i.m. ted jenner

We see, hear, smell with the breath-soul (thumos) in the lungs (phrenes)
from ‘AISTHĒSIS’, brief.23, Mar 2002

Ted Jenner was somebody who gave much of his life to words. In a sense, he was an anachronism: a dedicated classicist scholar-poet. If that sounds fusty, Ted could be fusty, and spare in his views. His mind was also marked by an exactitude, imbibed from the Classics, rather than by an embrace of diverse subjective modernity. Another quality that reverberates in the work and memories that Ted has left to us, in both human and literary terms, is an underlying geniality of character.

I have two memories to relate that convey something of this quality, within the realm of exactitude. The first concerns brussel sprouts, which Ted loved; and the second, his extension (to quote John Keats, another poet who prized lifegiving words) of ‘This living hand, now warm and capable of earnest grasping’.

Sprouts, first. My wife Karen and I were spending half of each year abroad at the time and, when we were back in New Zealand, Ted was keen to invite us around for a meal. ‘But, Ted, it’s tricky. We’re vegetarian’. ‘No problem, he remonstrated, ‘I love brussel sprouts’ – so long as we brought the mango slices. Well, we arrived at Ted’s flat in Meadowbank, and an hour later the frying began. Yes, the sprouts were fried in the pan; and when they were served on the plate they were accompanied with a substantial side-helping of pasta. Pasta and sprouts, that’s one fond remembrance. Indeed, Ted’s vegetarian repertoire may have been somewhat circumscribed, because the next year, and I think the next, on the plate we found the same dollop of pasta and brussel sprouts!

          Do not give me
          a mask of clay
          which loses face.
          someone in some
          future time will
          remember me.
		     (from ‘Sappho triptych’, The Arrow that Missed)

In his writing, pointedly intellectual, Ted was nonetheless drawn to giving elemental form to things of profundity. Breath, breath-as-spirit, breath-as-utterance, breath-as-lifegiving, drew him to modernists Pound and Olson, as it had drawn him throughout to classical antiquity. It also allowed his adroit dryness of wit to flourish. This small excerpt will suffice:

     Listen. His tongue moistened by plosives swells towards speech searching 
     for his sibilants and aspirants as he cheerfully churns out simulations and  
     representations of himself even as the critics are preparing their 
     programmed responses, swirling in circles around their customary epithets.
                     (‘The sprinkler’, The Arrow that Missed)

This takes me to a second little story that happened on a final visit to Ted at Auckland hospital, a few days before his passing. Again, the fussiness evaporated almost as soon as it was expressed. Ted was actually in excellent spirits, and his expression was animated and open. I remember him speaking appreciatively about his much-loved wife Vasalua, glancing out of the window at the bus-stop across the road, where she would get off the bus on her daily visits.

In contrast to the experience reported in his Malawian and Tongan poems, he was feeling the cold, and had a thermal foil sheet wrapped round his middle. But the thing that surprised me is that, when it came time for us to say goodbye, Ted gestured that I should take his hand, which he lifted towards me. We held each other’s hands for perhaps a minute and, while there was talk about how he felt coldness in his, the exchange was unusually warm, and appreciative–and, yes, genial.

§

The ceremony completed, as family and friends departed the funeral chapel, we were invited to place sprigs of rosemary on Ted’s casket. Rosemary was, explains Vasalua, another favourite of his. The Latin name for this hardy Mediterranean plant means ‘dew of the sea’. With the ancients, Ted recognised the resonant mystique of the commonplace, as suggested in the translation that follows. Let it serve as a tribute to an exacting, kindly individual.

          I am parched with thirst and dying: let me drink
          From the ever-flowing spring on the right, by the cypress    
          tree.
          ‘Who are you? And where are you from?’
          I am a son of Earth and starry Heaven.
                     (‘Eleutherna’ (tr), 2nd-1st centuries B.C., The Gold Leaves)

texts

A Memorial Brass (Hawk Press, 1980).
Dedications (Omphalos Press, 1991).
The Love Songs of Ibykos: 22 Fragments (The Holloway Press, 1997).
Sappho Triptych (Puriri Press, 2007).
Writers in Residence and Other Captive Fauna (Titus Books, Auckland, 2009). 
The Gold Leaves (being an account of the so-called 'Orphic' Gold tablets, with translations from the Ancient Greek) (Atuanui Press, 2014). 
Percutio (No.10 Special issue devoted to two projects by Classicist and poet Edward Jenner, 2016).
The Arrow that Missed' (Cold Hub Press, 2017).

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