Landfall wrangle1
What follows is a piece of literary excavation. It is an attempt at unearthing – in that sense reconstructing – the working relationship between Kendrick Smithyman as poet and contributor and Charles Brasch as editor of Landfall (1947 -1966). Hopefully this historical account is also of interest for the light it throws on the literary practices involved in Brasch’s twenty year editorship and the kinds of relationship that developed through the journal. And, in some way, I hope it may encourage a treatment of our past which is less a backward stare and more a bringing into the light of day that which lies immediately under our feet.
Readers and critics alike have complained, when approaching Smithyman poems, that they are unnecessarily forbidding, labyrinthine, that they do not warrant their own (sought) complexities. This is the predicament that confronted Brasch in managing the relationship between Smithyman and Landfall. Having serious reservations himself, Brasch was nonetheless convinced that it remained his duty to mediate between the poems and the journal, extending where appropriate the means of contact. Interest came to focus on the incongruities of design and execution: could they be resolved?
Two poems submitted in February 1947 elicited a usual cautious reply: ‘I find it hard to judge poems unless I can see several together, or unless I already know a poet’s work and can relate isolated pieces to it. I believe that many other readers of magazines find the same, so that I hope usually to print in Landfall groups of poems rather than single pieces, except perhaps long ones’ (1 March). A request for ‘about half a dozen’ other poem was encouraging, though tempered:
I am more than 'mildly interested' in 'Te Kopuru'. But, you know, it makes considerable demands on the reader (me, in this case); + since you mention hasty typing, I should like to be sure that you haven't made any typing errors; + particularly that you have put in all the punctuation you are prepared to allow: one wants as much as possible. (14 March 1947)
The modest pressure exerted here to simplify the texture of his poems was to be maintained throughout. Obscurity, unless the intention behind it was clear, was considered an unlikely means of going about a search for underlying harmony, order, for perspicuity, aesthetic priorities as far as Landfall was concerned. Why, when the underlying statement being conveyed was simple enough, go about saying it so confusingly?
Brasch decided, regretfully, not to print a punctuated and hyphenated version of ‘Te Kopuru’, admitting frankly that ‘although it has very good passages I do not think it quite comes off, because even after repeated reading a good many obscurities remain and thus several of the pictures, and the whole effect, are blurred and weakened. And in a long and static poem, in which there is no thread of argument to lead one on from stanza to stanza, the separate scenes and the general effect must be clear’ ( 12 May). Discerning a struggle in the poem between an ‘involved style’ and ‘direct statement’, Brasch admits to being ‘disturbed constantly in all your work by involved writing and apparently unrelated images out of which fine lines start vividly, and by unmusical lines or phrases among which musical ones strive to make themselves heard’. That the concern was genuine is not in dispute; and, as if in demonstration, the editor goes on to cite ‘chapter and verse’ of the offending passages. While there is nothing to suggest Smithyman felt intimidated (although some minor changes in punctuation were made), it is easy enough to imagine the very real pressure felt by younger writers eager to be included in New Zealand’s foremost literary journal.
Points of difference did not exist so much on a personal level, where relations remained cordial (as is a striking Brasch achievement as editor). Rather, the divergence is in their respective aesthetic views and practices. For example, Smithyman, who found little to favour in the older poet’s idealist mode of writing, wrote deprecatingly of Brasch’s The Estate in a 1957 Here & Now review:2
But, given Mr Brasch's technical limitations and the subtlety of the relationship he is at once reviewing and defining, there cannot be any question either of his failure to realise the friendship or to control his poetry. His good feeling gets the better of his poetic discretion much too often, and the relationship as set forth is a wordy adolescent crush, got up in a deal of talk about 'Life' and what seems to be a strongly Germanic romanticism?
In his critical book A Way of Saying Smithyman expresses his preference for poet-as-rhetor (the academic voice) over rhetorician (the romantic voice): irony, wit, baroque and complex structures, verbal play, with poems rooted in ‘an active body of information’, take precedence over romantic earnestness, commitment and self-authentication, as well as the urge to idealistic expansion. Smithyman viewed the 1930s poets in New Zealand as appropriating nineteenth century English romanticism as their rightful inheritance, and applied, with mixed success, to an as yet imaginatively unassimilated New Zealand landscape and people.
