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Books

Shrugging off the Establishment

The budding Baxters, Curnows, Fairburns or Clovers hoping to write the Great New Zealand Poem or Short Story and lay it between the covers of Landfall all seem finally to have disappeared. On flips through the pages of this years Art Festival Year Book and one finds neither descriptions of typical New Zealand scenes nor attacks on the Welfare State mentality which were commonplace even a year or two ago. Instead there is verse which might well have come out of the workshop of a course in creative writing at Black Mountain College and impressionistic, close-cropped prose obviously influenced by the modern American and French translations. For this change, or rather this progression we must thank, I think, the encouragement of those determindly up-with-the-times little magazines Freed, Crucible and Argot.

One must of course welcome this change and yet the characteristics of the traditional New Zealand writers—simplicity, sincerity and a determination to say something meaningful are easily lost in the more obscure and sophisticated modern forms, especially when they are viewed by the inexperienced. For instance these lines in a poem by P. F. Ireland:

the negative
allusion can
only mean
emptiness of
a sort

where nothing at all is specified, neither 'allusion' nor 'emptiness and the jerky, seemingly haphazard rhythm serves only to emphasise the poem's complete lack of direction. What, one asks in exasperation, is the poet trying to say?

A poem may well be best regarded as an object but to be meaningful its relation to other objects must be well-defined.

Wordiness is another fault the modern verse forms often give rise to. And in poems like 'I Toss Nails with Reliquary Old Men' by Alan Brunton; 'Poem' by Murray Édmond and 'Munch Night Walker' by H. K. A. McPherson, words lose the concentration, which as Pound says, forms true literature.

To avoid this tendency modern poetry has emphasised the concrete image within the poem, the unifying symbol and the terse rhythms of natural speech. The next poems in this collection adhere to this trend. Phrases stand out—

'It's wings ring
like crystal, cutting
space
into beautiful curves!
'the needle coldness of grass'
'something vulgar to remember me by..."

but most are lost; they do not achieve the exactness of communicated (not to, say communicable), experience

'dry airs deceptive rhetoric'
a concertina folder of the past'
'your face exploded into fragments'

and it is interesting to note that it is precisely these lines that one reads with that uneasy feeling of deja vu.

The prose suffers from related defects. All the pieces but one—Kevin Cunningham's '29 Distinct Damnations' the most successful story—attempt at surrealism using images as incident and incident as fantasy, in order, perhaps to deny the kiwi tradition and thus correct on it, but the attempts fail, they lack both humour and real audacity, two essential weapons in the surrealists armoury of style.

We have then in the Arts Festival Yearbook the beginnings of a modernistic trend New Zealand writing needs; let us hope as it continues it will find a necessary sense of direction.