Shadow Stands Up #15

It seems unintentionally appropriate as the coming days of feasting approach to remember how, when I lived in Jordan in the late 1960s, I noticed that people would touch a left-over bread crust to their lips and then place it on a wall where 'the birds' could find it.

Season’s greetings to all. What a year it’s been.

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15

There’s one of those early birds
in the (green now) tree outside
our bedroom window – you know
the kind, they get started in
the dark just when you think it’s
safe to try and dream again
but the dream’s gone already,
a transport hub was it, or
a place where people gathered
to hear the news, a battered
bus was leaving but waited
while the poet spoke on the
radio, the imbriqui
paused while the poet spoke,
and then the coffee was poured,
one of the weeping listeners
put his breakfast crust on
a low parapet by the
bus station so the birds could
make sure nothing was wasted –
was this what my early bird
was singing about in the
dark before dawn, or was it
a memory pretending
to be a dream I couldn’t
wake up from in time to go?

Young Knowledge on record

On Friday 26th October, in front of a screen on which was projected the extraordinary 1936 photograph by Spencer Digby of Iris Wilkinson – the poet who called herself Robin Hyde – five of us sat down to talk about a single poem of Hyde’s, ‘Young Knowledge’. A good-sized audience was there in Auckland Central Library’s whare wananga, including Hyde’s son, Derek Challis, and his wife Lynn.

All of us had particular interests in Hyde’s poem. Apart from Derek Challis seated in the audience, the two with the most obvious authority to talk about ‘Young Knowledge’ were Michele Leggott, editor of Hyde’s collected poems; and Mary Edmond-Paul, editor of Hyde’s autobiographical writings. Michele detailed the painstaking editorial work involved in assembling the poem from typescript pages whose coherence had been compromised; and locating it in the circumstances of Hyde’s life. At an early stage, then, we encountered the puzzle of what might appear to be two separate poems or at least two separate impulses spliced together; Michele argued for their coherence. So, by implication, did Mary, in terms of subjective or psychological coherence rather than manuscript evidence – though of course the text and its affects are not separate.

Though Iain Sharp modestly disclaimed any such direct connection with Hyde’s poem, he too had good credentials for talking about it. As the author of a superb illustrated biography of the explorer and artist Charles Heaphy, Iain was able to map the historical circumstances of the poem’s strange ‘turn’, the moment when its succession of intense, sometimes hallucinatory takes on what constitutes knowledge abruptly shifts to two historical moments and places in the nineteenth century. The first of these picks up and even cuts-and-pastes a fragment of Edward Markham’s account of settlers felling ship-building timber in Northland; and then relocates without transition to a place near the Arahura River on the South Island’s West Coast, visited by Heaphy in May 1846. Here, while looking for good arable land, the explorer seems to be ambushed by the poem at the moment he encounters a Maori community of ‘Greenstone people’ until then unknown to European settlers.

It’s at the moment of this encounter, at once vividly imagined by Hyde and factually documented in Heaphy’s journals (which Hyde had read close to the time she wrote the poem), as well as in a subsequently published magazine account, that Hyde’s poem releases its extraordinary burst of energy – its key moment of ‘mindfulness’, as Mary described it. Mindfulness is a concept used in modern clinical psychology since the 1970s, but related to much older Buddhist concepts of knowledge as acute awareness of and attention to the presentness of things, the present moment – sati in Pali, in Sanscrit smrti. Ranged against sati are the kinds of negative forces of anxiety and delusion with which Hyde was familiar.

Hyde was also familiar with ideas from Buddhism and translated them into her concept of ‘presentism’, which Mary referred to during the session. This interest was a factor in Hyde’s decision to travel to China in 1938. Her therapy under the enlightened ‘unselfish kindness’ of her psychiatrist Dr. Gilbert Tothill must have heightened her mindfulness of the ways those polarised conditions of acute perception and imaginative rhapsody sometimes complemented each other and sometimes clashed. The poem moves through strongly contrasted states of mind, sometimes blissful, at others filled with anger and despair, in strongly contrasting scenes and voices; so that the ‘Heaphy moment’, when it arrives in the narrative, has the impact of a dramatic crisis, the moment when the trajectory of the story pivots and changes direction, after which the voice or character of the poem is transformed, and moves or is impelled towards the closing resolution.

