Hard News: A Century Since
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If you can get hold of the newest number of the New Zealand Journal of History, Nepia Mahuika's article has some powerful things to say about 'learning the trick of standing upright here'. No online version yet I'm afraid, but it will more than reward a walk to your local library..
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I've been enjoying the Curnow readings on National Radio, and how they're presented in context.
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I've got to admit that you've quoted the obvious anthology piece (which it is for good reason), but the Curnow poems that always get me is Magnificat from his 1972 sequence Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects:
Who hasn’t sighted Mary
as he hung hot-paced
by the skin of the humped highway
south from Waikanae
three hundred feet above the
only life-size ocean?
Tell me, mother of mysteries,
how long is time?Twelve electric bulbs
halo Mary’s head,
a glory made visible
six feet in diameter,
two hundred and forty-five feet
of solid hill beneath,
Tell me, mother of the empty grave,
how high is heaven?Mary’s blessed face
is six-and-a-half feet long,
her nose eighteen inches,
her hands the same.
Conceived on such a scale,
tell me, Dolorosa,
how sharp should a thorn be?
how quick is death?Mary’s frame is timbered
of two-by-four,
lapped with scrim and plastered
three inches thick.
Westward of Kapiti
the sun is overturned.
Tell me, Star of the Sea,
what is darkness made of?Mary has a manhole
in the back of her head.
How else could a man get down there
for maintenance, etc?
Mary is forty-seven feet,
and that’s not tall.
Tell me, by the Bread in your belly,
how big is God?I AM THE IMMACULATE
CONCEPTION says
Mary’s proud pedestal.
Her lips concur.
Masterful giantess,
don’t misconceive me,
tell me, mother of the Way,
where is the world? -
Deb Mudie, in reply to
I've been enjoying the Curnow readings on National Radio...
I was about to say that very thing. They've been great listening, the last few days.
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Kate Hannah, in reply to
Did my MA with Nepia. Lovely chap and 'tis indeed an excellent article.
And thanks Russell for celebrating Curnow today - those words still resonate so many years later, as we all learn and relearn that trick. One of the little notes above my desk has a scrawled Carol Ann Duffy quote - poetry is the noise of being human - and Curnow's poems have always struck me as being an attempt at the noise of being a New Zealander. I see Michael King's beautifil summary of New Zealanders in the conclusion of the Penguin History as the descendant of Curnow's 'standing upright here'.
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John Armstrong, in reply to
Mmm. The reason I linked to Nepia's article, 'Closing the Gaps', is because it raises some critical questions about the somewhat cosy narrative that King and others have produced. I don't know enough about Curnow's oeuvre to make a judgement, but the poem that Russell has posted here - an iconic one - can certainly be read to support this narrative: that for those of us with European heritage, becoming a 'New Zealander' can be done entirely on out own terms, or at best by modelling our stance on a glass-encased indigenous museum piece. I am lucky enough to work with Nepia every day, and exposure to ideas such as those that the cited piece articulates has made me uneasy about that narrative. I think it also provides an immensely powerful alternative path to finding a way to stand in these islands.
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I saw the headline and thought you were referring toIBM's birthday that's all over the tech wires.
Sigh, now I feel like a geek, me who was an eng-lit major at Uni.
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Another recent, sad death of a NZ poet was Ken Arvidson. A real gent who taught in the English Dept at the University of Waikato.
Excellent Media 7 last night, Russell.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Excellent Media 7 last night, Russell.
Thanks Geoff. I thought I wasn't quite on form personally, but Jose's two tracks were brilliant.
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I hadn't heard about Ken Arvidson, he was one of my lecturers on the aforementioned eng-lit track. He was an odd duck - not what one would expect a poet to be like (which is probably a result of me having grown up while Sam Hunt was touring schools).
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Just while I think about it, here’s something for Friday from the Udmurt Republic in Russia. Starts off a bit new-agey, but gets a nice groove on, and it’s beautiful, too.
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Graig - thanks
Fantastic line " Tell me, mother of the empty grave, how high is heaven?" -
Thanks for bringing the 100th birthday to attention of this Curnow fan too. It seems clear he did learn to stand upright here, so it's interesting his assertion in his youthful 30s/early 1940s that he wouldn't. And the moa perception is of its time too, the failure to adapt rather than being hunted to extinction as now recognised - indeed "The stain of blood that writes an island story" (yes, "Landfall in Unknown Seas" would be my favourite of his early poems).
