Showing posts with label Kendrick Smithyman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kendrick Smithyman. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 11, 2023

Memories of Don Smith


D. I. B. Smith (1934-2023)
[photograph courtesy of Caitlin Smith]

i. m. Emeritus Professor Donal Ian Brice Smith
(4/2/1934 - 27/9/2023)


I don't think I ever had a conversation with Don Smith which didn't end in some interesting book recommendation - or else a new insight into a long-beloved classic. He was the first Academic I ever met who seemed to be driven solely by a love for books and reading in general. "Great stuff!" he would intone, as he leafed through another shabby-looking prize from the second-hand bookshops downtown.

I was somewhat in awe of him to start with - and for quite a long time after that. I had, for some unaccountable reason, decided in the early 1980s that it was up to me to reclaim from oblivion the long-neglected novels of British Poet Laureate John Masefield by composing a Master's thesis about them.


Constance Babington Smith: John Masefield: A Life (1978)


"How many novels did he actually write?" asked one of the prospective supervisors I approached. "Twenty-three," I replied. "And how many of them have you read?" "Twenty-three." [1] Strangely enough, that particular prospect discovered he had urgent duties elsewhere and could not accept a new research student at that time ...

Don - or 'Professor Smith', as I continued to address him till long after I had ceased to be his student - actually was far too busy to take me on. He was, after all, Head of Department at the time. But when I went to see him about it, he said that he would do it - but only if nobody else was able to.

Which left me with the somewhat invidious task of visiting each and every one of the Academics in the of the University of Auckland English Department who might conceivably be interested in such a project. It was certainly very educational to sample the variety of excuses they came up with - from the straight 'no' to the 'maybe some other time' to the 'perhaps if you changed it to ... [something quite unrelated].'

But no, I was - no doubt foolishly - quite determined, so I eventually made my way back to Don's door, and to his somewhat reluctant oversight ...

How did he approach it? He sat there and talked, while I took notes. His talk ranged over many subjects, some relevant and others perhaps not quite so relevant. At the time I recall he was reading the work of Anglo-Irish writer Shane Leslie - who was pretty obscure even by my standards - as well as working on some of the lesser known novels of Ezra Pound's early mentor (and Joseph Conrad's collaborator) Ford Madox Ford.

Was any of this relevant to Masefield? Well, in a curious way, as it turned out, yes. The interface between the 'commercial' and the 'literary' faces of Edwardian literature fitted rather nicely into studying the work of a poet, Masefield, who was publishing at the same time as Eliot and Pound, but inhabited a world almost literally invisible to their admirers. Ford was a good example of the same phenomenon, though in a rather different way.


Andrew Marvell: The Rehearsal Transpros'd, ed. D. I. B. Smith (1971)


Don's original field of specialisation had been seventeenth century literature. He'd published an edition of Andrew Marvell's satirical prose work The Rehearsal Transpros'd in the Oxford English Texts series. When I asked him about this, he said, "Well, it got me this job." What he seemed to like most, though, was exploring the more offbeat byways of Anglo-Irish literature - not to mention New Zealand writers such as Robin Hyde: far less well-known then than she is now.


Robin Hyde: Passport to Hell, ed. D. I. B. Smith (1986)


The more I heard from him, the more I liked it. I'd been trained in my undergraduate career to admire such extreme Modernists as Eliot and Joyce, and this (still) makes perfect sense to me. On the other hand, there was a rich penumbra of weirdos such as Chesterton and de la Mare, whom I liked just as much, but whom I'd been encouraged to dismiss as dead ends in the grand obstacle race of literary innovation.

Don wasn't interested in any of that survival-of-the-fittest nonsense. Is it enjoyable? was his central criterion for a book. Yes, he was certainly interested in the finesse and skill behind particular pieces of writing, but he still seemed to steer instinctively towards the anecdotal and - above all - towards enthusiasm in his approach to what he read.

I resolved to do likewise, and so, much later, when I in my turn became an English Academic with my own graduate students, I tried to give them as much as possible of the same formula: Read the book, not - till much later - the secondary literature about it. If you don't like it, acknowledge the fact - but then try and work out why.

It is, I suppose, an approach designed to produce readers, not students or teachers of literature. But then, if you don't actually get a kick out of the stuff you read, you probably shouldn't be teaching the subject in the first place.

That was the first - and probably the most important - of my many, many debts to Don.

Most prominent among the others would have to be the innumerable letters of recommendation he wrote for me while I was undertaking my long and arduous quest for an actual job in the fields of Academia. Once again, I've tried to follow his good example when asked to do the same thing for my ex-students.

But then I could never have got that far in the first place if I hadn't got a scholarship to study overseas, and I doubt very much that that would have happened without his powerful advocacy.


Roger Elwood, ed.: The Many Worlds of Andre Norton (1974)


What else? Well, after he retired, I visited him a few times at his wonderful house in Mission Bay, and admired the cupboard where he kept his very extensive collection of Sci-fi and Fantasy literature. That was another subject on which we saw eye to eye (for the most part). He had what seemed to me an inexplicable enthusiasm for Andre Norton, whereas I was more attuned to Philip K. Dick and Samuel R. Delany, but there was generally some new fantasy epic he'd been reading which I ended up making a mental note to get hold of as soon as I could.

