Who can forget the recent pained tweet of my co-editor, Bill Manhire: ‘the paper is dying!’ He’d just opened his 1988 Faber hardback copy of Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems. Okay, it’s not quite as alarming as West Indian cricketer Chris Gayle from the World Cup: ‘Bangladesh stoning our bus!!! Feeling glass break!!! This is ridiculous!!! Damn!!!’ But still, book-owners will recognise Bill’s dismay. Last month I discovered that my Viking Portable Hardy had become still more portable—it was being carried off by the bug that makes a queasy lace of pages. The evidence is mounting: things turn to dust.
Which does make this project a bit quaint. After all, the annual Best New Zealand Poems has been online for ten years and presumably will remain online until sea-levels wipe us out. If you wanted to, you could leave off reading this right now, tap whatever connected device you have at hand, and make your own Best Of, or several Best Ofs. In the contemporary mode of multiple paths and answer-back-the-teacher comments sections, fixing such a selection to an actual page looks decidedly retro. So why do it?
Because we do like books—those fading, failing homes in whose silent rooms the mites are, even as we write, eating our words. And because there are now 250 poems on the site. (Navigation—as if we were ships not readers—is getting trickier.) And because, as people who are paid to think about language, we were curious about what such a selection might look like, and what it might tell us about a decade we suspected—rightly, as it turns out—was full of life. And finally, let’s face it, because it feels very nice to point and say, ‘Look at this!’ This book points at many marvellous things. Based on the Best American Poetry series, Bill’s original notion in 2001 was that an internet anthology would bypass the traditional obstacles of book publishing. In a letter to Creative New Zealand successfully seeking funding assistance to pay the poets, he wrote that the site would ‘break through the distribution barrier which prevents New Zealand poetry from reaching an international audience’.
He built it but did they come?1
From its first year onwards, the site has done far better than expected. It now averages around 3000 page views per month, with just over a quarter of those coming from overseas.2 In some ways, of course, it would be a little optimistic to consider the browsing of interested folk from around the globe, spending on average five minutes in the company of New Zealand poetry, ‘an international audience’. After ten years of activity, there’s not been a noticeable change in the fortunes of our poets. Are we eating at the top table now? (That the appearance of a Manhire poem in The New Yorker was a news item in the Dominion Post last year says something about our relationship to the traditional centres of literary power—though, to be fair, the provincial cringe was also understandable; the simple fact is, we don’t get in The New Yorker that often.)
It is worth noting, however, that there was a place where our model made a traceable difference: Scotland. Robyn Marsack, a transplanted New Zealander and the Director of the Scottish Poetry Library, gratefully copied the format in establishing the Best Scottish Poems site in 2004. In the introduction, their first editor quoted the editor of the previous year’s New Zealand anthology; while Robyn was to act as the editor of BNZP 2009. That’s traffic with observable impact.
Perhaps the real effects of the BNZP site will—and should—remain more furtive than any institutional reporting allows. The channels of change are seldom visible. Writers (and their audiences) develop from odd and accidental meetings as much as from planned rendezvous. It seems entirely possible that in some corner of Oklahoma or Ottawa or Ostend, there’s a local poet in possession of our url who now believes that James Brown is the way of the future. And maybe she’s right.
While we’re doing the maths, I don’t think it would surprise anyone who’s been following New Zealand poetry to learn that women outnumber men in this book. Yet this fact—38 female poets to 27 male—is worth noting because it represents a considerable shift since the anthologies of the preceding decades. Jan Kemp was the only female poet among 18 blokes in Arthur Baysting’s The Young New Zealand Poets (1973). (Interestingly six of those blokes have poems in our anthology; if this is a book of newcomers, it also shows a resilient core at the heart of our poetry.) Vincent O’Sullivan’s influential Oxford Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry, in its second edition published in 1976 and reprinted in 1979, found two female poets (Janet Frame and Fleur Adcock) born after 1920, and 24 male poets. In the third edition (1987) there were 11 such women and 28 men. Fleur Adcock’s 1982 Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry has only four women out of 21 poets. The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (edited by Ian Wedde and Harvey McQueen, 1985) had 19 women born post-1920, and 35 men.3 By the time Oxford published An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English (edited by Jenny Bornholdt, Gregory O’Brien and Mark Williams, 1997), there were 24 female poets of that vintage and 49 men.
There’s nothing self-congratulatory about the swing in our numbers; our selections reflect where the action is, rather than where any progressive ideals might position it. This anthology takes in many of the key figures to emerge in the last ten to twenty years, many of whom are women: Jenny Bornholdt (seven BNZP appearances), and five-timers Bernadette Hall, Michele Leggott and Anne Kennedy. (Of the major writers, perhaps only Dinah Hawken—a single showing in the debut edition—has somehow slipped off editors’ radars.)
