My 2019 in Poetry

     

                  

I was on holiday, and away from a computer, when all of the end-of-decade best-of lists were getting written up and passed around. So here’s mine, rather late and for just one year. And as not much more than a list of my favourite poetry discoveries (and a few re-discoveries).

Laura Ritland, East and West (Montréal: Véhicule Press, 2018).

The collection that’s given me the most pleasure these last twelve months. Superb poems on giant squid, jellyfish, sharks, sea spiders, a perfect opening piece in ‘Summer Parties’ (‘the indifference/ of unopened books and the radio’s paper voice/ talking of tragedies in the next door room.’). A good, showing-off and fun sonnet ‘for winding late clocks’. So much clever thoughtfulness. 

Emily Jungmin Yoon, A Cruelty Special to Our Species (New York: HarperCollins, 2018).

‘I’m being as honest as a woman can’: most of the reviews I’ve read have, rightly probably, focused on the testimonial poems and their historical and political importance. That mattered for me too, of course, but I worry the publishers perhaps downplay Yoon’s virtuosity when they package this as ‘urgently relevant for our times’. It’s that, absolutely, but it’s also dazzling artistry. The series of poems each title ‘An Ordinary Misfortune’ especially.  History is what hurts.

Sasha Dugdale, Joy (Manchester: Carcanet, 2017).

The long opening poem, imagining and voicing Catherine Blake after William’s death, I was lucky to read first at Blake’s grave after seeing the big exhibition of his at the Tate, and that coloured my response accordingly. There’s a wonderful villanelle in here, too.

John Dickson, What happened on the way to Oamaru (Christchurch: Untold Books, 1986).

Irregular punctuation! Typewriter tabulation! Hairy tales! Lots of period markers here, but lots more also from the great ‘asset stripper of that wonderful junk heap known as European culture’. ‘Do you always make so much fuss / over something that happens each day?’

Kate Lilley, Tilt (Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2018).

Press coverage talked sometimes of the ‘revelations’ of abuse in this collection but, as Lilley herself has pointed out, the stories were always there in her mother’s own poetry. That they passed unremarked of course makes that worse. What stick with me as also particularly powerful are ‘Harm’s Way’, a meditation on the dishonest work language is made to do in the Australian state’s refugee regime, and ‘Tilt’, a complex and beautiful memory of a lost Sydney.

Alison Croggon, The Blue Gate (Melbourne: Black Pepper, 1997).

The Yarra’s Whitman, with some vaunting sonnets thrown in for good measure. And ‘Life with its kindling firsts / strikes a sudden pain / inside my pelvis.’ The ‘sorrow / of your swelling mother / who cannot remember.’

Bill Manhire, The Victims of Lightning (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2010).

‘1950s’ and ‘The Best Burns Statue’ especially. I could do without the songs, but.

Sarah Howe, Loop of Jade (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015).

‘The way my father,/ in his affable moods, always thinks you/ want a gin and tonic too.’

Anna Livesey, Good Luck (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2003).

‘the very mud of our belief, the swamp of/ our blinding, devastating revelation.’

Kevin Connolly, Asphalt Cigar (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1995).

Lots of period silliness (and charm), sure, and lots of strutting, but ‘Style is a collision of speed and beauty.’

Kathleen Hellen, The Only Country was the Color of My Skin (Hilo: Saddle Road Press, 2018).

Poems exploring the history of U.S. occupation in Japan and the post-war period, a history Hellen is connected to through her own life and her parents’ roles.

Mia Ayumi Malhorta, Isako Isako (Farmington: Alice James Books, 2018).

A debut collection, and a contribution to the literature memorializing and exploring Japanese-American internment in the United States during the Pacific War, and its long aftermath in individual and community suffering. ‘A History of Lost Things’.

The two critical works that have stuck with me are Stephen Hollis’s Almost Islands (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2018) on ‘Phyllis Webb and the pursuit of the unwritten’, and Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016). Hollis’s a lovely, thoughtful, meandering walk around Webb’s work, as well as around his own. Lerner’s has all that you’d expect, but is also an affectingly sincere bit of worrying at why poetry matters and feels wrong at the same time. There’s an egotistical generosity at work in poetry, he argues, trying to project individual experience into a communal, universal, Truth out there beyond us all. And he pulls off a proper close reading of McGonagall.