He made all them sound like so much fun - though he did stray into heresy on one occasion, I recall, by claiming to prefer Tad Williams to J. R. R. Tolkien as a writer of epic fantasy. This was, as I solemnly informed him, a little like preferring some latter-day SF luminary to Arthur C. Clarke - if they're able to see further, it's because they're standing on giant shoulders ...


Kendrick Smithyman: Campana to Montale, ed. Jack Ross (2004)


He knew I was passionate about the poetry of our Auckland University colleague Kendrick Smithyman, and since Don and I could both read Italian, he lent me the typescript of some versions the monolingual Smithyman had concocted of certain modern Italian poets through the medium of other people's translations.

That, too, was a precious gift. I ended up editing and publishing the entire collection, which still seems to me - like Pound's Cathay - to prove that the end result of a process of translation counts for far more than the way that a writer actually gets there. Kendrick's versions from Italian have a supple ease and charm which far better linguists than he have tried in vain to achieve - and, in the process, he found in the poet Salvatore Quasimodo a virtual alter ego.


Kendrick Smithyman: Campana to Montale, ed. Jack Ross & Marco Sonzogni (2010)


I was also presumptuous enough to ask Don to launch my first novel, Nights with Giordano Bruno, which he did with great style and panache. I remember he compared it to Mario Praz's famous critical book The Romantic Agony, which is, I'm sure, far more credit than it deserved. It was characteristic of his ready wit as well as his charity, though.

Another of my favourite memories of him is the time he hunted me down at my student lodgings in Edinburgh and took me out to dinner at a local tratteria called Pinocchio's. It was wonderful to see him en famille, with his wife Jill and daughter Caitlin, and - as I recall - a great deal of red wine was drunk and pasta eaten in the course of the evening!

As Stephen King's writer hero says of his friend in the movie Stand by Me: "I'll miss him forever." That's certainly true. I'd love to have another of those wonderful, unexpected conversations where Don Smith turned all my prejudices and presuppositions on their heads. But in another, realer sense he's not dead - he'll never be dead.

I can hear him now saying "Great stuff" and reading out another passage from his latest essay, where he juxtaposes a quote from Ford Madox Ford about his latest drivelly historical romance The Young Lovell with another precisely contemporary set of Fordian instructions on how to be absolutely modern to his errant young protégé Ezra Pound ... [2]




Notes:


2. Arthur Rimbaud, "Il faut être absolument moderne." Une Saison en enfer (1873). Pound said of Ford Madox Ford in his 1939 obituary:
[H]e felt the errors of contemporary style to the point of rolling (physically, and if you look at it as mere snob, ridiculously) on the floor of his temporary quarters in Giessen when my third volume displayed me trapped, fly-papered, gummed and strapped down in a jejune provincial effort to learn ... the stilted language that then passed for 'good English' ...
And that roll saved me two years, perhaps more. It sent me back to my own proper effort, namely, toward using the living tongue ... though none of us has found a more natural language than Ford did.


Don, Caitlin, & Jill Smith
[photograph courtesy of Caitlin Smith]




Wednesday, June 09, 2021

The Wizard of Helensville: John Perry (1943-2021)



Any Given Day: John Perry (2016)


It was a real shock to hear, earlier this week, that art historian, curator and antique dealer John Perry had died. It seems like forever that I've been driving up to Helensville periodically to check out his immense horde of vintage treasure: books, ceramics, furniture, pictures, prints, and everything in between.

Judging from the faded posters for Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown and James Cameron's Titanic in the lobby of the old cinema which John Perry had made his own, it must have closed down sometime around 1997. Certainly he'd been there for a good two decades or so.



In the early days, it was still possible to enter the body of the auditorium, and to get some sense of the sheer size of his collection. For many years now that part of the building has been closed off to the public, however, with only the front rooms accessible even to the most agile visitors.

Was it a hoard? Its intractable size and - it seems - uncontrollable tendency to grow made it seem so, but there were always strong themes and schemes underlying his accumulations. For a start, his longterm interest in primitive and outsider art made it essential to look not just at the pictures on the walls, but also those stacked in the narrow aisles.

As a book-collector, I can state with some confidence that John had an unerring eye for quality. I've bought so many treasures there it's hard to list them. But it took some time to learn how to do it. No prices were attached, so one had to be very keen before starting on the negotiation. I never haggled with him, but I found that the longer he talked about any given prize, the lower the price would tend to be.

I've listed, below, a few sample purchases: some of them dazzling coups, others merely interesting, but all bearing witness to his catholic tastes and interests in literature, as well as art!





    Henry Cary, trans.: The Vision of Dante (1910)


  1. Alighieri, Dante. The Vision, or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Trans. Henry Francis Cary. 1814. With 109 Illustrations by John Flaxman. Oxford Edition. London: Henry Frowde / Oxford University Press, 1910.
  2. A nice copy of the first major translation of Dante into English.





    J. C. Beaglehole, ed.: The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768-1771 (1963)


  3. Beaglehole, J. C., ed. The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768-1771. 2 vols. 1962. The Sir Joseph Banks Memorial. Sydney: The Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales, in association with Angus and Robertson, 1963.
  4. John was certainly very interested in everything to do with Captain Cook, and had a most impressive collection of old maps and early editions of the Voyages.