In the case of ‘Young Knowledge’, this crisis also seems to propel us into the present, and into an imagined scenario in which Heaphy decides not to reveal the whereabouts of this sanctuary, this unspoiled place, this Eden – but of course he does so in the end, as we know, because Hyde read his account of it, and we read hers.

Murray Edmond’s take on the poem suggests that it represents a new kind of historiography, a new way of knowing the past in the present; that a political or politicised poetics may provide the means by which poems become agents of ‘presentism’ and allow us to be mindful of the past now. In a sense, this poetics also resembles the concept of sati. It suggests that, whether the radical break in the poem at the Markham/Heaphy moment was wholly intentional, or partially the product of a fortuitous alignment of texts, its consequence is a moment of vivid knowledge, a heightened political consciousness of the impact of colonisation, and – implicitly – of its inevitable consequences in the present.

My thanks to the participants in this conversation for their marvellous contributions, and for their subsequent patient and tolerant help as I attempted to summarise what had been a fascinating and complex account of this extraordinary poem. And thanks, also, to the partners in this event: the National Library, Auckland Central Library, and the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) at Auckland University.

The recording of this session is made available here through the partnership with nzepc. If you’ve never visited this great resource, now’s your chance. And a special thanks to Tim Page, who expertly takes care of nzepc recordings, and who recorded this session on Robin Hyde’s ‘Young Knowledge’.

Introduction and Reading of Poem (15min)

Panellists' Commentaries (51min)

Discussion and Response (21min)

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Full recording (1hr 27min)

Shadow Stands Up #14

“Oh youth ... pass the bottle,” runs a refrain in Joseph Conrad’s great story Youth, in which an old, world-weary Marlow tells a table of friends the story of a defining experience in his youth, breaking his narrative from time to time to say, “Pass the bottle.” I’ve been fascinated by this story ever since I first read it, probably when I was about ten or eleven. My father loved Conrad’s stories, especially those like Youth and Typhoon that had tough old sea-dogs such as Captain MacWhirr in them. I think he also encouraged me to read them because they might be character-forming – they probably were, one way or another. Youth is filled with a mixture of droll nostalgia for the optimism of youth, and the world-weariness of age. Among the shadows that ‘stand up’ with us or even within us are our young selves. Mine was there with me one day when I walked past Victoria Park, remembering myself arriving in a dusty bus outside the old walls of the Moroccan city of Fez, in 1969. But being simultaneously young and older hasn’t driven me to drink yet, except in celebration – which includes raising a glass to my ‘old man’, Frederick Albert Wedde, an inveterate adventurer all his life.

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14

I’m back in a light jacket
walking past Victoria
Park without the heavy drape
of my winter coat and the
grey drape of the chilly sky
and he’s walking inside me,
two thirds my weight, the skinny
kid who called it a day in
1969 and went
to see the swallows at dusk
darting through the red-dusted
air above the battlements
of Fez – what is it that weighs
us down, not the adipose
illusion of wisdom, not
the gravity of habit,
not – his shadow stands up in-
side me, the light kid I was,
we walk along as one past
the personal trainers at
the park and their wards who want
to be forever young and
without heavy memories
of how different that was.

Young Knowledge

At Auckland Central Library, Friday 26 October, 5.30pm for 6pm start

A public conversation about Robin Hyde’s poem ‘Young Knowledge’ (1936?), with Murray Edmond, Michele Leggott, Mary Paul, Iain Sharp, and Ian Wedde.

Produced for the National Library of New Zealand’s series of events in the New Zealand Poet Laureate programme, in partnership with Auckland Central Library and the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc).

In 1936, the poet Robin Hyde travelled in the South Island, including parts of the West Coast explored by Charles Heaphy in 1846. Hyde wrote ‘Young Knowledge’ with the journals of Heaphy in mind. Her poem opens up an imaginative and political space between the stone memorial to the explorer in Nelson, and the pounamu of Arahura.