One final piece of accounting—and this will inflame some readers. By my estimate, more than 30 percent of the poets in this book have connections to either the International Institute of Modern Letters or Bill’s old Original Composition class. What can we say? The even distribution of talent is a dream that only prize committees and funding bodies need suffer; the rest of us should order our worlds according to the evidence of our senses. Bottom-line: these are the poems that most excited us. These are the ones that most consistently brought pleasure. These are the ones.
Now there’s usually an editorial disclaimer in these intros along the lines of feeling acute discomfort with the notion of ‘best’. Chris Price, our most recent editor, found it ‘absolutist’ and ‘Olympian’. Yes, this is true. Time’s test is the only real one. And yet it’s hard to resist running our own feeble ruler over proceedings. Philip Larkin—recall the dying pages—wrote about Thomas Hardy that in most of his poems ‘there is a spinal cord of thought and each has a little tune of its own’. Ideas and music—that sounds like a decisive combination to me, and probably the sort of test these poems were passing when we read and re-read them for this book.
The other pain felt by the editor is caused by the limits imposed—a measly 25 poems from such wealth! (Only the aforementioned James Brown confessed an opposite struggle: he said he couldn’t really find 25 that he wanted to call the best.) We had no such pains—the publisher asked us not to make the book too big, but apart from that, our only rule was we couldn’t select more than one poem from each poet. Which did, in fact, cause us regret. Under a different rubric we might have included everything that appeared from Anne Kennedy and Brian Turner and Jenny Bornholdt, and had a good fight over more from a few others too.
Of course we were also dealing only with what had been selected by the editors, and so some favourite poems of ours were missing. But already that sounds too niggardly; certain unimpeachably fine works were there, forever shining and ready to be picked, among them Allen Curnow’s ‘When and Where’, Andrew Johnston’s ‘The Sunflower’, Cliff Fell’s ‘Ophelia’, Vincent O’Sullivan’s ‘The Child in the Gardens: Winter’.
We especially enjoyed finding the single knockout poem from writers who don’t seem to belong anywhere much in this sort of accounting. Stu Bagby, Gordon Challis, Mary Cresswell, Rachel Bush, John Gallas, and Graham Lindsay all contribute alert, often funny, beguiling works. And it was hugely encouraging—and a testament to the editor’s truffle-sniffing abilities—to be able to include a poem such as Vivienne Plumb’s ‘Goldfish’—an overpowering piece of writing which might have easily been overlooked since it appeared in a chapbook from the tiny independent Seraph Press.
BNZP has also been rather good in gathering up newer writers such as David Beach, Anna Jackson, Michele Amas, Amy Brown and Johanna Aitchison. And in this anthology there are poets of such newness that they’re yet to publish a book: Joan Fleming, Marty Smith, Kerrin P. Sharpe and Ashleigh Young.
But how exactly did we make these calls? With, I fear, disappointing ease. Having both drawn up our own list of favourites, Bill and I met to compare notes. We probably agreed immediately on about 80 percent of the poems. Is that too much consensus? We read everything again before our next meeting, and settled very amicably, very satisfyingly, on the current contents.
Having landed the plum job of picking the best of the best poems, it was tempting to choose the best of the best introductions. The ten editors had lots of interesting things to say.
Iain Sharp, kicking things off, wrote that he didn’t want to suggest we were a nation of Billy Collins impersonators, though he did offer that the ‘unbuttoned, vernacular style of writing suits the sort of country we are’. In the blogs that concern themselves with NZ poetry—google ‘Bill Manhire’ and ‘evil’ or ‘Jenny Bornholdt’ and ‘chopped-up prose’— Sharp’s descriptions and no doubt his exemplars merely confirm a feeling that a dominant mode of formlessness is ruining us.
Elizabeth Smither, the following year, found the field ‘as diverse and interesting as anywhere on earth’, while admitting that it was ‘always easier (and safer) to choose among the dead’.4
Robin Dudding, despite a near-lifetime of distinguished editing—he gave Barry Crump his first publication—still sounded surprised, overcome almost by the task: ‘No “round up the usual suspects” procedure can possibly suffice when you discover that, just as every New Zealander thinks singing for supper is a piece of cake, every second one writes poems and manages to get them published.’ Helped by his wife Lois, he got over the hurdle of numbers, found joy even, though Dudding’s final judgement was sort of Crumpy: ‘We write pretty good poems in this country.’