  5. Barrow, Sir John. The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of HMS BOUNTY its Causes and Consequences. 1831. Ed. Captain Stephen W. Roskill. London: The Folio Society, 1976.
  6. Another classic piece of maritime lore, in a reprint by the Folio Society.





    Ernest Sutherland Bates, ed.: The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature


  7. The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature. Ed. Ernest Sutherland Bates. Introduction by Laurence Binyon. London: William Heinemann Limited, n.d. [c. 1930].
  8. A reprint of the King James version arranged for easier reading, with some omissions here and there: a very popular book in its day.



  9. Butler, Rev. Alban. The Lives of the The Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints. 1756-1759. 5 vols. Ed. Rev. F. C. Husenbeth. Supplementary Volume by Rev. Bernard Kelly. Preface by Rev. J. H. McShane. London, Dublin & Belfast: Virtue & Co. Ltd., 1928.
  10. I think that John told me that he'd acquired the library of an old clergyman, hence the large number of theological books visible latterly on his shelves.





    Arthur Machen, trans.: The Memoirs of Giacomo Casanova di Seingalt (1922)


  11. The Memoirs of Giacomo Casanova di Seingalt, Translated into English by Arthur Machen. Privately Printed for Subscribers Only. 1894. Limited Edition of 1,000 numbered sets. + The Twelfth Volume of the Memoirs of Giacomo Casanova; Containing Chapters VII. and VIII. Never Before Printed; Discovered and Translated by Mr. Arthur Symons; and Complete with an Index and Maps by Mr. Thomas Wright. 12 vols. London: The Casanova Society, 1922-1923.
  12. This was an unexpected windfall one day when I was passing through Helensville with David Howard.






    Chuang Tsu: Inner Chapters (1974)


  13. Chuang Tsu. Inner Chapters. Trans. Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English. London: Wildwood House Ltd., 1974.
  14. John's predilection for Eastern art and philosophy was strongly to the fore in a good deal of what he collected.





    Richard M. Dorson, ed.: American Negro Folktales (1967)


  15. Dorson, Richard M. ed. American Negro Folktales. Greenwich, Conn: Fawcett Premier, 1967.
  16. This classic piece of folklore I bought on an early visit to Helensville with my father, many years ago. Even then it was hard to get at many of the books. One could see but not touch.





    Robert Graves & Joshua Podro: The Nazarene Gospel Restored (1953)


  17. Graves, Robert, & Joshua Podro. The Nazarene Gospel Restored. London: Cassell & Company Limited, 1953.
  18. I could hardly believe it when I first saw this. As a confirmed fan of Robert Graves, even in his nuttier moments, this fabulously rare tome was the only one of his major works which had so far escaped me.





    George & Weedon Grossmith: The Diary of a Nobody (1969)


  19. Grossmith, George, & Weedon Grossmith. The Diary of a Nobody. 1892. Drawings by John Lawrence. 1969. London: The Folio Society, 1970.
  20. A nice Folio edition of this minor classic.





    H. W. Longfellow: Poetical Works (1908)


  21. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Poetical Works of Longfellow. Oxford Complete Copyright Edition. London, New York & Toronto: Henry Frowde / Oxford University Press, 1908.
  22. This I bought on my last trip up to the shop. I wrote about it here.





    Harry Price: The End of Borley Rectory (1946)


  23. Harry Price. The End of Borley Rectory: 'The Most Haunted House in England'. 1946. London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1952.
  24. And this I found the time before. I wrote about it here.





    George Ryley Scott: The History of Torture throughout the Ages (1940)


  25. Scott, George Ryley. The History of Torture throughout the Ages. 1940. London: Torchstream Books (Charles Skilton Ltd.), 1964.
  26. This was one of a pair of books by this English eccentric: the other being devoted to a history of flagellation. Not really my thing, to be honest,but they're certainly both quite collectable.


TVNZ: John Perry (2019)


That last (and oddest) volume on the list above seemed increasingly prophetic the last few times we saw John. He had such a strong desire to get away - to do the overseas trips he'd always planned, to live in some exotic otherwhere for a year or two.

He told us he'd worked out that he'd only spent 18 months or so of his life outside New Zealand, and felt that this was far too little for a man of his tastes. And yet, somehow, it just didn't happen.

Health worries, business worries (the sheer complexity of dealing with - let alone handing on - his building and its contents), and of course the epidemic, combined to make this an unattainable dream.

The second-to-last time we saw him, he invited me upstairs into his apartment, and I got some sense of how he lived there, surrounded by pictures and curios, with his rooftop garden out the front, there on the outskirts of the ancient Kauri kingdom of Helensville.



Mind you, it didn't seem too bad a place to live out your days - his apartment had a slightly Latin American air, as if he were one of those retired Colonels in a García Márquez novel, watching the rains come and go across the sinuous flatlands of the Kaipara.



