcentrism. Before it, quite differently, in a more devil-may-care, spontaneous manner, Freed throws the doors flamboyantly open to a new literary traffic. What follows three decades later, because it assumes the role of the historical continuation of Freed, down to including the then-as-now main protagonists, is Big Smoke. The limitations of this reification have been considered. This brings us to Young Poets, superficially the least ground-breaking in that it emulates proven historical models, yet it manages to do so in a manner that articulates future aspirations without detracting from those of its own time. To the talented Auckland-based Freed group, Baysting adds talented Dùn Èideann poets Olds and Loney, who individually will take the impetus of the energetic sixties & seventies in some of the more interesting fresh directions in ensuing decades.[63] Furthermore, it brings measured restraint to Freed’s exuding verve, without negating it. It adds editorial discretion and an expectation of literary expertise beyond what either the forerunner magazine or the belated Big Smoke dare, or for that matter what the more tentative Private Gardens might claim. As well as confirming Freed’s break with the predecessor generation (looks like Doyle on the outside, inside’s another place), it adumbrates an aesthetic perspective while attesting societal and intellectual revitalisation. In doing so, it is the least absorbed back into its times while carrying them with it. It approaches most closely Benjamin’s inverse ratio.
Other, unintended, consequences arising from our current peregrination are also worth noting, though on quite another scale. The pair of poets that caught our attention early on, Young and Kemp, have since travelled divergent paths beyond those intimated in Big Smoke.[64] Strangely, the truer ‘representative of the age’ has always been Kemp, whose career continues to embody its ideals: precociousness, feminism, naiveté, prodigiousness, outspoken earnestness, adventurism, itineracy. Yet her work, then as since, stays largely bounded by these same attributes. It belongs to the conservative part of Big Smoke’s looking backwards. Young, on the other hand, lost to the period had it not been for the laudable interventions of the editorial trio, has since progressively superseded them. Big Smoke, in cutting him to its size, unwittingly releases him to go inhabit other sizes altogether.
In contrast to his absconding, in medias res, initially to Sydney then North Queensland, where he has settled ‘permanently’,[65] Kemp’s sojourns over the years have taken her around the Pacific, to Singapore, the Philippines, Germany, multiple elsewheres. Yet New Zealand remains the point of return and identity. From here, for the most part, her publications originate and belong. Alongside the internationalist Australasians (Young and Loney), she continues to be our cherished ‘homely one’, at least at heart. Making Young our ‘gone forever’ elsewhere prodigal, who somehow continues to represent the rascally possibilities that await us in our bygone and huger undefinable future worlds. The genie flies.
notes
[1] At sixes and sevens ‘originated as gambling slang and may be an alteration or corruption of Old French cinque (five) and sice (six), these being the highest number on dice. The idea of risking all your goods on two highest numbers le to the idea of carelessness and neglect in your possessions’ (The Free Dictionary). NOTE: In keeping with this notion, some readers may prefer to read right through these endnotes, whether or not they decide to read the essay as a whole: in a slightly devious sense, the essay may be read as an elaboration on the more pithy notes.
[2] Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s (Atuanui Press: Pokeno, 2021), 188. ‘Fireflies dance over the star midden’ is lifted from Russell Haley’s poem ‘Turtle Time’, discussed later in this essay. Edmond’s distinction between ‘not imagination’ and ‘a world of sound and image in which sense has ceased to matter’ belongs to a sixties’ anti-rationalist mentality.
[3] In order: Auckland University Students’ Association; Heinemann: Auckland; Caveman: Dunedin; AUP: Auckland. The first is a standalone magazine; the middle two are anthologies; the last a collection from the period’s magazine material.
[4] See ‘Foundation & a supplement’ and ‘Brasch’s Landfall: A second life’ in Everything’s Something in Place (Titus Press: Auckland, 2019).
[5] Discontent in response to Curnow’s 1960 anthology, in preparation over the prior 2-3 years, centred on a lack of adequate representation of women poets and his elevation of the founding-myth South Islanders (Curnow, Brasch, Dallas, Dowling, Glover) over younger urbanites from Wellington (Baxter, Johnson, Campbell, Witheford).
