On the margins? New Zealand little magazines from Freed to And.

Williams, Mark

I propose to examine here the recent emergence in this country of an oppositional literary scene capable of mounting a sustained challenge to New Zealand's major literary institutions: Landfall and Islands. By 'institutions', I mean of course, not merely two journals but also the sets of attitudes and assumptions of which they are representative. I shall concentrate my discussion on two little magazines: The Word is Freed which ran through five numbers between 1969 and 1972, and And which ran through four numbers between August 1983 and October 1985. My contention is that in the years between 1972 and 1985 a change occurred in the relations between the major institutions and what C.K. Stead, in his review of Michael Morrissey's anthology The New Fiction in 1986, has called 'the margins'. (1)

One indication of this change is found, I would suggest, in the differences in tone which Stead has adopted towards the literary stances and personnel associated with the two journals in question. From as early as 1972 Stead showed himself very receptive to at least some aspects of Freed, reviewing David Mitchell's Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby extremely favourably in the first number of Islands, (2) which came out around the time of the disappearance of Freed, and conferring his approval on Ian Wedde whom Stead has described as one of Freed's instigators. (3) By 1979 in 'From Wystan to Carlos' Stead was maintaining that the major line in contemporary New Zealand poetry, which he characterizes as 'open form', had entered chiefly by way of Freed. (4) What is interesting here is not Stead's contribution to the by now tedious squabble about 'moderns' versus 'modernists' (an argument which goes back under different names at least as far as Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise [1949]), (5) but rather Stead's determination to put at the centre of local literary history a movement which had deliberately situated itself on the margins, and had done so not out of resentment or even a sense of exclusion but because the 'mainstream' held no attractions. In effect, Stead in 'From Wystan to Carlos' was in the business of institutionalizing Freed: sorting out its major figures from its minor ones, deciding which Freed innovations were acceptable and which (chiefly what Stead called 'surrealism') were not, and connecting it historically with such canonical predecessors as Phoenix, which went through its own four numbers in Auckland in the 1930s. The whole exercise constituted a calculated process of revision by which a subversive literary movement was purged of its most dangerous excesses and resituated in the 'mainstream'.

Towards the post-structuralist position associated with And, however, Stead has been decidedly less responsive. Where he has taken note, he has generally been dismissive. In his review of The New Fiction he takes the opportunity to call into question the competence of most of those associated with And. (6) He has not singled out for special mention and approval any poet associated with And, or for that matter with Splash, a loosely related magazine, as he did Mitchell. (One might suggest Leigh Davis as a suitable candidate for such attention: a likely contender for institutional honours once his enfant terrible days are over.) Above all, Stead shows his annoyance that 'academic worm[s]' like Simon During, who deconstructed Stead's critical rhetoric in And/1, should rebel 'against the authority of literature', or that writers like Russell Haley should be praised because their work 'suits current theoretical approaches to literature'. (7) Tellingly, it was During who used the conceited terms 'over-reading' and 'under-reading' in his And/1 article, 'Towards a Revision of Local Critical Habits'. (8) During's article provided the literary-critical 'Left' with a model stance of direct attack on the guardians of local literature. The key to this new stance was to sound as authoritative as Stead himself but to employ with total composure a critical technology derived from structuralism and post-structuralism which had made few inroads into the local critical scene and which Stead himself had studiously ignored. In response to this, Stead's Islands review strategically restages Curnow's dismissal of postmodernism and its local variants in his 1982 Turnbull lecture, 'Olson as Oracle'. (9) Where Curnow had drawn an exclusionary line around Olson and postmodernism, Stead draws one around post-structuralism.

The reasons for this change of stance towards the marginal are not far to seek. In the first place Freed never constituted a threat to the institutionalized values and priorities of 'New Zealand literature' (the term itself implying an institution, something imposing and monolithic with power to make its prejudices and preferences seem natural) in the way that And has. Freed was, of course, loudly and exuberantly oppositional. But in spite of Brunton's promise in the first number to take up 'THE STRUGGLE WITH THE THEORY', Freed never managed to arrive at any developed critique of the governing assumptions of 'New Zealand literature'. (10) Brunton hurled his dada-anarchist slogans, Haley engaged in surrealist acts of subversion, Murray Edmond launched a brief but colourful attack on the Curnow stress on geographical remoteness, but none of this was likely to shift entrenched attitudes in the universities or the established literary journals. At the level of theory Freed was too diffuse an instrument to serve as the vanguard of a thoroughgoing revolution in local poetics or local critical habits.

