Contents:
- Spin 29 (Summer 1997): Editorial
- Spin 32 (November 1998): Editorial
- Spin 35 (November 1999): Editorial
- Spin 38 (November 2000): Editorial
- Curriculum Vitae (2000)
- Sign-off: Aesthetics (2001)
- Peninsula Days: A Memoir of Joanna Paul (2005)
- A Letter from Buller (2006)
One of the pleasures of reading literature from the early C19th is that it has so much to say about food. They ate, then, enormous meals, so huge they're best encountered only in fiction. I have read that this indulgence was a result of Napoleon's conquests, which broke down borders, mixed cultures, and hastened commerce, hut this seems too easy an explanation.
A small example of such a banquet is in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, in chapter one:
He enters, corks go pop, they pour champagne.
Before them, a roast beef ensanguine;
Truffles, that extravagance of youth
And finest flower of the French cuisine;
Strasbourg's immortal dish, foie gras en croute;
Soft, ripening Limberger cheese
And golden pineapples from overseas.
Cheese, dessert, and mains are all together, as was the custom. Diners sat around the loaded table as soldiers camp about a besieged city, and ready to attack the lot.
It's an image that does, I hope, picture your thoughts as you behold this issue of 'Spin'. Everything is here before you, every course and dish to be consumed. Say grace, and hoe in.
Spin 29 (1997): 1.
There often arises, with my colleagues, a discussion as to what is good and what is bad poetry. Some are doctrinaire about the distinction, and would dismiss all judged to be bad. The good is made so rare it becomes unreachable by all but the elite.
Elitism has always been with the arts; it is why many associate with the arts, and why the able artist is often given some of the attributes of the aristocrat.
History shows elitism to be a weakening force to society and to any creative discipline or tradition. For this reason there is every now and then a peasant pope, a senior officer promoted from the ranks, and a poet raised out of illiteracy. Such recruits bring vigour and wisdom.
Defensiveness about poetry creates preciosity and little else. The categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are much less distinct in art (as in life) then we, for our own comfort, might care to think. Note how the standards change from one generation to another, and how influenced by fashion.
An open appreciation of what is judged to be good rather than a puritanical dismissal of what is judged to be bad, is much more likely to encourage a vigorous poetic tradition in any society.
Spin 32 (1998): 3.
Of the many submissions of poetry to this issue, only a very few were not acceptable, and therefore I have tried to be inclusive and to offer space, though this does mean that most poets have the use of only one page.
Surprisingly, a few of the unacceptable submissions were from overseas, and their authors boasted of many prizes. It seems that there are still journals that offer room to Scottish heroes, Celtic myths, and American mountain scenery.
A few ask what they can do to improve their poetry, a question it may not be wise to answer; I often sense that an answer will not be attended to, or will cause anger. A clue I first seek is evidence that the questioner reads poetry.
For someone who writes to not read the writing of others, brings a liability to become intoxicated by one's own words, inflated by one's own breath; it also indicates a sort of verbal self-love, that the poet writes not because he loves poetry, but because she loves her own.The Muse is most inclined to give her graces to those who earn it. If you would write better poetry, first study the work of those who write it.
Spin 35 (1999): 3.
Recently I was able to purchase a volume of T. S. Eliot's works, and discovered within it a collection of his 'dirty' poems; I had not known he had written any. All were composed in his poetic youth, and were sent for publication to Wyndham Lewis, editor of 'Blast', a radical and short-lived English literary journal. Lewis returned the works, advising he would publish nothing containing words that ended with 'unt' 'uck' or 'ugger'.
These days the editor would not be so censorious in this respect. Nevertheless, I think we have all experienced editors who are censorious in other respects, and it has always been so. Byron wrote "English Bards and Scots Reviewers" after cruel treatment from 'The Edinburgh Review', and others of the romantic poets were able to publish few if any of their poems in their lifetimes. (Some, as we know, had short lifetimes.)
It is well for the writer to be intelligent in submitting work, and for the editor to be fair in receiving it; the latter, for example, has no right to alter a poem without the author's consent (though the temptation to do otherwise is sometimes very great). Material must be accepted and rejected for good reason, closure dates and confidentiality be kept - the latter is important, because a perceptive editor will gain from the written work much knowledge of its author.
And the writer should respect the nature of the journal. It is obvious that though work by established poets is much appreciated, 'Spin' exists to encourage new ones. 'Landfall' most particularly serves the higher literary echelon; 'Sport' bas some interest in new writers, and 'Poetry NZ' holds a very useful median line. Naturally enough, the more senior a literary journal the more it must be concerned with its image; most have a particular job to do.
