“Allen Curnow's Later Poems”—not his last. The incomplete comparative remains necessary, because Curnow himself remains very much with us: last year, 1998, he turned eighty-seven, and published several new poems.

No doubt the protracted shelf-life of the Curnow brand owes less to the poet's own longevity than to the exceptional durability of his poetic and, in particular, of his very substantial contribution to the project of a mid-century cultural nationalism that sought to define in no uncertain terms a canon for literature in New Zealand.¹ Curnow's two anthologies—A Book of New Zealand Verse in 1945 and The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse in 1960²—and the long critical introductions that accompanied them, functioned as founding documents in this mapping out of a predominantly masculine, Pakeha (i.e. non-Maori, of European descent), and modernist high ground for New Zealand poetry. So authoritative did the voice of this movement become that writers, readers, teachers and students of this country's literature continue to answer—or answer back—to it today.

Plenty of backchat has occurred over the course of recent decades. In the late 'sixties and early 'seventies, poets associated with the magazine Freed. (Bill Manhire, Ian Wedde, Murray Edmond and Alan Brunton, to name a few) attacked the Curnow brand from the perspective of a poetic derived in equal measures from the American beat, Black Mountain and New York poets, as well as from the modernism of Williams and Pound.³ In the 1980s, revisionist critical approaches derived from post-structuralism and postmodernism were deployed to historicize Curnow's poetic, and to deconstruct his metaphysics.⁴ Later, feminist criticism began to identify the ways in which the cultural nationalist apparatus excluded those aspects of poetry by women which did not fit with its emphasis on rigour and transparency.⁵ Finally, the Pakeha chauvinism of the cultural nationalist project has become increasingly plain and has appeared increasingly narrow and colonial in the context of an emergent body of powerful and diverse Maori writing in English during the 1980s and 1990s. Such disparate challenges have clearly altered the terrain; the cultural nationalist monolith may not have moved, but it has dated or been historicized, and is now surrounded by a considerable diversity of alternative critical and literary positions.

Over the same thirty years, however, successive volumes of new poems by Curnow have continued to be received, by academics, critics and a small but significant highbrow readership, as major and defining events on the New Zealand—and indeed the international—literary scene.⁶ Therefore it seems necessary to enquire what has happened to Curnow's poetry over this time: how, if at all, has it engaged with the multiple challenges to the cultural nationalist poetic that Curnow helped to define and police during the middle decades of the century? Does his “later” poetry answer, retreat from, or adapt to the demands of postmodernism, feminism and biculturalism?

1. TIGHTROPE WALKING

At first, and even second, glance, Curnow's later poems seem to occupy similar ground to his earlier work: visiting and revisiting the same scenes, rehearsing the same gestures, time and again. Continuum: New and Later Poems, 1972-1988—the volume with which I am concerned here—comprises a collection of recurrent encounters in which the ordinary poses an extraordinary threat, the familiar returns in unfamiliar guise, and the everyday turns into the last day.⁷ The reader is introduced to a commonplace situation—walking a road, or wandering the beach—which then begins to fracture. Under pressure from the “observation” that constitutes the poem, however, two conflicting moments emerge: the first involves some form of a radical apocalypse, in the literal sense of a revelation; the second, a series of covering gestures, by which perception attempts to repress or to compensate for this threatening disclosure. The first moment dis-covers, while the second seeks to recover.

“Canto of Signs Without Wonders”, from the 1986 collection The Loop in Lone Kauri Road, typifies the anxieties that pervade the Continuum poems, as well as the recurrent gestures by which the poems' protagonists seek to cope with these. It begins with a characteristic preoccupation: a concern with vision, how it is produced and who controls it. Here, as in all the poems discussed in this article, I will designate the poem's “persona” as an “observer”: a subject who “makes an observation” both verbally (a speaker) and visually (a spectator). The “making” or construction of this observation tends to be foregrounded; a number of Curnow's poems present the poet in the act of constructing a scene, which emerges as a tenuous and ephemeral perception entirely reliant on the mediating material of representation: words, paint, images. In “A Window Frame”, for example, from 1973, the observer attempts to document and to record precisely the measurements of the paper he writes on, the table he leans on, the window he looks through, the house he occupies, before going on to enumerate every detail of the scene before him (C, pp. 163-4). Later this observing subject finds the landscape embedded in the glass of the window he looks through: “Why is the mud glassed, / with mangroves / bedded in the glass?”; at the same time, the colours of a water-colour by the nineteenth-century romantic landscape painter John Barr Clark Hoyte appear to be tinting his view of the scene outside: “Why are islands / in the gulf stained blue / grained green with / interior lighting / by Hoyte?” (C, pp. 164-5)

A dozen years later, “Canto of Signs Without Wonders” reflects a similar confusion, or interfusion, between words and colours, between the mediating representation and that which it represents:

I look where I'm going, it's the way
                              yesterday's and the day before's clouds
                              depict themselves over and over
an affluently planted skyline:
                              the clouds lay the whitenesses on thick
                              over the bluenesses
is unsigned, there's a kind of an impression
                              of lettering rapidly rubbed out
                              before I can read, pasted over again
                              and rewritten. …

(C, p. 46)

Looking at the sky, the observer sees clouds which are “kind of an impression / of lettering rapidly rubbed out / before I can read”; “highflown language”. Moreover once again the tones of a painting seep into the scene: whitenesses, bluenesses. The imagery produces its own kind of impasto; just as a painter can lay colours on so thickly that the brush marks remain visible, the text renders visible the techniques and materials of its own construction. Later lines repeat the dissolve between an artistic “interior” and external reality: “The painter is freshing / up yesterday's clouds by interior / light, he cleans his brushes, drinks a mug / of instant coffee” (“Canto”; C, p. 48).