Yet Brunton did initiate a theoretical revaluation of New Zealand poetry by attempting, as Murray Edmond put it in Freed/3, 'to blast a literary scene and an international awareness out of the Chinese wails of ingratiating taste-mongering that have been erected about us'. (11) Freed took up a number of positions, mainly through Brunton, that were to prove influential. Firstly, Freed began a strong swerve away from what Wedde in his introduction to the 1985 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse calls 'hieratic' language (this is roughly equivalent to Connolly's 'mandarin' writing, though Wedde has taken the term from Northrop Frye) towards speech-based language, or again in Wedde's terms, towards the 'demotic'. (12) Wedde's interest in this kind of language-use was prompted not by his association with Freed but by his experiences in Jordan, where he says he first encountered two languages operating side by side: 'an official lingua franca, classical, oratorical, and the local language' wherein vernacular poets worked. (13) Nonetheless it agreed with Freed's bias towards the speaking self, which was in part a reaction against Curnow's high, mandarin style, his preference for metaphysics and symbolism. There is a romantic base to Freed's early postmodernism which finds its classic theoretical formulation in Wedde's introduction to the 1985 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, where he sets out to revise Curnow's dominating precursive text by stressing the oral, the demotic, the growth of language towards location. There are certain similarities also to Wystan Curnow's 'pastoral' (14) version of postmodernism as outlined in Parallax/1 with its emphasis on the breath, its call for a 'reinstatement of the oral'. (15) But there the romanticism, out of Gregory Bateson, A.N. Whitehead and ultimately Coleridge, is more determining, the whole carapaced in a kind of semi-mystical organicism. In Freed the stresses are all fresh and uncodified, a mixture of unresolved elements generating experiment. And Freed was careful to set what was picked up from elsewhere to work on the local, to apply it inventively to what was to hand. Wystan Curnow's essay simply ignores all local versions of postmodernism and defines a position culled from U.S. art journals. (16)

At any rate, Freed was too determined not to take itself overly seriously for it to set about advancing any programme for a revolution in local poetics. High seriousness, after all, was the preserve of Curnow pere. Its revolutionary impulses were genuine enough, but Freed somehow managed to mix together elements of dada, anarchism, romanticism, American poetics from Pound and Williams to Olson and Creeley, with the period enthusiasm for sexual and hallucinogenic experimentation, and even with a respectful interest in the 'stubbornly individual' poetry of Kendrick Smithyman, in other words with neglected aspects of the local and the particular. (17) It was this very untidiness of purpose that made Freed so attractive as an oppositional focus in a narrow and stuffy literary scene. Freed was part of the general reaction against the forces of repression--literary, sexual, political, pedagogical--that was a central feature of the late '60s and early '70s. It was a vehicle through which the various enthusiasms of the period announced themselves and asserted their differences.

None of this was threatening to Allen Curnow or Stead or to the established journals. Curnow confessed in reply to Stead's attempt in 'From Wystan to Carlos' to fit him into the 'open form' line that the entire Freed phenomenon had passed unnoticed by him. (18) Stead himself was able by way of his revisionist interpretation to put Freed to the purposes of his own poetry politics. Freed provided him with an opportunity, which he seized upon with impressive single-mindedness, progressively to shift the 'mainstream' of New Zealand poetry away from the traditionalist influences of Vincent O'Sullivan and Fleur Adcock. Moreover, Stead was able to broaden his own poetic practice by responding positively to Mitchell. Clearly Stead was impressed by Mitchell's ability to get very transient kinds of experience into his poetry without losing that 'musical' quality which Stead has always favoured. (19) Mitchell's effect on him was, though in a far less significant way, like that of Baxter: it was a means of distancing himself from his longstanding poetic father figure, Curnow, without relegating himself to the 'margins'. The trick was to move Curnow and the salvageable parts of Freed closer together, thereby placing his own poetic preferences firmly at the 'centre'.

As for the established journals, in the period under discussion their fortunes were inseparable from the movements of Robin Dudding. As editor of Landfall from 1969 to 1971, Dudding published most of the younger poets who were to achieve prominence in the '70s. Wedde, Manhire, Edmond, Haley, Sam Hunt, and even Wystan Curnow, were all published in Landfall before the arrival of Freed or Islands or Arthur Baysting's Young New Zealand Poets anthology in 1973. When Dudding left Landfall to establish Islands he took with him not only established poets like Allen Curnow but also the most promising among the younger poets, the effect of which was to leave Landfall becalmed until well into the 1980s. The tradition handed down from Charles Brasch to Dudding had departed from the Caxton Press and was not to return. At any rate, we need to keep it in mind that Wedde, in spite of Stead's assertion to the contrary in 'From Wystan to Carlos', was no more a Freed poet than an Islands poet, or for that matter a Landfall poet before 1971. He was simply a very prolific and talented young poet who published widely and kept his options open as far as allegiances went.

