why continue…?
Each new poem is the last poem
or, 500 for John
C K Stead's lovely statement, which I erroneously rejected when first heard a few decades ago, is still singing : 'poets at the last are deft' - even then, the image of my grandfather (Mum's dad, my grandad) re-soling his boots on an old cast-iron boot-last (my father a tradesman iron moulder, I printed on a cast-iron handpress - always, poetry as craft, always, at the last, in the final analysis (Attic Greek λύω I free, set free, loosen, release - my mother taught me to steam-iron trouser creases with a damp tea-towel, I learn'd to damp paper for printing from a book by Lewis Allen, and from Allen Curnow I learn'd 'the literal is metaphor enough' - even in the core of one's distress, a bit of iron in the spine is necessary - 'poets at the last', yes, they had better be & 'cast' : in Bailey's Dictionary c1760 : 25 entries for 'cast', each line 9 cm long, 117 lines or part-lines, the physical length of the entry = 41.6 cm - within this large entry there are sub-entries for 'cast away', 'cast down', 'cast off', 'cast out', & 'cast up', each of which in turn has more than one meaning - even in the Shorter Oxford the word takes up two full columns - one has to figure this stuff out for oneself - I can even add something in neither Bailey nor Oxford, from my mother : 'to cast on' is to put the first row of stitches on a knitting needle, tho the Oxford does have 'Knitting. to close loops and make selvedge' under 'cast' having written one's last poem, why write another - I am attracted to Louis Zukofsky's notion that all one's life one writes only one poem - I asked a couple of painters about this (Max Gimblett in New York & Bruno Leti in Melbourne) and both replied, Yes, one picture all one's life - of course one can always point to specific instances, this poem, that picture etc, but Zukofsky is talking less about poems as individual entities than about writing as a single life-long activity - in that sense, the first word of one's very first poem (in my case in 1963) is the first word of one's last poem even so, why announce it in the title of the next book, VERSUS : LAST POEMS - in one way it's simple, I'm 84, unwell, and my generation is dying around me (most recently John Quilter & Tony Arthur in Wellington) - simply, to be clear in all senses - & VERSUS, masking VERSES - is that just typical Loney swimming vainly against the flow - well, it is that, but what else it is, each will have to make of it what they can in another sense, none of this matters - a single life, a single death, is nothing in the wider stream of things
alan loney
o
Continue, as so many poets have continued. Poetry doesn’t let up. Just as I begin to write, the low winter sun blares through the cloud and all I can see is myself reflected on the screen. I draw the blind and start again, returning to Wikipedia which has obtained a biography of my grandfather, Ewen Neil McQueen (1889-1967), distinguished in education, psychology and medicine. His research into the ‘Distribution of Attention’ was published as a monograph supplement by the British Journal of Psychology in 1917. I haven’t read this but in our days of fragmented perceptions and multi-tasking, work on the distribution of attention seems relevant. We are constantly assailed; it is hard to concentrate.
A favourite poem, Henry Reed’s ‘The Naming of Parts’ from ‘Lessons of the War’ published in 1942, still refreshes my mind. It’s older than I am.
Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning, And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.
Two voices: the voice of discipline giving basic training in how to use a gun and the inner voice of the soldier who is distracted by the calm operations of nature. In the five stanzas, the stiff language of wartime directions contrasts with the supple interior language of individual perception,
The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures
flicking between levels. Under the changes in attention that interrupt and power the stanzas, the perennial tragedy of war.
And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring....
The split attention in the poem. The dreaming voice running underneath like water. This poetic voice seems quite of the present time.
the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For today we have naming of parts.
In my upstairs study in Bluff my attention flicks between the view and the screen, the books, radio, pens and paper, outside and inside, one moment up to my eyes in text, the next switched outwards to the world in the wide window. The port, the harbour, the long view from here in the south, nature going on as usual.
So on we go.
cilla mcqueen
o
The poem that came to mind when you asked ‘Why continue…?’ is a favourite poem by John Crowe Ransom, ‘Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter’, written in the early 1920s and published in the appropriately titled collection, ‘Fever and Chills’, Alfred A Knopf, 1924. From my first reading I could clearly see the determined little girl, the geese with their snowy feathers, her chivvying as she chased them and made them airborne. I could also see in it the reason for writing; the profoundest reason: that even a tireless heart may at any instance fail and the character of its possessor be subjected to the judgement that stillness confers. We have a ‘tireless heart’ and then there are bells. Donne’s bells, our own lesser bells – perhaps the closest we come is a gun salute for a certain number of birthdays.
There was such speed in her little body
And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder her brown study
Astonishes us all.