For his part, when invited by J.A.W. Bennett to nominate Smithyman poems for inclusion in the Chapman/Bennett Anthology of New Zealand Verse (1956), Brasch took the opportunity to elaborate on his own reservations:
My general impression is that he writes too much and too easily, or is too easily satisfied with what he writes and too little concerned to make himself understood. Some of the [poems] read like K.S. talking on and on - no beginning, no end, no shape, with a slightly pedantic strain in the vocabulary which is sadly inappropriate. The pieces that stand out, for me, are those where a strong impulse seems to have driven him forward past the by-paths that too often mislead him.... Would you say he's a considerable talent without sufficient direction (in both senses) to realize what one feels to be his potentialities.... his artistic sense doesn't control his tech[ni]cal competence as it ought to. (10 June 1953)
Notwithstanding his reservations, Brasch had already sufficient confidence for him to include Smithyman in Landfall’s 1948 under-30 poets mini-anthology (others are Dallas, Wilson, Oliver, Johnson and Sinclair). Beyond this, the cross-and-parry in evidence in the correspondence indicates a mutual wariness that was scarcely to make its way onto the pages Landfall ‘proper’.
Attempts at bridging the gap were mutual. Most of the work offered by Smithyman – if we picture his work as complying to a scale of accessibility – comprise the less difficult of his poems. Pains were taken to make himself properly understood. Sometimes, at Brasch’s request, he affixes notes to explain individual poems. At other times, he does so voluntarily, as with the following ‘Journey Towards Easter’. However, these were thought unnecessary, as Brasch found the poem readily decipherable on its own. (Interestingly, Smithyman had originally envisaged notes and poem as closely interrelated – the poem working hand in hand with the theological ideas and sources referred to.) The verse mixes dramatic monologue and speculative meditation.3 Peter Radford, parish priest, ruminates awaiting the arrival of his new curate:
I have come thirty miles to meet
this boy, driven thirty miles, have been driven -
put anyway, am here waiting at a place for waiting,
urgent to say there is no hope in his people.
How say there is no hope, as I wait in fog,
autumn lightly adding days toward Easter?
The god is dead in me. So there is no priest
for the people who ask that one may come to bind
their communion. (Lf20)
Brasch readily approves this kind of rumination. The flow of thoughts, even where they move in typically oblique fashion, is easily enough to follow. .
On another occasion, a six page letter was despatched, prompted by the editor’s inquiring of ‘Emblems’, ‘Can you make these passages any clearer? I do want to know what sort of statement the whole poem makes, because it interests and attracts me, and at present I can’t’ (12 April 1950). The response was to the offer a group of three poems: ‘Dirge for Two Clavichords and Hat’, ‘Of our Muted Circumstance’ and ‘Emblems, a Casual Shire’. Of the first two, Brasch initially remarked, ‘Both sound convincingly well’. Yet some bewilderment lingers. Brasch weighs each word, questioning: ‘Does “Muted” in the title mean “changed” or “silenced”?’ He thought ‘Dirge’ ‘very obscure’ for an ‘ironical bar song’. Approval and complaint merge: ‘there are admirable and plain things embedded in the darkness of its general drift’. Here are the opening stanzas of the poem, appearing eighteen years later in Flying to Palmerston:
All day that metronome, thrice-gallant heart,
ails of a musing but declines to stay.
Between their rounds of drinks in city bars
some tell (but softly) how Troy had its day
and fell, caught out in musing on delay, delay
which echoes with the echoing barman's voice.
While at the doorstep dogs lie down and moan
Waring persists, 'Why! Have I now no choice?'
as fellows leave. He goes out last, alone.
Let us go call upon Count Ivanhoe,
an innocent of enthusiastic flesh
who's free of vulgar as of obvious vice,
unless that scent is meths which sails his breath.
There with him pass in song a certain time
until, responsive to his sad metronome,
one sits aside deliberating his death.
Ring taxis to him. He wearies for his home.