Red Salute to Teresia Teaiwa

The last proper conversation I had with Teresia Teaiwa involved a lot of scheming. We had, the year before, come out of a partial victory through industrial action at work, and were pondering what we might next have to expect this coming year. That led to a conversation on the state of our union’s branch, on the Living Wage, and how we might build the movement of staff and students at Victoria in order to win this demand. And then that led – by way of talking about who would benefit from a Living Wage, and who loses out the most currently – to talk of Māori and Pasefika students, their needs and aspirations, their literature, how we might be failing them or serving them as teachers and trade unionists. About where Māori and Pacific literatures could be found in universities and criticism, and about how they might unexpectedly offer insights in places – our unionism, our activism, my socialism – we least expect.

The exchange was typical of my experiences with Teresia: off-hand and yet urgent; measured, thoughtful, calm, seemingly infinitely patient and yet all the time shot through with what Martin Luther King called ‘the fierce urgency of now’. Teresia was a relaxed and relaxing presence amidst a hum of anxiousness and self-enforced busyness, but that was only because she realised how much there was needed to be done. And how little time, once the question of climate change and the ecological devastation of the Pacific came into consciousness, there is for us to do what is needed. She brought these qualities to her writing – both poetry and critical pieces, especially on militarism and the militarisation of the Pacific – and to her organising and activism. Much of that activist work was, as usual, unseen or not easily visible: relationships built, colleagues drawn into union, tensions eased or – sometimes – usefully drawn out into open debate.

Teresia was a genuine intellectual, something not at all the same as – or often, indeed, really coinciding with – the role of the academic. She made thinking possible, encouraged thought and criticism and wrote, spoke, and organised always with an audience and a goal in mind: anti-colonial struggle, and the long freedom struggle in West Papua in particular; the project of human freedom. That project, in Teresia’s work and life, was rooted in the Pacific and in the celebration and critical exploration of Pacific resistance and cultures, but, as always with properly critical work, it opened out to us all. She received accolades and official recognition, all richly deserved, for her research and teaching, but these were just red roses on the highways: the road itself led on to getting thought working for social transformation.

Once you stop thinking about small islands in a large sea and start thinking about a sea of islands, Epeli Hau’ofa teaches us, what seems insignificant and weak reveals itself to be vast, strong, knitted together and full of expansive possibility. I learned about and through that text thanks to Teresia, who herself had important personal and scholarly ties to Hau’ofa. Teresia managed a similar kind of reversal with her teaching and her approach to Pasefika students. Endless repetition of statistics about disadvantage, no matter how well meaning, can reinforce stereotypes of failures waiting to happen. Talking to Teresia introduced you, instead, to poets, performers, intellectuals in formation, almost boundless creative energy wanting to take its place in this unequal world needing changing. One sign of how much that trust and belief mattered is the enormous response we’ve seen from her students already, just hours from the news of her death. Some highly intelligent people make others around them seem smaller, but Teresia had the anti-capitalist gift of making you feel, after conversation or exchange with her, cleverer yourself.

Her work developed in dialogue with Marxism, drawing on the dissident Marxists in particular of the anti-colonial struggles and, although we adhered to different traditions, programmes, and  organisations, I drew – and will continue to draw – on her teaching, encouragement, inspiration and example. These institutions can be lonely places for socialist intellectual life: Teresia managed, by her work and example, to make this one feel like it could be made a viable home.

These thoughts I’ve written down without taking the time properly to revise so I’ve a chance now to say thank you, and to share them with the many others of us who have benefited from having this poet and militant thinker a part of our lives. I only wish it could have been for many more years still. 

Symmes Roll

In breaks at work these last weeks I've been dipping in and out of James McGonigal and John Coyle's fine and generous selection of Edwin Morgan's letters. They're a treat.