"It is a brilliant moment; the explorer refracted through his journal, standing between worlds and made over into poetry." Michele Leggott, from Introduction to Young Knowledge: The poems of Robin Hyde (Auckland University Press, 2003)

Murray Edmond is a poet, and has written about Hyde’s use of Charles Heaphy’s journal. Michele Leggott is a former New Zealand Poet Laureate, and the editor of Robin Hyde’s collected poems. Mary Paul is the editor of Your Unselfish Kindness (University of Otago Press, 2012), a critical edition of Robin Hyde’s autobiographical writings. Iain Sharp is a poet and the author of Heaphy (Auckland University Press, 2008), an illustrated biography of the explorer.

Shadow Stands Up #13

13

No shadows for a while now,
nothing standing up, only
a warning about the word
‘trill’ came to mind, then a man
silhouetted against the
sky-line behind the sand-dunes
at St Clair, then the poet
Baxter came to mind, then the
man silhouetted against
the gusty southern sky was
gone, in spite of everything
I didn’t ask of language
birds were ‘trilling’ in the bush
we walked through to get back to
the car parked above the kelp
by the cold salt water baths –
Baxter couldn’t help it, he
always saw more than was there,
always the shadows of things
for instance the swirling kelp
at St Clair wasn’t seaweed,
it was a goddesses’s hair
or some such, a kraken with
its arms around his neck. Me,
I’m back where I started, on
Jervois Road walking past the
Herne Bay Dental Centre whose
signage reassures me it’s
because my smile means so much.

'The Place of Poetry'

On Thursday 30 August, as part of the National Library’s Laureate programme, a poetry reading was organised in the wharewaka on Wellington’s waterfront. Its principal guest was Andrew Motion, who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009. In 2012 he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, a responsibility formerly shouldered by the American writer Bill Bryson. Andrew teaches poetry as Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, where one of the teaching themes is ‘the poetry of place’. The Wellington occasion, which included memorable readings by Bernadette Hall and Bill Manhire, had this theme in mind in its title, albeit in a tweaked form.

The title, ‘The Place of Poetry’, has a double meaning. Poetry is often associated with places; and it occupies a place in cultures and societies. Are these kinds of location related, and if so how?

Aboriginal song-lines, Horace’s Sabine farm, Wordsworth’s Lake District, Robert Burns’s Ayrshire, the burnt-off country of Blanche Baughan’s ‘Bush Section’, Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil, Pablo Neruda’s Chile, Judith Wright’s Australian ‘Blood Country’, Robin Hyde’s Island Bay, the Gallipoli of Paraire Tomoana’s ‘E pari rā’, Allen Curnow’s Lone Kauri Road, Kendrick Smithyman’s Tomarata, Mahmoud Darwish’s Galilee, the ‘my country’ of A.R. Ammons’s The Snow Poems, Ted Berrigan’s New York City, the place of exile in Bei Dao’s poems, the view from Jenny Bornholdt’s work-shed window, the ‘environs of the goat’ in Sophie Loizeau’s poems...

Some poems seem to have uttered their locations; those of us who know the poems find it hard to know the place without the poem. The experience of place mediated in this way recalls Georges Poulet’s description of reading, ‘I am a consciousness astonished by an existence which is not mine, but which I experience as though it were mine...’ And of course it’s in the place of language that the ‘astonished’ exchange of consciousness takes place.

This exchange can take many forms. A mountain that is one person’s geological feature may be uttered as another’s ancestor. An uttered landscape may ground a spirit of national resistance, a place where blood and language are spilled together. A poem may imbue a place with the vividness of the perpetual emigré’s fascinated gaze. It may become the topos around which an argument or idea is constructed. The poem may be recited over and over in order to call up a place that can no longer be lived in, or that can only be lived in through uttering or writing the poem. The poem may mark the place where whenua establishes an inseparable link between birth and earth. It may equally mark the place where language itself is the poem’s only location.

All these utterances lead to another sense in which poetry is placed: how and where is it placed in culture, what role and significance does it have? Is it an object of delectation in the literary salon, the anthem of popular uprising, the etherised patient of academic forensics, the repository of community memory, the lyric downloaded from iTunes, the challenge at a poetry slam? What kind of esteem does poetry command in the cultures of different societies? And how does this esteem – this cultural location – relate (or not) to that other meaning of ‘place’, to physical location? Mahmoud Darwish’s last public reading in Beirut early in 2008 filled a stadium with an estimated 25,000 people; in Bangladesh, the vast crowds that assemble at the Shaheed Minar on Language Martys’ Day every year on 21 February know by heart Kazi Nazrul Islam’s poem ‘Rebel’, a rallying-cry in the 1971 war of liberation. In these instances, the two ‘places’ of poetry appear almost indistinguishable; the ground you kiss is unimaginable without esteemed language.