Unfortunately, parts of the exegesis would not have been a great help to a bemused Brasch. ‘Dirge’, Smithyman explains,
is for Waring, Ivanhoe, and us; for Western Man, Urban Man; for Waring, the New Zealand intellectual is Waring, a composite figure I have persuaded out of the historic Browning-Dommett relation (What's become of Waring?). For Count Ivanhoe, the prototype figure of European consciousness and import, whose society is attractive to Waring, and charming and dangerous but necessary, all the more because its moral defect is evident and gives form to the defect of morality not yet specific in us. (14 April 1950)
And so it goes… over several pages, showing the by now familiar inclination to wayward progression. And, as Brasch himself points out, some of the allusions are so marginal that the reader cannot reasonably be expected to make anything of them. Later in the letter Smithyman discloses, percipiently, that the poems are concerned with ‘statement and symbolic action’, and his own proclivity is for ‘stating the poem, not commenting’. In characteristically anecdotal fashion, an agreement to disagree follows:
I think of Valery's dictum of dropping [the] poem like a ton of bricks and leaving the Air Raid Squad to sort out the components, and weighing them to see whether the ton was short, standard, metric or what you will. Lack of sympathy in this one, so far as your conclusion goes that there is no communication at the end. One man 's meat is another's poison; our judgements if diverse are valid.
But if a marked difference in temperament is acknowledged, Smithyman’s aspirations are as considerable as any poet’s:
Sargeson was rather concerned when I declared I was not writing for the literate mass or the Bloomsburys of the North Shore or elsewhere, for he has some eager consciousness of his audience. So had l once. Then I was concerned with audience, but now I am less so. In honesty I hope to write some day poetry with various characters and as worthy of regard as the poetry of our time or of our history which I regard as worthy. My work moves (l think) slowly towards reaching that standard of worth but it won't be, what it should be, for a long time. It may never reach that. There may never be an audience but myself or perhaps a few. My poems may not deserve even that. But I seem to be committed to this slogging, to finding the right way of saying what demands to be said. (My italics)
But let’s return to Brasch, who had suffixed criticism of the first two poems with an avowal of good faith, confiding – ‘I’m sorry if this seems harsh, but I must protest that for me at any rate you’re not putting your gifts to good use by wrapping your meaning up so darkly. I work on your poems because I believe you’re a serious writer, but I’m sure that most readers would give up these pieces in despair much sooner’. An impasse persisted, albeit one which both editor and poet endeavoured to counteract. Brasch accepted the third poem ‘Emblems’, again expressing mixed feelings:
'Emblems' is a different matter because one can see at once what the subject is and it has the interest and attractiveness of being local and personal. But it also is too difficult in places, one just can't follow what you're saying and the phrases become mere background noise.
Next, offending usages are listed:
E.g. in I the second sentence and the first sentence of stanza 2; in III the first sentence of stanza 2; in IV the second sentence (and what does 'stance 11' mean in stanza 2 1.1.?); in V stanza 4 first sentence (and what do the last two lines of stanza 3 mean?) - these are sentences I can't untangle grammatically and fail to understand. Can you enlighten me? Better, can you [make] these passages any clearer? (12 April 1950)
Before elaborating further on these details and Smithyman’s response, let me summarise the key difficulty in the relationship may be isolated. Smithyman’s oblique method – a practice, as he coins it, of ‘intricating and integrating… to a state of density’ – seems to Brasch a handicap because it denies easy access and distances the very readers it hopes to draw into its creation. Brasch urges Smithyman to simplify his verse. Smithyman, in practice, refuses.· The latter views the poem as a construction of the mind, an artifice, a way of saying: its power of enchantment and social transformation is (for him) surely secondary, if not altogether beside the point?