A lovely surprise, this Friday last, stumbling across an account of Morgan reading Ian Wedde's masterpiece Symmes Hole. The Scottish Pacific rises up again! The contact was via - who else? - Alan Riach.

Morgan takes a while to warm up to the novel, writing to Riach in April 1987:


“Well I finished that extraordinary Symmes book and have now passed it on to Dr McCarey from whom you will doubtless receive a ‘second opinion’. I must admit I skipped here and there, finding the ubiquitous triple dotting … extrememly irritating …. And the disconnectedness that might be a virtue in poetry … somewhat worrying in a prose story. I think I was also a mite disappointed that the title promised more than ever appeared; perhaps I was misled by Verne/Poe/ERBurroughs expectations; the hole, in fact, seemed to be fairly peripheral as holes go. Like your father, I enjoyed the ‘sea’ parts of it best, especially such longish passages as escaped the plague of dots. The great virtue of the book is in what it brings together; you’re forced to think and rethink. Its weakness, no it’s not exactly a weakness, its problem for most readers I imagine is simply its density, and the very difficult of perceiving a goal. Anyhow I’m very grateful to you for shooting it across my bow.”

He continues to other subjects, before finishing:

“Dan Sweigert, of Batavia (Illinois, not Indonesia) is busy setting my ‘Message Clear’ to piano roll music (for player pianos). Letters become holes in rolls. Symmes Roll, and a vicus of recirculation from the northern periphery –“

* * *

ANZAC: they'll remember it for us wholesale

I hadn’t expected the shift from pomposity to kitsch to be so sudden, or so vertiginous. Gesturing at its own hyperreality the opening this morning of Pukeahu National War Memorial Park – a bipartisan project of nationalist reaction planted in the middle of Wellington – things moved from the physical to the digital, from actors marching in front of us to footage of history as consumer spectacle on the big screen. The same performers, the same script, the move seamless. A woman in red prancing about the tower until, above us, the War Memorial threw out billows of the same fabric, the same symbol. Blood? Memory? Poppies? Intoxication, certainly. It was Leni Riefenstahl meeting the Feebles.

“in face of the massive realities of present-day social existence, individuals do not actually experience events. Because history itself is the spectre haunting modern society, pseudo-history has to be fabricated at every level of the consumption of life; otherwise, the equilibrium of the frozen time that presently holds sway could not be preserved.” (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, thesis 200)

Who better to package and present our pseudo-history than Peter Jackson, kitsch master and union-buster of the Wellington ‘creative’ class? There’s an obvious – and essential – political point to make about memory and forgetting, the traces suppressed (dissent, sedition, resistance, revolt) in the recording of this particular story. But this morning something deeper seemed at work – full fantasy, full consumption, ANZAC as video game and branding exercise and empty spectacle. Join #theshadowbattalion, care of your local bank! Keep your memories fresh in the crisper over the ditch at Woolies!

A "new depthlessness...a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum." A “society bereft of all historicity, whose own putative past is little more than a set of dusty spectacles." (Who else? Jameson back in 1984, and still making the case today.)

This is New Zealand nationalism, however, a different package to the brasher and more direct boosterism of the rather more ambitious political culture across the Tasman. The volume’s down low; the emphasis is on commemoration, compassion, tributes. The tone is sober. The message is the same nonetheless; gathering for our protest this morning we had a plain-clothes police officer waiting to try and intimidate us and to threaten our right to assembly. Dissent gets stifled in low key ways in this country perhaps, but it gets stifled all the same.

And that red! The price of nationhood, some polite voice on Nine to Noon called it earlier in the week. Workers’ blood, wasted invading Turkey a century ago. What relevance has that to now, and what forces are served in this aestheticization of politics? The resonances were somewhere between Marvel comics and European fascism. 

That, of course, isn’t a question you’re supposed to ask. They died for our freedoms, so make sure you don’t try and use those freedoms. Debord again: “The spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute.” Or, as the man said to me this morning, there’s a time and a place for everything: the Prime Minister might be there, but no politics at this war ceremony please.