Yet Freed had a vital function in the literary economy that can only be understood in terms of its positioning in opposition to Islands and the notion of literary value that journal represented. To turn from Islands to Freed is to turn from a solidly built, top-of-the-line product offering 'the best' of the eminent and the emergent, to the 'research-and-development sector' of the poetry economy, provided we understand by the latter term not some gleaming and well-funded high tech centre but an anarchic backyard machine shop given to eccentric experiment and adventuresome bricolage. And in a New Zealand tradition of mixing local and foreign elements, of squeezing the contents of the traditional filled roll into the imported croissant, Freed was able to nativize its exotic borrowings. (This practice is not to be confused with that described by Leonard Wilcox when he defines the colonial bricoleur as he who 'attempt[s] to construct a cultural artifact, a representational form from transplanted materials from the old world, a 'classic' work of 'high' culture'. (20)) From its inception Freed was the risk-taker in a conspicuously cautious scene, not because it published less well known poets than Landfall or Islands but because it had a broader understanding of the literary than either of these journals under any of their editors. Freed wasn't fighting merely to substitute one kind of poetry for another kind (although necessarily and properly the magazine had clear ideas about what kinds of poetry could be written here).

Freed made a number of key breaks with prevailing orthodoxies. In particular, Freed broke with the key Curnow insistence on the poet's task of redeeming New Zealand from its historylessness and remoteness. It was time, as Murray Edmond put it in the third number of Freed, 'to stop nam[ing] them hills' and to set about 'construct[ing] a poetic'. (21) If the poetic was never finally constructed, at least the need for one was recognized, and this was a significant shift from Curnow's refusal to let such abstract concerns as poetics get between the poet and the reality he/she was forever failing to reach.

Also, Freed moved the old dispute about nationalism versus internationalism away from the Manichaean simplicities that had characterized it previously. In Wellington in the 1950s Baxter and Louis Johnson had reacted against Curnow's insistence on 'the New Zealand referent' as landscape, by turning towards urban experience, the kind of experience that could be found anywhere in the modern western world. (22) Freed extended the scope of this necessary reaction not so much by introducing more extreme kinds of experience (Baxter had already taken this about as far as it could go), as by avoiding the Baxterian habit of orotundity, the jeremiahan tone he adopted when dealing with contemporary life. Where Baxter, however much he disguised himself as the Catholic flagellant, was always something of a protestant prophet for whom drugtakers and drop-outs figured apocalyptically, the Freed poets were enthusiastically engaged in counter-cultural activity without seeking to turn that activity into religion, mysticism or vatic social pronouncement. In the poetry of Murray Edmond that comes out of his Freed period, collected in his 1974 volume Entering the Eye, we find an exact, immediate, wholly accepting registering from within of the demi-world of Auckland students, night-shift workers, party-goers, poets, and lovers, of the period. Yet Edmond's poetry is also rich in New Zealand historical material, a stress that goes back, chiefly by way of Kendrick Smithyman's longstanding effort to get this kind of information into his poetry, to Curnow's efforts from the 1930s on to define the peculiar quality of experience in this place (actually, Curnow was always a reluctant nationalist who saw the writer's obligation to mediate his vision through his country much as he saw the general post-Christian obligation to concentrate on the untranscendable world to hand: as something unavoidable but regrettable). (23)

Moreover, the Freed poets were open to international influence in a way that was as alien to Baxter and Johnson as to Curnow. They were responsive to movements, manifestoes and ideas, political as well as poetical. Curnow had always allowed that the poet in this country must be open to the influence of strong poets from whatever source, but only as one attentive poet reading and assimilating another. The signal achievement of the Freed poets in this respect was to be responsive to movements, to those abstract 'theories' which Curnow characterized as 'intellectual or academic fossils', (24) while remaining attentive to the bearing of those movements here, to the peculiarly local shapes they might take. Thus they avoided substituting Baxter for Curnow as the urgent precursor, and Murray Edmond, at least, elected instead to explore the dense, difficult but potentially rewarding terrain opened up by Smithyman, whose critical method over several years had involved keeping alert to movements and trends in contemporary American poetics while minutely exploring the local.