Power comes into this too to some degree, and editors tend to like it. We are often titled 'gate-keepers', and for good reason, as we keep some out and others in. This is often done by calling some poetry 'bad' and other 'good', which standards might sometimes seem puzzling to the writer. For example, one editor will reject rhyming poetry as bad, while another will accept it. The truth is that editors, like poets, are likely to be submerged in the literary values of the times in which they began their work, and are as unlikely to change. Perhaps the best response is this - know your journal, know your editor; we can be comforted by the thought that - in spite of all human failing, poetry of the better variety does get published and does live.
Leicester Kyle
Spin 38 (2000): 3.
b.1937 in Ch.Ch.
First took up botany as a career, and worked in the Ch.Ch. Botanical Gardens, then turned to theology, and was ordained an anglican priest at the age of 26. Remained in this work until retirement at the age of 60, on the illness of my wife. I have worked as a parish priest in many parts of N.Z. and in England, and have travelled widely.
During my life I have written a great deal, though always against the demands of my occupation. I have had articles, short stories, and poems published in many places, including London Magazine, the N.Z. Listener, the Ch.Ch. Press, Poetry NZ., Sport, Takahe, Printout, Pander, and the journal of experimental poetry—A Brief Description of the Whole World. My poetry is increasingly appearing in anthologies,such as the Auckland Poetry Live ‘Tongue in Your Ear’ and the recent school anthologies published from Waikato university.
After the death of my wife I moved from Auckland to Buller, the better to continue my interest in botany, and to write. I have published a number of books privately, excerpts from which have regularly appeared in “A Brief Description of the Whole World’. These include:
- Colenso — Poetry written upon the disputed botanical discoveries of William Colenso, the missionary/botanist/explorer/printer.
- A Voyge To N.Z. — Poetry made from the diary of William Sowry, a colonist.
- Options — Poetry based upon various Christian spiritualities.
- The Galapagos Tracts — Poetry based upon material in the first ten issues of ‘The Transactions of the N.Z. Institute’ (1867-1876).
- Heteropholis — A poetic fantasy — the world seen through the eyes of a gecko captive in a Remuera apartment.
My first commercial publication has been ‘A Safe House For a Man’, published in July 2000 by Polygraphia. Until now my main purpose has been to assemble a good body of writing. In general I write mostly about the meeting of the individual with a formalised code or text, generally scientific, and write from a long experience. ‘Five Anzac Liturgies’ is about the community fulfilling a formalised ritual of expectation.
At present I am working on ‘The People’, poetry made from a sociological analysis of a West Coast Wedding. I am much involved in my community and am engaged in some conservation issues.
I am much embarrassed by my own aesthetic, and wonder if it’s morally defensible. It has been with me from infancy, so taken for granted that until most recently I had assumed it was an invariable part of the human condition; the discovery that this is not so is a late one, and leads me to doubt that humour can be a permissible aesthetic, however subtle or profound. The title of the book that is beside me at this moment—‘The Divine Comedy. 1.Hell’ – leads me to a labyrinth of reflection, without doubt that this is how it is, the ‘it’ being life, existence, matter ‘it’self—that at the centre of all being there is the paradoxical, the inappropriate, as a matter of course. I would not wonder if the music of the spheres should prove to be jazz, or that God, having consecrated a bishop, should next go to Hyde Park to lecture on socialism. This is how ‘it’ is.
And it is the crucible for my creativity, in which my poetry cooks up in an inveterate attitude of writing that is so masked and layered that it’s usually taken straight—but then that (so I hold) is how we deal with life. This is broadly apparent in my recent work ‘A Safe House for a Man’, in which I take to task a popular wisdom relating to personal freedom. The protagonist is so unable to justify what he has done that he romanticises himself, and at the conclusion is forced to take refuge in exaltation. Though the book is contrived as a complex of gentle mockeries, it is usually read uneasily as biography.
In ‘The Araneidea’ I deconstruct a lecture by a Victorian Arachnologist, and expose it to the aesthetic values of our day. The consequence is, to me, a comment on the cosmos, but perhaps not so to anyone else.
My aesthetic gains much stimulus from the conjunction of my scientific, theological, and poetic leanings, which have a happy coexistence in that wryness I perceive at the centre. ‘The Galapagos Tracts’ is a collection of C19th. scientific documents made poetry specifically to display this principle; once a fact is put into words it always seems to gather a beauty about it, and there’s always a spark of life in the stoniest fossil, alive or dead.