Three years later, in reply to Brasch’s conveying on behalf of the 1953 Poetry Competition judges (including himself) the general opinion that Smithyman’s entry ‘Of the Enduring City’ was ‘much too obscure, that indeed after the first section it is very hard to follow’ ( 1 7 September). The news, comes the response, was ‘scarcely a surprise’:
As you know, I work a great deal over poets who attract me and I see their complexities revealed (and largely I have admired complex poets, such as Donne, or Shakespeare rather than simple singers, at the foolhardy extreme where one meets W.H. Davies) so my own construction has become increasingly organised and multiple, and I know it is consequently more difficult. (19 September 1953)
Missing the Award must have been a disappointment, especially as the poem, Smithyman contends, ‘still seems to me the most considerable work I’ve done’. The judges (Sargeson was the exception) were understandably wary of a poetry which did not, as it were, lay its cards on the table. Of similar mind to Brasch, they shared his concern for lyrical continuity, for direct unequivocal statement. Whereas other local poets, reading the 1951 Faber Book of Modem Verse (Smithyman singled it out in A Way of Saying as having had considerable impact), found inspiration in the incisive social or personal stroke of Yeats or Auden or perhaps Dylan Thomas, Smithyman was drawn to cerebral, witty, difficult poets such as Allen Tate, John Crow Ransom, William Empson (these in turn looked to T.S. Eliot, who had been instramental in reactivating interest in the metaphysical poets). In these and related poets – Robert Lowell’s another – Smithyman had sufficient placement in contemporary poetry in English to sustain him in his way of craft. Apart from Curnow, who was developing in a related style in the 1950s, not much contemporary local even remotely compared.
If we now turn back to the exchange over ‘Emblems’, some practical aspects of Smithyman’s craftsmanship can be elucidated.
Returning day, and day without return
drowned, yes, say deeper than a valley
eight years away conned below morning's
tide-rising light. Valley, whose half one
was of land alluvial, cattle frequented,
and half of sea, not arable pasturing,
conjoint your arcs escort my fancy now
whole presence, being shown returning day.
Curbed north by heralds skyline breaking,
south by the fern, the wind-besotted,
harsh area from retrospect resumed guide -
westering my eye your brother coast!
How seen there last, that now by pain
is dimmed since then I left, one undesigned
to travel through corrupting forces to war
saw steeper under shallow off-shore hyaline
Cook's desert coast my childhood played
beyond my knowledgeable fondness' hold, and hold?
Emblems, a Casual shire, sea and wind attach
the emblematic names, the tattered stance
to cabbage tree and person, making local
those places, people, on their tolerance only.
Local my fancy hawks on the river flats
nostalgia, day, my freedom to return.
II
No fathers lay down for me coolly sleeping
beside that river divides bank only from bank,
there in the long sleep of heraldry keeping
watch on the acres while the farm lands sank
into a lasting dusk... (Lf15)
The poem – to paraphrase the poet’s exposition – is a rumination on his place of childhood (to the west of the northern peninsular), and opens with an image of the further (opposite) coast, of the imaginary circle formed in linking the Brynderwen hills to the hills north of Whangārei, taking in as well the sea of Bream Bay and the Hen and Chicken Islands. Half this circular valley, or cup, comprises ‘land alluvial’ and the other half ‘not arable pasturing’ (i.e. the sea). Occurring in the poet’s vision together the two ‘arcs’ are ‘conjoint’. The speaker, then in military camp (‘through corrupting force to war’), has memories of childhood triggered when he observes the sun rise above the water. From the second stanza onward the poem shifts to and fro, interlacing memories of that time and locality. Pictorial representations are linked, sometimes tenuously, in a criss-cross of allusion and symbolic suggestion, so that the poem makes not only a statement about childhood but recaptures the texture of interconnection between the individual, family, locality, history, myth and literature.
