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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Further Notes on New Zealand Poetry

Further Notes on New Zealand Poetry

At times in the past I have made comments about New Zealand poetry – what kind of creature it is, where it came from, and what should be done about it. Looking back on those comments, I see many red herrings, an uneasy amalgam between the personal and the academic, and a possible disservice to the writers whose works I have discussed. Not that one should apologise. It takes brains to make a critic; a poet depends much more on luck and his own peculiar kind of honesty. Writing poetry is a vocation, like being a good barman or a racetrack driver. It has its public rewards and its liabilities. It’s very easy, for example, to slip into a delusion that one is a minor prophet. If I had a choice, I’d want to be Hosea, the man with the wife whom he always forgave when she’d been playing up with other men. But my delusion more often tells me that I’m Jonah, a long way down in the gullet of the whale.

There may still be something I’ve not yet said about New Zealand poetry – the wheat and the weeds whose roots are inextricably mingled together – after too many radio talks and Adult Education lectures; but you must remember I am not a lecturer by profession. There is a genuine difficulty. When I write poems I am serving some kind of difficult truth; when I talk about New Zealand poetry I am serving some kind of incubus dreamt up in a classroom. There are several myths about the origin of New Zealand poetry. There is probably a Curnow myth. I do not propose to argue with it, or addpage 619 to it, for fear of adding to the weight of lumber. The country is here, the great Fish, our mother; stabilised and torn apart by profiteers.

There was once a boy who went out to seek his fortune. He went with his mother’s blessing, a bottle of water and a loaf of rye bread. And he had not gone far before he came to a forest, and in the middle of the forest was a cave. In this cave lived a giant. This giant possessed a magic table. When he cried out, ‘Turkey!’ a plucked and roasted turkey would appear on the table. When he cried out, ‘Mutton birds!’ straight away the table would provide mutton birds. He offered this magic food to the travellers who came inside his cave. For himself, he was more ascetic. Human flesh, the traditional food of giants, did him very well, boiled in a pot with a few potatoes and cabbages.

After midday the boy arrived at the mouth of the cave. It was large and gloomy, but he remembered his mother’s blessing, and went in fearlessly. The giant welcomed him. ‘Come in!’ he said. ‘You must be hungry. You’ve come to the right place. Sit down and I’ll get you a meal.’

The boy thanked the giant and sat down at the magic table. ‘Clear soup!’ cried the giant, and a bowl of soup with noodles in it stood smoking on the table. The boy needed no further invitation. Soon the bowl was empty. ‘You still look hungry,’ said the smiling giant. ‘What would you like now?’

‘Sheep’s heart wrapped in bacon,’ said the boy.

‘Sheep’s hearts!’ cried the giant, and there stood a dozen sheep’s hearts in a dish. And so the meal went on, till the boy had tasted every delicacy he could imagine. But his hunger was not satisfied; if anything, it had grown greater. And this wasn’t really strange, because the food that the magic table provided was made entirely of bubbles.

The boy rose from the table as the sun began to drop over the mountains to the west. ‘Have you had enough?’ asked the giant. ‘My word, you’re a small eater.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said the boy. ‘I’m sure some people could live on your victuals quite easily. But I think I must have a peculiar kind of stomach. Your food does not satisfy me.’

The giant grew very angry. ‘You’re maladjusted!’ he shouted. ‘What’s good enough for other people should be good enough for you. I’ve never seen anybody more conceited or egocentric.’ Part of his anger came from disappointment. When the boy had become feeble, chewing endlessly at the food made of bubbles, the giant had intended to grab him and make a meal off him.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the boy. He remembered his mother’s advice to be polite always to people who were trying to be helpful. ‘Probably there’s something wrong with my stomach. But I still am hungry.’ He went outside the cave, leaving the giant, who was unable to live in sunlight, in an even worse temper, and sat down between the roots of a great tree. There he opened his knapsack, said grace, and ate bits of the rye bread his mother had given him, washingpage 620 it down with gulps of cold water. This food too was magical. The loaf never became less and the bottle was never empty. And his hunger was satisfied.