In other words, while not programmatic, Freed was open to theory and poetics in an exploratory way. Hence, for all its diffusely directed energies, Freed had a sharper focus than Islands. It didn't privilege the man-of-taste notion of excellence that had proceeded from Brasch to Dudding. It didn't set about institutionalizing itself. It was short-lived but left behind a formidable legacy, and this has been not unusual in the history of New Zealand literary journals: that change has been initiated by little magazines, cheaply produced and lasting a few numbers only. Above all, Freed increased the ideas input of the New Zealand poetry scene at a crucial moment. This is especially vital in a scene given to sinking into orthodoxy, to closing itself against change, difference, movement of any kind, a scene with too few journals and those not sufficiently differentiated.

Throughout the 1970s a succession of small magazines competed with Landfall through its doldrums and Islands through its years of literary preeminence and precarious existence. But the decisive movements of the literary scene over these years were effected not by Mate, Cave, Pilgrims, Edge, Lipsync, or Spleen but by Stead, who engaged himself in shifting the whole weight of the scene leftwards, at the same time making sure that the more radical elements to his own left were marginalized. The effectiveness of Stead's endeavours here is attested by one of the margins' most consistent and astute polemicists, Roger Horrocks, in the form of a complaint in Parallax/3:

 ... It is time that Stead's 'open form' ceased to be thought of as
 an advanced position, as 'the new mode'. Certainly there are still
 readers who regard The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse [1960] as
 their bible, or who wish that Stead spent more time with British
 poets and stopped hanging out with American punks. Still, the
 position described in 'From Wystan to Carlos' is smack in the
 middle of the road, and it's taking up so much room it blocks the
 fast lanes. (25)

From Horrocks' position 'on the margins' Stead's activity over the 1970s looks not only middle-of-the road, but also appropriative. Stead repositioned the 'centre' by stating a view of modernism that included elements of postmodernism while retaining elements of the realism Stead himself has never wholly dislodged from his poetry. For Horrocks, Stead thus not only kept in the outer darkness the truly adventurous poets in this country but also took over and vulgarized the key terms of the adventure they undertook. Moreover, Stead's contentious construction of contemporary literary history became swiftly institutionalized, and thus, according to Horrocks, pre-empted discussion and blocked off contestatory positions. Stead exercized enormous leverage by virtue of his clearly defined, but to Horrocks misrepresenting, positions. His 'open form' 'mainstream' of New Zealand poetry was broad enough to include poets like Wedde (at least until the rupture over Wedde's editing of the 1985 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse), (26) and Murray Edmond, but excluded 'surrealists' like Haley and over-theorizers like Alan Loney, Wystan Curnow and Horrocks himself. Moreover, throughout the late 1970s and into the '80s it was Stead, not Loney or Wystan Curnow, who stood as the fearsome theorizer and doctrinaire 'modernist' of New Zealand poetry in the eyes of conservative mainstream poets like Fleur Adcock and Lauris Edmond.

Stead's 'misrepresentation' of postmodernism, his cunning displacement of the 'genuine' practitioners, account in part for the anger and resentment shown by Ixmey in his savage review of Stead's 'Walking Westward' in Islands, 30. (27) As late as 1979 Stead had praised Loney's work in 'From Wystan to Carlos', (28) but Loney evidently finds such praise more discomforting than censure. He has no desire to be offered a subsidiary position in Stead's revised mainstream. The 'Walking Westward' review signals Loney's determination to effect a decisive break with Stead's poetic, to clear the terms for polemical use. Specifically, Loney uses Olson as a lever against Stead as Stead had used Pound against what he calls 'the Georgian realist tradition'. (29) He starts out from Stead's assumption that poets cannot afford to ignore literary history, in the post-war period.

The 'Walking Westward' review signalled not only Loney's resistance to inclusion in Stead's 'open form' line but also his new determination to define clearly a counter position, to establish an opposing line. Hence, when Loney founded Parallax: a Journal of Post-modern Literature and Art in 1982 he chose to include articles as well as poetry and fiction. Thus Parallax set itself the task of providing a theoretical infrastructure for postmodernism in this country, as its predecessor, Morepork (a Dunedin-based magazine of postmodern poetry edited by Graham Lindsay, who was acknowledged in the dedication to Parallax/1), had failed to do. Loney clearly wanted his journal to be more than a place where those few interested in postmodern poetry could publish and be read by one another. He aimed at a strategic intervention in the literary scene as a whole, addressing the politics as well as the poetics of poetry production and reception. Parallax ran a number of polemical articles the thrust of which was towards a redrawing of the then-dominant maps of New Zealand poetry by broadening the art-historical information available to readers and producers of poetry. No polemical effort, for instance, was wasted battling against that monster of a bygone age, Georgian realism, already well buried by Brunton and Stead on successive occasions. But battle was declared against Stead, a present threat because of his 'crowding out [of] alternatives', as Horrocks put it, his 'tak[ing] over' of 'the central terms of post-modernism' in order to apply them to specifically modernist poems. (30)

