A Day for a Lay

Salient's printers, the Wanganui Chronicle, declined to print a centre-spread of the W.H. Auden poem, "A Day for a Lay," in the last issue. This is the second time this year that the firm's management has not accepted a centre-spread in the form submitted. Chronicle Manager Mead commented to "Truth" that "it was something we did not want to print. There were page break claims that it had literary merit; not being an expert, I was not able to say if it had."

This was the point: it had no literary merit, or, more exactly, that was an irrelevant criterion. This is not to say that if the case had (or does) come to court, no-one would testify to the poem's literary worth; but that this was not the intention in publishing it. There are some who would believe that there is a qualitative difference between good wanking fodder with literary merit, and the same thing without. The indecency law is framed in this way, and the executive's decision to print was taken in defiance of a law which provides that personal literary values can be mitigating factors in prosecutions of this kind. The poem does seem to have provoked as much comment as anything else in Salient this year, which is a pretty damning condemnation of the kind of worthless muck being churned out.