This story, to my mind, expresses exactly the relation existing between anyone who wants to write truthfully and the apparatus of culture, money and education which our society has to offer. The rye bread and the water are the stuff that poems are made of; and the poet needs also the blessing of his mother, the earth, from whom he came and to whom he will go back.

I remember walking down a Wellington street with a young Maori who was bent double with the effort to reconcile the view of life he had obtained from his own tribe and that which our pakeha society held out to him. ‘I think it is the Temptation in the Wilderness,’ he said at last. Perhaps he was thinking of the technological assets of the modern world, the conversion of stones to bread; perhaps he was thinking of the temptation to personal power, the view of the cities of the world seen from the top of the mountain; but either way, he felt there was a price to be paid, the loss of some primitive order of love and justice in which the face of one’s neighbour was what mattered most. And the price seemed to him exorbitant, the loss of God’s light in his heart. Also, with the price not yet paid, he was able to make action songs for the group which he happened to be a leader of, as naturally as a duck skids down on the water.

Like most pakeha New Zealanders I had no access to Maori poetry at the time of my growing up, except for an occasional very bad translation. And I knew nothing of the spadework which was being done by Mason, Fairburn, Curnow, Glover or Brasch. On the other hand, my father, a New Zealand farmer of Scottish descent, had his head full of Burns, Byron, Blake, Shelley and Thomas Hood. With no secondary-school education to fuddle his brains, he tried to write in the manner of the poets he most admired. These lines of his, put into the mouths of the spirits present at the creation of the world, were very likely modelled on the choruses of ‘Prometheus Unbound’:

In the elemental chaos
When the worlds were in the making,
None could rule nor disobey us,
We were there in all partaking,
And we caught the rhythmic motion
Of the orbs that roll and swing
In the vast ethereal ocean
Deep beyond all fathoming.

And our music rolled over the waters before
Their free swelling billows were barred by a shore,
And we sang as we saw the Earth leap from the main
And the plan of Creation before us made plain.

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Then it was our delight when the Earth in the pride
Of her sweet virgin beauty in us did confide,
And we rustled and played
Through her forests, and swayed
All the reeds and the brackens and bade them rejoice,
And the birds in their flight
When the sunshine was bright
Caught the sound of our music and each found a voice . . .

It was a good poem in the Romantic mode, and heady stuff as well for the ears of a six-year-old, especially when it came from the lips and the mind of a man whom it was never a penance to love. On its own, it could have inclined me to regard the making of poems as a kind of Delphic mystery, not to be connected with everyday happenings. But my father’s deepest attachment was to Burns. He did not imitate the bawdiness of Burns, though he liked it well enough, or his lyrical writing; instead he used the Burns six-line stanza as a mirror to the events of local society and politics. When a certain farmer boiled over at the action of the County Council in driving a road through the centre of his property, my father wrote a verse lament on this man’s behalf – ironically, because he himself, having built roads under contract in many places, thought this particular road needed to be put through – and he laid the completed poem on the County Clerk’s table:

In all these gullies I’ve made bridges
With great logs split by mall and wedges,
I’ve cut the fern from off the ridges
To make pig-bedding,
And with great care I’ve nurtured hedges
Around my steading . . .

Then comes the bellow of a ringed bull from the farmer whose land and possessions (as much a part of him as the hat on his head) are being split in two by local Government action:

Right through the cowshed and the yard
A fu’ chain broad
My foes agree with one accord
To make a road . . .

Again, the poem is good in the satiric mode. Under this kind of stimulus it was not strange that I too should want to write. It was probably some sense of depression, or a failure to hold my end up in the battle to avoid getting beaten up or educated, that took me at the age of seven to a promontory notpage 622 far from my home. I found a burrow, a kind of seat in the rock, at the top of a steep slope of grass above a cliff, and crouched down there. I did not realise it was the Delphic cave. But in this solitude the sound of the breakers on the rocks below had a hypnotic effect; and for the first time I heard that voice inside my head – not in the head, in the mind – that makes my poems for me:

O Ocean, in thy rocky bed
The starry fishes swim about;
There coral rocks are strewn around
Like some great temple on the ground . . .