My thanks to the poets who took part in ‘The Place of Poetry’, to the National Library for organising it, and to the audience that came along. I didn’t notice an outbreak of ground-kissing afterwards, but it was a great place to be on the night.

‘The Pleasures of Poetry’ at Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, May 2012

The Auckland Writers & Readers Festival is New Zealand's largest literature event, running for five days every May. They have a dedicated two day schools programme and a three day public programme, which includes great stuff like Ian's talk.

In 2013 the Festival will run 15-19 May.

Sincere thanks to the Festival for providing this video. Their Vimeo channel has hours of wonderful talks and discussions.

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The Auckland Writers and Readers Festival organisers asked me to do a session with high school students in May this year. At some point, ‘The Pleasures of Poetry’ appeared as a theme for it. I was happy with that – especially the plural ‘pleasures’, which opened up a pretty wide front.

But nothing is simple, even when – as is often the case with poetry – it looks that way. I soon realised I’d have to cut a fairly narrow channel through the topic, or risk bewildering the audience as much as I almost certainly would myself. I thought I’d go back to my memories of first encounters with poetry of some sort, and try to explain why the pleasures that began then have continued.

When my brother and I were little, our father ‘Chick’ Wedde used to row us around Waikawa Bay in the Marlborough Sounds singing ‘Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream – merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream!’ Without wishing to over-egg this memory, I can say, with my hand hovering a few millimetres above my heart, that the rhyming of ‘stream’ and ‘dream’ seemed to me to make those words flow together into the joining-up word ‘life’, producing a puzzle that stretched the meaning of the rowing-chant between nonsense and something very significant.

At the age of five or six, this is not what I thought; but it’s something like how I thought. Nor did I know, then, that this was a kind of ‘poetry’, but fairly soon afterwards I did begin to know that words organised like this were poetry.

Back then in the old kauri clinker rowboat, exactly where meaning came to rest along that stretch between nonsense and significance was pleasantly complicated by the sunshine and sea, the salty taste of splashes, sometimes by the speckled glitter of fish-scales on Chick’s forearms, and frequently by the rowing-exertion farts he let rip with obvious pleasure. It’s not possible, now, for me to separate the ‘pleasures of poetry’ from these apparently circumstantial factors, nor from the physical nature of the rhythm.

I got similar kinds of pleasure, though probably not as richly sensual, from the meaning-stretch in poems we were read when my twin brother Dave and I were learning to read for ourselves. Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ was one:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
    Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogroves,
    And the mome raths outgrabe.

Of course, one of the pleasures of this poem, aside from the tantalising hunch that meaning and nonsense weren’t opposites, was the old story of a boy going forth to conquer his fear and winning his father’s praise.

Another favourite was also a Lewis Carroll poem, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’.

The sun was shining on the sea,
    Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
    The billows smooth and bright –
And this was odd, because it was
    The middle of the night.

The joke turns sinister when Carroll, with droll, laconic dramatic understatement, prefaces the paedophiliac Osteidaecide of juvenile oysters with the most famous nonsense in English poetry:

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
    “To talk of many things:
Of shoes – and ships – and sealing wax –
    Of cabbages – and kings –
And why the sea is boiling hot –
    And whether pigs have wings.”

The shudder of pleasure I got from hearing, and then reading, this poem had as much to do with the jokes as with the warning about accepting beach-walk invitations from strangers; with the nonsense as with the sense. What made it work – what made the pleasure special – was the way sense and nonsense, fun and danger, jokes and horror, played together in the poem.