Such moments indicate the extent to which Curnow's later poems complicate that aspect of the cultural nationalist poetic which Roger Horrocks has described as “realism”: an expectation that a good poem possesses an “instinct for a reality prior to the poem”, as Curnow's Introduction to The Penguin Anthology of New Zealand Verse described it.⁸ This theory, of the text as a transparent window onto an external and antecedent (local) reality, shatters or melts into something far less clear-cut in the later poems. Horrocks can imagine the Curnow of the 1960 anthology as an art gallery caretaker, who “tells local stories about the paintings as though he were pointing things out to you through a window”;⁹ but in the Continuum poems, language has thickened into opacity, functioning as a stained or fragmented glass.

This inability to separate the artwork from the real thing, the representation from the represented, indicates the persistence of a number of mutually reinforcing anxieties about the stability of the phenomenal world, the reliability of perception and the possible loss of the observer's control over representation. Thus, in “Canto”, the observer walks a tightrope, teetering between climbing and falling, between attempting to grasp the object, and avoiding being swallowed up by the environment:

                                                                                          My eyes
                              walk a tight wire made fast to a cloud,
                              securest anchorage, the weather
man's promise of “settled conditions”.
                              Underfoot, the pavement keeps falling
                              away step by step …

(C, p. 47)

Such moments, at which the environment threatens to drop away or to swallow the subject up, recur frequently in Curnow's later poetry. In this poem, the observer's visual “walk” across the city requires him to step gingerly right on top of the nodal points of this apocalyptic threat, the visible signs of its emergence out of the ground, into the sky:

                                                                                                              my eyes
walk not precisely stepping high across
                              craters and cones, “best parts” of our city:
                              volcanic pustules green a thousand
years.

(C, p. 47)

The poem thus charts a kind of vertigo, in which various dangers and anxieties—falling, blindness, volcanic eruption, viral infection, ageing, depreciation—stand in for a fundamental uncertainty about representation and perception. The observer seeks a means to focus his gaze, in order to keep hold of his perceptions, and thereby to counter these threats; he makes his line of sight “fast to a cloud”, which is the “securest anchorage” his perception can manage. Adrift in a semiotic flux, a free-form self-producing writing, the observer searches for objects to which meanings can be attributed. This enterprise inevitably participates in one manifestation of what post-structuralism calls the “metaphysics of presence”: in this case, the desire for a direct apperception of the real, unmediated by language; the illusion of a perfect and unambiguous relationship between signifier and signified, or representation and referent.¹⁰

The title of the poem recalls Christ's prophecy about his second coming, the parousia (meaning “presence” in the Greek of the New Testament). According to the gospels, the days leading up to the parousia are to be marked by its precise opposite—deception by false prophets, a proliferation of signs that do not signify (the) presence (of God): “False messiahs and false prophets will appear, performing signs and wonders so great as to mislead even the chosen if that were possible” (Matthew 24:24).

In these times, Curnow's title implies, “wonders” may be too much to ask for, but the desperate hyper-production of “signs” goes on regardless.

2. COCKSURE

At one point the poem describes a couple walking “side by side”:

                              his hand fondles the blueness of her
                              jeans, her thready rondure and the stitched
name of Levi Strauss, below the patch
                              seeking. She takes the hand. The sign is
                              what the maker means.

(C, p. 48)

The reference to Levi Strauss, the jeans manufacturer, features as part of the poem's thermatization of advertising:

                              … the name of the famous
                              product, the thing that's everything,
                              the sky being prime space, anyway
the most public part of the universe.
                              Speculative thunder is noises,
                              contused vapours, colours into which
my eyes walk: high-flown language, logo and
                              sign of a brand of which “the authors
                              are in eternity”, at least some
country we never trade with.

(C, pp. 46-7)

A familiar paranoia colours this scene: the not uncommon fear of postmodern culture as an uncontrolled proliferation of “signage”, as a totalitarian advertising regime which inscribes brand names on our bodies, writes them in the sky, projects them on to the moon. More specifically, imported signs from who-knows-where threaten to efface another of the touchstones of Curnow & Co.'s cultural nationalism: the capacity of language to ground itself in local reality.¹¹ Punning between the name of the jeans manufacturer and that of French structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the poem brings together three powerful reactions: a (characteristically modernist) disdain for globalized mass culture, a (Pakeha nationalist) suspicion at the separation between language and the local, and a (modernist and Pakeha) mistrust for the “foreign” post-Saussurean reconceptualization of the relationship between signifier and signified in general.¹²

Because the plethora of sign-language appalls the observer, seeming to offer no certain position, no “securest anchorage” for perception, his gaze keeps trying to find local details, reassuring fragments of the real, upon which to rest. It is to this end that the eye of the observer follows and mimics the action of the man's hand, which “fondles the blueness of her / jeans, her thready rondure and the stitched / name of Levi-Strauss, below the patch / seeking”. This gesture recalls the process of the poem itself (an act of the poet's own “hand”) attempting to dis/cover, to penetrate an enveloping layer of signs for some physical reality, some corporeal substance “below the patch”.