Emma Neale, the 2004 editor, tried to unpack that ‘good’, writing about poems with ‘a syntax and semantics which mimic the mind’s progress as it encounters experience, struggles with it, or moves towards understanding. When I read a fine poem, there is usually a sense of actively arriving at layers of new knowledge, of discovering experience, or even belief, simultaneously with the speaker or personality in the poem.’
The next editor was also after the simultaneous when he wrote that the poem ‘is both the winding road and the wild horse that gallops past us as we read, so that when we come around the last bend, there it is, waiting for our shock of recognition’. Andrew Johnston, sensitised by his time living and writing in Paris and London, decided that, on the whole, New Zealand poetry, in its tolerance for variety, ‘mostly avoids the kind of sectarianism that one sees elsewhere in the poetry world’.
Refining Iain Sharp’s idea of the conversational manner, he wrote: ‘More often than not, it seems to me that the best New Zealand poems derive considerable energy from the tension between heightened language and “unpoetic” subject.’ So far so good. However, Johnston is enough of a formalist to see the dangers of the ‘prosy, personal poem that purports to use language transparently’. Cue, one might think, a plea for another approach altogether. Not quite. Instead, Johnston’s brief commentary on Brian Turner’s poem brilliantly corrected the uninspired readings of what might be seen as ‘straight’ verse, suggesting that the so-called conversational mode was as strange, playful and complex as any other mode, and that such a poem’s capacity to ‘change language’, as he writes, was unimpeded by any apparent plainness. Indeed, straightforwardness begins to figure as a kind of disguise.
If Robin Dudding found plenitude a problem, joint editors Anne Kennedy and Robert Sullivan, writing from Hawaii, discovered the opposite: ‘We noticed that in 2006 there were far fewer books or poems in periodicals by Maori and Asian writers than others, per capita. Those writers—if indeed they exist—either were not sending their work out for publication or it was being rejected.’ The notion of these writers not existing is a haunting one, if only because it seems sensible to assume poetry might be universally scattered rather than ethnically determined. (As teachers of creative writing we’ve also pondered this under-representation.)
Kennedy and Sullivan wondered if the solution was encouragement from the gatekeepers: publishers, editors, educators. They concluded by talking about the ‘healthy oral culture in Maori’ and the popularity of kapa haka— ‘choreographed bodies of men and women moving to the charged language of a composer’—which, they argued, carries the same functions as poetry in other cultures. It’s an enlivening thought but then again, choreographed bodies and composers sounds like ballet or dance or theatre or film even, and why would these other cultures then need written poetry as well?
The following year, Paula Green took up the call, writing of ‘our hunger for Maori, Pacific Island, and Asian voices’. It’s a topic awaiting further research. One thing we did note in making our selection was the strength of Pasifika women in BNZP: Tusiata Avia, Sia Figiel, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Karlo Mila. Here’s a group, pace traditional cultural forms, who feel poetry is a potent expressive choice.
Green’s editorial also picked up an image from a Charles Brasch poem—‘Shadow of departure; distance looks our way’—and argued that distance was still the defining preoccupation in our poetry, though the ‘archetypal New Zealand poem’ was being resisted. One year later James Brown was hoping that poets would resist poetry itself: ‘… less isn’t automatically best, but I will say that not everything is interesting or significant just because it is set down in lines that don’t go all the way across the page.’ Earnestness, too, caused him to go all Shakespearian: ‘Forsooth, but we’re a serious lot!’ More on that later.
Like many of our editors, Brown had no trouble identifying what he called ‘the usual frequencies of contemporary poetry … casual, personable … confessional, quietly insightful’. He was attracted to poems in voices outside these frequencies.
It was the frequencies of childhood that Robyn Marsack found herself tuned to in 2009. She felt that her own biography—leaving New Zealand as an adolescent—might have played into her selections but she also wondered, accurately I think, whether childhood was a particular strength of our literature. Still, writing from life was again something this editor felt compelled to warn against. For Marsack factual truth in poetry wasn’t any sort of guarantee. Selecting Tim Upperton’s ‘The Starlings’ (also in this anthology), she argued that the thing may or may not have happened to the poet, what mattered was ‘his method of composition’: ‘the birds don’t know “when to leave off”, but the poet does.’
Chris Price amplified a note running through many of the introductions when she invoked the ‘ghost anthologies’ that move behind the one an editor settles on. Generously she supplied a number of links and titles to swell the enforced skinniness of the chosen few. Here Price wasn’t simply covering her bases, she was expressing ‘the possibly quixotic and old-fashioned hope that reading books, as well as individual poems, is one result these anthologies might achieve’. We think those italics are pointing in exactly the right direction.