Perhaps Kendrick Smithyman, who grew up in Te Kopuru, just up the coast, put it best, in one of his earlier, uncollected poems:
Kaipara

English visitors find strangely unlovely
a river all silt prospecting coarse paddocks
as though reluctant of its way with tides.
Sluggishly it bends south, half-circling
raw hills which even in summer eat at clouds.
Mornings break out cold on a terse view.
Westward, they bear the Tasman’s unstopped rumour.

They want cars to take them north to an alien bush,
or would get back to the brashest city – its harbour
is famed more tantalising. A city may offer
even the least men a consolation of like crowds.
Whereas, that northern country proffers nothing,
but lies suffering all wounds made in its soils
and knows to be spoiled and rent and made over
is to have estranged spirit, but can be patient.
Sensual men are dulled. Earth is tutored bearing.

Yet if you make your peace with that soil
which burns barren this season the land will give
peace in return. Eyes will learn to open
the clay scars, bush burns, water courses;
learn way of manuka and lank toitoi, harshly winded.
Then, not heard before but some morning unpredicted,
a certain music is sensed to have spoken.
At midday there are birds springing beyond sight,
evening is tempered. Dogs barking summer away.

I can never drive through Helensville without thinking of that phrase: "Dogs barking summer away." Now it makes me remember how much John hated the screech of brakes as cars and trucks hooned round the bend into town. He'd shrug, stop for a moment in mid-discourse, then resume once they'd made their way by.

Rest in peace, John. You'll be greatly missed by all your many friends, here and elsewhere.



Wednesday, April 01, 2020

The Art of the Literary Anecdote



Ernest Hemingway: The Torrents of Spring (1926)

The story begins with [writer Scripps O'Neill] returning home from the library to find that his wife and small daughter have left him ... O'Neill, desperate for companionship, befriends a British waitress, Diana, at the restaurant where she works and immediately asks her to marry him.
Diana makes an attempt to impress her spouse by reading books from the lists of The New York Times Book Review ... But O'Neill soon leaves her ... for another waitress, Mandy, who enthralls him with her store of literary (but possibly made up) anecdotes.
The Torrents of Spring has found few defenders. Although it is Hemingway's first extended prose work, it's been dismissed as a somewhat juvenile parody of Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter (1925). Leslie Fiedler is the one major exception. In his 1968 book The Return of the Vanishing American, he argued for a more generally subversive intent in this aberrant early work of Hemingway's.

Be that as it may, it is rather amusing to read about Mandy's careful deployment of spicy literary anecdotes to ensnare her new man. Not to mention Diana's failure to do the same thing, despite her careful perusal of the book review pages. It does make one wonder, though, just why we seem to have such an insatiable anecdote for such stories - what precisely, in fact, an anecdote is?

I remember once overhearing a young GP (my brother) denouncing an older one (my father) for having "an exclusively anecdotal view of medicine." The older doctor, it is true to say, certainly had a story to fit every occasion, and perhaps relied on them to the exclusion of more quantifiable research results. But this form of codified experience does have its uses, too, at times.



James Sutherland, ed. The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (1975)
His most memorable remark of the day occurred when I asked him if he agreed with the definition that most editors are failed writers, and he replied: 'Perhaps, but so are most writers.'
- Robert Giroux on his first meeting with T. S. Eliot
[Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, no. 474]
I often tell my Creative Writing students that the art of storytelling begins with the anecdote. If you can't learn how to tell one of those, then it's most unlikely that you'll be able to interest a reader in a more extended tale.

And now that we're in the process of switching all of our face-to-face teaching to distance, I've been disconcerted to find just how many of my responses to online forum posts take the form of anecdotes of the type quoted above. Is this just laziness on my part - a refusal to engage with abstractions such as 'the true nature of creativity' or 'the best way to organise your writing day'? Or is there a bit more to it than that?



Philip Gooden, ed. The Mammoth Book of Literary Anecdotes (2002)
"In short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but the right), where are we now in relation to ....'
At this point James' companion Edith Wharton cut in impatiently, 'Oh, please, do ask him where the King's Road is.'
'Ah -? The King's Road? Just so! Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King's Road exactly is?'
The doddery old man's reply was as short and simple as it could be. All he said was: 'Ye're in it.'
- Henry James asks for directions from an elderly local
[Mammoth Book of Literary Anecdotes, p.353]
I guess, from my point of view, the above anecdote embodies Marl Twain's writing maxim to 'eschew surplusage' more effective than earnest exhortations to that effect. It's therefore the best way I can think of to obey Emily Dickinson's instruction to "tell all the truth but tell it slant."

Of course it does have the effect of reducing certain writers - Samuel Johnson, Oscar Wilde, Dylan Thomas - to essentially emblematic figures. The term 'Henry James' has become shorthand for 'obscure prolixity,' rather than the genuinely enigmatic and mercurial figure he in fact was. And, yes, it certainly has a tendency to encourage the vice of name-dropping: boasting of your own acquaintance with the great in the guise of telling a funny story about them.



Kendrick Smithyman (1922-1995)


One writer who made a speciality of the embodied anecdote in his work was the poet Kendrick Smithyman. Kendrick was himself a marvellous anecdotalist (do I speak from personal experience? Why yes I do!) Almost all of his later poems hinge on stories of various kinds, but - as anecdotes - their 'slant' approach generally takes a fair bit of unpacking.