Brasch liked the poem initially because the subject was quickly recognisable and because of the ‘ interest and attractiveness of [its] being local and personal’ (12 April 1950). Having received an account of the background to ‘Emblems’, he compliments it (in a hasty note in late April) as ‘a fine conception, a real imaginative attempt to get this country into poetry’. (Indeed, the regional quality of Smithyman’s verse was something that Brasch admired and especially encouraged amongst Landfall contributions. One of Smithyman’s earliest offered poems ‘Te Kopuru’ was praised as ‘something authentically of N.Z. and gives glimpses of part of the N.Z. scene not to my knowledge recorded before – one might call it a N.Z. autobiography’ (12 May 1947)). The passages referred to earlier which Brasch finds grammatically confusing and over which he seeks clarification are:
Valley, whose half one
was of land alluvial, cattle frequented,
and half of sea, not arable pasturing,
conjoint your arcs escort my fancy now
whole presence, being shown returning day. (1)
How seen there last, that now by pain
is dimmed since then left, one undesigned
to travel through corrupting force to war
was steeper under shallow off-shore hyaline
Cook's desert coast my childhood played
beyond my knowledgeable fondness' hold, and hold? (1)
Dryness at root and dearth against breast
I body that peninsula in these words,
land locked in evening's injunctions, pressed
below cloud and vision while the straggling cords
of catch cry flocks lash coast on coast. (Ill)
Knot, knot the divisible cords
and tell each stage out an act of faith
by sundry acts to breach a droning time
lay bonds upon the real so to regain
the faith of that most unfelicitous soil. (IV)
To entertain with withering the host
propose perpetuate deliberate light,
assure that ancestry adopted once
conflict is yet a victory of the Beast,
flood tide the single measure against chance. (V)
Smithyman stays resolute in his defence of these passages. The single concession he is prepared to make in clarifying syntax is to close the third passage, above, with a full point; four additional queries, concerning punctuation and diction, elicit no further change. Why the reluctance to make even minor changes? Several pages of explanation belie mere recalcitrance. The reason lies, I consider, elsewhere: in the very method of poem-crafting that he adopts. The notes, however precisely they may have delineated the various strands of the poem, present in themselves no satisfactory solution to doubts felt by the editor. Nor was the underlying statement in the poem elusive; it could be seen in such aptly phrased lines as: ‘I body that peninsula in these words… // so to regain / the faith of that most unfelicitous soil’. The theme was conventional enough – indeed, quite within Landfall’s main interests.
The problem does not rest in comprehension – which notes might facilitate – but in preferred practice. For Smithyman, as in a Piranesi print, complexity in design is intrinsic rather than extrinsic and amenable to modification; complexity communicates. An oblique and circumlocutory approach to the subject is integral to it – the archaisms, pedantic strain, the obscurities and fitful connections, sudden flashes of illumination contorted phraseology, the learned allusions, a frequent overriding of syntactical order. At the same time, a struggle to reconcile one with oneself, with one’s fellows, with the past and present, is acknowledged: ‘yet grown, cropped, chewed, some faith uphold’ (IV). Disorder on the surface of events is for this poet a fact of life. One perceives, beneath the baroque, mannered surface level of the poem, the complement of form. The real order of things, ‘Emblems’ insists, is not arrived at by forcing disparate things into a semblance of synchronicity, rather it meets in disjunction itself. Always ‘Man and a brute like proper in one pit’ (‘Parable of two talents’), or, as ‘Emblems’ states, one ‘sees tempers changing forms, but always one’.
The reason that the poems do not satisfy Brasch’s expectations of progressive logical statement is that this is not their purpose. Progress in the poems is multivalent. Moreover, each poem as an entity does not represent a distance traversed so much as an extensive grid cut out of infinite possible intersections. Individual connections may elude or enthral or befuddle: the reader must engage where he or she is able. It is a poetry which is in part a response, Smithyman has said, to ‘an advanced and intricated community’ in which a section of its poetry ‘must inevitably be complex, and because complex, obscure’.4 In this society of complex dealings, Smithyman adopts a strategy aptly described described by Wystan Curnow in a review of Inheritance as ‘a ‘circle of images’ arranged ‘around his subject’ which the poet probes ‘with a radial line, of thought which, as it proceeds to describe that circle in the reader’s mind, indicates the relevance of each image to the completed poetic statement’ (Lf67).
The problem did not rest on comprehension – which notes would facilitate – but on practice. Why, Brasch might have asked, disguise,
Poems sent in early 1960, from which the final group to be printed, ‘Parable of Two Talents’, ‘Song after Supper’ and ‘Air for Two Voices’, was chosen, still drew a sense of puzzled admiration in the editor’s response:
I've read and re-read your poems with various pleasure, amusement, puzzlement, surprise; continual surprise above all at your inventiveness and ingenuity and skill. How you have mastered your instrument: I can't help some envy mixing with my admiration. (6 January)
These poems were amongst the last to be gathered into Inheritance, a collection over which Brasch was later to be warmly congratulatory:
I've been wanting to say how much I admire some of the poems in Inheritance. Several of them seem to be in a new or relatively new key in your work, a fine clear assured C major which it's a delight to hear ringing out in such fulness as it does in 'End of Year' and 'Climbing the Himalayas', 'Outlooks' - these particularly. (10 May 1963)
Notwithstanding, it is fair to conclude that Smithyman’s work was not very broadly represented in Landfall, compared to others like Dallas and Baxter, and in contrast to the coverage his work continued to attract locally and internationally during the period and since.