There were inevitably problems with the method of effecting local cultural change adopted by Parallax. For a start the very portentousness of the title indicated the high seriousness of the endeavour. Landfall's subtitle, 'A New Zealand quarterly', sounds modest by comparison. Secondly, the terms of the discussion were fatally limited by an over-preoccupation with American poetry and American poetics. The effect of the constant reiteration of certain apparently luminous names--David Antin, Robert Creeley, Boundary 2, et al.--in Wystan Curnow's opening essay, 'Post-modernism in Poetry and the Visual Arts,' was unfortunate in this respect. It suggested that Parallax was to be no more than the private vehicle of a clique of local poetry cognoscenti talking to each other about the American fashions that really interested them. The names functioned as shibboleths, and clearly not to be familiar with them was not to count.

Yet Parallax, although it continued throughout its three numbers to function in part as a talking-shop for the self-appointed avant-garde, was not simply another little magazine on the fringes, fated to launch a few new or neglected poets into the orbit of the mainstream then die. Parallax articulated an alternative set of assumptions about who counted and who didn't in New Zealand poetry. It constructed its own interpretation of literary history and argued for that construction. It developed (or borrowed) a complete set of literary terminologies. In other words, Parallax presented itself as the organ of an oppositional literary scene with its own terms of reference, its own claims to priority and its own notions about where 'the margins' of New Zealand poetry were to be found.

The most seminal essay in the first number of Parallax, and the most instructive for this discussion, is not Wystan Curnow's often quoted 'Post-Modernism in Poetry' but Horrocks' less noticed 'An Essay About Experimental Films That Ended Up As An Essay About New Zealand'. Where Curnow's essay has the strained, high tone of someone addressing an international art audience through the unlikely vehicle of a New Zealand little magazine, Horrocks' aim is more modest, his prose more accessible, his intended audience local and specific. Where Curnow declines to engage with the local variants of the general tendency he describes, Horrocks eagerly displays his intimacy with the most immediate levels of the local scene. Horrocks is trying to trace the emergence of an audience alert to the really new, the experimental, the alternative, out of the tiny circles of enthusiastic amateurs that have traditionally constituted the New Zealand avant-garde in film, in poetry and in art. What Horrocks seeks is an audience which is sufficiently discriminating, sufficiently focussed and of just sufficient size (fit but few) to serve as the vanguard of fundamental change in local cultural preferences. He records his pleasure in the discovery of 'a small, well-attuned audience (in the Maidment Little Theatre, for example, or Just Desserts Cafe, or at 191 Hobson Street)'. (31) Horrocks isn't indulging here in surreptitious advertising by slipping the names of these establishments into his essay. He is indicating where and at what level of intimacy the changes he seeks are beginning to take place.

While Curnow steps from one American art 'authority' to another, evidently wishing he were actually walking through SoHo or the Village where all his terms and references have currency, Horrocks is excitedly engaged with what is happening here--or is just about to happen. He senses an underground change taking place, one that will revise assumptions about 'what "experimental" means in the New Zealand context'. He notes the appearance of 'a certain type of essay' that 'wants to argue with our whole culture, our whole set of artistic habits and values'. (32) Horrocks' attitude to cultural change is like that of the revolutionary towards political change. His priorities and strategies are Leninist. What is needed is a small but 'intense' group of activists with a long-range historical sense and determined on nothing less than wholesale renovation of the local poetry polity. The group must be 'self-contained' and specialized. It must be alert to change that is taking place 'at a deep level,' (33) change of which the effects are only discernible by those who read art history as the revolutionary reads the masses. Above all, the group must resist the drift 'back from the edge towards the middle' that has swallowed previous hopeful movements in New Zealand poetry. (34) In other words, 'the margins' are to provide the necessary vantage point from which the centre, that morass of error and compromise that swallows the promising and corrupts the ambitious, will be radically shifted. The mainstream will, in fact, become at last the marginal, the redundant, and literary history will record only the bright moments of real change brought about by those tiny 'scenes' of dedicated individuals.

Horrocks is right, of course, that the great art shifts in the past have been initiated by such small 'scenes' (though this oversimplifies the process by which they become generally felt). The problem is that the art historian in this country inevitably is attuned to movements and changes that have already occurred elsewhere, and there is a danger that the 'deep change' awaited will turn out to be some fashion already shop-worn in New York or San Francisco. (There is also the problem of to whom these changes will be addressed. Does a rise in the prestige of postmodernism among the readers of literary magazines really mean a change in the culture as a whole?) The major shifts in art history effected by, say, Pound and Eliot around the time of the First World War or Olson just after the Second did not simply borrow some already existing script. Eliot certainly learned a great deal from Jules Laforgue (as Coleridge before him learned from the German philosophers of his day) and part of his shock value for English readers of 1910 may be attributed to his adoption of Laforgian mannerisms. But he didn't take from Laforgue or from any prior poet a complete plan for a poetic revolution that had already been carried through. It was enough to know what he was writing against and to be aware of exemplary predecessors and contemporaries. He had no way of telling exactly where he was leaping to when he wrote The Waste Land, or where precisely he would carry poetry in English by doing so.