Furthermore, such gestures identify the characteristic voice and eye of the Curnow poem as masculine, insofar as they participate in a phallicized economy of desire, which at every turn associates its phenomenological anxieties with a gaze that aims to strip, to grasp, or to penetrate the objects and environments encountered.

Other poems from Continuum identify the gender of their protagonists with even less ambiguity. The speaker in “Things To Do With Moonlight”, for example, in the face of profound epistemological doubts, parodically seeks reassurance of his privileged position within a phallic economy by referring to his genitals. Leaving bed in the middle of the night to urinate, he imagines a visit from Descartes. Amidst the resulting philosophical ruminations, the gesture that anchors this observer's perceptions proves to be a peculiarly masculine one, a posture that enables him to stake out a claim on the real, to stand his ground (mock-)heroically:

something stuck its ground like a man
in a posture of pissing out of doors,
thankfully by moonlight. …

(C, p. 138)

Such bravado contrasts markedly with the precarious phenomenological stance of the observer at the start of “Canto”. “Things To Do With Moonlight” demonstrates, however, in another moment typical of Curnow, that the attainment of such self-assurance depends upon a paradoxical self-sacrifice, which offers (up) the corporeality absent from the Cartesian formula and thereby completes it:

Cogito. I borrowed his knife
to cut my throat and thoughtfully
saw the blood soaking the singular
gold humid night.

Blood, like urine, the distillation of the corporeal reality of the man, meets and assimilates into the environment:

Ergo sum. Having relieved myself
of that small matter on my mind,
I leaned lighter on my pillow
for a gibbous moon, a philosopher's
finger on his cock,
and a comfortable grumble of the sea.

(C, pp. 138-9)

The comfort gained from such nocturnal emissions, the return to sleep from an anxious bladder-induced pressure, lies in those reassuring touches of physical reality. “A philosopher's / finger on his cock” enables the observer to relieve himself of his existential frustrations; it brings him back to earth, makes him, we could say, cocksure of himself.

Returning to “Canto of Signs Without Wonders”, we find that the hand of the observed, seeking below the patch, has also found what it was after: the woman's flesh, combined with another kind of phallic reassurance, the guarantee of a “name brand”: “the stitched / name of Levi Strauss … She takes the hand. The sign is / what the maker means” (C, p. 48). What the hand seeks is a metaphysical guarantee of presence, of immediate referentiality and authorial intention: the reassurance that the sign offers to both its author and its reader. The signature on the woman's body, and her own signature, her hand, her gesture of taking the man's hand, all confirm the propriety of his exploratory gesture.

Reassurance, however—granted by what another “road” poem calls “A Touch of the Hand”, “a welcome / touch of sincerity” (C, p. 59)—does not always endure in the Continuum poems. The most consistent pattern remains that of oscillation between moments of phenomenological or epistemological doubt, and the recurrent gestures by which the subject seeks to compensate for these. Earlier on in “Canto” for example, the eye looked in vain for similar reassurance of its right to be there, its proprietorship over the scene. Anxiously seeking confirming signatures, “hands”, underwritings, the subject tries to make out the painted-over signatures in the clouds, “a kind of impression / of lettering rapidly rubbed out / before I can read, pasted over again / and rewritten (C, p. 46). But whoever is painting this picture—and repainting it, as a palimpsest—refuses to sign their name, to show their hand, to offer the guarantee of authenticity offered by the name of Levi Strauss. If “the sign is / what the maker means”, an uncertainty remains over the identity of that maker.

This operation recalls Freud's “mystic writing pad”, which he uses as an analogy for the process of perception and memory.¹³ In Freud's schema, although the “impression”, once made on the unconscious, cannot be erased, it is endlessly overwritten, and thus disappears from that part of the mind concerned with conscious perception. As Jacques Derrida has pointed out, this model of the imprinting of the “memory trace” constitutes a phenomenology of non-presence: “Writing supplements perception before perception even appears to itself [is conscious of itself]”.¹⁴ In the same way, in Curnow's poem, the scene no sooner inscribes itself for the observer's gaze, than it rewrites and thereby erases itself.

Memory and perception are therefore always already implicated in the loss of presence, its replacement by representation, by the trace, by writing. The observer cannot be considered either the proprietor or the author of her/his “own” perceptions. Poetry, which begins as the attempt to fix the endless flux of phenomena, only participates in this death-by-writing of presence; it offers only

high-flown language, logo and
                              sign of a brand of which “the authors
                              are in eternity”, at least some
country we never trade with.

(C, pp. 46-7)

The phrase “the authors / are in eternity” is itself a quote from Blake, describing his own process of composition as dictation, automatic writing.¹⁵

Overwritings and underwritings return to undermine the poem's later claims to certainty. Even in advertising, the meaning of the sign may be overdetermined; it cannot always be simply “what the maker means”; nor can it always signify or single out its maker. Similarly, poetry refuses to underwrite delivery of either authorial presence or intended meaning. Instead it participates in a form of ghost writing, produced not by any singular and identifiable author but by language itself, by cultures, by literary archives. “The impasto / is unsigned” because no one painted it except the colours themselves. In the same way that the colours paint the clouds, language itself writes not only the poem but also the speaker and the other characters within it; “these people, yesterday's and the day / before's people”, are rewritten day by day, moment by moment, by signs, colours, language, perception:

                                                                                Much more than that
calls for an impossible presence
                              of mind, I look where I'm going and
                              that way they depict themselves, yes
that's all for today, my eyes wired
                              to a system there, feet falling in turn
                              on the pavement which is falling away,
unsigned whitenesses, unsigned bluenesses.