[6] In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin committed suicide at Portbou on the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from the invading German Wehrmacht.
[7] Unless otherwise indicated, references are to Big Smoke, in which poems are arranged chronologically.
[8] The revolution was thoroughgoing. Brasch’s ontological ‘imaginative order’ and Curnow’s epistemological ‘New Zealand… remains to be created’ are struck null and void. Phenomenological immediatism is the new rule. Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945-1960 is the book young poets carry in their pockets. See Edmond (Song and Dance, 193) and Mark Young: ‘What saved me from becoming a pallid poet in the English tradition was Don Allen’s 1960 anthology’ (Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959-2008 (Meritage Press: USA, 2008), 19).
[9] The haphazard nature of the enterprise is reflected in the fact that I have come across what appear to be two Freed/2 issues: TWO:THE WORD IS FREED and THE FREE WORD 2, the latter a flimsy cyclostyle.
[10] Horrocks, a young Auckland University teacher, introduced contemporary American Poetry to the student launchers of Freed. His ‘Three Versions of Avant-Garde’ includes an element of hip regret: ‘In fact, N.Z. has never been fortunate enough to have a true avant-garde movement’, Freed/4). Fellow essayists make similar use of graphics: the cut-up ‘notes on film alone’ by ‘M.D. Edmond & Ian MacMillan’ (see inset) and John Daly-Peoples’ ‘LEON NARBEY: real time’ (freed/3). Sam Pillsbury’s ‘Talking about that Swede, Ingmar’, another film critique, is conventional in format (freed/2).
[11] In historical order, the three lapsed after 5, 5, 4 issues.
[12] Grundnorm [Ge] ‘denote[s] the basic norm, order, or rule that forms an underlying basis for a legal system. The theory is based on a need to find a point of origin for all law, on which basic law and the constitution can gain their legitimacy’. <Wikipedia, accessed 1 June 2021>
[13] Of those in Lf53, only Bland makes it into Big Smoke, something of a curiosity, given he turned 36 that year. Of Lf73’s up-&-comings, Young alone makes the later cut.
[14] Chameleon-like Young, prominent at both ends of the generational divide (‘Poems of the Mid-Sixties’ / Big Smoke), is conspicuously absent from both publications. In 1969, we are told, he headed to Australia ‘for good’.
[15] The inaugural issue includes Jan Kemp and Jocelyn Hopkinson, the only two women who appear throughout. Kemp has the further distinction of being the only woman in Young Poets AND the only poet included in all four of our publications.
[16] Self-characterisation conforms along gender lines. Representing the boys, Bob Orr: ‘Born Morrinsville 1949. Spent some time at Auckland University. Now working on a farm. Married with one child, Ezra [nee Pound?]. A slim volume, Blue Footpaths, published by Amphedesma Press, 1972 (YP, 154). Compare Lauris Edmond’s bio: ‘Lately emerged from intensive domesticity in a state of dissatisfaction and completed Honours degree in English, taught French and English in secondary schools’ (PG, 148).
[17] For 18 contributors 1-3 poems apiece, up to 12 for Adcock. If inclusivity is a female-tending quality, then – jumping forward three decades – the same quality is active in Paula Green’s compendious 99 ways to Read a Poem (2008) and her more recent Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Woman’s Poetry (2019), whose index lists some 200 women writers. Nor should we overlook her ongoing NZ Poetry Shelf blog, which projects a similar ambiance of non-discriminatory inclusion.
[18] The refusal of Frame (important in Landfall and Big Smoke) and Dallas (the significant Landfall poet) to be included because they considered poetry to be a non-gendered activity; the inclusion of deceased Mary Stanley (because she is ‘difficult to get hold of’) but not other deceased women poets; and the belated decision to include several new 1975-76 published women – while significantly reframing the anthology, are all factors nonetheless consistent with O’Sullivan’s allowance that ‘an uneven poem is not the worst of poetic sins’ (PG, 145).
[19] Lydia Wevers, editor of Yellow Pencils: Contemporary Poetry by New Zealand Women (OUP: Auckland, 1988), successor anthology to Private Gardens – and much its superior – acknowledges this when she writes that the latter’s poems are ‘interrupted by mood-setting photographs or portraits of the poets’ – adding – ‘Even the title suggests a characterization of the work that is limited by understood boundaries’ (xx).