Horrocks, however, knows pretty well where he wants New Zealand writing and reading habits to head. It isn't simply towards the Olsonian postmodernism propagandized for by Loney. Horrocks sees Parallax as part of the 'shift' he envisages, not the thing itself. (35) The trouble with Parallax for someone with Horrocks' peculiarly acute historical sense was not that its focus was too narrow or its audience too tiny, but that it already had about it the fatal air of being historical when it appeared. Loney in the 1980s was still fighting the battles of the 1970s (in Olson's terms, those of the 1950s).

The little magazine which was most exactly to suit Horrocks' purposes appeared towards the end of 1983. It was called And and was co-edited by two Auckland English graduates, Alex Calder who was working on his Ph.D. at Auckland at that time, and Leigh Davis who had already gone to a job in Treasury in Wellington, having somehow learned the trick of marketing an M.A. in English with a Marxist dissertation on Allen Curnow, in the world of finance. And was intended from the start to run for no more than four numbers. Its very name stressed that it intended to put itself within historical change, not to become an institution. If the name also seemed to draw attention to the sequentiality of little magazines in this country (with Morepork, Parallax and Splash, for all their differences, providing some sort of continuum on the poetry left), it did so subversively. And had no intention of carrying on the flame nurtured by Loney. The interview of Loney by Davis in And/1 signals as much rupture and difference (though amiable and respectful) as continuity, in spite of Loney's efforts to offer avuncular support to Davis. And entered NZ lit. with a calculated estimation of its own delinquency and power to shock not seen in New Zealand literary magazines (nor so brilliantly manipulated) since Freed. Its cover showed two cowboys, guns at the ready, above the caption, 'coming in'. Its stapled penurious format announced not only its difference from high-cost, high-quality productions like Landfall, Islands or Parallax, but also announced the benefits for little magazines of the photocopying machine.

Perhaps the most telling sign of And's marketing savvy was its presentation of its very poverty, the ephemerality of the magazine as an object, as an enormous advantage that it possessed over the existing journals, establishment or oppositional. While Landfall continued expensively as the Caxton Press's flagship, while Islands, like some down-at-heels scholar whose private means had long since declined, struggled to keep up appearances, and while Parallax, designed by the meticulous craftsman Loney, was handsomely done on good quality paper with proper binding, And emulated the producers of underground comics and punk handbills by using available technology and the enthusiasm of its contributors. The editors simply stapled the xeroxed blocks of contributors' articles inside A4 covers and let the readers' eyes cope with the plethora of typefaces and the occasional transposition. And was dense with information, liable to disintegrate (like other consumer durables it requires to be repurchased every so often), recalcitrant against plain writing and abominably difficult to shelve. More important, it saw no need to disguise its poverty by clinging, like the revived Islands, to 'an old and expensive format'. (36) It wasn't hip to aim for longevity any longer. (37)

What is most telling here is And's difference not only from Landfall and Islands but also from Parallax. And departed from Loney's magazine in more than the cost of its production and the permanence of its binding. And started out with a clear sense of its intended market, a market which needed not so much to be reached as created. Moreover it started out with no sense of grudge against local 'authorities'. And didn't see itself as excluded, as Loney did. The post-structuralist constituency which And claimed as its own was, as Davis cheerfully acknowledged in the first number, not large. So And pushed off exuberantly to a zero market share. Davis' language, which is cluttered with terms taken from physics, commerce, advertising, marketing analysis, the new technologies, is utterly unlike Loney's. In fact, with its love of the language of the marketplace (quite a different thing from Wedde's 'demotic', a concept which signals a resistance to the world of consumerism, utility and commerce), And was moving as far from Parallax and Loney's oppositional postmodernist line as from Stead's mainstream modernism. In a sense, Loney's concern with book form placed him in the unlikely tradition of opposition to the 'technologico-Benthamite' world of utility and commerce, of which the most trenchant critic in this century has been none other than F.R. Leavis. More than any editor in this country Loney kept alive into the 1970s and '80s the Glover tradition of fine craftsmanship, of detailed attention to book-presentation in the face of public indifference to quality and the publishers' preoccupation with cost-cutting. And set out with a wholly different understanding of what little magazines should contain and how they should look.

