Correspondence.

Stead, C.K.

Dear Editor,

Charles Croot suggests that 'the strongest message' to come from my 1988 collection, Between, is that I feel 'undervalued by the literary community', and cites number 16 of my Clodian poems (the one in which Suffenia feminist in fiction and Tullius Tuhoe walk off with the Book Awards) as illustration. I don't deny that there is a connection between 'Catullus' and CKS, but to make it so literal is as crude as it is to suggest that this poems 'message' has more to do with personal pique than with the serious subject of positive discrimination.

Then, as if to ensure that my productive paranoia isn't allowed to grow tired of itself and fall asleep on the job, he offers the following by way of critical insight: 'But Stead the poet suffers from being so well-endowed as Stead the critic; he can't help sounding like the poets he reads and absorbs so effectively.' Poets, it seems, may not echo poets; but critics may echo critics, and do, of course, especially when they feel unsafe thinking for themselves.

If Croot detects 'the unmistakeable voice of Stead loud and clear only in the bitchy imitations of Catullus', what is his complaint about 'echo'? He may not like the poems; he may find them 'bitchy'; but he seems to be saying that in sounding like Catullus I sound most like myself. At least there is something here he hasn't thought out.

But what I would especially like to know, and think I and your readers have the right to ask, is this: which poets am I echoing in the other poems of Between? Who is echoed in 'After the Wedding', for example? To whom do I owe a debt in 'Paris: the End of a Story'? What was my 'source' for 'Going to Heaven'? Mark Williams chose the first and second of these for the Caxton New Zealand Poetry, 1972-86, and Wedde and McQueen chose the first and third for the Penguin Contemporary New Zealand Poetry, so readers of these anthologies might like to share your Mr Croot's secret. (If you would kindly leave a space, perhaps he will answer these questions at the bottom of the page.)

Another extraordinary insight is that 'recycling the classics seems to be the latest Auckland fad'--and to make the point he refers to Kevin Ireland's Tiberius at the Beehive. Of course if the Ireland book had only come out first he would have been able to say I had been stealing from it; chronology prevents this (especially since my Catullus versions began to appear twelve years ago), but doesn't suggest to him that 'influence' might have run the other way. As for 'latest', and 'fad': I suggest he look at Classical New Zealand Poetry ed. Richard J. H. Matthews in which he will find versions of Latin poems by James K. Baxter (16), Fleur Adcock (16), R. A. K. Mason (8), Denis Glover (2), as well as Stead (6), and others.

All of which allows me to add something I have intended for some time to report to you, and which I now see is not unconnected. I have written a number of times about Maurice Duggan's 'Along Rideout Road that Summer', which I have thought, and still think, the finest single example of New Zealand short fiction. About a year ago I read Nabokov's Lolita for the first time and was struck by a connection I ought to have known about when editing Duggan's stories--a recognition so powerful and immediate it was as if Nabokov had been influenced by Duggan. In fact it even became the measure of what seemed a critical failure in the Nabokov novel; because somewhere well on in Lolita the Duggan 'influence' faded and died--by which I mean, of course, that Nabokov lost the particular and peculiar 'voice' established for perhaps the first third or half of the book. Even Duggan's explanation to me (which I report in my notes to the Collected Stories) that Buster O'Leary's occasional address to certain unidentified 'Gentlemen' was to the gentlemen of an imagined jury comes, I now see, direct from the structure of Lolita.

Does this recognition make me think less of Duggan or his story? Not in the least. Writers must take from literature as they take from life, and make it their own. Our problem in New Zealand--our lack--is not over-literary writers but rather the under-educated ones who are egotistical enough to believe that the 'individual talent' is enough, and too stupid, too lazy or self-absorbed, to make themselves part of the living, on-going continuum which is literature.

Your homespun Mr Croot (he thinks Louis Johnson's 'contribution to poetry ... cannot be over-estimated'--Really?) is perhaps the very critic such writing calls for; but is that the level of sophistication something which calls itself a Journal of New Zealand Literature should be content with?

C. K. Stead

Dear Sir,

It is no small task to make an overview of all of the poetry published in New Zealand in two years. In the main Charles Croot has covered the field thoroughly, but I would like to take up a few points.