I am a lover of speed, uninhibited speed, because of what it may catch. In the little girl it is character, her contribution already formed. The geese must be forced to yield, to participate. She wills what she
sees into an action, a narrative. With what pursuit and swagger does Ransom create this little Lady who will not live to acquire that title. But his poet’s empathy, the echo of her footfalls, the then but not-permanently-then tireless heart must be celebrated inside the frame she has created with maximum effect and reverence.
Her ways were bruited in our high window.
We looked among orchard trees and beyond
Where she took arms against her shadow.
Or harried unto the pond
The lazy geese, like a snow cloud
Dripping their snow on the green grass,
Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud,
Who cried in goose, Alas,
For the tireless heart within the little
Lady with rod that made them rise
From their noon apple-dreams and scuttle
Goose-fashion under the skies!
What is a ‘brown study’? And is her head propped as a head is in a coffin? I imagine she is lying on a kitchen table with a small cushion behind her neck and the neighbours are standing around. A brown study is not merely a stoppage but a deep meditation or a reverie, a silence, a stillness which (the opposite of the geese which will land again and go on waddling to the pond) is the outward sign of death.
But now go the bells, and we are ready,
In one house we are sternly stopped
To say we are vexed at her brown study
Lying so primly propped.
The matching energies of Miss Whiteside, who could not have known the meaning of ‘brown study’ or ‘primly propped’ and John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) who knew it well, convince me that however energy may fade – I could certainly not catch a goose – writing poems with whatever gifts we have
is for the whole of life.
elizabeth smither
o
Why continue? My first response is, with words all around me and poems on the workbench, why stop writing now, even if that’s possible?
Fresh from post-war Britain, in my teenage years I wrote poems inspired by falling in love, by Auckland’s seemingly-endless summer, and after discovering Fairburn, Baxter, Smithyman, Curnow… who joined Keats and Dylan Thomas as my exemplars.
Amazingly, Landfall took three of my poems while I was still at school, which gave me a certain status as a ‘published poet’ all through my university years. I was never a prolific writer, however, having just enough poems to make a first slim volume, The Eye Corrects (1967), and the next decade saw me finish only another handful of poems.
Was it James K Baxter who said that poets write in time stolen from their family and employer? In my case, dentistry, a growing family, and DIY renovations left no time for any poems to get a look in.
I also made things worse with a succession of after-hours jobs, including the monthly radio programme ‘Poetry’, first for two years, later on another two, a term on the State Literary Fund committee, and a commissioned monograph on the work of Allen Curnow. Charles Brasch had made me his literary executor, and his untimely death in 1973 meant I had another big after-hours job – correspondence, permissions, readings, and editing three further Brasch collections over the next 50 years. Belatedly, I know I have my wife to thank that our marriage survived those years.
In 2007, fully retired, I was part of the Caselberg Trust Fiordland Residency, a week aboard the ‘Breaksea Girl’ with a group of dauntingly creative people. Here they are, on the foredeck at Cascade Cove in Dusky Sound:
Look! A writer sees
our jeweller glance up from her notebook to nudge
the composer to watch
a poet photograph
the cameraman filming
one painter sketching mountains
while another
studies waterfalls.
Their company in that landscape with all its charts, maps, place-names and stories, jump-started my battery again, and out of that week I became able to write not only Fiordland poems, but poems to do with childhood and family, and friends, present and past. And, after encounters with cancer and heart attack, in an early new poem I mis-remembered the name, piwakawaka, of ‘a small dark urgent bird’, a fantail, bringer of death, bouncing at my window – mortality making its first appearance in my second collection, Getting It Right in 2016.
I can count myself lucky to be writing poems again, and in naming my latest collection Next, I’m probably pushing my luck. I can recognise my own voice now, and know that making a poem takes me time, silence, thought, as well as words on paper. I know, too, that my piwakawaka will be back soon enough, but for now, I want to be ready for the next poem – it might be my last. So why not continue?
alan roddick
o
Likenesses
(for Craig Raine)
King of Comparison, clever as the Reverend Moon
you marry a dozen thises to a dozen thats
in a flash of light, while I admire and demur.
Nothing, for example, is so like a swallow
as these swallows are, describing their twittering arcs
without analogy, in and out of an archway
that opens on a village square. Under umbrellas
we sit out on the cobbles with cool drinks, eating
a sandwich of crudités made for us in the bar.
Under the arch roof we can see the mud-fixed nests
like inverted igloos, or those domed African huts
on a stone landscape yellow and pitted like the moon.
Siesta time. The swallows have a silence to fill
and the stones for echo. They are the bats of the day
as bats are the swallows of darkness. There's no end
to likeness it seems, only because nothing is the same.
And here’s another one relevant to Alan’s remarks – from my collection That Derrida whom I Derided Died:
The laureate’s last…
His last
was not least
nor yet his best
but shaped for a shoe
his size
and like his sighs
not to last.
c k stead