Finally, something interests me in the commentary of a number of our guest editors, and that is the perceived earnestness of New Zealand poetry. James Brown’s exasperation we’ve already noted; Chris Price mentions that she could have made a full selection of poems dealing with illness, especially cancer and dementia. (It reminds me of what people often say about our fiction, that it’s dour and death-haunted.) Yet neither of these editors made that sort of selection—and nor have we. That is, there’s obviously enough excellence outside the apparent default mode to make a case for a whole different set of qualities. And perhaps it’s more the case that the idea of our grimness persists far beyond its actual presence in our best poetry.
If I were put against a wall and asked to make any sort of general observation about the poetry here, it would have something to do with, well, fun. Not a very high-minded concept, I know. A kind of buoyancy then. Or lightness, in the sense Italo Calvino asked for when he wrote that ‘thoughtful lightness can make frivolity dull and heavy’. It’s there obviously, wonderfully, in a poem like Rachel Bush’s ‘The Strong Mothers’, with Mrs Chapman who ‘heated records and shaped them into vases for presents’; it’s there in the best baby-in-the bed poem ever written, Graham Lindsay’s ‘big bed’: ‘Her ring-finger hand covers one breast/He sucks the other and fiddles/with my penis with his foot’; it’s there in Anne Kennedy’s rugby poem: ‘Five-nil to them./ Fuck. And fuck/the conversion/too …’
These, you might argue, are comic poems and are just behaving as they should, and yet the same buoyancy animates several senior elegies.
When Allen Curnow writes ‘… Gently as I stroke/this child’s head, I’m thinking, “Goodbye!”’, and then goes on to rhyme ‘season’s crop’ with ‘wither and drop’, the humour carries the weight—there is no weight.
You could say Sam Hunt is feeling sad in ‘Lines for a New Year’, but the sections open and close like strange and powerful riddles:
It’s a love song
between a mother and son.
The son plays the drums
and wrote the song.
On the recording
mother sings the song
like mothers do. And the
son plays the drums
like a good boy. It’s a
love song.
Instantly, I’d like to make that my blindfold test for New Zealand poetry: name the writer. And if Sam Hunt can manage, gloriously, not to sound especially like Sam Hunt, I reckon the gates are open.
You only need sample opening lines to catch similar acts of disorientation: ‘I make telephone calls/to my bones, eat evenings’ (Johanna Aitchison); ‘All day today the ice melted./My name is Queen.’ (Anna Jackson); ‘The computer is dead; long live the computer’ (Cilla McQueen); ‘pity the poor giraffe/lost on the frozen steppe’ (James Norcliffe); ‘I auditioned for the part. And this way/I came to dance’ (Gregory O’Brien); ‘If it was tattooed in Maori there’d be an indigenous Universe/in this curvy groove—but it’s a problem of bleeding translation’ (Robert Sullivan’); ‘Get off my back/ daughter’ (Michele Amas); ‘She emerged from the bamboo forest/with a white, fleshy-petalled flower/and her gun.’ (Amy Brown).
Of course it’s not all like this, and yet the headlong rush into odd scenarios and askew voicings gives this anthology much of its tone. Here are the first four lines of Joan Fleming’s ‘Theory of Light’:
Andy goes craving all over the beach
With her red grip and her red grapple.
A red apple after dark isn’t red,
It’s a black apple.
Andy? Because that’s the poet’s friend’s name? Or because it makes a nice sound with apple? Andy also makes us think of sandy. And where did all this excited utterance come from? Did language itself cause the colours to pop as they do here? Whatever work we care to engage in figuring out the meaning of Fleming’s beachcombing—and the poem as it progresses is clearly not nonsense, not only sounds—it’s that eruptive, confident address which is grabbing.5
I find myself grabbed in this way a lot as I read these poems. So there’s confidence, yes, but also a feeling of agitation and short-circuited stories. Facts come at us fast without obvious illumination: ‘Ernest Hemingway found rain to be made of knowledge …’ (Paula Green). The narratives crackle but they often break down. There’s immediacy but it can be sourceless. And at the risk of pathologising the decade, it looks also like a time of jitteriness, agitation. The boldness of these poems is striking and often strikingly unresolved. Does calm never come to our poor poets?6
In this context, I was struck by how a poet such as the late Alan Brunton, who began publishing in the 1960s, and was never ‘New Zealandy’ and always cosmopolitan, looks utterly at home. This is how ‘Movie’ begins:
I like dinner music.
I like water in a clay jug.