(C, p. 48)

What the observing subject finds, at the end of “Canto”, is not just the lack of any ability to hang onto his perceptions, but even the discontinuity of his own identity, which “calls for an impossible presence / of mind”. He finishes up “wired to a system”, tied into or hanging onto a visual, perceptual and linguistic order that depicts him, speaks him, constructs him as its by-product.

3. DECOMPOSITION

When not walking down an Auckland street or pissing out of doors, Curnow's observer spends a lot of time at the beach, fishing, or picking mussels, but at the same time, angling for perceptions, hooking memories, bagging images. But the beach is also, for Curnow, the place at which the observer and his observations—his “angles” or perspectives on the scene—face recurrent threats: drowning, dissolution, decomposition.

As the “primal scene” of colonial encounter between migrant and inhabitant, the beach often figures in New Zealand writing as a liminal site, a privileged location at which to define the origins and limits of the imaginary geography of both settler and indigenous cultural landscapes; Curnow's earlier work often returned to the coast as the site of colonial discovery.¹⁶ These more recent poems, however, tend to occupy a coastline devoid of such historical specificity. In this sense, these poems refuse to engage with the past and present contexts of cross-cultural conflict in Aotearoa/New Zealand.¹⁷

At least one of those challenges to the cultural nationalist project identified at the start of this study—that deriving from an emergent body of Maori writing—thus remains unanswered. So too does that other major challenge posed by feminism, as my reading of gender representation in these poems aims to demonstrate. It would seem, then, that insofar as these poems enter into the post-cultural nationalist debates, they continue to stake out a position on the high ground of poetics and phenomenology, engaging with the aesthetic and theoretical manifestations of postmodernism, but avoiding any direct confrontation with a postcolonial, bicultural or feminist politics.¹⁸

With the heuristic ahistoricism characteristic of a modernist—which however in this context resembles more closely the globalization commonly attributed to postmodernity—Curnow writes his beach outside of both history and local geography: Karekare turns into fifteenth-century Florence in “In the Duomo”, for example (C, pp. 120-35). A universalized phenomenological uncertainty characterizes the figure fishing from this shoreline, who thus becomes an emblem of the poet/observer employing the line of sight (and the lines on the page) to catch perceptions and hook them into the mind of the reader:

Is there a reef with an angler on it
whose rod makes a twitching U?
Has he landed his fat silver-gilt
dorado, smack! on a pan of the mind?

(C, p. 32)

These lines cook up a simple recipe for presence to satisfy the reader's appetite for the “real thing”: the images and perceptions come directly, without any messy mediating art, just like a fish being hooked straight from the sea into the pan, with no scaling or filleting required. But the interrogative mode cannot be avoided—“Is there … ?”, “Has he … ?”—and the rest of this poem seems to answer “no” to these questions, with its allusions to Plato, its scepticism about the relationship between mind, perception and language, and even its title: “Do Not Touch the Exhibits”.

In “Canst Thou Draw Out Leviathan With An Hook?”, similarly, the efficacy of “the lure, the line” remains in doubt, and the figure of the angler occupies an even more dangerous position:

                                                            Swimming closer
the kahawai drew down the steely cloud
and the lure, the line you cast
from cathedral rock, the thoughtful death
whispering to the thoughtless,
Will you be caught?

(C, p. 116)

The second person pronouns keep an ambiguity in play: who is to be caught? The fish (representation, or piece of the real?) or the fisher? As in so many of these poems, perceptions and memories return upon and overwhelm the subject, so that the angler in “Leviathan” ends up dangling from a helicopter, “fished from the rip” (C, p. 116).

A later poem, “Moules à la Marinière” (1986), revisits and develops these preoccupations with fishing and drowning. Instead of dipping into the sea with a fishing rod, or diving into it, the observer in this poem has the tide stripped away for his apparent benefit.¹⁹ The text thereby exemplifies, in a naturalized form, the gesture of apocalypse or revelation:

It took the sun six hours to peel
the sea from the gut, black underwater
cries out grey underfoot, “cleft for me”
to look down. The dull thought of drowning
ebbed with the flood, this orifice entices
wide open, gargling, warm at the lips.
Not all the way down. The deepest secretions
don't drain, still you can “feel”
what's below the bottom of the tide,
knowing more than's good for you.

(C, p. 29)

After six hours—time enough for a major surgical operation, or a thorough autopsy—the “gut” of the seabed is revealed. Unexpectedly, the uncovered seabed offers no surprises, nothing new; on the contrary, it appears uncannily familiar to “you”, the observer:

muddy cysts, mucus, you own interior
furnishings, glands, genitalia
of the slit reef spilling seawards:
walls all scabby pink, sprayed-on starfish,
gluey limpets, linings of the gut which
swallowing a wave throws up an ocean,
it smells of your nature, sickishly

(C, p. 30)

The observer feels a certain disgust, explicitly associated with the familiarity of the scene: it smells, looks and feels identical to the observer's own “guts”; it has digestive, endocrine and genital organs, just as “you” do; it is subject to the same motions and nauseas.

