[In the following essay, Paterson provides a brief overview of early twentieth-century New Zealand poetry, suggesting that it was deeply influenced by the cultural and historical forces that shaped the country at that time.]

How does one write down anything about poetry; it is something almost impossible to define and not much easier to evaluate; but we keep attempting (in spite of the difficulties) to trace out the patterns of its development, to determine the influences which have shaped it and to designate the contributions of individual writers—and even of groups of writers. No one is ever much satisfied with the results. The critics and commentators seldom reach agreement; yet the beast goes on weaving its spell like the hydra-head of Medusa, changes its colours and spots, enchants, mystifies, frustrates and drives to distraction. This country's poetry is no easier to deal with than is the poetry of any other: its beginnings are undistinguished, its antecedents doubtful, its development haphazard, and its future unpredictable.

The recent publication of the Ballads of Thomas Bracken¹ and Ian Wedde's Earthly, Sonnets for Carlos,² proves the point. No writings could be more unlike nor based on more widely disparate conceptions of the nature of poetry; nor could the isolated reading of Bracken's verse give the slightest suggestion of the direction in which New Zealand's poetry was likely to move. Nevertheless, these notes are an attempt to provide a tentative exploration of some of those directions and of the places they have led to.

To the contemporary eye, Bracken now reads very badly indeed—is an embarrassment when it is remembered that in his time he held ‘a reputation as New Zealand's best loved poet … was regarded as this country's Tennyson’³, that there are streets named after him and that he is the author of a hymn which is likely to become New Zealand's national anthem. He wrote under very difficult conditions—as a colonial in a colony which was devoted almost exclusively to material pursuits and which fed on an English literary tradition rapidly approaching bankruptcy. As a poet, he is probably representative of his period and, despite the widely-held view of this country's isolation from the world at large, he drew on the most inappropriate of models—Tennyson, Longfellow and the contemporary English public versifiers who had given away their poetic integrity for the sake of quick popularity. His own popularity lasted longer than it should have—almost up to the 1920s—but it is now possible to see him in a similar light to that of Sir Henry Newbolt who wasn't so much writing poetry as catering for a debased public taste, a demand that writers (particularly poets) should reflect public values and attitudes. Bracken's style, however, is varied—a fact which does not reflect any great versatility, but an attempt to adapt his writing to the kind of public, and the occasions, for which it was intended. The tragedy is that there are hints in his work that he could have done better; but unfortunately they are only hints and his writing lacks even the rough integrity found in the folk songs and anonymous ballads which have survived from the colonial period. But Bracken did have the serious intention of being a poet—a virtue he shares with his more gifted and more fortunate successors.

Allen Curnow's presupposition⁴ that a nation must have a sense of identity and a feeling for the land before successful poetry can be written, seems to be only part of the story; there is also the requirement that a poet should work from an appropriate tradition. In New Zealand's case the problem was not that there was no tradition on which to build, but that the only one which poets working in English could employ had exhausted itself.⁵ It was therefore inevitable that (except for a few minor and almost accidental pieces) serious poetry writing in this country (and in Australia) was almost an impossibility; without a sense of place, a literature to build on, and a suitable audience, nothing of note could be accomplished. Domett's earlier failure (and Bowen's), Jessie Mackay's attitudinizing, and the near success of such writers as Arthur H. Adams and (later) Arnold Wall are not particularly surprising when it is remembered that, historically, they were contemporaneous with a major decline in English poetry and that, in England, writers were experiencing problems which precluded the making of poetry in a place as distant, and as traumatically involved with materialism and land as New Zealand was at the time.

As Alistair Campbell has so rightly said,⁶ poetry in this country begins with the Georgians—the men who soberly, seriously, and with considerable contempt for public taste commenced the task of re-establishing poetry on the basis of a personal, social reality and of the re-education of its audience. The evidence seems to suggest that New Zealand's poets (and would-be poets) of the twenties modelled their work on that of these men rather than the more extreme and uncompromising attitude of Ezra Pound. Mason, Fairburn and Glover founded their poetry on the Georgians. Brasch and Curnow took a slightly different stance; but in the 1930s their view of man and his alienation from the land began to become the dominant philosophy which obscured New Zealand poetry's Georgian origins, and allowed Curnow to employ, and at the same time deny, the influence of Auden and Macneice. The outside influences, however, were always there, as were the Wordsworthian overtones (through the Georgians), and Curnow's obsession with geographic isolation and alienation:

The sensitive nor'west afternoon
Collapsed, and the rain came;
The dog crept into his barrel
Looking lost and lame.
But you can't attribute to either
Awareness of what great gloom
Stands in a land of settlers
with never a soul at home.