I like it when the water rains on me.
The vivid unattached declaration runs a strong line through contemporary poetry, though Brunton was doing this decades ago. Has he been generative then? My guess is that few of the newer poets would have any clear sense of his work. Indeed, having hung around with a number of them in workshop rooms, I’m not convinced that the category of ‘New Zealand poetry’ is formative in ways witnessed by preceding generations.
I was at university in the early 1980s and in NZ Lit, our lecturer Father Frank McKay, James K. Baxter’s biographer, set a test based on the Oxford poetry anthology. To do well in this test we basically had to learn the contents of the entire book. Shamefully, I did this. I memorised the names of every poet, their dates, and every opening line. And I want you to know, dear reader, I forgot everything within a week. But it also felt kind of good to have done it. And when I was dreaming of becoming a writer, my model was a version of that swotty kid instructed by a priest in the religion of literature: I set about reading everything ever written by a New Zealander. Kids these days … they don’t know their catechism.
In conclusion, here’s a wild generalisation. When I read British and American poetry, I tend to have the feeling that the poet is always making a case for what he/she is doing to be considered poetry, i.e. a major art form. I don’t know precisely how this manifests itself. A density perhaps, an upholstery in the language, a sense of occasion. What’s shocking in New Zealand poetry—it shocks overseas readers—is, I think, the absence of this effort. All our efforts seem directed elsewhere. But where? Into pretending we’re not writing poems. Jenny Bornholdt’s great poem ‘Fitter Turner’ articulates this issue fiercely and movingly, but again and again our poets throw productive doubt on the whole enterprise. It’s what makes the moment in James Brown’s ‘Open Day’—‘We got trapped, but managed to get out/before the poetry started’—resound with national significance: we’re all trying to get out before the poetry starts.
So if it’s been ten years of feeling antsy, let’s put scepticism in the mix too. And jokes. Always jokes. This is how Sia Figiel ends ‘Songs of the fat brown woman’:
The fat blue Pacific
The fat brown Earth
Thank you very much.
Because the poem pretends to be a song, the poet, pretending to be a singer, looks out into the crowd she pretends is there, and pretends to be grateful: ‘Thank you very much.’ Of course the real part of this transaction is our pleasure.
One oddity of the Best New Zealand Poems arrangement has been the agreed absence of a certain poet whose work and example have meant so much not only to many of the poets here but also to the reading public. Bill’s scrupulous self-exile, perhaps necessary, is also a little undermining of the project’s title—here’s another of those moments when I wish he’d not had such a brilliant founding idea. (Remember, during this period Lifted and The Victims of Lightning were published.)
In consultation with Fergus Barrowman, the publisher, and a reluctant Bill, we’ve appended some Manhire to this introduction. ‘The Next Thousand’ was published in a special Sunday Star-Times supplement on 2 January 2000. This future-eating millennium work falls at the very start of our period and gives the act of wise prophecy the bad name it deserves: ‘And goodbye to those long millennial lists,/all of the “this and that” and “this and this”.’
Of course it’s a poem which also takes great rolling pleasure in its list, piling on the predictions until somehow the incantatory power takes over and we end up feeling—as with all the best poems—that what’s being said is indeed worth paying attention to, even at the very moment the poem itself seems to be telling us not to believe anyone or anything: ‘Someone will want to be Moslem or Christian.’
The poem richly refuses us.
But then there’s one thing left over: smuggled inside the self-cancelling ambivalent jokes and the infectious chanting, a bracingly straightforward article of faith, two lines short enough to tweet, sweet enough to sing, strong enough to set this book sailing off into a world the poem calls ‘so safe, so dangerous’:
There will be no more screens or screen-savers
but I believe there will still be pages.
Here then, for the moment, are some pages.
Damien Wilkins
March 2010
1 Bill wasn’t a sole operator. Fiona Wright worked on the design and management of the website in the first years and then Clare Moleta has continued that support. And of course the task of selecting the poems has been done by a different editor each year.
2 The bulk of offshore visitors are from the US, Australia, and the UK, in that order.
3 Among the 19 women, there were six composers of waiata.
4 Our own RIP rule was that if the poet was active at the time of his/her selection, we could consider it. This left no room for BNZP poets Robin Hyde and James K. Baxter.
5 In the interest of registering initial impact, my reading dispenses with the poet’s helpful note which goes a way towards explaining the occasion. Collectively, the poets’ notes form a remarkable resource.
6 Poems with low jittery ratings appear in this book by Dinah Hawken, Stu Bagby, Bob Orr, Chris Orsman, Kerrin P. Sharpe.