I’m glad we did a little to disrupt the spectacle, and I’m dreading the coming years in this carnival of reaction. But I wonder this morning too if ‘peak brANZAC’ might be on its way. They can remember it for us wholesale. Capitalism can commodify everything – even memories – but there’s a risk in that for our rulers. Video games sometimes give you the controls.

[Images: the photographs of our protest I took, and the others are from the twitter feed of the British High Commissioner, who declares himself 'moved' by this tribute to sacrifice.] 

Jottings from Marxism in Melbourne

Back yesterday from a week in Melbourne, and four days at Marxism 2015. I’ve been travelling across, on and off, to Marxism for a dozen years now; I think this year’s conference was the best and most rewarding I’ve been to yet.

The stand-out sessions, for me, were talks by Marjorie Thorpe and Noel C Tovey AM. Both I’m sure I’ll be telling my children about many years from now, as moments I was near enough to History to feel it shivering. Thorpe, in sharing stories of her family’s times in Fitzroy, managed to recreate a whole social world of Aboriginal resistance, survival, struggle and celebration. A revelation. Noel C Tovey AM is one of Australia’s most celebrated Aboriginal dancers, actors, directors and performers. I hadn’t, to my shame, heard of him or his achievement before the conference – sitting through the excerpts he performed for us of Little Black Bastard, the story of the suffering early years, was one of the most moving theatrical experiences I’ve had in years. How often do you listen to the memories of a man who was at the Stonewall Riots, and has performed on some of the most distinguished stages of the world? He was Young, Black, and Gay in 1950s Australia and he has survived to teach us all. A mind-bending life. Liz Ross’s interview with him in Red Flag gives just a little sampling of a richer feast.

What else? Khury Petersen-Smith was eloquent and wise on the struggles against racist state murder in the United States and the #BlackLivesMatter movement; a series of talks on philosophy and theory (on Lise Vogel; on Spinoza; on Hegel’s Phenomenology); an eye-opening and absorbing account by ETU militant Strawbs Hayes on organizing FIFO workers. This last talk was as much a cultural experience as a political one for me – who knew unionists in the Northern Territory can hold meetings under the shade of the gum tree?

The organization I’m a member of was able to host Nadia Abu-Shanab, from Auckland Action Against Poverty, as one of the speakers over the weekend. There are connections to be made.

***

My own talk on the poets in World War One went well, I think, although the stage is usually the worst place to judge those kinds of things.

It was a particular pleasure to be able to do the Australian launch of Writing the 1926 General Strike as a part of the conference, and so nice to have a dear friend and comrade James Plested do the launching. Thanks to the organisers for making this possible.

***

And the books! My budget, as usual, blown: Bryan Palmer’s biography of James P. Cannon; Cannon’s own Notebooks of an Agitator; a collection of essays by Alan M. Wald on Writing from the Left.

Stutje’s biography of Ernest Mandel.

(I've learnt more from Mandel than a love of what Americans call "sweater vests", but I won't pretend that isn't part of the education too.)

Otto Braun’s account of being A Comintern Agent in China, covering his time journey with Mao and the Party through the Long March and after. This I picked up for $1 on the sale bin, and am not sure what to expect: the introduction mentions that Braun “suffered from the disadvantage of being ignorant of the Chinese language, culture, and history.” Let’s see.

There are lots of new friends met each time I go over for the conference, and that youth and energy are inspiring. But important for me too are the old faces – people I met a decade ago who are active still and in a range of different campaigns and questions. We’re building something real.

[The conference photographs I've taken from the Marxism Conference tumblr and Facebook pages -- both accessible via www.marxismconference.org]

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open

Teach the free man how to praise. What is there to say about the writers who settle in and become part of your everyday life, co-habiting in ear and mind? Most of the time, as a critic and teacher, the texts that set me writing are the ones I can’t fully assent to, books that lodge themselves in my memory in ways that can feel stuck or misplaced; texts to worry to and with. Other writers, other poems, sink so deeply in the mind I reach for them all the time, but wouldn’t know how to say why. Auden, Bishop, Glover: their lines, learnt in adolescence, I’ve detached from poems and worked in to personal vocabulary.