Into most of my works I place a set text: in “A Voyge to N.Z.” it is the diary of a colonist; in “A Wedding At Tintown” it is an essay on the Maori race; for “The king Of Bliss” it is the psychotherapist’s charter of ethics, and “Five Anzac Liturgies” obviously makes use of the liturgy of the eucharist. The purpose of the textual presence is to heighten what some might judge to be irony, but which is really the essential inappropriateness of life, in which is beauty. It is like stillness against motion, stability in love.
Poetry is, I believe, the art that can best discern and display this truth. The organisation of words can make a fire from this existential spark and show its light.
The nature of my aesthetic is not one shared by other poets, so there is not much point in my inhabiting a poets’ community, nor in functioning publicly as a poet. I have belonged to such in the past, and had support, guidance, and good instruction from them, but now in my latter years I have chosen one where (in my own judgement) the three strands of my creativity may be able to come together. Any reader who knows Millerton (and only one or two will) might wonder at my choice; I can best use Pepys excuse for a rough night out:
“What a loose cursed company was this, that I was in tonight, though full of wit; and worth a man’s being in for once, to know the nature of it, and their manner of talk, and lives.”
Though I do myself read widely within a broad spectrum of poetry, I do not expect my own to be much read, nor published. And so the question: why write? I’ll let George Herbert sum up for me:
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
and relish versing.
brief 20 - aesthetics (2001): 66-67.
In the seventies I rented an old house, for time out with my young family. It stood on a small plateau on the hillside, at the back of Barrys Bay near Akaroa, and was a charming place, built about a hundred years earlier, with attic bedrooms, a fine colonial kitchen and pantry, and verandah on three sides. An orchard of gnarled plums and apples grew behind it, there was a stables nearby, and before it lay the whole of Akaroa harbour.
Three or four years later I became the vicar of Banks Peninsula, and was required to live at the vicarage in Okains Bay, just over the hill. Hearing of this, a young Christchurch painter named Philip Trusttum approached me, asking for the use of the house, now that I had no use for it myself. Philip and Lee and their two children took it as a holiday house and made good use of it, and we came to know them well. Into this friendship came other artists of various disciplines who lived about, or had connections with the Peninsula.
This was at the height of the Whole Earth Movement, and idealistic young couples yearned to do the right thing and live off the land; they found the means on the Peninsula hills, in disused farmhouses which could be rented or bought cheaply. I was not overworked in the parish; though there were five churches (one in each bay) it was depopulating—which accounted for the vacant houses. . The bishop had sent me there to take things easy, as both my parents had calamitously died and I was supposed to be near a breakdown. I was to recover, before moving on to a city parish. As part of the recovery plan I was writing short stories, which met with a brief success.
However, my pastoral work was, as always, interesting, and through the course of parish visiting I came to know these new residents; generally, they found rural life a heavy and unaccustomed chore, being inexperienced with the component parts of mud weather, vegetables, poultry, fire, plumbing, space, and country people. With most it was the man who worked at his heart’s desire and the woman at the house. As they had children about the same age as ours, we came to socialise, especially at dinners. The children would be fed first, then bedded down around whichever house we were at, and then we would sit by the fire and eagerly discuss the intricacies of our lives on these wild headlands and hills.
Philip and Daphne Temple lived in a fine old house at Little Akaloa. Philip is from Yorkshire, where I had worked for a while, and which helped to establish a connection. I found his position as an Englishman adopting another country and using this process to fuel his creativity, an interesting one; we would talk about it for hours, then drive back home through rain and snow and count ourselves lucky. His skill at literary politics brought interesting people to our evenings, such as Brian Turner, Peter and Ursula Cape, and the Weddes; these often cowed me with their erudition and experience, but the Capes made another impression on me, for reasons I’ve only recently understood.
Kobi and Patricia Bosshard lived at Akaroa, where Kobi worked as a jeweller. In a sense they brokered our art, calling exhibitions and concerts to the tiny town, and they knew everyone. They did a great job, and Kobi, being Swiss, introduced an exotic element—I remember one dinner at which our only food was apricot dumplings; I remember no reason for this, and no thought to challenge their right to feed us in this unusual way.
The Trusttums were often present at these evenings, through their knowledge of the Bosshards and their frequent presence on the Peninsula. They were great company, intelligent and articulate. Lee’s mother was Fanny Buss, a well-known Christchurch fabric artist, and Lee worked with her. Philip already had a name as a painter.
Into this regional mix came Jeffrey and Joanna Harris. Jeffrey’s grandparents were farmers at Okains Bay, and his parents lived at Wainui in Akaroa harbour, where they had a market garden. He and Joanna had not long been married, and had a small daughter, Magdalena. Joanna was sociable, and the hesitancy, later such a part of her personality, was not then particularly noticeable. Jeffrey was saturnine, pleasant enough but discouraged presumption. Sometimes Joanna came alone.