This extraordinary message – that fishes resemble stars – is all I can remember of a long dithyrambic ode which dealt also with the fate of the souls and bodies of the drowned. A good deal later on, I made it into a formal poem:

Fishes like stars that swim
Within the dark abyss
Where charmed, unsought by cherubim,
Sea’s coral temple is,
Come from your cold sea bed
To billows over head;
Let your mute voices sing
My love awakened . . .

But in some ways I still prefer the first version. It was less pretentious.

Again, like most New Zealanders, I remember adolescence as a very arid time. A time when sex and intellect are both active but have nothing to feed on but the sight of a girl’s legs in the bus and coloured diagrams of test-tubes in a science notebook. Like certain animals in cages, the adolescent begins to devour himself. Slowly the manuscript books were filled up with private junk. Occasionally the verse was good:

Uncontemplative clouds forever move
For skies cannot earth’s suffering burden see;
Light shingles on the inland wave
Rattle; only the winds of autumn sigh
While man the hawk and man the hare
Pursue their unrelenting passage here,
Are born, beget, and die . . . [‘Hawk and Hare’, CP 3]

The emblems of adolescence, however, are the private demon, the spider on the wall, and rat-eaten books in old cupboards. I don’t object to this. I thinkpage 623 anyone who has survived an English or New Zealand adolescence would feel at home anywhere – in a space ship going to Venus or in a pit full of tarantulas. The all-but-unbreakable armour of the Anglo-Saxon adult is forged then. It gave me time to write a vast quantity of bad verse. And it left me with a curious religious feeling that God existed, but He did not know that I existed. Something like that.

I remember Lehmann’s New Writing in Europe bursting like a bomb in the middle of my unlimited private desert. There was the noise of trumpets in those early poems of Auden and Day Lewis. Somewhere a battle was being fought. I think there may have been a subconscious link for me between the poets of the Left in England and the Australian balladists I had known by heart in childhood:

On the runs to the west of the Dingo Scrub there was
drought and rain and death
And the sandstorm came from the dread north-east with
the blast of a furnace breath . . . [Henry Lawson, ‘The Bush Fire’]

Lawson and Paterson had resembled somewhat the leaders of a Maori action song group, or the Viking bards who chanted while their companions straddled a bench and recapitulated the voyages of the dragon ships. They were often sentimental. Their stereotypes of Australian backblocks life did not greatly resemble the life of the New Zealand farmers, rabbiters and workers in road-building camps who carried the paper-backed books in their swags or kept them on a shelf. But they were the nearest thing to popular poetry this country has ever had. I felt that Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice and Spender, were giving voice to the social battles of our own time. And even though the vision of a new society proved to be a false sunrise, the sense of contemporaneous idiom remained with me. The poems of Dylan Thomas are a different kettle of fish. They became part of my mind, and still are.

What about the other New Zealand poets? The truth is I did not know they existed. Some time in 1944 I took a book of verse to the Caxton Press in Christchurch and they agreed to publish it. I had read a few of the rhymesters in C.A. Marris’s selections of so-called Best Poems, and saw that they were building bird-cages with no birds inside. The idea of any real cliques existing among New Zealand poets is nonsense. Certainly friendships do occur, but each poet that I have known has gone through his formative years in the profoundest solitude. Somebody told me in 1944 that I should write to Fairburn, and I must have done so because that amiable and immensely tolerant man sent me good epigrams in return for my own bad ones and gave me excellent advice (which I did not take) on the conduct of my sex life. I must have read him first in 1945. The characteristically warm sexual tone of his poems was like a tonic. It was Fairburn who broke the sex taboos, in apage 624 positive way, by showing a simultaneous vision of the body of the earth and the body of the beloved:

From the cliff-top it appeared a place of defeat,
the nest of an extinct bird, or the hole where the sea hoards its bones,
a pocket of night in the sun-faced rock,
sole emblem of mystery and death in that enormous noon.