After June 1960 (Lf54) Smithyman had no further poems published in Landfall, though Brasch continued to invite submissions. In a letter of 2 April 1964, he wrote, ‘How welcome some new poems from you would be, if and when – ‘. Between these two dates, the few poems that were offered were declined. In February 1961, ‘Vignettes’ (published 1963), and ‘Question’ (published 1966) were turned down. Smithyman spent considerable time in the early 60s revising and reworking poems and wrote little new work. Flying to Palmerston (1968), as a result, proved to be something of a compendium volume, containing poems written as early as 1950 and including nine poems which had been rejected by Landfall. In fact, no poems in that volume had previously appeared in Landfall. Certainly, poems approximating narrative continuity (‘Emblems’, ‘A Casual Shire’, ‘Journey Towards Easter’, ‘Elegy against a Latter Day’) or near-logical statements (‘Inheritance’, ‘Parable of Two Talents’, ‘The Weeping Face’) were accepted. More demanding poems – ‘Te Kopuru’, ‘Island Discourse’, ‘Die Bauernhochzeit’, ‘Just an Evening in the Ranges’, ‘Mister Virgil in his Latter Days’, ‘Original Sin A Suburban Prospect’ – were not.
In summary, of 13 poems printed in Landfall, six did not reappear in volume form.5 Conversely, at least 16 poems turned down by Landfall have since appeared in volume form.6 These figures must, of course, be tempered with the knowledge that editor and contributor had each constantly to cater for various requirements beyond the individual poem in hand. Brasch, to begin with, had limited space available and several poets to represent; and, for Smithyman, each new volume had its own character: Flying to Palmerston is more diffuse and ranging in both theme and style than lnheritance, in which points of relation are more frequent between the poems. Notwithstanding, it is clear that there was divergence in appreciation and working method alike. While Brasch strove to fairly represent all established and capable poets, it is clear that, within the limits he allowed himself, his own preferences were for such poets as Dallas, Oliver, Dowling, Baxter.7 And inasmuch as Landfall aimed for equitable representation, this – somewhat guarded – proclivity is revealing. The limited coverage for Smithyman is a consequence, not of Brasch’s reluctance to make genuine efforts, but rather of a difference in temperament and an accompanying aesthetic discomfort. In terms of Brasch’s sincere efforts we have Smithyman’s own words:
... my own construction has become increasingly organised and multiple, and I know it is consequently more difficult. Exegesis is needed, or a lot of hard work and it is to be expected that Sargeson, who has tensed at work in the past, and yourself, from labouring over it while still unconvinced would be closer to conviction than your associates whose own poetry is either of a very different order or whose selection has shown no appreciation at all of my type of writing. (19 September 1953)
On this note of approbation we end our excavation of some of the ways literary relationships were conducted in Landfall operated under Brasch. Such interactions and the choices they lead to are often not obvious in the journal’s actual appearance, yet they remain a hidden and telling part of its structural possibility – the appearance, the contents, the inclusions and omissions, the layout. With an eye for only the obvious, we have tended to focus almost exclusively on our literature as end product, as somehow spontaneous and sacrosanct. This has kept from view the more awkward but compelling question of how we come to actually practise literature.