Quite a few years later, when I was about nine or ten, I completely bewildered myself by obsessively reading Robert Browning’s incomprehensible historical narrative poem ‘Sordello’, which I found by accident in a padded, leather-bound 1907 edition whose binding was leaking its mysterious, woolly stuffing, and whose title page had my grandfather’s name, A.A. Wedde, written on it in fading, elegant handwriting. The pleasure of this doomed enterprise came down to a couple of simple factors anticipated in my encounters with Lewis Carroll. Firstly, I knew nothing about the Italian history in the poem, let alone what Browning was making, or hoping to make, of it; the poem might as well have been about ‘cabbages and kings’ as about Guelphs and Ghibellines; it was non-sense. But secondly, there was an irresistable undertow of significant meaning whose codes I wouldn’t crack simply by finding out who exactly the ‘cabbages’ and ‘kings’ were and what they’d been up to back then. Rather, the pleasurable sense of meaning that kept me reading was in the space between non-sense and something that could be easily explained away as ‘facts’. The non-sense was intriguing but ultimately a blind alley; the explanation of who Sordello was and what he was actually doing was only interesting in the limited way that facts are interesting. What was pleasurable was found in the gap between the two. I came to think quite early on that this was where poetry belonged and where the pleasures of poetry were found. Around sixty years later I still find this to be so.

Another very special pleasure on the day of the Festival event last May was the readings by two poets in the high school audience, which you can hear if you watch the video. There were about 500 students in the audience, and their poets Ben and Hamish got huge applause.

Shadow Stands Up #12

Last Friday was National Poetry Day and I was invited to take part in the celebration organised by Tony Chad at the Upper Hutt Public Library. I like going to events organised around community centres that are outside or on the edges of larger metropolitan organisations. They’re usually friendly, without the protocol complications of large bureaucracies, and, not least, their hospitality usually knocks the socks off high-end catering consisting of very small things on toothpicks.

Friday night at Upper Hutt was no exception. Tony, a marvellously sociable and at-ease MC and organiser, and himself a poet and musician (he plays in a Celtic band), introduced the mayor of Upper Hutt, Wayne Guppy, who was on a busy round of functions that night but took time to welcome the local poets, and to greet many people he obviously knew by name. In May this year the national news media reported that Mayor Guppy’s Council had rejected a pay rise; its unanimity in response to tough times wasn’t the national norm. I get email news from environmental action groups about the Council’s river restoration programmes; when we lived in Wellington I used to spend a fair amount of time in the hills and rivers around the Hutt catchment.

In the back of my mind is a cultural history that associates Hutt Valley High with the legendary art teacher, artist, and designer James Coe, whose revolutionary art classes from 1945 to 1959 included Bill Culbert as one of several gifted students; Bill is representing New Zealand at the Venice Biennale in 2013. The high school may also take some responsibility for producing writers including Damien Wilkins, Lloyd Jones, and Nigel Cox, not to mention the Nobel Prize winner Alan McDiarmid. Right now it’s the Hutt Valley alumnus Nick Willis who’s in the news; at this time of writing he’s one of New Zealand’s best Olympic medal prospects.

The National Poetry Day evening included a poetry competition around the theme of Upper Hutt as a gateway to the hills, bush, and rivers that partially encircle the city. Ten poets read poems variously extolling the beauties of this place, fearing for its future, or lamenting the harsh treatment it had received in the past. The poems were judged by an audience ballot; one poet had submitted the first poem she’d ever written – partly in response to an encounter with Persian Sufi poetry and the tradition of colour-coding found there. Her poem won the popular choice award, and her children applauded loudly.

In the breaks between these readings, the presentations, and my own contributions, people drank the plentiful supply of very good wine, helped themselves to a generous spread, and talked a lot. Just beyond the function area, the library’s stacks revealed a magnificent poetry collection. I can’t think of a better place to have been on the night.

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12

Through spring-green leaves on the tree
outside our place I can see
the green Link bus putter past
Cartune Auto, in Albert
Park graduates are blooming
in their extravagant silks,
Cook Island fafafine
bedecked with flowers are singing
outside the student food-court
at the university,
my spring-time cough is yelping
like an excited young pup,
likening, get over it,
I can’t, 1968,
the year I packed up and went
in search of the life I was
just going to go on having
the time of my life with,
and here I am having it
now, just look at those flowers,
the way I remember them.