We climbed down, and crossed over the sand,
and there were islands floating in the wind-whipped blue,
and clouds and islands trembling in your eyes,
and every footstep and every glance
was a fatality felt and unspoken, our way
rigid and glorious as the sun’s path,
unbroken as the genealogy of man . . .

There should be the shapes of leaves and flowers
printed on the rock, and a blackening of the walls
from the flame on your mouth,
to be found by the lovers straying
from the picnic two worlds hence, to be found and known,
because the form of the dream is always the same,
and whatever dies or changes this will persist and recur,
will compel the means and the end, find consummation,
whether it be
silent in swansdown and darkness, or in grass moon-shadow-mottled,
or in a murmuring cave of the sea . . . [‘The Cave’]

I think Fairburn’s handful of love poems could hardly be surpassed; a great treasure, so very untypical of this country. I have often felt a resemblance between his work and that of the Australian poet, A.D. Hope. Both are essentially solar poets, with frankness in their handling of sexual themes, using the bludgeon rather than the small knife, and capable of giving intellectual courage to others.

I met Brasch in Dunedin when he was just beginning to edit Landfall. There was some divergence of opinion. Brasch was a kind man. But he believed in culture more than I did. I then came to Christchurch and got acquainted with Glover and Curnow. It was good to be able to converse with people who were writing poems from the rock bottom. I saw most of Glover, and cannot remember discussing verse with him much; but I think I learnt from him the way in which various problems could be tackled, seeing the contemplative process at work in him. I had never met a man who was more aware of his own destitution:

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While all around us ancient ills
Devour like blackberry the hills
On every product of the time
Let fall a poisoned rain of rhyme,
sings Harry,
But praise St Francis feeding crumbs
Into the empty mouths of guns.

‘What shall I sing?’ sings Harry,

‘Sing all things sweet or harsh upon
These islands in the Pacific sun,
The mountains whitened endlessly
And the white horses of the winter sea . . .’ [‘Themes’ in ‘Sings Harry’]

Later I was able to learn a great deal from another New Zealand poet, Louis Johnson. In Johnson’s case, it was the sense of being in the lion’s den which he could give shape to:

Nature ordains sleep as its very breath:
A gradual sleep which, along any way
May charm the errant from his laurel wreath
With casual contentments. Dawns a day

When, for all his possessions and great calm
Too carefully tended in the Land of Sleep,
The storm breaks and the beacons of alarm
Blaze in the morning from the castle keep . . .

I was able to learn something from this; again, a certain injection of intellectual courage at the right moment.

Does all this add up to much? I don’t know. But to strike a lighter note, I will give you a description of an imaginary cultural gathering, in a South Island town, where a young man named Horse comes under the influence of an imaginary New Zealand poet called Mr Grummet. Horse is having difficulty with his girlfriend Fern, who has begun to prefer another man. The cultural factor in the equation is represented by Zoe Virtue, the wife of the varsity librarian . . .

[‘Bulls and Cows’, an extract from Horse, followed. (See No. 280.) Because it is included in the full text of the novel it is not included at this point.]

page 626

I will leave it to your discretion to work out what relation the adventures of Horse have to the growth and continuance of New Zealand poetry – saying only that, to my mind, Zoe represents culture and education, while Fern is the goddess in charge of the natural paradise. You have been very patient with me.

So far, in this talk, I have made my own kind of clearing in the scrub.