Take. for example, his wonderful 1971 poem "Hitching":


Fellow of jest!
Infinite variety steps up from the scrub,
desiring to take your hands in his
to confide that he is, however priestly,
spoilt by the old Adam, by skull
aching doggedly under tanned skin.
First he introduces us to the subject: the protagonist, his jester's (or would-be Yorick-like) demeanour - as well as 'the old Adam': his carnal preoccupations.
He is pitchpine, claypatch, highcountry
scree. Shitwood, and knotty offcut.
Clothed, like one of our mountain men
with parka, pack and cutdown .303.
Stinking, like deerhide,
countryman of a horned god, himself horny
he is warlock out to conjure
a licklipping housekeeper at one of the motels
along the highway by the Lake.
Next he fills in the background: the Barry Crump-like demeanour of this 'mountain man' - 'countryman of a horned god, himself horny.'
I’ll put him down this side of
the store.
Near the stream, where trout are for tickling,
where a private sybil-mouthed pool fumes
like a woman on heat. You can’t blame them,
it’s nature (he assures me) if a man
with a hard on puts the hard word
to her, she’ll come across.
For the next mile or two, looks thoughtful.
We carry on, between folk tales.
Finally, after some rather more intense Smithymanian psychogeographical specifications of time, space and locale, we end with the nub of the matter: the hitcher's insistently urged theory that nature requires of woman that 'if a man / with a hard on puts the hard word / to her, she’ll come across.'

Which would, of course, be quite a crass and unpalatable conclusion to the story were it not for that detail about how he 'For the next mile or two, looks thoughtful.' In other words, even he cannot believe his own bullshit, much though he undoubtedly wishes it was true.

And thus the two "carry on, between folk tales."



Margaret Edgcumbe: The Empty Desk (1996)


Would you call it a good yarn? There's not that much to it, really. And yet it's very revealing of character, both the mountain man's and his relentlessly observant interlocutor. Thus men do talk. Sometimes. Some of them. And just so do they look thoughtful, at times, in the midst of their confident brag.

It's an oblique and sharp-edged insight, not claiming any particular wisdom or universal applicability, but telling nevertheless. It's a way of communicating ideas without ever stating them directly. And that has been - I suppose, continues to be - its function within our society: a body of oral lore, handed down from parent to child, from mentor to apprentice, in equivocal succession.

I was brought up by an anecdotalist - saw him in action, often, with his peers and contemporaries - have his stories codified in my skull, willy-nilly, whether I like it or not. I wouldn't want to argue that New Zealand has any particular lien on the art of the anecdote, but we certainly once were an almost exclusively anecdotal culture.

Any other type of conversation was, I suppose, considered unsafe: loud expressions of political (or religious) opinion were too dangerous to venture upon in untested company - stories, by contrast, could communicate more obliquely, more deniably.



'Not everything is an anecdote!' is the most cutting thing the uptight Steve Martin character can think of to shout at the more homespun John Candy in Planes Trains and Automobiles. Yes, there can be few things more lethal than being caught in the company of a truly insistent and ruthless storyteller.

At its best, though, in the hands of a master such as Kendrick Smithyman (or, for that matter, Ernest Hemingway) the art of the anecdote can act as a crystallised version of the art of fiction.





Kendrick Smithyman: Collected Poems 1943-1995 Kendrick Smithyman
ed. Peter Simpson & Margaret Edgcumbe (2004)


HITCHING


Fellow of jest!
Infinite variety steps up from the scrub,
desiring to take your hands in his
to confide that he is, however priestly,
spoilt by the old Adam, by skull
aching doggedly under tanned skin.

He is pitchpine, claypatch, highcountry
scree. Shitwood, and knotty offcut.
Clothed, like one of our mountain men
with parka, pack and cutdown .303.
Stinking, like deerhide,
countryman of a horned god, himself horny
he is warlock out to conjure
a licklipping housekeeper at one of the motels
along the highway by the Lake.

A chopper dragonflies away from a crater
where seismic survey gear is freighted
for vulcanologists intent to exorcise
preAdamite nature. Science is
so far it’s nearly out of sight,
but one gross burly cloud smokes
resistance. Otherwise, skies are clean,
farseeing
far enough for him to pick out
unbroken ponies herded by native
will, a line of descent from
guerrilla bands of the Sixties and Seventies.
With Old Testament in one hand,
millenarian carbine in the other
they shot from rock to rock extravagant
and spent like so many rounds,
not forsaking the old Adam
who cantered ahead, wives and all.

Who, like us, liked to hang on to the skirts
of Mystery. Who (they say) giving or taking
half a chance, liked to get his hand up,
countryman of a horned god,
homing on deerhide, catskin, beard of the goat?
I’ll put him down this side of
the store.
Near the stream, where trout are for tickling,
where a private sybil-mouthed pool fumes
like a woman on heat. You can’t blame them,
it’s nature (he assures me) if a man
with a hard on puts the hard word
to her, she’ll come across.
For the next mile or two, looks thoughtful.
We carry on, between folk tales.