(House and Land)

In the immediate post-war years, and as a logical follow-up to Curnow's seminal Book of New Zealand Verse,⁷ the founding of Landfall provided its editor, Charles Brasch, with the opportunity to institutionalise the alienation theme and, through his editorial policy, to prolong the Georgian secondary characteristics of ‘a provincial or rural consciousness, as against an urban sophisticated consciousness’.⁸ In retrospect, this was antithetical to increasing overseas influences and to the growing urban consciousness of younger New Zealand writers; it ran contrary to this country's war-enforced awareness of its membership of the world community and its involvement in social and political events overseas. The result was that A. W. Stockwell, in reviewing Louis Johnson's The Sun among the Ruins,⁹ could justly give emphasis to an apparently novel view-point: ‘The poems have no local flavour at all; for anything they suggest to the contrary, they might have been written in London or New England rather than in Wellington. … Unlike some other poets, he seems not concerned with anything specifically New Zealand …’. The poet was, of course, very much concerned with things New Zealand and his poems were, as events ultimately proved, symptomatic of a stance which was in conflict with the Brasch/Curnow dictum.

With the introduction of his New Zealand Poetry Yearbook in 1951, Louis Johnson provided an arena which reopened New Zealand poetry to outside influences, and allowed the appearance of an increasingly wide variety of dissenting voices. Baxter, who by then was under the influence of the British poet, George Barker, lent Johnson his support as is evidenced by his generous contributions to the Yearbook, and by his collaboration with Johnson and Anton Vogt in their group venture of 1952.¹⁰ The major influences, however, were still from the United Kingdom (although Johnson was apparently drawing on the middle-generation American poets) where poetry was developing relatively slowly and reverting to the kind of formalism which is represented in the Penguin Modern Poets—a representative series published by Penguin in the early 1960s. As a result, the changes in New Zealand poetry were not as marked as they could have been, but the ground was being laid, a climate open to new techniques and responsive to new social conditions was being prepared. The credit for this rests with Johnson.

The late 1950s and early 1960s now appear to have been marked by a consolidation of the movement Johnson began—not without its stresses as the ignominious end of the Yearbook demonstrates! At the same time, there were other factors at work. In response to the post-war boom, the introduction of television, New Zealand's token involvement in South East Asia and its accompanying protest movement, dissent and varying life-styles began to make poetry-writing more acceptable. These changes were supported by such magazines as Landfall, Mate, Arena, The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, and (later) the Oxford Anthology, which provided the publishing outlets essential to writers who needed a genuine and sympathetic audience and the critical feedback which encouraged an atmosphere conducive to personal growth and literary development. From the platform of confidence which resulted, New Zealand poetry began to expand and to take advantage of overseas literary movements—particularly those in America.

In the 1950s the middle-generation of American poets—some of them ‘European’ in their orientation and inclusive of such writers as Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and William Stafford—began to give way before a flood of new voices as extreme and various as the continent which produced them. The ‘Beat’ generation, spear-headed by Allen Ginsberg, dug back through and around William Carlos Williams to Walt Whitman, drew on the American sub-strata of inventive discontent which had always been there and was now responding—sometimes violently—to the obsessive materialism and political chauvinism which led to involvement in Vietnam. Working on from Williams, Denise Levertov and Anne Sexton moved into the ‘confessional’ vein while Charles Bukowski and William Wantling (still not as widely appreciated as they might be) worked underground. More important, Charles Olsen, with Robert Creeley and the exceptionally fine Robert Duncan, formed the Black Mountain group which has probably been the most influential American movement of the last fifteen years. All these, and many other external influences have had their effects on New Zealand poetry—partly through the intermediary of Auckland University whose English Department was wise enough to introduce a course in American poetry, and partly through the efforts of independent enthusiasts in Christchurch and Dunedin.

At the same time New Zealand's indigenous culture was beginning to have an effect. Alistair Campbell and James K. Baxter both drew on New Zealand's Polynesian heritage while Hone Tuwhare became the first Maori to gain popularity and acclaim as a poet working in English.

The result has been a sudden rush of variety and life into the writing of New Zealand verse, an awareness that this country's literary isolation is more apparent than real—but the new awareness is not without its risks as a cursory reading of Arthur Baysting's Young New Zealand Poets¹¹ (modelled on an American publication of similar name) reveals. It is easy—too easy—to take up the techniques and styles of overseas writers and produce work which initially seems entirely original and even acceptable poetry. Poets almost always begin by imitation; purely imitative writing, however, is best left unpublished (as Baxter discovered from his early flirtation with Yeats) because, as was said long ago and has been reiterated by Wantling, ‘le style, c'est l'homme’ and conversely, ‘the poet is the style’. Thus, writers in this, or in any other country must ultimately become themselves or fail to produce anything of note. But this is not to denigrate some of the excellent work in Baysting's anthology—David Mitchell and a number of other poets represented are plainly outstanding.