More remains below, more than the observer wants to be exposed to, “more than's good for you”. The poem struggles to encounter whatever lies beneath the underneath: “The deepest secretions”, “what's below the bottom”. Again, the text personifies, anthropomorphizes—or rather, it gynomorphizes—the “slit reef”, “‘cleft for me’”: “this orifice entices / wide open, gargling, warm at the lips”. In so far as the seabed takes on the form of a vast female body, the gesture of stripping away and attempting to penetrate the “real”—with vision, or with touch—again rehearses a masculinist economy of desire.²⁰ For Curnow's feminist critics, such a manoeuvre—representation of the threat to the subject implied by a decomposing environment as engulfment by a feminized environment—would simply repeat the masculinism of mid-century cultural nationalism, which subjected both the poetry of women, and nature, represented as a feminized body, to a violent repression.²¹

In poetry as in dreams, however the repression barrier proves thoroughly permeable: soon enough, therefore, the observer himself, no longer the agent of a penetrating discovery but instead subject to an all-covering engulfment, suffers decomposition and an accompanying feminization. Anticipating the drowning that occurs later on, the poem's syntax dissolves both sexual difference and the phenomenological distance between the subject and his environment. Swallowed up by the sea, and swallowing it, the observer dissolves into the scene, “down in the gut and the blind gut / in the wet of your eye” (C, p. 30). He becomes part of its body, and its organs enter him in turn:

muddy cysts, mucus, you own interior
furnishings, glands, genitalia
of the slit reef spilling seawards …

The externality of the subject to its environment, and the mastery that this externality guarantees, is inverted. The “object” envelops—turns into, and turns inside out—the “subject”. And the dissolution of sexual difference parallels this process: the speaker's external equipment is replaced by “interior furnishings”, becoming in these lines syntactically indistinguishable from the “genitalia / of the slit reef spilling seawards”.

Dissolution continues; at the end of the poem the observer drowns.

                                                            Picked off alive and
kicking in the rip, did you “feel”
unaccountably unsurprised by
how natural it all is, in the end,
no problem, the arms and legs have only
to exercise the right allowed by law,
last words, the succinctest body-language.
You're innocent. The sea does the rest.

(C, pp. 30-31)

Unsurprisingly and unproblematically, innocent of agency, the drowning subject surrenders to the law of the sea, which dictates all its gestures. The body's own “language” is spoken for it by the current, like that other drowned fisherman in “Leviathan”:

                                                                                                                        a man
willing to abstain from his next breath,
who will not be found fishing from these rocks
but likeliest fished from the rip,
white belly to wetsuit black, swung copular
under the winching chopper's bubble,
too late for vomiting salt but fluent at last
in the languages of the sea.

(C, pp. 116-17)

The body “swung copular” from the helicopter, recalls the grammatical function of the copula: the connecting link in a sentence. The fisherman has drowned not in water but in language—and he ends up, like the observer in “Canto”, still wired to a system that reels him in. The fisherman/poet/observer, seeking to cast his line and catch perceptions, finds himself in turn held fast:

the barb's behind the root
of the tongue and the tight
fibre is tearing the mouth
and you're caught, mate, you're caught. …

(C, p. 117)

Hooked through the tongue, this angler recalls the subject tied via language into the symbolic order, “eyes wired / to a system”, in “Canto” (C, p. 48).

It is also no surprise therefore when, fishing around in the earlier stanzas of “Moules à la Marinière”, we find that “what's below the bottom of the tide”, the deepest level of all, comprises a collection of

                                                                                                    … seabed
rock wetted perpetually with spectral
colours, quotations lifted from
life into a stony text, epigraphies
remembering shot-silk offals, trapped
green weed, petrifying mauves. …

(C, p. 29)

Quotations, epigraphies, text—“what's below the bottom” appears to be nothing other than writing itself.

At those moments, then, when Curnow's poems work hardest to uncover nature, to discover the “reality” of their objects and environments, what emerges appears to be a decomposing body: the drowned angler, the rotting reef, or the “billion bodies burning” underground in “Any Time Now” (C, pp. 223-4). But the corpse we are asked to identify is never the one we expected or were promised; it's not the “real” at all. Instead, it's a substitute body: the corpus of the text, the “memory trace”, the rotting remainder/reminder of a writing that has replaced presence, replaced the “real”. These disgusting “remains” at the bottom of the sea in “Moules à la Marinière”, are “quotations lifted from / life into a stony text”. Poetry thus descends to—or aspires to?—a kind of Frankensteinian surgery: digging up decomposing body parts, stitching together the offal of language, with which the subject is inextricably mixed up, into a monstrous and putrid effigy of the “real”.

Poetry also, as suggested earlier, takes place as a kind of haunting, a ghost-writing, as shown by the uncanny familiarity of some of these phrases. The “spectral colours” and “epigraphies” in “Moules” are not so much “quotations lifted from / life” as they are words lifted from an earlier poem, “A Balanced Bait in Handy Pellet Form”; there, the gardener observes that “Dead snails / have left shells, trails, baffled epigraphy / and excreta of such slow short lives”, and that

mown grass diversely parched is a skinned “soul”
which the sun sloughed; similarly the spectral purples
perplexing the drab of the dugover topsoil
explain themselves too well to be understood.