And was no more interested in making pious gestures towards Olson than in returning to the organicist counter-cultural posturings of the late 1960s. It had no intention either of becoming burdened by the dead weight of terminologies inherited from the feuds of the 1970s. Moreover, where Parallax had perpetuated the notion that there were such things as a 'centre' and a 'peripheries' by pitting its polemics against Stead's orthodoxy, And sought not merely to shift the 'centre' but to explode it from within by contesting the whole notion of literary hierarchies. Writing was simply a cultural product, its texts encoded with ideology and information exactly as advertisements and consumer fashions are.

Above all, And was determined to set itself in contra-distinction from the generation of the late 1960s, the poetry opposition its editors saw as by now bankrupt, working from an exhausted model, chiefly the lyric pamphlet of protest or confession. Davis admonished the Ian Wedde of Georgicon (1984) for his traces of nostalgia, his refusal to immerse his poetry wholly in the current expressions of popular culture without placing himself somehow outside the breccia. (38) When Davis remarked in a Landfall interview that 'McDonald's hamburgers are rich in implications' he was tilting at Wedde, whose obsession with cloacal fast food as emblem of the American Age recalls the moment in George Orwell's Coming Up for Air (1939) when the hero bites into a sausage and discovers within all the ersatz, nausea-including vileness of the modern world. (39)

And, then, was determined to bring about nothing less than the wholesale renovation of local literary assumptions and habits looked for by Horrocks. It aimed to be loose, responsive, in keeping with its perception that the movement of literature historically through styles and conventions had become more rapid ('Literary history is measured in weeks', announced Davis). (40) It aimed to place the writer within culture and thus reverse the longstanding prejudice among writers in this country that the place itself is unsuitable for art--puritanical, mediocre, philistine--and that the artist must stand apart, a 'Man Alone'. It aimed to replace the 'Romantic' and 'bourgeois' epistemology (which means in effect that of Allen Curnow) according to which 'literature originate(s) with an author, and his encounter with things'. (41) It dispensed with the reified term 'reality' as the set of referents with which the writer was bound to engage in the process of literary production. It also avoided the term 'postmodernism' or at least significantly downplayed it. Davis was not primarily interested in effecting what he saw as art-term changes but in bringing about a fundamental alteration in attitude 'from a kind of bourgeois stance to one which is everywhere informed by the consciousness of historical and cultural factors'. (42)

To effect all this And needed in the first place to develop or borrow a consistent theoretical position, as Freed had not. But more than this it needed a very astute marketing sense. Like all small literary movements possessed by an overwhelming sense of mission, And needed to attract attention to itself. It needed, in other words, to turn the liabilities of little magazine production to advantage. Davis was adept at this. He grasped in the New Zealand context the true scale of a little magazine, its function in the literary marketplace, its effective life span and its best chances of capturing an audience. He proceeded to issue a series of oracular utterances, comparing Allen Curnow to a 1957 Chrysler in one notorious instance, which startled not only by virtue of the enormous authority they assumed but also by their method of defamiliarizing literary discussion by drawing metaphors from unlikely sources. (43) Of course, Davis's strategy of comparing literary styles to consumer fashions--in cars, clothes, etc.--is not original. It draws heavily and directly on Roland Barthes, especially the Barthes of Mythologies. But in the context of local literary discussion Davis' deployment of Barthes had the kind of effect that Donne's use of contemporary scientific terms must have had for Elizabethan readers.

Davis' attitude towards Allen Curnow also had about it an element of calculated irreverence that served effectively to promote the And cause. Davis adopted, one assumes partly with an eye to the marketing advantage, the same stance towards Curnow that the young James Joyce had adopted towards the older poet Yeats, and there was a similar element of flattery behind the cheek. Curnow, for Davis--and the same might be said of Stead for the younger man--has become a period piece, a brilliant operator within a set of literary assumptions that Davis affects to find faintly boring (there is inescapably something of the flaneur behind Davis' claims to a superior boredom). But Davis has been careful to stress the consummateness of the performance. Curnow, for Davis, is impeccable within limits that are by no means narrow. If he is interesting now chiefly in the way museums are interesting--full of material that has become historically significant, encrusted with information --that does not so much diminish as place his performance as a poet. His work is achieved, impressive, imposing, in its way spacious, and Davis has generously acknowledged the elder poet's preeminence in the field ('He's right out in front by himself and in his own movie'). (44) The thing for a young poet as ambitious as Davis to do in the face of such eminence is to step beyond it.