All the features so far discussed are apparent in the more recent publications of New Zealand poetry—as is the powerful influence of the women's liberation movement.

Under normal circumstances, it would not be of any value to consider the poetry of women as distinct from that of men—but 1975 was International Women's Year and this may have encouraged publishers to accept more manuscripts from women than might otherwise have been the case; it has also resulted in Riemke Ensing's compilation of an anthology of poetry by women and has demonstrated that there are more able women poets in this country than was formerly realised. Considered as a whole, however, their writing sometimes seems over-polite (which is possibly the fault of a sexist society rather than of the writers themselves). For my part, I would like to see more of the kind of teeth that Jan Kemp can put into a poem:¹²

no smoky incubus nor swan
is seed for this Hexandra—
riding time's night, bareback
Godiva of the sheets:
after the bullwhip cracks
the air in slivers / after
the tiered planks are hush
she will still ride ride
circling the ring, thud hooves
scudding sawdust on sweating flanks
molten in floodlight …

By Woman Wailing for Her Demon Lover

Rachel McAlpine's Lament for Ariadne¹³ reflects something of the Women's Liberation Movement but does not rely on it exclusively; there is as well a misleading simplicity about her work, and a suggestion that she is likely to become a considerable poet in the confessional vein:

… your blood
                    has the beat
                    of the sea
                    it pulls
                    to the pulse
                    of the moon
                    If I die
                    before I lie
                    with you
                    rocks will rain
                    from heaven …

Love Song

The confessional mode is also evident in Marilyn Duckworth's Other Lovers' Children¹⁴—poems which contain a genuine warmth, a sense of the living flesh and blood which surrounds all of us. Fiona Kidman's Honey and Bitters¹⁵ has a similar felicity: she has a feeling for people and places, a sense of the wry humour that underlies so much of what New Zealanders say and do, but the poems themselves are perhaps too loosely structured to be as effective as they might be—could perhaps have a greater ‘sting’. Lauris Edmond's In Middle Air¹⁶ displays considerable concern for form and possesses a genuine and well-established style; it shows an underlying awareness of the realities of conventional urban life but once more, is perhaps more polite than it should be:

Eyes above the white masks
that parody our faces, nothing
but eyes; yours are still water—
you travel in another country
and do no recognize our landmarks.

Attempted Suicide

Jane Stewart's Muse¹⁷ published by Outrigger has, on the other hand, not been noticed as much as it deserves. Her poems are of interest because she has established in them the kind of distancing that marked Emily Dickinson: a great economy of language, a distrust of the direct statement, together with a powerful and unexpected imagery:

I'll play the ape
to no man's image of ourselves,
let younger artists peel
bananas deftly
as they may.
Fresh eyes, more shrewdly simian
than mine,
may trace fine lines
of age old wisdom
deeper wrinkled
in the universal face …

Defiantly, The Grey Baboon

New Zealand poetry, in addition to its response to overseas developments, has also achieved a minor international influence—largely through the efforts of the Christchurch-based Edge (now rather spasmodic in its publication), through Cave, and the now defunct Frontiers. All these magazines emphasise internationalism and have led to a few non-New Zealanders having associations with this country. One of the latter is the American poet, Michael Harlow, whose collection Edges,¹⁸ published in Greece, contains some poems which were originally printed in New Zealand and Australia as well as in a number of other countries. His work reflects this but suffers from being unnecessarily de-personalised. Internationalism also results from the tendency of younger poets to spend a few years overseas. One such poet is R. C. Riddell whose Beads¹⁹ shows a strong American/European influence.

Conversely, Bruce Beaver is a member of the recent wave of expatriates (which includes Louis Johnson, Fleur Adcock, and Eric Beach). His Odes and Days²⁰ is strongly influenced by an association with, and an interest in, Ezra Pound. It is extremely professional, highly competent work of great control and sensitivity but in style more properly belongs to Australia, where he lives, than to his homeland. Louis Johnson (also living in Australia) has rapidly adapted, as his Fires and Patterns²¹ demonstrates, to the overseas environment and has developed an extremely flexible and personal voice well suited to his social and urban concerns—a voice which is still essentially of this country, and which possesses some of the characteristics of the middle-generation of American poets. Reinforcing the effects of prolonged overseas experience on the expatriates, the Winn-Manson Fellowship takes writers to the South of France and allows them the opportunity of working at Menton. Already it is having an influence on the kind of poetry that is produced by New Zealanders. C. K. Stead's Quesada,²² produced while he held the Fellowship, is conclusive evidence of the benefits gained through such means. Using a long line which is possibly derived from the work of Whitman, Stead has developed a remarkably flexible and expressive language, a casual turn of phrase coupled with a European sensibility which would have pleased even the fastidious and irascible Ezra Pound; at the same time, the earlier Stead is still there—but warmer, more approachable, a poet who catches and holds his reader's sympathy:

          the hero/fool is a warning to us all
Before thirst, before hunger, before pains of love and war
          yet he is also the only true hero in literature
Quesada's visionary morning of the world
          because we all lack and look for a little of his madness
The straw-pale sky calling him from home.