12. 10. 71




Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Jack Ross: Opinions



James Ko: "Jack" (c.1996)


So I've started another blog. You may have noticed that it's crept unobtrusively into the sidebar over there, listed under "Bibliography Sites." This particular one is devoted to providing consistent, accurate texts of all of my published essays, introductions and reviews, together with full details of the journals and books they originally appeared in. Thrilling, no? It's called (for what I suspect will be fairly obvious reasons): Jack Ross: Opinions. NINO: Nothing If Not Opinionated, as they say ...

I suppose that it sounds like a pretty egotistical thing to do (hence reproducing above that caricature of me by my ex-Language School student, James Ko). There have been previous suggestions, from time to time, that I should collect some of these essays - the poetry ones, in particular - in book form, but I have to say that I've always resisted it. It isn't that I don't enjoy reading collections of essays: just that my own ones, on examination, always seemed too clearly connected to particular arguments or controversies (or publishing contexts), and I found it hard to imagine them making much sense in isolation.

I have devoted a good deal of time to working in this form, though. Poetry and fiction remain my areas of predilection, but you don't always find poems and stories to hand when you want them - and editors do often seem to prefer commissioning essays and reviews. Academic committees like them, too.

Anyway, while the site is not yet complete (I've put up a bit over half of the essays I'd like to include on it eventually), I find that there are 125 pieces there already, covering the period from 1987 (when I published my first review, in Scotland) to a piece which appeared in the latest issue of brief [49 (2013): 129-45].

For further details on precisely how to navigate between these various sites, you could do worse than consult the post called Crossroads (listed on the side bar opposite under "Site-map"). It'll give you some idea of the extent of this web-based madness of mine.

I won't say, either, that I haven't blushed from time to time at the silliness and general effrontery of some of the opinions included on the site. But then, you have to start somewhere, and the only way to learn is to fail: again and again, repeatedly. My original plan was to suppress some of the more embarrassing ones (and - who knows - the links may not function quite so well to those ones) ... But I decided finally to throw them all up and let anyone who can be bothered to read them sort them out.

That isn't really the point, anyway: "You can't know where you're going until you know where you've been," as Laurence Olivier sagely informs his big-screen son in the Neil Diamond remake of The Jazz Singer. There are a lot of repetitions, tics of phrasing, favourite quotes which I've begun to notice now I've been forced to trawl through all of these pieces again. I'd like to avoid as many as possible of those in future.

Finally, though, the whole project has been (and continues to be) redolent of the same kind of schadenfreude Kendrick Smithyman so accurately describes in his 1968 poem "Research Project":
I fossick among very minor novelists
of our nineteenth century, ours, by God,
peculiarly by virtue of whatever was
held in common with other colonies.
Or, what held them.
I have picked pockets
of several shrouds and more than one
fashion of shroud, for crummiest of crumbs,
driest fragments, dust of droppings, bone
flakes. A shard flint-sharp at the edges,
that was prematurely aspiring red muscle,
a heart. Pick, and pocket.
Someone knew
an impulse to act, entertained a dream
of action

That "ours, by God" phrase rather sums it up for me: good or bad, these reviews and essays are mine, by God. They were the best I could do at the time, and - with all their obvious imperfections - I simply can't disown them, however much I'd like to sometimes.



Neil Diamond: The Jazz Singer (1980)


Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Top Ten Favourite Poems



My colleague Bryan Walpert and I are co-supervising a couple of Doctorates in Creative Writing at Massey University, both focussing on poetry. It's not as easy as you might think to keep the critical portion of these projects in balance with the creative.

The other day, at one of our video conferences, he came up with what seemed to me a very intriguing idea for taking a kind of barometer reading of someone else's aesthetic: he asked our PhD student to send us ten of her favourite poems: or (at least) ten poems that seemed truly extraordinary and moving to her.

I've done a couple of "top twenty" posts before now: 20 Favourite 20th-Century Novels and 20 Favourite 20th-Century Long Poems, both back in 2008, but this seemed a little different somehow.

As I see it, the plan is to be as honest as possible about what you really like, as opposed to what you think you should like. It got me to thinking about what would be in my own "top ten" - with stress on the poems that I've actually tried to memorise and thus keep with me, rather than those I simply admire from a distance.

Anyway, for what it's worth, here - in alphabetical, rather than chronological, order - is my top ten (today, at any rate: next week the list might be completely different):


Jack’s Top Ten
    Alphabetical (by surname):

  1. W. H. Auden: “The Letter” [1927]
  2. Gavin Ewart: “Sonnet: How Life Too is Sentimental” [1980]
  3. Robert Lowell: “For the Union Dead” [1964]
  4. Marianne Moore: “Poetry” [1919]
  5. Ezra Pound: “Lament of the Frontier Guard” [1915]
  6. Kendrick Smithyman: “Colville” [1968]
  7. Stephen Spender: “Cadet Cornelius Rilke” [1933]
  8. Edward Thomas: “Adlestrop” [1917]
  9. Ian Wedde: “Barbary Coast” [1988]
  10. W. B. Yeats: “The Circus Animals' Desertion” [1939]

    Chronological (by date of publication):