[20] Roughly half the poems of three pages or more in length are contributed by Freed poets. Mitchell’s 10-pages ‘The Singing Bread’ is the single longest poem, originally from Freed/3.
[21] While just one of 67 magazines listed, and spanning a mere four of the designated 15-years, Freed provides a third of male contributors and two of its three editors, surely something that deserves explanation. Material from its first issue occupies 16 of 27 pages in the 1969 portion of Big Smoke.
[22] Editorial Notes aside, self-inclusion is something the high-minded Brasch was careful to avoid in Landfall Country, a 1962 selection from the journal.
[23] The Brunton-Edmond alliance comprises a kind of moral hazard in that they effectively underwrite the insurance on their own building. Oddly, it reminds one of Brasch and Curnow when they were up to their hegemonic tricks!
[24] Young’s qualifications extend beyond the perennial youthfulness of the surname. His spouse and namesake, Merlene, has three poems in Private Gardens and six in Big Smoke, alongside Mark’s eight. Theirs are the time’s ‘male’ and ‘female’ tell-tale voices. Mark also features in one of the few poetry photographs and is pivotal in the introductory arguments. In 1969, he unexpectedly leaves for Australia, where, since 2000, he has continued to prodigiously publish and blog. ‘Season in Hell’ is not included in Pelican Dreaming (2008), though it appears in Brunton’s Bumper Book series, Young’s first book publication, The Right Foot of the Giant (Wellington, 1999). Assuredly, Big Smoke deserves credit for his poster-boy ‘outsider’ revival. The weirder thing is that pre-Freed he had already achieved mainstream inclusion in NZ Listener (1959) and ‘Poems of the Mid-Sixties’ (Lf73), with several other poems in Landfall during the sixties. His outsize output and reputation since 2000 invite a revaluation of the pyrodynamics that governs literary history.
[25] Rimbaud is Big Smoke’s totemic figure;less so Freed’s; hardly so Young Poets’; definitely-not Private Gardens’. By my count, he is mentioned 18 times in the introductions (Brunton 11, Edmond 7). Several poets are enthralled by his e-x-r-otic adventurism and disdain for authority. Edmond goes so far as to wonder whether ‘Arabian’ allusions constitute a seminal experience. Several contributors, mostly male, record literal – or imaginary – travel experiences. Wedde, for example, refers to sojourns in Africa, the Middle East and Europe and peppers poems with snippets from the German or French (see ‘from Postcards: London/Jamaica/New York/London’ and ‘from Homage to Matisse’ (YP, 186-89). The lizard’s attributes, on the other hand, appeal across genders. Feminist Beer, prominent in Private Gardens and Big Smoke, uses this metaphor: ‘i am a small woman lying flat / a dark lizard’ (270). A Merlene Young poem includes the line: ‘SO I WILL CELEBRATE THE LIZARD’ (274). Without disparaging them, it is fair to say that such allusions are richer metaphorically than they are zoologically.
[26] One remembers Frame and Dallas declined inclusion in Private Gardens because poetry ‘should stand or fall on its own merits… whether it is written by women or men seems to me to be irrelevant’ (Dallas, 10). A recent returnee in 2014, Kemp reiterates an essentially romantic view of inspired poetic immediacy – ‘finessing’ occurs in fidelity to primary inspirational impetus. ‘My view of how I write hasn’t really changed since I first wrote of this in the anthology The Young New Zealand Poets (1973)…. I still hear a line or lines or just a phrase in my head and have taught myself to listen, to let the words keep on coming…. I do the thinking work then, once I’ve seen what I’ve said or am trying to say (Nicholas Reid, ‘Jan Kemp: Background’, Poetry NZ (March 2014), 48 (my italics)). Kemp’s statement resonates with Edmond’s, used in the epigraph.