Quesada II

Meanwhile, the younger writers appear to be becoming more politically-minded. Some of them, including Stephen Chan, have stood for parliament and undertaken publishing. Some are ardent supporters of the Values Party. Chan's recent collection, Arden's Summer²³, while not reflecting these interests, shows considerable delicacy and sensitivity but is marred by possessing the marks of a private voice speaking largely to friends. The result is that the reader finds little he can come to grips with and goes away wishing for the harder, brighter imagery that is Ian Wedde's trade-mark.

Earthly²⁴, Ian Wedde's collection which was published late in 1975, is the most impressive writing. It takes and reshapes the traditional sonnet into a powerful and flexible poetic instrument of exceptional vitality—and this is accomplished through a happy synthesis of the techniques of contemporary American and European writing:

& what's to do than celebrate
the fact? Look
                                                            the dark bloom's left your eyes
spring's ripe          the horizon the blue sky
the air pours towards you          the bean flower's sweet
again                    that fucking ferryman grates
his rowlocks in mid-channel again          high
clouds are spinning like tops again & I
couldn't ever have enough of all that

Sonnet 44

It is indeed sustained and impressive work—and a long way from Thomas Bracken with whom these notes began. Where New Zealand poetry goes now is anybody's guess; yet it is likely to retain some of the marks of its Georgian origins and of this country's geographic position and historical heritage. Probably it will continue to draw on any and every international development that occurs, and it is certain (as has always been the case) to rely upon the individual talent which, alone, is essential to the making of poetry.

Notes

1. Thomas Bracken, Ballads of Thomas Bracken (Palmerston North, The Dunmore Press, 1975).

2. Ian Wedde, Earthly, Sonnets for Carlos (Akaroa, Amphedesma Press, 1975).

3. John Dunmore in the Introduction to Ballads of Thomas Bracken (Palmerston North, The Dunmore Press, 1975).

4. Allen Curnow in Introduction to The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (Auckland, Penguin Books and Blackwood and Janet Paul, 1960).

5. See: C. K. Stead, The New Poetic (London, Hutchinson & Co., 1964), and V. de S. Pinto, Crisis in English Poetry 1880-1940 (London, Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, Fifth edition, 1967).

6. Alistair Campbell, ‘Glover and Georgianism’ in Comment (Oct-Nov, 1964).

7. Allen Curnow, ed, A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923-45.

8. Alistair Campbell, ‘Glover and Georgianism’ in Comment (Oct-Nov, 1964).

9. A. W. Stockwell, review of Louis Johnson's The Sun Among the Ruins in Landfall 21 (March, 1952).

10. Baxter, Johnson & Vogt, Poems Unpleasant, (Christchurch, Pegasus Press, 1952).

11. Arthur Baysting, The Young New Zealand Poets (Auckland, Heinemann Educational Books, 1973).

12. Jan Kemp, Ibid, p.73.

13. Rachel McAlpine, Lament for Ariadne (Dunedin, Caveman Press, 1975).

14. Marilyn Duckworth, Other Lovers' Children (Christchurch, Pegasus Press, 1952).

15. Fiona Kidman, Honey and Bitters (Christchurch, Pegasus Press, 1975).

16. Lauris Edmond, In Middle Air (Christchurch, Pegasus Press, 1975).

17. Jane Stewart, Muse (Hamilton, Outrigger, 1975).

18. Michael Harlow, Edges (Greece, Lycabettus Press, 1974).

19. R. G. Riddell, Beads (Auckland, The Parnassus Press).

20. Bruce Beaver, Odes and Days (Sydney, The South Head Press, 1975).

21. Louis Johnson, Fires and Patterns (Queensland, The Jacaranda Press, 1975).

22. C. K. Stead, Quesada (Auckland, The Shed, 1975).

23. Stephen Chan, Arden's Summer (Christchurch, Pegasus Press, 1975).

24. Ian Wedde, Earthly, Sonnets for Carlos (Akaroa, Amphedesma Press, 1975).