  1. Ezra Pound (1885-1972):
    “Lament of the Frontier Guard” [1915]
  2. Edward Thomas (1878-1917):
    “Adlestrop” [1917]
  3. Marianne Moore (1887-1972):
    “Poetry” [1919]
  4. W. H. Auden (1907-1973):
    “The Letter” [1927]
  5. Stephen Spender (1909-1995):
    “Cadet Cornelius Rilke” [1933]
  6. W. B. Yeats (1865-1939):
    “The Circus Animals' Desertion” [1939]
  7. Robert Lowell (1917-1977):
    “For the Union Dead” [1964]
  8. Kendrick Smithyman (1922-1995):
    “Colville” [1968]
  9. Gavin Ewart (1916-1995):
    “Sonnet: How Life Too is Sentimental” [1980]
  10. Ian Wedde (1946- ):
    “Barbary Coast” [1988]




From the very first coming down
Into a new valley with a frown
Because of the sun and a lost way,
You certainly remain: to-day
I, crouching behind a sheep-pen, heard
Travel across a sudden bird,
Cry out against the storm, and found
The year’s arc a completed round
And love’s worn circuit re-begun,
Endless with no dissenting turn.
Shall see, shall pass, as we have seen
The swallow on the tile, spring’s green
Preliminary shiver, passed
A solitary truck, the last
Of shunting in the Autumn. But now,
To interrupt the homely brow,
Thought warmed to evening through and through,
Your letter comes, speaking as you,
Speaking of much but not to come.

Nor speech is close nor fingers numb
If love not seldom has received
An unjust answer, was deceived.
I, decent with the seasons, move
Different or with a different love,
Nor question overmuch the nod
The stone smile of this country god
That never was more reticent
Always afraid to say more than it meant.


[1927]


It's interesting that Auden never rewrote this poem, even in the complete overhaul of his canon he undertook for the 1966 Collected Shorter Poems (which appalled so many of the admirers of his early work). There's an incantatory quality about it which has always fascinated me, and which made me like it long before I had any real understanding of what it was about. It is, after all, the poem he chose to begin his Collected Poems with, despite the fact that there are some earlier ones reprinted later on in the text ...



When our son was a few weeks old he had bronchial trouble
and picked up a cross-infection in the hospital
(salmonella typhimurium) through sluttish feeding –
but a hospital never admits it’s responsible –
and was rushed away behind glass in an isolation ward,
at the point, it might be, of death. Our daughter,
eighteen months old, was just tall enough
to look into his empty cot and say: ‘Baby gone!’

A situation, an action and a speech
so tear-jerking that Dickens might have thought of them –
and indeed, in life, when we say ‘It couldn’t happen!’
almost at once it happens. And the word ‘sentimental’
has come to mean exaggerated feeling.
It would have been hard to exaggerate our feelings then.


[1980]


I really like this poem. Ewart is more associated with light verse than serious poetry, but that's what gives it its sting, I think. That MC sitting beside him in the picture above and cracking up at what he's reading is actually the great Peter Reading ...




[Robert Lowell (1917-1977)]


"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."



The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die –
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year –
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.


[1964]


I talk a bit about this poem in my post on The Literature of the Civil War. I do think it's a great example of the "State of the Nation" poem, something I say more about in my Jacket2 column here...




[Marianne Moore (1887-1972)]



I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician –
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination” – above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,”
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.


[1919]


Moore famously repudiated this poem, and cut it and cut it until it finally consisted of an abridged version of the first three lines (minus the "beyond all this fiddle"). Paul Celan translated the whole thing into German, though, which to me is pretty much a guarantee of its quality. Here it is in its complete, original form ...



By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers
to watch out the barbarous land:
Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
There is no wall left to this village.
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous kings.
A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,
Desolate, desolate fields,
And no children of warfare upon them,
No longer the men for offence and defence.
Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Rihoku’s name forgotten,
And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.


[1915]


Those early poems from Cathay are some of Pound's finest, I think. I suppose one could argue that it's a translation rather than an original poem,, but given the complicated mode of transmission from Ernest Fenollosa's notes from the Japanese, it seems better to concentrate on how it superimposes a kind of World War One landscape on the original Chinese one ...



That sort of place where you stop
long enough to fill the tank, buy plums,
perhaps, and an icecream thing on a stick
while somebody local comes
in, leans on the counter, takes a good look
but does not like what he sees of you,

intangible as menace,
a monotone with a name, as place
it is an aspect of human spirit
(by which shaped), mean, wind-worn. Face
outwards, over the saltings: with what merit
the bay, wise as contrition, shallow

as their hold on small repute,
good for dragging nets which men are doing
through channels, disproportionate in the blaze
of hot afternoon’s down-going
to a far fire-hard tide’s rise
upon the vague where time is distance?

It could be plainly simple
pleasure, but these have another tone
or quality, something aboriginal,
reductive as soil itself – bone
must get close here, final
yet unrefined at all. They endure.

A school, a War Memorial
Hall, the store, neighbourhood of salt
and hills. The road goes through to somewhere else.
Not a geologic fault
line only scars textures of experience.
Defined, plotted; which maps do not speak.


[1968]


I have a good deal to say about this poem in my post A Visit to Colville. It's one of Kendrick's finest, I think ...



Rolled over on Europe: the sharp dew frozen to stars
Below us; above our heads, the night
Frozen again to stars; the stars
In pools between our coats, and that charmed moon.
Ah, what supports? What cross draws out our arms,
Heaves up our bodies towards the wind
And hammers us between the mirrored lights?