[27] The feminist movement had an early kick-off with Leslie M. Hall’s ‘Women and Men in New Zealand’ (Lf45, 1958): ‘Even if our present scientific-materialist values remain, those destructive, masculine attitudes which are essentially a product of contempt for women should grow weaker and masculine interests and sympathies should widen correspondingly’ (57). To be clear, Leslie Hall was a pseudonym for Phoebe Meikle – a lingering case of gender-blanking? Times change… and don’t! Christina Beer, who reveals in her Private Gardens Biographical Note, ‘I have chosen [these poems] for I like them and for social reasons’, appears in Yellow Pencils as ‘Christina Conrad (Beere [sic])’.
[28] Since 1999, Young has been far and away the most prolific all sixties and seventies poets. A publication list forwarded to the author includes 50 individual book titles. The expansive development since Big Smoke is extraordinary, to say the least.
[29] Curiously, the poem, included as a counterculture statement in Big Smoke, appeared originally in Lf87 (Sep, ’68). Its subject is the psychological stress encountered on departing Mt Eden prison and ‘drifting on methedrine’ around town. Young rightly credits Leggott and Big Smoke for his ‘gradually being drawn back into poetic production’ (Pelican Dreaming, 20) – a hiatus of 25 years! Another nod to literary history’s careless rhyme and reason is the epigraph to ‘Mirror / Images’, one among a plethora of poems marking his resurgence, which quotes Leggott: ‘The thoroughness of your disappearance is outstanding’.
[30] These are brave poems in the context of the time when homosexual relationships were illegal. The Homosexual Law Reform Act was passed only in 1986. (Allowance should be made for the fact that Big Smoke is limited to magazine-published poems, excluding anthology-only appearances in Young Poets and Private Gardens.)
[31] This poem, like Levy’s, uses conventional imagery to convey an emotional state. Another Lowry poem ‘Landscape with Guitars’ employs phrases like ‘honey, flower’s thigh, breasting earth, my bloodred song, burst into fruit for me, and go cross your legs at the naked hour’. Blood and flowers are the universal vocabulary of love and passion. Both genders (and all four publications) suffer from the tendency to sexualise poetic language. A sign of their times.
[32] The especially overt feminist poems are taken from Broadsheet, launched in 1972, whose preoccupation was socio-political (see Christine Dann, Up from Under: Women and Liberation in New Zealand, 1970-1985 (Allen and Unwin: Wellington, 1985). Their inclusion in Big Smoke approaches poetic over-indulgence. Less than a dozen poems appeared in Broadsheet between 1972-75. (For our purposes, more notable are articles focused on Ensing and Kemp (22 Sep 1974)).
[33] Yellow Pencils picks up where Private Gardens left off. The latter, says Wevers, provided ‘an antecedent… pioneering work largely unaffected by feminism (xix)… an unadventurous poetic’ (xx)… ’an established core’… ‘historical boundary of feminism’ (xx)). Nor is Yellow Pencils strident in tone: ‘Associated with this move [from private to public] is 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’ (xxi): ‘Energy, expansion, and difference’. Non-inclusion of Māori women [in deference to editorial monolingualism] is regretted, because ‘the full dimensions of the literary history of women in this country cannot be realised, and a unilingual anthology is only a partial representation of it’ (xxi). Beyond these progressive aspects, the one I most admire is playfulness: attributable, in part at least, to Leggott, who provides the title.
[34] Big Smoke includes six poets (italicised) whose reputations start with Freed and keep increasing. In diminishing order: Brunton, Young (8 poems), Edmond, Wedde (7), Kirkland-female, List, Merlene Young-f (6), Haley, Manhire, Sanderson (5), Lowry-f, Mitchell (4). Freed, around 110 pages in the original, punches well beyond its weight in Big Smoke.
[35] Says the biographical note: ‘Ngahuia Gordon / Ngahuia Tahuri o te Arawa / Ngahuia Volkerling / Ngahuia Te Awekototuku. Born Rotorua, 1949, of Te Arawa, Waikato and Tuhoe descent. A short story writer, essayist and spokeswoman on Māori, feminist and lesbian issues, she has been a curator of ethnology at the Waikato Museum, an art history lecturer at Auckland University and professor of Maori Studies at Victoria. A collection of loosely autobiographical stories, Tahuri, was published by New Women’s Press in 1989’. Surely, the note outshines the poem! Such re-naming belongs to 2000: thus Kuki Kaa, to Wi Kuki Kaa; and Rowley Habib, to Rore Hapipi.