In my next talk, ironically entitled ‘Poetry and Education’, I will have the pleasure of quoting a good deal of other people’s verse. If you wanted a conducted guidebook tour of New Zealand poetry, or even a careful point-by- point evaluation of the poems that have been written, you should have picked on another man – preferably one who does not regard whatever work he has done on behalf of education as a kind of apprenticeship to the undertaker. Through the labours of Mr Curnow and Messrs Chapman and Bennett anthologies already exist which put some, though not all, of our established poets on display. One notable exception is Charles Doyle:

There lingers here all this but faintly now
In the headlong Winter when the hurled waves hammer
With hurling fists the promenade’s cold plateau,
Flinging against the rocks that every Summer

Capture clear, peaceful pools with gentle fingers.
The sea throws on the sand old, twisted wood
Sapped in the marrow, a prey to Nature’s anger,
Among the broken shells and the other dead

Come uncertainly to rest. The breakers crack
With malice again and yet again, at the drab
Front-line of beach, raiding, marauding the rock,
Hissing like a blowtorch at a cracksman’s crib.

Omnivorous, the tide swallows, the wind tears
Tears of spray from the impact. Nothing is spared
The rage, the tantrum, the recriminations, the roar
Of the mad-wild winter weather whipping a bleeding world. . . .

I am quoting from his poem ‘Winter Beach’ which expresses so exactly the profound negative force of this age of destitution. I cannot imagine why the anthologists did not take the trouble to find it. If I were editing an anthology (which, thank God, I have no intention of doing) I would include also a good handful of poems by Fleur Adcock. This magnificent sonnet is called ‘Before Sleep’; it comes from a longer sequence called ‘Night-Piece’:

page 627

Lying close to your heart-beat, my lips
Touching the pulse in your neck, my head on your arm,
I listen to your hidden blood as it slips
With a small furry sound along the warm
Veins; and my slowly-flowering dream
Of Chinese landscapes, river-banks and flying
Splits into sudden shapes – children who scream
By a roadside, blinded men, a woman lying
In a bed filled with blood: the broken ones.
We are so vulnerable. I curl towards
That intricate machine of nerves and bones
With its built-in life: your body. And to your words
I whisper ‘Yes’ and ‘Always’, as I lie
Listening for thunder from a stony sky.

It must have required not only talent but also great intellectual courage for a New Zealand woman to write this poem. I believe that our poets write well in spite of, not because of, their social conditioning; and this is particularly true for a woman poet. There are, of course, external factors – I remember one woman novelist telling me, having written one vigorous novel, that she had decided to write no more – the buzzing of the grape-vine among the women she knew, and the obscene expectations of her male acquaintances were too unnerving. But I think the most difficult factors are internal. Most New Zealand women have had enough experience of life to give them the material for any number of poems or stories. It is another thing, though, to set down on paper the crises of lovemaking or childbearing or the death of relatives. A deep negative tradition of moralising, whimsy and camouflage is likely to take charge at this point and the woman who goes against it will feel herself to be in a position of extreme vulnerability and solitude. What strikes me most, though, in Fleur Adcock’s poem is the way in which the images of public calamity – refugee children, men blinded, women whose sex has been damaged – the habitual atrocities of our time – enter the closed world of the love poem so easily and so exactly. It is as if, touching her private bedrock, the poet finds it is alive with the communications of all who suffer everywhere. It is worth the struggle to break the negative conditioning.

Perhaps there is no other choice. As I have suggested, this is not only the Atom Age; it is also the Age of Destitution. The experience of monotony within the social pyramid; the gigantic public atrocities of genocide, mass bombing, and so on, in which we are all implicitly involved; the anarchy that occurs when the social forms are all but entirely divorced from the actual needs of adolescent or adult people – these wounds like craters in the body of humanity lead honest writers to a separateness, a habit of not trusting the ways of looking at life that have allowed these things to happen. I seepage 628 two habits of thought among the young – those who are just beginning to think and perhaps write. On the one hand they turn to private symbolism, quarrying in their own nature for some positive archetype to set against the society made of iron and excreta which they are obliged to inhabit – looking for the natural image, the private rhythm – and they also endeavour from time to time to hold up a mirror to the inhuman pattern of public events, as Perseus held up a shield to the Gorgon. The inward and the outward road may lead eventually to the same destination. I prefer poems that are ill-made but reflect something that has actually happened to poems that are well-made but reflect little or nothing. There are a lot of the first kind being written in this country; and some of these poets may learn to write well, one can never tell when or how.

