Magasines

Argot 24

I might as well start at home, not only because Argot is the last magazine published, but also because it is the worst. Everything about it is wrong. The headings jig up and down like the dance of death, page numbers are missing, blead photos have while borders around. As for the contents, we return once again to schoolboy first attempts. S. Jane Leeburn cannot even write in sentences. Mere romantic nonsence 'why was, these beautiful spirals / Vanished, sounded Olaf as the' typical big-schoolgirl-hero-type image. What does it mean? Where is its moral message? It has not even a rhyme-scheme to recommend it. Of course Dennis List's mumbo-jumbo is here again 'Yap yap yap yap he said to me / (not seeing my armband VPDT) fitting words to describe the whole collection. The intellectual bogus edification in the editorial does much to enlighten us as to the nature of the editor. Me tells us, using the royal 'we' of course, "that liking a poem need have nothing to do with comprehension. List's absurd universe strikes some sympathetic chords in our nature." These poems are chosen because they have no meaning: they are chosen because the poets are the buddies of the editor: they are chosen because they sound as though they should make sense; they are not chosen because they have good rhythms or rhymes or poetic devices; an; most important they are not chosen to being the enlightened words of some new morality to a country that is sick of free-love, drugs, booze, atheistic fifth and lies. I may fittingly quote from the only poem that shows a fitting respect for a healthy moral atmosphere, Warwick Harvey's 'Letter from a New Zealand Farmer' - 'I sometimes wonder / what the country / is coming to.'