[36] The poetics of proximity relates to an aesthetics of de-timing, according to Benjamin. The poetic intention is to simultaneously inhabit and overflow time. Poetic figuration is not a simple equivalence to evolutionary social ‘betterment’.
[37] A later mini-cluster is Warren Dibble’s sequence ‘Maori Surveyor: His Field Notes’, occupying 109-18 (one-page is Glossary). Interestingly, its isolation from the earlier Māori ‘cluster’ reduces its thematic impact.
[38] Alongside Young, Tuwhare is the most talked-about poet in the two introductions. Almost as if to rub it in, he reappears in the penultimate, talismanic poem of the anthology ’The New Zealand Land March on Wellington, Hepetema 14-Oktetopa 17, 1975’. The structural (ethno-poetical) symmetry is neatly done but, in terms of the approach taken in this essay, indicates as well a concerted choreographic bookending that mismatches the actual period’s mishmash.
[39] Taylor’s ‘Lament: Ihumatao Paa’ appeared originally (foresightedly!) in Freed/3; for the rest, negligible interest is shown in ethnicity and women issues. No-one in Private Gardens identifies as Māori; anti-Europeanism is pretty much unhinted (Peggy Dunstan’s ‘After Listening to an Interview with a Maori Poet’ almost qualifies). In Young Poets, aside from condescension shown female submissions, concession to ethnicity forms only a distant horizon: ‘One might also hope for more study of the Māori and Polynesian cultures in schools. At present we are a multi-racial society which makes few concessions to anything other than western culture’ (4).
[40] As indeed he was, one thinks regrettably, in terms of Freed, and certainly in terms of the Wedde/McQueen Penguin anthology, as Young explains when interviewed by Martin Edmond in 2004: ‘I had the feeling of being forgotten in my original arena of New Zealand. This was in part due to picking up a copy of the Wedde & McQueen Penguin Book of NZ Verse when Lauren & I were in Auckland in 1987 & reading there that I was ‘abandoned to the Australians’. Those few words, & the fact they meant I was excluded from an anthology I thought I should have been in, caused a hurt that took me years to recover from & undermined my belief in myself as a writer’ (brief#31, 24).
[41] In an amusing irony, we see Young’s subsequent rise to international prominence is in no small part due to the encouragement of the Big Smoke editors; yet what was incidentally unleashed was unforeseen by them. A future renaissance was (unwittingly) enabled through a reconfiguration of the past. The thought is enough to have Benjamin’s thought-wheel spin!
[42] That an era should be made aware of what it would/should become is Big Smoke’s driving premise. Certainly, there is restitution for the dearth of female voices heard in Freed and Young Poets, and the neglect of tangata whenua in Freed and Young Poets and Private Gardens – the very first places we would expect to see these issues eagerly debated.
[43] It is noteworthy that Brunton, in ’Restoring the Commune’, alludes to Derridian ‘différences’, an instance of time-lapse, given that the availability of Derridean thought is post-Freed. That sense of differa/ence further applies, as does Derrida, to the presumed secondariness of written language. Big Smoke advocates the immediacy of the spoken word, underscored by live-event photographs (Barry Lett poetry readings, Albert Park’s Jumping Sundays), the inclusion of cartoon layouts with speech-bubble illustrations, plus an attitude of implied non-reliability of traditional poetic forms.
[44] The single indigenous magazine listed in Big Smoke is state-sponsored Te Ao Hou (1952-76). It needs to be remembered that the other 66 magazines listed address diverse constituencies and had their own wide-ranging inclusion criteria. Besides that, the ample editorial space used to expound the case in Big Smoke is hardly distinguishable from the similarly extensive polemic used by Curnow to introduce the Caxton and Penguin anthologies. A case of stepping inside the spurned father’s shoes?
[45] No shared rationale is forthcoming; however, one relevant point is that Brunton-Edmond-Leggott had by 2000 established a close personal and writing friendship. Another factor to consider is Leggott’s achievement as editor of Landfall (1991-93), during which time Brunton and Edmond are significant presences. Leggott’s editorial nous, her organisational sophistication, let alone her academic prowess and easy-going womanly confidence, render her an almost antithetical figure in Freed, Young Poets, Private Gardens – dare one say, even in Big Smoke?