I long wondered what was it that made 1911 a marvellous year (note double ell in Curnow's and Oxford's spelling). Then I found that Kendrick Smithyman had wondered too, and had the answer -
What, if anything, happened in 1911?
Somebody screwed someone, somebody else
screwed up.I guess Smithyman was not such a fan of this particular poem of Curnow's, on the evidence (from Smithyman Online)
of -MOWER: RUAPEKAPEKA
Skeleton of a motor mower on iron crutches,
its own museum piece, eyes fix on in that museumwithout walls, the paddock’s fag end. What used to be
a tractorshed keels into windbreak broken macrocarpaalong with the tractor, early Fordson, and Terraplane
without wheels or motives, a swaybacked Mack dumper,an almost toothless hayrake. It was not born in any
marvellous year, has forgotten tricks of standing upright.Luxurious man brought/brings to use his vice,
anvil, welding torch, elsewhere to other ends.Where Nature was most plain and pure wild onion,
hemlock, cow parsley, rage and rant. The mower’s bonesare chilled, as are the gods themselves who no more
with us seemly dwell. -
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And just to lower the tone I think we have to have this too:
No moa, no moa
In old Ao-tea-roa.
Can't get 'em.
They've et 'em;
They've gone and there aint no moa!(popular New Zealand song, quoted in Trotter and McCulloch 1984)
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Lilith __, in reply to
MOWER: RUAPEKAPEKA
Burn! But brilliantly done. :-)
[can someone remind me of the name of that South Island painter who did a series of huge heroic paintings of his motor mower?]
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Ah, it was Philip Trusttum. And the only one of his mower paintings I can find online.
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popular New Zealand song
from a poem by W Chamberlain.
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I long wondered what was it that made 1911 a marvellous year
…Eh? It’s a real struggle getting to that reading of it.
The voice of the poem (“I”) is presumably Curnow, born in 1911, who watches children interacting with the exhibit.
“Not I” is therefore “some child” born at a later time;
indeed, perhaps born in some future,
unimaginable at the time of narration,
“marvellous year”.* * *
One of my favourite NZ paintings
(albeit for its dark humour more than for its technique)
is a piece in the VUW collection, “Onward”,
which shows a moa, lumbering on blindly, boldly going …
in all likelihood to its death in a swamp.
Which, of course, is a kind of posterity,
given where the bones on display were dug up from. -
Didn't quite track down the reference within 15 minutes, but here it is:
"Onward" by Caroline Williams (1987) -
It's hard to go past Baxter;
Alone we are born
And die alone
Yet see the red-gold cirrus
over snow-mountain shine.That'll do me.
It's not hard to walk upright here, but it's hard to walk in the right direction.
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JLM, in reply to
“Not I” is therefore “some child” born at a later time;
indeed, perhaps born in some future,
unimaginable at the time of narration,
“marvellous year”.I sent this link to my daughter, a Curnow fan, addressing her as "my child born in a marvellous year" which tickled her greatly.
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I was privileged to work on 'Early Days Yet,' Shirley Horrocks' 2001 documentary and what Allen said that day will always remain with me: "A poet can work very hard all day to put in a comma...then spend all of the next day taking it out"
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ChrisW, in reply to
I long wondered what was it that made 1911 a marvellous year
…Eh? It’s a real struggle getting to that reading of it.Well, seems the straightforward reading to me, and I would understand also to Smithyman who was a colleague of Curnow's over many years. But yes, there is the alternative reading, seeming less obvious to me given the conspicuous pair of commas making 'some child' apparently parenthetic. Perhaps a little creative ambiguity, but for essentially the same overall meaning anyway, of a future Curnow not only imagined but promoted.
Clearly that second comma of the pair was one Allen Curnow had in mind in Cromie's quote above, and after Smithyman's poking the borax, he probably thought he should have spent another day or two on it.
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nzlemming, in reply to
I was privileged to work on ‘Early Days Yet,’ Shirley Horrocks’ 2001 documentary and what Allen said that day will always remain with me: “A poet can work very hard all day to put in a comma…then spend all of the next day taking it out"
Obviously, poets are doing nothing to close the productivity gap with Australia. The government will therefore introduce legislation (under urgency) to require a quota of verse (including commas) per day that will soon see us rise up the OECD rankings.
"They toil not, neither do they spin..."
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- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which sayswe are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraphAnd death i think is no parenthesis
Not a NZ poet, but strong on punctuation.
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