Shadow Stands Up #11

I’ve just read 296 poems by young poets in New Zealand, for the annual New Zealand High School Poetry Competition. This was an amazing experience, perhaps at the ethnographic margin of reading. The quality of the work was uneven if judged by standard measures of correct writing, and the poems’ default mode was probably personal, anecdotal lyrics addressing a few familiar themes; but what was much more important and interesting was the variety of ways in which these poems were uttered, and at the same time their collective energy, which was overwhelming. It would be silly to claim I encountered some kind of aggregated self here, and equally silly to claim that each poet had a totally distinctive ‘voice’, though there were some marvellous, smart, and original poems in the pile. We speak and write using comprehensive common languages and, within those, in argots and accents that identify us tribally; what distinguishes our individual utterance involves variation rather than uniqueness. The effect of reading so many poems by poets within an age-span of thirteen to seventeen was of being within a dense texture, a layering of variations – a complex social chord; or, as Roland Barthes would have described it half a century ago, reminding us of the etymology of ‘Text’, a woven fabric, a textile. Of course I’m not suggesting that there is a single tribal language for New Zealand high school poets, god forbid: I encountered a great many interlocking variations within the span of English, and even within the span of English as a second language. Rather, what I think I was experiencing was a kind of poetic socio-biology, a situation in which the tensions between diverse tribals and distinct individuals generated extraordinary energy.

I had to choose ten distinct threads from this interweaving of poems, and from that ten a single winner. These are the rules of the competition, which is, after all, a competition; which admirably aims to encourage young poets to write, to enter their poems in the competition, and perhaps to experience the satisfaction and encouragement of making the short list or winning. I think the short listed poems I’ve selected are terrific, and though there could have been other winners chosen, I also think the winning poem is a good one. Pulling these threads out of the collective text does highlight their distinctions, and I hope other readers will enjoy them on that basis; but I was lucky enough to encounter these individuals first-off within a larger, denser, richly textured, highly-strung, sometimes chaotic energy fabric. The ethnographer in me observed this ritualised face-off between cultural loyalty and individual subversion. Then I could look at the best results. That was a special, slightly illicit pleasure, and a privilege.

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11

If I wanted to translate
silence I would have to be
deaf, to remember silence
I would have to recognise
its opposite, for instance
singing, a miracle, not
too much to ask I hope, and
why wouldn’t I hope, why not?

A response

A response from Sam Sampson to "Shadow Stands Up #10".

i

Just read your 'Shadow Stands Up #10'. What a great read. The Ashbery translation of Rimbaud's Illuminations is up there on my reading list, not just for the translation, but Ashbery's introduction. His Selected Prose, edited by Eugene Richie is, to my mind, essential reading for the Ashbery take on an array of writers and artists.

I was interested in your views regarding Goldsmith, and additionally, Perloff's support of the appropriation model. I like Goldsmith and think his uncreative model is, if used at the initial compositional stage a way to reinvent (maybe even reinvigorate?) the subjective, rather than shut it down. His poetry is boring (as he himself admits) but his conceptual framework is not, and does a lot to dismantle the overt subjective nature of what many believe is 'personal' poetry. I see Goldsmith as being poetry's equivalent of Richard Dawkins. The logic is sound, the intellect and argumentation hard to fault, but the absolutism can tend toward a form of reductionism. By this, I mean there's a directive toward a categorical imperative, the Goldsmith credo: select all / copy / paste, with his proviso: ‘the secret’... suppression of self-expression is impossible.

For me, as liberating as it sounds, and it is liberating – to devolve the self not just from its poetic centre but cut the reflexive self from the poetic – it still seems a somewhat circular argument. The imagination, and conscious memory, is present, and ever prescient – it's just to what degree you want to remix / repurpose / or reframe the final product. I also can't see how copying a pre-existing text could not be original. The Goldsmith body of works are original, and are sui generis... it’s just the conceptual framework has done most, if not all of the work, and is more tangible than the finished product.

ii

I think the more important point relayed by Goldsmith and Perloff, via the artist Brion Gysin (who in 1959 claimed writing was 50 years behind painting) is the question of whether writing is still catching up to the art world? Their premise, that in the art world, the avant-garde has been mainstream and innovation and risk-taking consistently rewarded. While in spite of the successes of modernism, literature has remained on two parallel tracks, the mainstream and the avant-garde, with the two rarely intersecting. Now, both Goldsmith and Perloff believe the two have unexpectedly (and fantastically) collided through the conditions of a technology-driven digital culture.

