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Notes Made in Winter
A poem has substance and form. Poets are concerned with the substance most – you see, they hope to write again some time, they are looking forward, and they can borrow form or trim one up any day of the week, but substance is hard to come by. The icy brooms of cloud are sweeping the top of Mount Kaukau. Tomorrow I will go through five tunnels into that great ditch called Wellington City, whose own quiet inanity is much more terrible than any vial of plague an angel could empty on it; and I will swim there with other newts through office and coffee-bar, and watch other newts trying desperately and angrily to climb up high straw ladders; and I will light the gas fire in my hutch and work the typewriter like someone playing the banjo with his feet:
Like salamanders we don’t realize
The element we live in – Us
Bureaucrats I mean. A tight
Cramp like the impulse to masturbate
Squeezes me as I tilt back on the chair
Of bent tubes and sponge rubber
Between the loaded desk and the door shut
By a forgotten choice. It is not
New: this nausea, a flicker of
Cold fire. My wife’s photograph
With canoes in her eyes, and a steel crucifix
Pinned on the wall, shatter the reflex
That yielded for an instant to the invisible flame
Of nothingness. Caesar is not. I am. (‘The Bureaucrats’, CP 249)
The academic critics study form. Like punters. That is because they make a living by it, in the universities; or gain kudos by it, in their hair-splitting reviews. I remember C.K. Stead about five years ago taking apart Alistair Campbell’s ‘Elegy’ in Landfall – he listed fourteen nouns, eighteen adjectives, and thirteen present particles, and groaned about the welter he himself had made, as if Campbell had been to blame for it. The point of Campbell’s poem lay in its extraordinary substance: the animistic lament of a Southland valley for the death of a mountaineer. It had enough form to make the substance plain; and that is all it needed. Form is only of primary importance in light parlour verse.
I see New Zealand verse afflicted with a disease of formalism. Waiting for the formalin bath of the academic anthologist. If you read Landfall, you will find that at least half the verse included there is anaemic in substance, intricate in form – wire and glass structures, light-weight, like the mobiles they hang up in a pub lounge. The substance depends on what the man knows, at the time of writing; the form depends on his skill in expressing it. Who wants to be told, in five well-wrought stanzas, that it’s a nice day, the poet had radishes for dinner, his wife has yellow hair, and he’s feeling a bit queasy? When you look at what’s behind it, you can find a gently sighing void. Yes, of course, Picasso can make a lively bit of sculpture by putting the handlebars of a bicycle on to a horse’s skull; but Picasso did that for fun; he also painted ‘Guernica’.
I find this lopsided emphasis on form throughout Curnow’s new Penguin anthology. If it becomes popular in the secondary schools (and of course it will be, being cheap) we will have a fresh generation of poets fitting together bits of wire and glass. It wasn’t really a revolution in form, though, when Curnow and Mason and Glover and Brasch and Fairburn first got under way. Mason used the old gas-bracket Housman had left behind him; Brasch picked up a bit from Rilke and a lot from Yeats; Glover used the Georgian forms, jazzing them up with a bit of conversation; Fairburn developed a loose, sometimes sloppy free verse from Eliot and some of the other Americans; it was only Curnow who experimented a lot with form, and after all (not being nasty) he did have the least to say; and his sonnets are generally as makeshift as Fairburn’s free verse.
No, the revolution was a revolution in substance. (Plenty of the deadbeats in the C.A. Marris school could turn a sonnet formally as well as Mason could.) The thing was that all these poets knew something; and they managed, against external and internal censorship, to get what they knew down on paper. Glover knew that life was tough in Pig Island, even for a Captain Cooker; Fairburn knew that some women can do surprising things; Mason caught the whiff of Grandfather’s corpse laid to rest in the earth closet; Brasch noticed that Rangitoto resembled Mum; and Curnow re-wrote the Primary School history-book.
page 598I grant you that they needed form to put these things across. But it was their eyesight, not their skill in placing commas, which made them good poets.
Getting back to the Penguin anthology – Curnow makes it abundantly clear in his Introduction that only one kind of substance will pass muster with him: Kiwi stuff, bush broodings, seacoast broodings, mountain broodings, by poets who still think of London as the centre of the cultural universe. He even tries to twist Mason’s ruminations on the isolation of the human race in the stellar system into a poem about the second Fall: the fall of Grandad from an English country vicarage to a Canterbury sheep-run. I grant that this kind of substance can be found scattered through New Zealand poetry; but it’s not the only kind of substance. Take Louis Johnson’s explorings of the Don Juan situation; or Smithyman’s wry, tender reflections on married life; or Peter Bland’s Orpheus of the Jazz Age; or my own elegy for an Irish publican. Their substance is richer than almost anything you’ll find in the Penguin anthology; but they don’t fit Curnow’s box, so he doesn’t want them.
Poems are loopholes into human experience: symbolic microcosms of the world of the person who makes them. I can think of plenty of fine poems (the Spoon River Anthology, for example, by Edgar Lee Masters) in which the formal element is cut to the minimum, a mere hole ripped in a corrugated iron tank, but the substance of the poems is so real, so fertile, that you can read them a thousand times and still come back for more.
A training-college boy writes a bit of free verse; a female librarian writes a sonnet. They show it to you, and you say something about its form, God help your hypocrisy, and I mean my own – because the truth is too impolite – ‘Dear Jack, dear Sally, your poems are the product of the pressure of intolerably vacant, hide-bound lives. I don’t blame you much. Calvin had something to do with it; and his unconscious disciple, Peter Fraser. But if you can’t find a way out of it, get hold of some actual substance, you’ll never write a line that makes sense, and you’ll live and die wondering why.’
Those who think and write about poems primarily in terms of their form imply that there are tricks of the trade; and that anyone who learns these can learn to write. That is nonsense. A blind man cannot tell you what an ostrich looks like, not if he knows every word in the Braille dictionary; a man who has never experienced love cannot write a love poem. The present black frost in New Zealand letters can only be lifted (I think) by a few people (who must possess, I grant, a minimum capacity to write) getting off their suckers, forgetting the kudos game and the hair-splitting reviews and the echoing university morgues, and finding out and setting down what they actually know. And if they find that after thirty years’ intensive State education they don’t know anything at all, and decide to remedy the situation by getting a job as a chucker-out in a brothel – well, they’ll find it hard going, becausepage 599 there aren’t any brothels in this country, except metaphorical ones, like advertising agencies or State organs of publicity.
1962 (286)