The Harrises had taken the Barrys Bay house from the Trusttums, and lived there. Jeffrey used one of the attic rooms as a studio; it had a morning light. I remember going to buy a painting from him, a large one of his mother and grandmother, and being almost overcome by his dreams stacked about me. Joanna painted too. For many years I had a portrait she did, a pleasant dappled painting on board, of Jeffrey holding Magdalena. Both were gaining respect for their work, but not enough to take them out of poverty.
Here their second daughter Imogen was born, and I was made her godfather. This proved to be not an easy position. Joanna was Roman Catholic and I Anglican, so I was unsure of her expectations, and certainly did not meet several of them. The ‘pompous letter’ she refers to in Imogen was most probably one of mine. Our theologies were pretty well identical, and we talked it a good deal, but I must admit to being timid before both Jeffrey and Joanna; their focussed intelligence intimidated me.
Imogen was found to have a heart defect, and after time in hospital died, being buried at Akaroa. Her illness and death bore down heavily upon the couple, and caused Joanna to take a great dislike to the house. They moved to another, at the top of Okains Bay, a very desolate and long-abandoned place, without garden or paths, and about a thousand feet above sea level. Mostly they had no transport, and life was very tough for them, especially in the winter. Fortunately, Jeffrey’s rural background helped, as did the near presence of family, and he always seemed to be fit.
They would come to our group dinners, though Jeffrey did not always enjoy them. He and Philip were not close friends, and Joanna seemed to think that Philip had strayed from some true path. I regretted this, for Philip always has known what he’s doing, and has taught me a great deal of the philosophy and ethics of art; I’ve always admired his work. As time went by, Jeffrey came less often..
It was here, in this ruinous tree-shadowed farmhouse, that Joanna wrote Imogen. I remember her asking me to type it for her. There had been, I think, some friction between husband and wife—she said nothing about it, the two were loyal to each other, but on this occasion she put Magdalena in the pram and walked down the hill to the vicarage, a distance of some four or five kilometres, in the rain. We were out at the time, and returned to find her seated at the kitchen fire, reading. Magdalena was asleep in a bed. The bath had been turned on and forgotten, and was coming down the passage. Her wet shoes had been placed by the fire to dry, and their soles had melted off.
Typing Imogen wasn’t easy; the subject was painful, and mixed with my own griefs. The manuscript was untidy, and the shape and format of the poems were novel to me. As Joanna had no phone she was not readily available for consultation, and I fear I did not do a good job.
Imogen is in form a classical sequence of poems, in style and perspective contemporary. The author sits at her sick child’s bedside, thinks of the birth, the gathering illness, of the few choices given her: ‘I could have taken her to another country that is quiet’. She observes the hospital ward, the child, the staff; she interprets Imogen’s death: delivered of
a baby
from the womb of living
to the life of night
she reflects with particular accuracy, intelligence and sincerity; there’s intense feeling, but no sentiment; profundity but no obscurity. Few of the poems are titled, and it’s uncertain whether some stand individually or are part of another. Typography and shape vary. It needs to be read a few times, as an anatomy of grief.
The work was published by Hawk Press in 1978, as ‘IMOGEN poems by Joanna Margaret Paul’, and dedicated ‘IMOGEN ROSE, February 28-December 9, 1976 farewell brave heart arohanui.’ It was printed and sewn by Alan Loney in a limited edition of 300, of which I have no.11. Alan was proud of his part in the publication; I talked with him about it, and the circumstances of its creation.
About ten years ago David Howard told me of the effects Imogen has upon him, at his first reading of it. I repeated this to Joanna soon after, and she was thrilled. Only then, I think, did she begin to realise the high regard that is held for the work, its high place in our poetry, and she spoke of a reprint.
Soon after the typing I moved to Christchurch, and Joanna and Jeffrey separated. She would call at our Addington vicarage from time to time, and stay overnight. She spoke of the separation and the reasons for it, but I do not remember them and don’t want to, as I was fond of them both.
We maintained a friendship, mostly by correspondence and telephone, and I observed her growing reputation as a painter. She asked me for some contribution to her anti-G.E. compendium ‘Consider the Lilies’. In her last letter she suggested she would make me a visit, with her new husband.
On the day of her funeral at Akaroa, I read in the Christchurch Press of her death.
- Leicester Kyle
Postscript:
Philip Trusttum has reminded me of the party that we held at the Barry’s Bay house. There must have been some occasion for the party; I can’t recall any reason, but there was a great gathering—the Bosshards, Harrises, Trusttums, Temples, the Edmonds, Weddes, and others.