Having a foot in both camps, working as much with visual artists as writers, this seems to me an important distinction and also a correct observation. I’m just not convinced, that ultimately, digital culture will reframe the writer-self, or reprogramme the reader-self. The fact is, words are not like paint or musical notation, however language is moved, cut, sampled... etc. it still rubs up against actuality at every point, and as Samuel Beckett would say, is ‘tainted’.

It may be old fashion late-modernism, but the meanderings of Beckett still hold a conundrum for the writer today, as Rimbaud’s did, and still do. Beckett, is closer to the Rimbaud you mention, and Ashbery’s assertion, that for Rimbaud, ‘the self is obsolete’ reminds me of Beckett’s struggle ‘to create a work that is totally autonomous, since it refers to nothing but itself’... he goes on... ‘Is literature alone to be left behind on that old, foul road long ago abandoned by music and painting?... Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of word surface should not be dissolved...?'

iii

Personally, I’m excited by, and use both Goldsmith’s and Perloff’s mixed model of ‘moving information’... this includes: appropriation, elaborate constraint, visual and sound composition, and a reliance on intertextuality. When asked in 2010 about my own practice, I tended toward this mixed model – trying to find ways out of the ‘plain language loop’.

(here's a selection from the 2010 interview text below):

'Although appropriative writing and list poems intrigue me, I’m more interested in striking up a conversation, taking another writer’s words as departure points, whether that includes breaking them up to create rhythmic tension, or responding to the words in the writer’s mode through a rearrangement of their words.

The way the lines are arranged on the page (I’ve subsequently discovered) have a number of parallels with Mallarmé. Cole Swensen talks of Mallarmé’s preface to 'Un Coup de dés', where he states: “nothing new except a certain distribution of space made within the reading.” Swensen also talks of his inherent move towards a fusion of sequential perception and simultaneous perception, to fully engage the eye and ear, as a result pushing poetry in two directions – toward visual art and toward musical performance. I like this distinction, how the physicality of the language – this chopped nervousness, how the line is broken, the spatial repetitions, cause and effect, conflict and displacement – is essential to how the poem is laid out. I feel some of my longer works allow the reader to access the poem at many different points, but once inside the poem, the sonic components, whether it’s a single word filling a gap, or a vowel or half-rhyme sitting directly below a corresponding sound structure are complete in themselves – the idea of a beginning or end neither here nor there. This is not to say I felt poetry (my poetry especially) should ever purely be of the sound poetry tradition. I felt meaning inherently tied at the initial compositional stage, but this structure could be extended, until in some cases only a shimmer of the original meaning was left behind. I always hoped (if interested) the reader would work to solve conundrums, to supply transitions, to make out of a haphazard assortment of building materials, a habitable dwelling.’

iv

As with your Rimbaud spectre, I recently had a similar experience while reading Keats’s ‘Hyperion’. A sense of how sincerely modern Keats could be. How the Keatsian aestheticism and intellect seemed prescient, and (as you say) ready to jab at the surface of the modern...‘the horizon in noise’. It seems Michael Parekowhai was also inspired by John Keats, and his sonnet – 'On first looking into Chapman’s Homer' – with its intimations of departure and return. Parekowhai borrowing the title for his 2011 show at the Venice Biennale, allegedly to give viewers another entry point into his work, and potentially, a contemporary entry point. One line, ‘He star'd at the Pacific’, seemed especially poignant, how it talked to Parekowhai ‘about the positional relationship, of standing on a peak in Darien (Panama), looking across the Pacific in awe of the possibilities – and if they could see that far, they'd see us looking back at them.’

v

Rimbaud, Ashbery, Keats, your poem... I agree there is the tidal wash, the back and forth; the present recreating the past, but also realigning the past in the present moment. I also think, the resolute vanguardism of Perloff’s (and Goldsmith’s) neomodernist progressive time (as you call it) cannot, and hasn't come ex nihilo, they are also in the wash; reframing, investing in what they believe to be the future of poetry.

Thanks once again for a thought provoking and interesting read.

p.s. a poem of collective memory?

Erasure

history in a nearby tree
isolated sightings (aligned by absence):              huia extinct