[46] The relative prominence of the favoured few, mentioned already, undercuts Edmond’s egalitarian call for ‘a collection of poems rather than poets’ (21).
[47] In the midst of the section tracing the advance of women poets (correlated to Edmond’s fourth phase, 1972-75), are four poems from Broadsheet (nestled between pages 266-90). Two are from Val Smith, one is anonymous, and one is from Rachel McAlpine (of an inexplicably minimal two poems). McAlpine is, however, an important inclusion in Private Gardens.
[48] ‘By the light of the silvery moon, / I want to spoon, to my honey I’ll croon love’s tune, / Honeymoon keep a shining in June, / Your silvery beams will bring love dreams, we’ll be cuddling soon, / By the silvery moon’.
[49] The aesthetic adheres to an adaptive staunch Eurocentric androcentrism: ‘In New Zealand we are fortunate in being able to observe influences in Europe and America from a reasonably objective stance, and to function in our own literary surroundings’ (3).
[50] As a reputable poet and editor of short fiction and poetry anthologies over the preceding decade, the O’Sullivan imprimatur is significant. At the same time, his affirmation of the noble intentions of women writers does not automatically translate into aesthetic prowess. Of the 35 poets included in Private Gardens, only two appear in his 1970 edition of An Anthology of Twentieth-Century New Zealand Poetry. Conversely, four of the five women included in Paterson’s 15 Contemporary New Zealand Poets (1980) appeared in Private Gardens. What a difference a few years and a less mainstream editor make!
[51] In 1960 Brunton turns 14, Edmond 11, Leggott 4.
[52] The cut-off, for reasons that are not made entirely clear, is 1975. Emergent women’s poetry is a viable explanation, one I concur with to some extent, though that movement had hardly gained traction at the cut-off point, which is more coherently grasped as a point of blast-off (as evidenced in the transformation between Private Gardens and Yellow Pencils), and in the sixties the category was not-so-much-as imagined. It can also be seen as arbitrary, in that, from at least the mid-seventies, interest was already gathering towards what would, through the 1980s, materialise as Parallax (1980-82), And (1983-84), Splash (1984-5), and Antic (1986-87, our first feminist literary theory magazine). These magazines reinstated the cerebral, neglected until then.
[53] Consonant with Emily Dickinson’s ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’, Leggott extends the gaze of her male co-editors: ‘Nga Tamātoa and Citizens Association for Racial Equality (CARE) criticise entry procedures for proposed one-year training college course in Maori language: ”What is a “good level of general education?”’ (1974, 332). That is, poems and the historical record collapse onto an undifferentiated, interchangeable horizon.
[54] This response is in part acceptance part repudiation of Benjamin’s flaring view of history, as well as his touchstones of authenticity, aura, messianism. One sees this dilemma personified in his figure of the flâneur, an idealised Parisian Arcadeswanderer who sees self-identity in ‘purposeless strolling’, salvation via milieu (an aesthetics of interiority, Illuminations, 13, 43), in preference to the projection of individual identity. Incidentally, of Benjamin’s Illuminations, Brunton insists, ‘See throughout’ (BS, 16).
[55] The poem is the occasion of my epigraph, taken from Song and Dance. Of a live musical performance of ‘Turtle Time’ in 2016, Edmond reflects, ‘Towards the end of the piece… time seems to break up into fragments floating in space-time forever’ (189). Again, the underlying trope is escape, entropic de-anchorage.
