The Failures We can be Ashamed of:

The ungainly spectacle of N.Z.'s largest and most affluent university wasting its resources on preparing for publication a series of local 'classics' (may the good Lord forgive them) when a literature could be made by putting the present company of creators into pamphlet form, examples could be found in Yale, Wesley and Leeds publishing programmes.

The programme to teach N.Z. Lit. in the universities is based on inferior examples, badly researched and criminally misleading — a farce for all seasons.

Landfall — which everybody knows to be a shit of journal and not worth the lingering death it indulges itself in.

The tradition of criticism that has formulated those inferior models, we weep for the coming of a scholar or erudition, sympathy and humanity.

The weekend schools of writing that convince the gullible, the untalented, the schoolteachers, the housewives that literature is accessible to the mediocre.

The presses that print the bullshit that issues hard upon these schools.

The State literary Fund for condescension to the writers it should be rescuing with generosity and grace.

The anthologies which have proclaimed the mediocre to be masters and which removed dignity from the genuinely talented, their philosophies which tainted our minds with the crap their conceit and arrogance lead them to state as fact.