1. 'fulfilling earlier promise' ... I have already taken Michael King to task for this limp bromide that too many New Zealand reviewers trot out when they can think of nothing else to say. Besides the list of those now living up to their promise is rather odd--three women poets in their early thirties and three male poets in their late forties/early fifties. My own view would be that while Barford and Leggot are still 'promising', French arrived mature. Very arguably her first book All Cretans are Liars is superior to the nagging The Male as Evader (and I do think we need a companion volume, The Female as Evader). The male poets listed are surely beyond the age and stage when they can be considered promising. (In my own case the books under review are my seventh, eighth and ninth volumes.)

2. Inconsistency. Though hailed as fulfilling my promise on p. 15, on p. 25 I discover that I write 'thin straggly poems' and haven't yet learnt how to apply the discrimination and discipline that would give my work entry to the top rank. Alack! It would appear that what we have here (as Strother Martin told Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke) is a failure to communicate. I thought it rather obvious that A Case of Briefs and The American Hero Loosens his Tie were playful volumes more or less deploying American idioms. They weren't so to speak shooting for the top shelf (i.e., late late Modernism or whatever). Perhaps one should label certain works an entertainment, though surely the titles and the covers of the books shrieked their shoot-from-the-hip tone. Rosemary Menzies suffers a similar love/hate approach. On p. 24 she is making an impact. A few lines down she is going on a bit and needs stern editing. By p. 30 only a few poems in her book To Where the Bare Earth Waits warrant publication! You can't have it both ways, Charles.

3. Inaccuracy. Croot says I published three books in 1988-89. Actually I published four (the missing one is New Zealand--What Went Wrong?). My articles both definite and indefinite have been stripped from A Case of Briefs and The American Hero Loosens his Tie.

4. Cliched critical language. I have already dealt with the promising bromide. On p. 17 we have productive toil in the poetic vineyard and sticks closely to his familiar last, without even a saving nuance of irony. Apart from the fact that neither vintner Smithyman nor blacksmith Turner would turn in such antediluvian imagery, they hardly seem the stuff of scholarly comment.

5. Kicking a man when he's down. This could well apply to myself--regularly passed up by anthologies, not mentioned in the poetry chapter of the Oxford History of New Zealand Literature--but I was thinking of C. E. G. Moisa. Currently Moisa would hardly loom large on our poetic horizon, but Croot reminds us that he had five dubious volumes published. So? This leads to the sixth point:

6. Naivety about poetry publishers. On p. 30 Croot complains about publishers of serious poetry not doing their editing. One Eyed Press and Hudson/Cresset are not Oxford or Auckland University presses; they are the equivalent of garage bands--backyard presses publishing friends. And where would we be without friends--or garage bands?

7. No long well-developed poems. Charles, you mention Dr Strangelove's Prescription in your survey, but did you open its highly explosive cover? You would have discovered a ... wait for it ... long poem. And speaking of being well-developed, I was tested at the last literary olympics and found to be free of that equivalent to an anabolic steroid, i.e., a course in poststructural poetics.

8. Bibliography. Not mentioned was One Candle One Night by Charles Bisley, published by Blackwood.

9. Swinging sentences p. 28 : The universities and teachers' colleges have a lot to answer for here because they are still sending out to the chalk-face graduates who can, etc. What is it that the universities are still sending out to the chalk-face graduates? This sentence does not tell us.

10. Confused thought. On pp. 27-28 Croot appears to be arguing that we get so much bad poetry because teachers of English haven't come to grips with the fact that it is 60 years since we had much rhyme and metre and thus we have readers who don't understand modern poetry. Does the conclusion follow from the premise? I think not. In any case the teachers seem to have grasped the shedding of rhyme ... but (in any case) it's back! Look at master Eggleton! Even our Kendrick sneaks in rhyme or two in his lastest book. I myself wrote a rhyming quatrain as recently as 1981!

11. Simplifying military metaphor. Curnow as junta chairman/dictator (and even Pope!). Smithyman as one of Curnow's lieutenants? I'm sure both will be gasping and on the double....

12. Inadequate particularising of automobile metaphor. I surmise Croot's extended automobile metaphor on p. 31 may been supercharged by Leigh Davis's witty but silly observation that Curnow was like a 1957 Chrysler. Croot divides New Zealand poets between true car makers and assemblers. I agree about assemblers--certainly this would fit many of our university-conditioned poets. And it would have been interesting had Croot started naming names. However, there is another category--the Hot Rodders: Peter Olds, Sam Hunt, David Eggleton, Alan Brunton (and on occasion--myself?) And possibly a fourth category--those that own a tired old English car (a Humber or Rover) and keep patching it up. I could name names but....

Sincerely,

Michael Morrissey