[56] Olds and Young comprise our dynamic duo. A third name I want to add but feel I mustn’t is Baxter, already in his 40s when these two drug-fuelled prodigies were in their 20s. It makes sense that he is not included in Freed or Young Poets (despite the fact that he’s only eight years Haley’s senior), though he is surely an appropriate Big Smoke personage (beyond being pictured alongside Young – both heavily bearded – as co-readers at the Barry Lett Gallery in 1969). Edmond’s Song and Dance Preface’s dismissal of Baxter’s ‘cultural contortionism’ is exorbitant. Despite his energetic translations of Rimbaud in Lf72 (1964), it is the object of his admiration, not he, who becomes Big Smoke‘s shaman. Impoverished, vagrant, alcoholic, presumed fornicator, anti-war protestor, anti-establishment and anti-war, founder of the Jerusalem community for dropouts-and-the-rejected and a crash pad for druggies and crims at Boyle Crescent (see Jerusalem Daybook, 1971), welcomed into tangata whenua, prodigious, transformer of sixties’ poetic language – how can he have been overlooked? One can only assume his place is ideologically given to Hone Tuwhare, four years Jim’s senior, and much his poetic inferior. Much the same can be said of Fleur Adcock (exactly Haley’s age), though a very different personality, who is the period’s leading progressive woman writer, overlooked in Big Smoke, where her place is ideologically given to Janet Frame, two years Baxter’s senior. The web, indeed, is more tangled than at first appears. A final irony is that Frame, refusing inclusion in feminist Private Gardens, is Big Smoke’s visionary, acclaimed for ‘the energy of speech that infuses this new work’ (26).
[57] Loney’s permission was sought to include a single poem in Big Smoke, though the offer was declined (email to author).
[58] Benjamin elaborates with an analogy: ‘While [the chemist] is left with wood and ashes as the sole objects of his analysis, [the alchemist] is concerned only with the enigma of the flame itself: the enigma of being alive’ (Illuminations, 4-5).
[59] In a late 1940s university essay on Marvell’s ‘The Mower to the Glow-Worms’, student postmodernist John Ashbery writes: ‘The poem owes its impact… to the insignificant glow-worms, who remain with us after we have forgotten the point of it all, only remembering that it has left us in that magical, suggestive land where all great poems take place… we are released from the things of the world to find a new significance in the world of the imagination, though the separation from “things” is never complete, and the higher meaning of the poem will invariably have its roots in them’ (my italics), in The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life, Karin Roffman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: TY, 2017) 160.
[60] In Benjamin’s terms, ‘the size of an object [causality] was in an inverse ratio to its significance [effect]’ (Illuminations, 11).
[61] Thus, ‘weak Messianic power’. Because there is no way the entire network comprising past reality can be grasped in its intricate wholeness, the inverse ratio crystalises a non-reductive meaningfulness, never finally fixed or exhausted.
[62] These convoluted sentences say little more than Ensing’s ‘classification of convenience’, albeit more enticingly. In Arendt’s paraphrase, ‘no society can properly function without classification, without an arrangement of things and men in classes and prescribed types’ (Illuminations, 3).
[63] In another strange twist of literary history, Adcock, who has effectively been written out of local literary history (see footnote 56), when editing OUP’s Contemporary New Zealand Poetry (1982), includes Loney and McApline, two of the more radical poets to fully emerge in the seventies who receive no or scant attention in Big Smoke.
[64] My idiosyncratic side-by-side presentation early on suggests a degree of compatibility that can only be considered superficial. A ‘deeper’ incompatibility is intimated in the extensive footnotes I have used, underscoring the contrast between roles assigned in the poetic community and actual poetic temperaments and attainments.
[65] Had Loney appeared in Big Smoke, the same could be said. Actually, his non-appearance makes a stronger case for saying it. The biggest innovatory movements of the period reach outside the confines of Big Smoke. Before his departure to Australia in 1999, Loney was an eminent local poet, editor and publisher, having earlier been singled out by visiting Black Mountain poet Creeley in the mid-1970s. Just as Young, since 1999, continues to publish prodigiously in NZ, Australia, UK, USA and Finland, Loney, since his relocation to Melbourne in the same year, continues to be published in NZ, Australia and USA. Their personal paths have not yet significantly crossed, nor has literary history yet brought them into proximity, yet a lovely titbit emerges, as Alan tells it: ‘… but Mark Young, he & I shared with a couple of others a house in Scarborough Terrace in Wellington in 1960 or 61 – he played double bass in the University Jazz Club where I played drums, but I haven’t seen him or heard from him since that time, 60 years ago – ‘ (email to author).
john geraets 