(C, pp. 118-19, emphases added)

For Curnow, these remnants of garbage and compost that keep turning up represent the recalcitrance of the “real”: it cannot be summoned by language; nor can it be dismissed at will. Instead, the “real” endlessly represents itself as a challenge to representation. Unexpected colour—purple, the colour of corruption—emerges when the soil has been dug over; this dis/covery remains “perplexing” and “spectral”. Like the “skinned soul” of the mown grass, the colours haunt and bewilder the eye and the comprehension of the viewer; they “explain themselves too well to be understood”. The gardener/poet's activity raises ghosts; it exhumes the decomposing remains of language's failure to capture the “real”.

This corruption of perception into abject shreds of rotten language suggests, at bottom, the same anxiety about a literary and cultural move from an ageing modernism to a postmodern figured as decay. In this context, local reality—the cultural nationalist chimera—returns as nothing other than a constitutive lack in the symbolic order, the breakdown of perception and representation into an always already dug-over linguistic compost.

Faced with the decomposition of both the symbolic order and the subjectivity provided by it, the observer reacts in poem after poem with acute unease. For example, in “Dialogue with Four Rocks”, the poem projects a kind of somatic dis-ease onto the rocky outcrops, describing one as a “face” covered with cracks, spots, creases and a “weeping lesion” (C, pp. 93-4). Another of these “Four Rocks”, like the seabed in “Moules à la Marinière”, seems to have emerged, disconcertingly, out of a nature that displays—even in its most chaotic state, the storm—the attributes of a semiotic system:

                                                                                                    a formation
out of the gut of the gales the noise
the haze the vocabulary of
water and wind.

(C, p. 91)

Apparently a piece of the “real”, the rock threatens to dissolve into the putrefying corpus of the symbolic. Moreover, just as the seabed in “Moules” dissolved the subject-object split, this rock menacingly questions the subjectivity of the onlooker: “the thing ‘demands an / ‘answer’ / I know you do you know me?” (C, p. 91).²²

Such moments cannot be “described”, or simply “represented” by the text. Rather, the poem emerges as a panicked reaction to the subject's approach to the “real”. Like an oath, the poem represents not a mastery of the “real”, but a contingent by-product of the symbolic's traumatic failure to incorporate it.²³ In “Any Time Now”, the last poem printed in Continuum (and the first published, chronologically), once again a discarded remainder figures as both a symptom of the failure of language to capture the real, and an attempt to concentrate both perception and representation, and thus compensate for the radical apocalypse with which the poem opens:

                                        … the ground broke
disclosing a billion bodes burning
under a thin smoke.
Was it then that I saw in my walk
an eggshell, a capsicum stalk?
Such details are always so terribly
(if that is the word) distinct
as grit under the eyelid, like today
when the ground blinked,
disclosing what never should be seen.

(C, p. 223)

Once again, the observer fails and is swallowed up in the attempt: “the ground closed over the sky / hollow as the cloud was high” (C, p. 224).

For Curnow, it would seem, poetry emerges out of this “disclosing” (the word occurs twice in the lines above): a moment of dis-covery or exposure simultaneous, and in tension with, its own form of repression, of re-covery,

                                                                                          little
as you like to think nothing's either
covered or uncovered for ever.

(“Dialogue With Four Rocks”, C, p. 91)

The poems may appear to describe an act of simple disclosure, an unmediated encounter with “reality”; or they may claim to show precisely what goes on “behind the scenes”, to show the poet at work on the poem, the observer constructing a perception. Invariably, however, these scenes themselves constitute another performance, another cover. Ultimately, the poems portray only this process of dis/covery itself, the simultaneous discovering and covering, the ebb and flow of language and perception, that constitutes the subject's relationship with the environment. In so doing they approach not reality “itself”, but something that can only be called the “real” in the Lacanian sense: the symptom of a failure in signification, the trauma in the linguistic and cultural web, the momentary dissolution of the subject-object split, the gesture of disgust or irritation provoked by a fundamental failure or lack in the symbolic order.²⁴

4. POSTSCRIPT

Something remains that can't be tidied up: afterwords and revisions. Allen Curnow's most recent poetry rewrites Continuum, copies it again.

“Another Week-end at the Beach” (1993), as the title implies, revisits a familiar scene once more, and performs the same gestures. But by now, the habit of conscious display has become self-parodic; all Curnow's characteristic locations and gestures—the foregrounding of the “sign”, the ground dropping away, the scene masked and gazing back at the observer, the gendering of difference via anatomical reference—are repeated as a kind of mannerism:

Turn left at the sign. Lone Kauri Road
winds down to the coast. That's a drop
of about five hundred feet. Look out
for the waterfall, the wooden bridge,
the mown grass, the pohutukawa glade.
The western horizon will have slid
behind the mask of an eye-levelled
next eyeballing wave. Park here. Proceed
on foot. The spot has barbecues with
MALE and FEMALE dunnies in a figtree
thicket, wrong hemisphere, implausibly fruiting.(25)

Concerns about semiotic drift return as well, in the guise of “broken waves”:

                                                                      … the way I've
come and come, how many thousand times
to no other conclusion, the back
of a broken wave, and found no word
or forgot or omitted to write
it down, Ah, quelle écriture de la
différance! l'orthographe derridienne
for every thing's everything.