+
Addendum: as far as prose is concerned, Smithyman’s contribution was modest: two reviews, one of M.K. Joseph’s Imaginary Islands (Lf18) and the other a short review of Denis Glover’s Since Then (Lf43), plus an essay based on on Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘A Reading of “Goblin Market”‘ (Lf31). Brasch dissuaded Smithyman from going ahead (so far as Landfall publication was concerned) with proposed essays on Ursula Bethell (the single poem, ‘Picnic’), an essay on Thomas Warton, and an (earlier) account of Australian painters. The reason given in regard to Bethell was its limited scope; the remaining two were thought to be of too narrow interest for Landfall readers. Smithyman’s quirky, idiosyncratic critical style may also well not have endeared itself to Brasch, who sought impartial, soberly reasoned assessments. Smithyman’s 1957 review of Glover was his last to appear.
notes
- The case study originate in my doctoral thesis Landfall Under Brasch: The Humanizing Journey (Auckland University, 1982). ↩︎
- Here & Now, 60 (Sep 1957), p. 31. ↩︎
- Smithyman said the poem ‘was triggered off by Robert Lowell’s “Thanksgiving” poem: I wanted to try my hand at a meditation’. He went on to claim, justly, that ‘it is an experiment seldom make in this country, and in this form I don’t think has been tried previously at all’ (27 May 1951). Approximately half the poem was included in Curnow’s 1960 Penguin anthology, otherwise is has not been republished. ↩︎
- ‘Dark Horses Capering’, Poetry Yearbook 4 (1954), pp 88-89. ↩︎
- The six are: ‘Four Stanzas’, ‘Emblems, a Casual Shire’, ‘Journey towards Easter’, ‘Elegy against a Latter Day’, ‘Discourse on Settlement’, ‘Song after Supper’. The seven that appeared in both Landfall and volume form were: ‘The Weeping Face’ (Lf3), ‘What it is to be Opheus’ (Lf8), ‘Poem for a Winter Birth’ (Lf8), ‘Considerations’ (Lf8), ‘Inheritance’ (Lf33), ‘Parable of Two Talents’ (Lf54), ‘Air for Two Voices’ (Lf54). ↩︎
- These included: ‘Time’, ‘Island Discourse’, ;Icarus’, ‘Die Bauemhochhzeit’ (BM); ‘Sinfonia Dornestica’, ‘Snapshots from The Pigbreeders’ Gazette‘ (In); ‘Old Folks at the Home’, ‘Demolishing the Farmhouse’, ‘Vignettes of the Maori Wars’, ‘Dirge for Two Clavichords and Bowler Hat’, ‘An Evening in the Ranges, ‘Mister Virgil in his Latter Days’, ‘Original Sin A Suburban Prospect’, ‘Autumn Leaves’, ‘Flight of Fancy’, ‘Reminiscence’ (FP). ↩︎
- The development of contributor relationships in Landfall varied from writer to writer. An instance is the exorbitant representation accorded Ruth Dallas in comparison with Smithyman. Taking the decade 1947-56, Smithyman had 10 of about 38 (recorded) poems accepted for publication, whereas Dallas had 21 of a total of 46. (Both appeared in the 1948 mini-anthology in Lf8.) Further, for Dallas, for whom Brasch was an important presence, there was a greater correlation between poems appearing in the journal and subsequent volume form. Of 35 poems in Country Road, 29 had been offered to Landfall and 18 accepted; meanwhile, for Smithyman, of the 12-plus poems offered to Landfall during 1947-49, five appeared there, eight appeared in Blind Mountain (1950), and four in both. The pattern was similar in the 1950-66 period. Of about 50 poems offered to the journal, eight appeared there, five in Inheritance, (1962) and 10 in Flying to Palmerston (1968), with only three appearing in both forms.
While Dallas was fairly methodical writer, developing throughout in close relation with the journal, Smithyman would probe here and there, writing and also discarding much, and writing in several forms, considerably less dependent on or influenced by Landfall. Only Dallas’s ‘Bird and Flower’, in Landfall 8, did not subsequently appear in volume form. Again, the correlation was otherwise for Smithyman. The list of other magazines acknowledged in Blind Mountain includes: Kiwi, Book, National Education, Hilltop, Listener, Angry Penguins, Meanjin (Australia), Briardiff Quarterly (United States), Poetry Quarterly, Poetry Commonwealth and Albion (England). Allen Curnow and Louis Johnson were two others poets who published more widely outside of Landfall during these years: the majority, meanwhile, gave the journal top priority in terms of where they most desired to be published. ↩︎
john geraets 