In spite of the insularity of New Zealand – a geographical and cultural accident which some of our critics have stressed far too much – our poets have had certain advantages. One is the absence of any clear-cut critical doctrine formulated in the universities. In America the poets labour under a vast load of academic criticism, and it has made them fidgety and sapped their confidence – I think, for example, of Karl Shapiro, who wrote some good love poems and satires and then camouflaged himself as an academic pundit. We have not had so much of that business here. The other advantage is a positive one – the existence, here and there, of an active Bohemia.

Bohemia is frequently the only situation where a modern writer can acquire the outlook and habits of a tribesman. The values of our Bohemia, as I recall them, were something like this:

An insistence on the value of conversation, as a way of sorting out one’s problems and helping others to sort out theirs;

An insistence on the relative unimportance of regular work and money- making. A man with his eye on the pound note might not notice that his neighbour needed him;

An insistence on an appreciation of the value of sexual experience. On all accounts this is the main point where Bohemia clashes with the established order. But the emphasis is not laid on cold promiscuity, but on growth, colour, vitality, and very likely, subconsciously, fertility as well. The slogan is ‘I may be wrong, but I’ll be right some day’;

Sympathy and understanding towards those whom the established order tends to reject: the alcoholic, the homosexual, and so on. The notion that no one is really so very good or so very bad;

A tendency towards the periodic explosion, get-together, communal orgy;

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An appreciation of the savour, quality, colour, of the New Zealand landscape and seascape, and of works of art that reflect this;

A strong pro-Maori bias;

A Leftism not based so much on Marxist doctrine as on a more flexible and primitive feeling that the Government and its agents had too much say in people’s lives, and that the working man had salt in him . . .

Bohemia has its obvious disadvantages. It does not, for example, generally lead to a stable family life. Perhaps Bohemia is based on a flight from the inescapable – from the death each person must undergo. But it is an excellent situation for a young writer who wants to know people, find his or her feet, develop his or her own point of view. And Bohemians make good friends. I know this myself. Whenever I have been flattened, blinded or bewildered by personal problems, I found that the only people who could provide an atmosphere for recovery and understanding were Bohemians. When they shovel the clods over me, I would like them to cut these words on the bit of marble – He had good friends.

The fruit of poetry is in the intellect; but its roots are always in the obscure soil of personal relationships. If there are no relationships, how can the tree grow? I am not suggesting that I ever found Bohemia a wholly satisfactory condition; it depends a lot on one’s natural vitality, which becomes less as one grows older; and Bohemia does not count the cost of any expenditure, physical or spiritual. Here are some lines I wrote on the subject to an old friend in Auckland:

How do the rough boys end?
In furnished rooms Many drink hemlock. Some, some
Lie like straws in ice, lulled
By the spider-headed queen.
Keep safe the small gold cross I gave you,
These ambiguities of friendship culled
At morning when the leaves are green.

Light ebbs on tilting jetties, night
Pressing her fingers on reddened eyes . . . [‘To a Travelling Friend’, CP 182]

No doubt one has to live by one’s responsibilities, at times without any vision at all, like the blind camel turning the water wheel, who cannot even stoop and drink. But without visions, no poems can be written; and I would regret it if there were none. One fights not for justice, but to retain a little hearing and eyesight among the picture-boxes and noise-boxes which are soldpage 630 continually over the counter.

Beyond the island at Waimarama there is a river that rises from the bottom of the sea. It rises with such pressure that it forms a mound of fresh water on the surface of the sea. It is a tree of water rising from the sea bottom. It is more primitive than Arethusa, the Greek fountain who plunged under the waves to escape or meet her lover – I forget which. It is beyond the reach of the Tourist and Publicity Department which kills every blade of grass on which it focuses its lenses. I think of that river sometimes when I am falling asleep. While it goes on rising it will be possible to write poems in this country.

1963 (299)