By means of the throwaway reference to Derrida's spelling of “différance”, an entire post-structuralist theoretical complex can be casually summoned, and summarily dismissed, as a kind of semiotic free-for-all in which “every thing's everything”²⁶ The nonchalance of the performance, as usual, aims to mislead: as Curnow might guess, the anxieties about language and perception that characterize this poem and the others discussed above remain highly susceptible to Derridean and post-structuralist analysis.

In the remainder of the poem, more familiar remains—submarine colours and corpses, decomposing wastes—present themselves to the observer:

                                                                                Then why
not phytoplankton, the algoid bloom
any less than those offshore purples, this
beached medusa, polythene waste, bubbled
sea-froth, tincture of a present spume
spattered up the sands? Mind where you pick
your mussels and kina, these tides may
secrete indigenous toxins. Deadly
to the text. Shall I copy it again?

These “indigenous toxins” that are “Deadly / to the text” sound as if they might represent the return of Curnow's habitual emphasis on “local reality”, and its destructive effect on foreign (Continental) theories of “the text”: those of Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Lacan, and so on. But we've seen this collection of wastes and residues before: the purples, the bubbles, the sea-froth, the mussels, all wash into the text not from “local reality” but from other Curnow poems. Once again, then, these toxic secretions from the tide recall those recurrent moments in Continuum when the “real” will not emerge as anything other than a disgusting linguistic surplus, a decomposition of the text, a threat to the symbolic; these recurrences demand in turn the repeated compensatory rehearsal of the poet's postures and gestures. Recognizing this, the poem addresses its final ironic question to the reader—“Shall I copy it again?”.

Shall the reader answer? Not this one. I prefer to leave Curnow here, caught in his compulsion to repeat and engage in pastiche; his ironically, peculiarly, postmodern condition.

Notes

1. Some of the other writers most usually associated with mid-century Pakeha cultural nationalism are Frank Sargeson, A. R. D. Fairburn, R. A. K. Mason and Denis Glover.

2. Allen Curnow, ed., A Book of New Zealand Verse, 1923-50, Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1945; The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960.

3. Significantly, Curnow's most recent substantial piece of published criticism constitutes a sustained attack on the “open form” poetic of Charles Olson: see Allen Curnow, “Olson as Oracle: ‘Projective Verse’ Thirty Years On”, Look Back Harder: Critical Writings, 1935-1984, ed. Peter Simpson, Auckland, Auckland UP, 1987, pp. 305-18.

4. The best examples are Roger Horrocks, “The Invention of New Zealand”, And/1 (1983), 9-30; and Leigh Davis, “Solo Curnow”, And/3 (1984), 49-62.

5. See Michele Leggott, “Opening the Archive: Hyde, Duggan, and the Persistence of Record”, Opening the Book: New Essays on New Zealand Writing, ed. Mark Williams and Michele Leggott, Auckland: Auckland UP, 1995, pp. 162-87.

6. C. K. Stead's 1989 assessment of Curnow's 1970s and 1980s poetry as “unsurpassed by the work of any other poet at present writing in English” exemplifies the institutional orthodoxy of the time: C. K. Stead, “Second Wind: Allen Curnow's Continuum”, Answering to the Language: Essays on Modern Writers, Auckland: Auckland UP, 1989, p. 100.

7. Allen Curnow, Continuum: New and Later Poems, 1972-1988, Auckland: Auckland UP, 1988. Subsequent references cite C and page numbers.

8. Curnow, Penguin Book, p. 62; cited in Horrocks, pp. 12-13.

9. Horrocks, p. 9.

10. Jacques Derrida describes, for example, the “anchoring” of any given structure by a term which is beyond the signifying play of the system and thus guarantees presence (“essence, existence, substance, subject”) in his essay “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge, London: Longman, 1988, pp. 108-23.

11. “Reality must be local and special at the point where we pick up the traces: as manifold as the signs we follow and the routes we take. Whatever is true vision belongs, here, uniquely to the islands of New Zealand. The best of our verse is marked or moulded everywhere by peculiar pressures … arising from the isolation of the country, its physical character, and its history” (Curnow, Penguin Book, p. 17).

12. Roger Horrocks has discussed the powerful anti-(foreign)-theory tendency of New Zealand Pakeha culture in his article “No Theory Permitted on These Premises”, And/2 (1984), 119-37. He cites Curnow's exhortation to local writers to free themselves from “imperial theorising” and to “seek reality” (Curnow, Book of New Zealand Verse, p. 21; cited in Horrocks, “No Theory”, p. 119).

13. Sigmund Freud, “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’”, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol XIX, ed. and trans. James Strachey, London: Hogarth, 1961, pp. 227-32.

14. Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, pp. 196-231, p. 224.

15. In a letter to Thomas Butts of 25 April 1803, Blake speaks of a “long Poem … on one grand Theme … written … from immediate Dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without Premeditation and even against my Will”. A fortnight later, another letter refers to “a Sublime Allegory, which is now perfectly completed into a Grand Poem. I may praise it, since I dare not pretend to be any other than the Secretary; the Authors are in Eternity. I consider it the Grandest Poem that the World Contains”. Keynes considers that both comments refer to Blake's Milton: see Geoffrey Keynes, ed., The Letters of William Blake, 3rd. edn., Oxford: OUP, 1980, pp. 55-8.