I remember that it was a sunny day, which was as well, for the verandah and grounds were much more convenient than the house, and the view was a reliable source of conversation. My most explicit memories centre around one of the guests, a one-armed freedom fighter from Palestine; as I collected him from the Harris’s house, he probably came as a guest of Jeffrey and Joanna, and had newly arrived in this country. He was taciturn, and uncomfortable in this unheroic environment. I happened to be nearby when he was thrust into the company of Daphne Temple; affecting ease, he leant against the doorframe, sipped at his drink, and gazed abstractedly out over the valley. Daphne, feeling obliged to say something to this visitor to our country, was eventually forced into the obvious, and asked:
“And how do you find New Zealand?”
“Oh,” he replied, “I got off the plane at the airport”—a cliché, of course, but it’s a pleasure to hear a cliché well used.
Dear Scott,
As for your invitation to write something on the theme of Exile and Home I hurry to respond, though with difficulty, as my thoughts on the subject are many and uncertain.
I came here to Buller about eight years ago, the complacent possessor of a small private income. Buller is an area I've known and loved since childhood. My ancestors came to the Coast in gold rush times, so I'm at ease in the area. I've long realised that the culture of the Buller district is relatively distinct, and it was my intention to attempt to define this in poetry while also practising my other discipline of botany.
Both these ambitions have had considerable consequences, and have become intertwined, some poetry moving into the scientific area (i.e. in botanical journals) and some science in the poetry, such as a campaign to establish a new park. This campaign was initiated by a collection of poems "The Great Buller Coal Plateaux" which was sent to every appropriate authority, and was received as such an attractive alternative to a protest letter that the campaign proved amazingly effective. This gave me my first personal experience of the potential power of poetry and how it can, when rightly used, accomplish considerable ends. This is an aspect of poetry that we don't usually consider.
A small remote and isolated area like Buller is an ideal one in which to study the teleology of poetry. We don't as yet really know the whole scope of poetry's place in New Zealand, of what it can or should do. The first pakeha settlers here regarded it as a frivolity, unlike in Australia where it made an early flowering in ballad form, and here it is still relatively untried and, ours being essentially a metropolitan country, is very much a metropolitan art. I'm fascinated by what poetry can do, what it can achieve, change and record in a region, whether it can find the place in our native lore that it has in most other countries, where in some it has led revolutions and aroused powerful sentiments.
In other lands the plants and animals are protected by the love they're held in and poetically identified by it, but here this is lacking and our environment is without the most powerful protection it could have.
A desire to accomplish this is the impetus behind a good deal of my poetry, and accounts for some of its particular character i.e. a disinclination to metaphor and an emphasis on the disparate. It also means that most of my work, being of such regional application, has relatively little interest to those outside Buller. The greater proportion is self-published and locally distributed, it seeming a waste of time to even attempt to find a commercial publisher; the little which has wider significance is sent out to journals which, fortunately, are inclined to accept it. I feel that it's essential to do this, to be part of contemporary writing, to be familiar with the writing standards of the times and be judged by them.
To my regret I have little personal contact with other poets. If I were younger I would have more, but I took my place in poetry rather late in life so my history in it is short. I do, however, read widely. With respect to being in exile, that doesn't much feature in my thinking. From this distance national poetry is something of a passing parade, and the urge to be part of that is not great. One misses the nearness of colleagues, however, and the stimulus of talking knowingly with friends in practice. After my last visit to Auckland it took me several weeks to settle but, though I like city life, it can never give me the intensity of interest that this does. There is also the point that one does like to write for a known readership, and that being poet to a defined and domestic community has its attractions, a sense of professional belonging. Until very recently the publishing and performance of poetry was a metropolitan prerogative and one had to go to town to do it; this seems to be a changing circumstance, and it is easier now to appear before one's own and to be better understood.
An editor once rebuked me with the dictum 'no good poetry ever comes out of the country'. Though obviously factually wrong there is truth in the saying, for rural life does encourage a softer art, removed as it inevitably is from proximate criticism and competition. In Buller there is a great fondness for verse but little for poetry, so I stand alone and unassailed.
My observable literary ability, my success in conservation and botany, my involvement in civic affairs, have all pushed me into a certain notoriety in the region which, were I so ambitious, would give me satisfaction. At home, however, I'm in solitude with my self, my past, and my advancing age. It's from these vulnerabilities that the poetry springs.
I hope the above is of use to you, is the sort of return you want. Congratulations on your editorship and the steps you have so far taken for 'Brief'. Your team is impressive.
Best wishes,
Leicester Kylebrief 33 (2006): 44-45.
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© Leicester Kyle Literary Estate, 2012
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