Big Smoke, New Zealand Poems 1960-1975, eds. Alan Brunton, Murray Edmond, Michele Leggott, Auckland University Press, 2000, 344 pp, ISBN 1-86940-230-8, $49.95. Reviewed by Bernard Gadd.
- This volume is founded on the sensible idea that "It is a collection of poems rather than poets", the poems being placed in chronological order of first publication between the 1958 of the first poem and 1983 of the sole out-of-period last, along with date and source. And the editors have searched far beyond the literary periodicals for their material. There is ample scholarly apparatus: brief biographical notes on most of the writers and artists, a "selected list of periodicals of the time" (but which omits for example the PPTA Journal), a "chronological sampling" of "Protest, Performance, Publication 1960-75", and two introductions to the 1960s and early '70s, one about the socio-political events of the time, the other about the literary trends. The editors have selected poetry which still reads without a sense of datedness of language (except for the inclusion of ersatz Maori poetry by pakeha writing as if they were Maori, something I have done myself, a form of condescension best left in the past.). The selection is gender balanced; includes several Maori poets, has Wendt to represent Polynesians and Chan Asians, and several representatives of other immigrant groups; and provides a range of ages and voices. Indeed it is this variety of voices which is the strength of the volume along with strong artwork images such as those by Jack Body and Vanessa Lowry. Twenty-nine of the poets, the editors tell us, have not been previously anthologised. All of that sets a high standard for other anthologists to follow.
- What is more contentious is the rationale for such a collection in the year 2000. The publisher's blurb sells this as "an exciting collection of New Zealand poetry from an energetic, iconoclastic and innovative periods ... [dominated by] a spirit of change ... this revolutionary scene ... with strong links to the present". Since the collection is essentially of the work of writers born during or close to the 1940s and who entered adulthood at some stage during the 15 years embraced by this volume, it is perhaps understandable that introductions together with the cover blurb overstate the lasting significance of those years and misinterpret their relationship to our contemporary world. The 60s and 70s certainly saw diverse quite long-standing trends coming together to foster considerable changes in ideas and in societies of the western world. Hopes, ideals, methods of public expression were revitalised from earlier tumultuous eras including the 1930s. But the 1960s and '70s also saw the beginning of that reaction against hopes for greater personal, social, cultural, ethnic, gender freedom and greater social justice which culminated in the even more change-filled New Right years of the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed most of these poets, apart from the Maori writers Chan and Wendt, write poetry which is expressive of a self-focus that reads at times something like the first inklings of the New Right's cult of de-socialised individualism.
- Brunton's introduction and Leggott's Chronology recall their chosen years' headline-making events around the world, and Brunton lists the various social freedoms sought. Yet the impression of all of this together with the selection of poems and poets represented in this book is of a core group whose members were less concerned with making social-cultural changes than with performing the role of 60s people. This is confirmed by the photos in the book of various poets as visual stenotypes even caricatures of the era, as well as such an event as Leggott records for 1971 when "Arthur Bates, Murray Edmond, Russell Haley and David Mitchell read from white basements, with naked chests, while walking across the domain with a shopping bag". Like wow, man!
- Poetically the 1960s and 70s saw Modernism, with its own hopes of freedoms of thought, language and prosody, became dominant. Yet the harbingers and the early world-class authors of kiwi Modernism date from more than a generation before 1960. And interestingly enough Glover, Curnow, Mason and Brasch were all writing during the period of this volume, and in some cases writing well, while Fairburn had just died - but none of their work is included. Nor is work by poets born in the 1930s who had begun to work towards kinds of kiwi Modernism, people like Harlow, Stead, Arvidson, O'Sullivan, Adcock. Nor are exact contemporaries of the included writers admitted, such as Loney, Jackson, Langford. Mitcalfe is mentioned in Leggott's afterword for his anti-nuclear activism but not as a poet and nor is Reeves, though the importance of his publishing activity was referred to in Edmond's introduction. The exclusion of Paterson is a signal that in fact this is a highly selective anthology focussed on Modernism and preferring to ignore the steady move during the 1970s and 80s towards Post-Modernism and 'language' poetry with their concerns to free language from social and cultural constrictions and constructions. Yet early intimations of both are evidenced in work included here by the editors. And of course the late 1990s saw other poetic counter-currents towards more accessible poetry than those of late Modernism and in Post-Modernism in their infinite varieties. In short the editors have a very particular retrospective view of the 1960s and 70s so that even a collection of over 60 poets can only offer a highly biased selection.
- The volume assumes that the two bracketing dates have some validity. Perhaps a case might be made for 1960 as a handy if arbitrary date. But no case can be made for 1975 as the terminus of an era of innovation. In the next year American advocate of free verse Creeley was to be brought to New Zealand by Paterson, inaugurating a tremendous wave of Modernist and then post-Modernist creativity.
- Some poems of this collection are light-weight but very few are, of their various types, bad. Perhaps the worst of the offerings are the shoddy Baxterian pastiches by Southgate and Manhire, "New Jerusalem sonnets" with their strained or wannabe-Maori or corny imagery: "The journey down, John is the worst./ The feet are a kind of condition -/They want to carry us under the earth,/Not over it." A number of the anthology's poems have the feel of being well contrived verbal machines. They fail to engage a sense of shareable emotion, but seek to perform emotion. Christina Beers' verses are notably of this kind. Only a few of the several hundred poems of the collection convey a sense of delight in verbal and imaginative experimentation. Sometimes one almost expects the pages to be greasy with the sweat that has gone into producing the artefacts upon them. Some are simply callow works written at the ages of 19 and 20 yet included here by editors who prefer those to some of the interesting verse by excluded writers. Some are little different from the Georgian and late Romanticism the editors have declared themselves to be against.
- Nonetheless, there are several poems in this collection which appealed to me as standing out from the rest. In some instances they have remained in my memory from their original publication and were striking and fresh on re-encounter: Mitchell's Night through the orange window, Bland's Lines on leaving the last reservation, Young's After Han-Shan and A season in hell, Manhire's The clown at the death of his wife which catches so much of the theatricality in this volume:
Now I am feeling grief
I have received these flowers
Triste I am, triste
Heaven gawps
Please believe that one
and For President Johnson on the shores of America, Ensing's Laments from an asylum, Haley's Hoardings, Wedde's Poets of love, Merlene Young's alone on the bed, a genuine senryu signifying a growing Japanese influence upon New Zealand poetry: –
alone on the bed
the sound of the typewriter
in the next room
Edmond's Night shift and In a year's turning, Chan's A spirit medical for Fall or Strick, Tuwhare's The New Zealand Land March. It is noticeable that most of these are shorter poems in contrast to some unduly lengthy works. There is also, in the spirit of the times, a manifesto written for One/The World is Freed by Brunton complete with the Blakean conceit "Each thought a conventicle of rhythms & the possible".
- Was the volume worth publishing? Not in this form. Readers looking for a re-creation of the 1960s and 70s will find only a pale and partial representation of it here. The exclusion of so many poems of time which were, whatever the opinions of the editors, as much part of the Modernist movement as any reprinted here very much limits the value of the collection. The incessant recurrence in introductions and the Chronology of the same few names suggests that what we have is in part the self-promotion of a somewhat self-pleased clique and their associates ... together with writers who were party neither to clique nor claque. And of course the limitation of the selection to a 15 year period which excludes both the originators of New Zealand Modernism and later-comers who developed a multitude of Modernisms limits the relevance and the usefulness of the volume.
Even so, there is much to enjoy and admire in this well produced anthology in which virtually all of the included works merit their place.