16. Among the better-known examples are poems from the 1940s such as “The Unhistoric Story”; “Sailing or Drowning” and “Polynesia”; “Landfall in Unknown Seas” (Allen Curnow, Collected Poems, 1933-73, Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1973, pp. 79-80, 122-3, 136-9); and the 1947 “verse tragedy” The Axe (collected in Allen Curnow, Four Plays, Wellington: A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1972).

17. The Continuum poems do make frequent use of Maori mythological narratives; for example the demigod Maui's fishing up of (the North Island of) Aotearoa is repeatedly echoed in the poem “Canst Thou Draw Out Leviathan With An Hook?” (C, pp. 115-7); while the forest-god Tane's rebellion against the sky-father and earth-mother constitutes one subtext of “A Four Letter Word” (C, pp. 214-16). However, these references are subsumed within an encompassing Westernized philosophical enquiry—a manoeuvre quite characteristic of modernism.

18. It might be suggested that a poem such as “A Fellow Being” offers one example of a more historicized representation of Curnow's favourite location, Karekare Beach on Auckland's West Coast (C, pp. 66-84). The poem narrates the local history of an American doctor of dentistry, F. J. Rayner, who during the Depression made a fortune logging native Kauri in the region. By focusing on a local instance of American neo-colonialism, however, this poem reiterates the more wide-ranging avoidance of an engagement with questions of cultural and post-colonial engagement between Maori and Pakeha.

19. The notion of the seabed laying itself bare to the gaze of the observer recurs in other poems, including “You Will Know When You Get There” (1982; C, pp. 110-11) and “A Dead Lamb” (1972; C, p. 206). The illusion of such “an arrangement with the tide” (C, p. 111) suggests a certain over-confidence in the observer's attitude to his environment, which each of these poems in turn will correct.

20. As with most of the gestures that characterize his “recent” poetry, Curnow anticipates this stripping back of the reef forty years earlier, in strikingly similar terms, in the poem “At Dead Low Water” (1949): “Salt rocky chink, nude silted cleft give off / Birth smell, death smell. Mute ages tread the womb” (Curnow, Collected Poems, p. 157).

21. Michele Leggott, for example, describes how Pakeha cultural nationalism represented the land as “an alien, hostile presence, female and other, to be ‘broken in’” (Leggott, “Opening the Archive”, p. 274). Leggott also argues that the dominance of “a cultural nationalism inimical to previous competencies” forced women poets such as Robin Hyde, for example, to deploy an enigmatic double-coding in which female sexuality and corporeality could be concealed within ambiguous “metamorphics” (p. 266; pp. 270-1).

22. My argument here follows Alex Calder's discussion of the rock as an instance of the Kristevan “abject”, the disgusting remnant of that which is foreclosed by the subject in order to separate self from not-self, and thereby to enter the symbolic: the proximity of the abject, like that of the Lacanian real (see note 21 below), causes a crisis in the symbolic constitution of the subject. See Alex Calder, “Sacrifice and Signification in the Poetry of Allen Curnow”, Opening the Book, pp. 83-104; Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia UP, 1982, pp. 1-89.

23. Curnow at times envisages the act of swearing as the origin of language, most obviously in “A Four Letter Word”, where the name for the tree/god Tane emerges because there was

                                                                          time only
    short of an unspeakable supervention
    to blurt him, Logos begotten of log,
    the disyllable, as he came

    (C, p. 215).

    For further discussion of this point see Alex Calder (“Sacrifice and Signification”, pp. 88-97), and Terry Sturm, “Fictions and Realities: An Approach to Allen Curnow's Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects”, World Literature Written in English 14 (1976), 44-5.

24. Slavoj Zizek describes the Lacanian notion of the “Real” as: “an object which is just an embodiment of the lack in the Other, in the symbolic order. The sublime object is an object which cannot be approached too closely: if we get too near it, it loses its sublime features and becomes an ordinary vulgar object. … In a first approach, the Real is a shock of a contingent encounter which disrupts the automatic circulation of the symbolic mechanism; a grain of sand preventing its smooth functioning; a traumatic encounter which ruins the balance of the symbolic universe of the subject” (Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989, pp. 170-71).

25. First published in Sport 10, May 1993, pp. 3-4. This magazine tends to be promoted as a vehicle for New Zealand's newest generation of writers, which only multiplies the irony inherent in the poem's very self-conscious rehearsal of the most familiar features of the country's most venerable living poet. Like Horrocks's art gallery caretaker, Curnow here tells us stories, pointing out the highlights, this time, of his own career. The most familiar site referred to in the poem is Lone Kauri Road itself, and its steep descent down to Karekare beach on Auckland's West Coast, with waterfall and bridge at the bottom; also easily recognizable to the Curnow reader is the characterization of this location as a scene that backs away from, and returns the gaze of, the viewer: see the two “Lone Kauri Road” poems (1972; C, pp. 189-90, 222) and “The Loop in Lone Kauri Road” (1986; C, pp. 52-3). The mention of “mown grass” recalls “A Balanced Bait in Handy Pellet Form” (1979; C, p. 118); the pohutukawa glade recalls the very famous tree in “Spectacular Blossom” (1957; Collected Poems, 193).

26. The nature and extent of Curnow's engagement with Derrida can be gauged from a reading of the latter's “Différance”, Writing and Difference, pp. 129-60.

I am very grateful to John Newton, whose ideas about New Zealand poetry and Pakeha cultural nationalism have been crucial in providing a context for my reading of Curnow; and to Alex Calder, for his invaluable comments on earlier versions of this paper.