Only my body is real; which wolves
Are free to oppress and gnaw. Only this rose
My friend laid on my breast, and these few lines
written from home, are real.


[1933]


This is kind of a weird choice, I suppose. Again, it might be my taste for incantatory eloquence which made it stand out for me among Spender's early poems. It wasn't till later that I realised it was made up of phrases culled from Rilke's impressionistic early short story "Cadet Cornelius Rilke". It's hard to say if that makes it a translation or an original poem. Can that be regarded as a real distinction anymore, in fact?




[Edward Thomas (1878-1917)]



Yes. I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.


[1917]


This is the first poem I ever read by Edward Thomas, but I've loved his poetry ever since. I could easily have chosen any of a number of others, but this one still appeals to me deeply. He manages to get away with the poeticisms in stanza three and even gets them to work for him in a strange way, I'm not quite sure how ...




[Robert Cross: Ian Wedde (1946- )]



When the people emerge from the water
who can tell if it’s brine or tears
that streams from them, purple sea
or the bruises of their long immersion?

They seem to weep for the dreams they had
which now the light slices into buildings
of blinding concrete along the Corniche.
Is it music or news the dark windows utter?

Day-long dazzle of the shallows
and at night the moon trails her tipsy sleeves
past the windows of raffish diners.
The hectic brake-lights of lovers

jam the streets. My place or your place.
They lose the way again and again.
At dawn the birds leave the trees in clouds,
they petition the city for its crumbs.

The diners are cheap and the food is bad
but you’d sail a long way to find anything
as convenient. Pretty soon, sailor boy,
you’ll lose your bearings on language.

Language with no tongue
to lash it to the teller.
Stern-slither of dogfish guttings.
Sinbad’s sail swaying in the desert.

Only those given words can say what they want.
Out there the velvet lady runs her tongue
over them. And she is queen of the night –
her shadow flutters in the alleys.

And young sailors, speechless, lean
on the taffrail. They gaze at the queen’s amber
but see simple lamps their girls hang in sash windows.
Thud of drums. Beach-fires. Salt wind in the ratlines.

Takes more than one nice green kawakawa
leaf, chewed, to freshen the mouth
that’s kissed the wooden lips of the figurehead
above history’s cut-water

in the barbarous isles’
virgin harbours. That hulk shunned by rats
bursts into flames.
And now the smoky lattice of spars

casts upon the beach
the shadow-grid of your enlightened city.
And now I reach through them – I reach
through the eyes of dreaming sailors,

faces inches from the sweating bulkheads,
blankets drenched in brine and sperm.
Trailing blood across the moon’s wake
the ship bore out of Boka Bay.

Trailing sharks, she sailed
for Port Destruction. In Saint Van le Mar,
Jamaica, Bligh’s breadfruit trees grew tall.
In Callao on the coast of Peru

geraniums bloomed like sores
against whitewashed walls.
The dock tarts’ parrots jabbering
cut-rates in six tongues.

The eroding heartland, inland cordillera
flashing with snow – these the voyager forgets.
His briny eyes
flood with chimerical horizons.

‘I would tell you if I could – if I could
remember, I would tell you.
All around us the horizons
are turning air into water

and I can’t remember
where the silence ended and speech began,
where vision ended and tears began.
All our promises vanish into thin air.

What I remember are the beaches of that city
whose golden children dance
on broken glass. I remember cold beer
trickling between her breasts as she drank.

But my paper money burned
when she touched it. The ship
clanked up to its bower, the glass towers
of the city burned back there in the sunset glow.’

Cool star foundering in the west.
Coast the dusty colour of lions.
The story navigates by vectors
whose only connection is the story.

The story is told in words
whose only language is the story.
All night the fo’c’s’le lamp smokes above the words.
All day the sun counts the hours of the story.

Heave of dark water where something
else turns – the castaway’s tongue
clappers like a mission bell.
Unheard his end, and the story’s.

Raconteurs in smoky dives
recall his phosphorescent arm
waving in the ship’s wake.
Almost gaily. But the ship sailed on.


[1988]


One necessary constraint on this choice of poems was length. I was originally going to include Paul Muldoon's extraordinary elegy Incantata as one of my ten, but it's just too long to reprint or really take in at a sitting. This, too, is quite a long poem, but I felt that I had to include it even so. I say more about it here, but its true significance remains mysterious to me: mysterious, but somehow immensely alluring.




I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.


II

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.


III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.


[1939]


Well, what can you say? The aging Yeats reinvents himself yet again, "Lion and woman and the Lord knows what" - how can you just keep on getting better and better and simpler and simpler over the course of a fifty-year career?




So there you are: that's my ten. They do say some slightly disqueting things about my taste, I suppose. Nine out of my ten poets are men; nine out of my ten poets are dead; all of them are white ...

Having ruled out straight translations, though - and also longer poems - I guess it's kind of inevitable that I should gravitate to the kinds of poems I loved when I was a kid: eloquent, even grandiloquent at times, but with the Modernist fetish for simplicity constantly undermining their verbal flourishes.

What would your list look like?



[Doug Savage: Savage Chickens (2005)]