Seamus Heaney was one of these writers for me. His poems are a continuing source of joy and sustenance, to be sure, but many of them feel so familiar – and so right – the brilliance of their achievement threatens to end up obscured. Isn’t that how I’ve always described such things, even if “that last / gh” isn’t mine at all? There hasn’t been a week, in the sixteen years since I first discovered him in sixth form,  I haven’t read or remembered or gone back to a Heaney poem, all the time thinking that somewhere or other his own voice has been going on and new works were still to come. A companion, and part of an introduction to poetry, as with the names evoked in Auden’s ‘Thanksgiving.’

The first Heaney I bought, the inscription reminds me, was his New Selected Poems on my seventeenth birthday. ‘The squat pen’ and the showily terse equivalence of writing and ‘digging’ in the early poems were what drew me in, that gorgeously physical imagery – of peat and field, a ‘straining rump’ labouring ‘among the flowerbeds’ – and those terse full rhymes feeling like a kind of anti-poetry, an assertion of the place of labour and community and commitment against abstraction. History was there, too, and resistance: ‘And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.’ The words were what they talked about. How my adolescent reading combined this ‘phenomenalisation of language’ with Heaney’s supererogatory word choices and reach in vocabulary I can’t remember; I suspect I skimmed over the more thrawn lines in search of further sensuous particulars. There were plenty of those. The poems sustain that kind of naive reading – and Heaney, in his critical writing allowed himself the occasional anti-Theory jibe – but only to let you settle in and then ask from you more. These are poems that, eventually, teach pleasure in dictionaries, and I’m grateful for that.

The Spirit Level was a gift, later that year, fraught with the usual teenage baggage of unequal, unrequited exchange, and still means more to me, I imagine, than it ever did to the giver, if only in a kind of residually self-pitying and maudlin bitter way: ‘A deep mistaken chivalry, old friend. / At this stage only foul play cleans the slate.’ (The ‘Invocation’ to MacDiarmid’s ‘far-out, blathering genius’ would have meant nothing to me then; ‘endure / At an embraced distance’ feels right now.)

Some lines I memorised on first encounter for their sound and feel as if I’m only now learning how to grow into. All those very Irish punning terms for good conduct (‘govern your tongue!’) helped, and Heaney’s clear-sighted risk-taking in registering particular kinds of sadness without giving in self-indulgence or ‘expressiveness’:

When I went to the gents

There was a skewered heart

And a legend of love. Let me

Sleep on your breast to the airport.

Living in Tokyo, and travelling a split shift between teaching jobs, I’d often stop at the Oshima Book Store, picking up cheap copies of Heaney second hand. Station Island; Wintering Out; Seeing Things; Sweeney Astray – I re-discovered these either down the road in Ochanomizu, reading Heaney while drinking vodka and eating borscht at Russia Tei, or on the train home. 

‘They seem hundreds of years away,’ those days, but re-reading the lines now brings an almost physical sense of the joy and personal help the encounters brought. Coping with the poems’ intellect and range and formal loveliness better now, and not in such a hurry to force them into adolescent patterns, there were new delights. 

The refusals of Heaney’s poems from the 1970s, the way the poems turn eloquently in on themselves, marking false phrases off in quotation and worrying through, feel to me like his best work. ‘Whatever you say say nothing’ still astonishes:

Is there life before death? That’s chalked up

In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,

Coherent miseries, a bite and sup,

We hug our little destiny again.

Poems make good companions. I bought District and Circle and Human Chain around about this time last year, in Dunedin for the funeral of a dearly-loved friend. They were good, helpful choices:

It was your first leave,

A stranger arrived

In a house with no upstairs,

But heaven enough

To be going on with.

The whole of you a-patter, ‘alive and ticking like an electric fence’: that’s the Heaney sensation, and I wish there could be more of it still. But this is no bad word-hoard at all.

I drink to you

in smoke-mirled, blue-black,

polished sloes, bitter

and dependable.