Horrocks has claimed that in fact Davis does not feel the need to struggle against Curnow as a dominating precursor in the way that Baxter did. (45) Yet Davis in his writings on Curnow in And has given every indication of being a fretful and ambitious son, a would-be supplanter (hence, perhaps, his choice of Horrocks as a substitute poetic father figure, kindly and unthreatening, is a means of masking or displacing his real struggle against Curnow). Davis signals the degree of his interest in some older writer by the amount of negative energy he puts into his writing on that precursor. For Horrocks' work he is all praise, but the praise is primarily for Horrocks' art-historical sense, the way in which his Auckland Regional Poetry Transit Line enables subsequent New Zealand poetry. (46) Yet with Curnow, Stead, Wedde, Manhire he is engaged in a prodigious effort of rediscovery, assimilation, rejection, revision, displacement. At times, indeed, he presents himself as the defender of Curnow's true stature against the vulgar criticism he's been subjected to in this country. He also acknowledges Stead's 'fluency' and 'sheer regard for the field' he operates in more generously and fairly than most other New Zealand commentators. (47) If Davis discovers limits in Stead's performance, which he describes as 'unimpeachable within a certain direction', that is not to diminish him as the exemplary practitioner, along with Curnow, of New Zealand poetry up to the late 1970s. (48) Towards Manhire and Wedde also his stance has been characterized by a mixture of admiration for their performances, particularly in Manhire's case, and impatience with the repetitiveness that marks them. Certainly, Davis has lavished no such attention on Alistair Paterson or Vincent O'Sullivan or Lauris Edmond. In these cases neither the performances nor the lacunae they disclose are of interest. Even Loney he treats as an elder statesmen of postmodernism vaguely irritating because And might confusedly be placed in the Parallax line. (49)

It would be wrong-headed, however, to present And merely as the vehicle of Davis' poetic careerism, his early struggle against precursors. And went further towards initiating that long awaited renovation of local literary habits than any previous New Zealand little magazine since Freed, and perhaps since Phoenix. It eschewed the anarchistic outrages of Freed, but offered forms of sabotage and re-examination that, seemingly mild, proved more effective. It was noticed not only by the tiny audience for little magazines but also by established poets who resented being subjected, not only in And but also in Landfall, the Listener and the New Zealand (now Dominion Sunday) Times, to Davis' witty and cheeky deconstructions. Its success is measurable partly in the garbled versions of its favourite terms that now turn up in Listener and newspaper reviews. The words 'under-read' and 'over-read' have become catch-cries among reviewers and anthologists like Morrissey. They even turn up in the Listener's 'Bookmarks' column. More important, the last two or three years in this country have seen a developing market for small-scale, cheaply produced little magazines aimed at specific audiences that have obviously learned from And. Splash follows the same xeroxed format but includes only poetry, chiefly language poetry. Antic is a little magazine dedicated to feminist theory. Untold originally came out of Christchurch, having a regional focus but avoiding provincialism. Since the beginning of 1988 it has divided its critical energies between Wellington and Christchurch, thereby broadening its base. Primarily a poetry magazine, it also publishes articles on New Zealand culture generally without taking any particular line. Rambling Jack was a small, very cheap magazine of new writing that also took no particular line but had the advantages of being unpredictable, humorous and distinctive. In a sense, it set itself up as a kind of anti-And promising to run for only four numbers (actually a fifth 'back-to-life' number followed) and including no criticism or theory.

Landfall itself has responded to a gradually changing marketplace by questioning its longstanding presumption that it addresses and holds the loyalty of a general, national audience of literary readers. Having accepted that the political climate does not favour homogeneity, Landfall from about number 154 set itself to juggle among a number of fairly narrowly defined audiences rather than try any longer to speak to and for a fictional all-embracing one. As the editorial to Landfall 160 put it, the days of the editor as man of taste with sufficient wit and authority to speak for the plethora of emerging, clamorous (and often rancorous) audiences are over, even in New Zealand, the last stand of homogeneity and pragmatism.

Except that the position is really not quite so clear, at least not yet. If the putative general reader is truly dead, as And urged and K.K. Ruthven urged also in an attack on Stead's latest critical book, Pound, Eliot, Yeats and the Modernist Movement, that book itself, not to mention The New Poetic which continues to be reissued, should not be selling so well. A recent Landfall survey of readers' preferences showed a very clear approval among respondents for Stead's criticism in that journal. Clearly there is still a considerable market for his style of commonsensical, reader-friendly prose and his scorn for what he sees as pretension. At the same time a constituency was also shown to exist, small but not negligible, for the strongly theoretized writings of Simon During and Jonathan Lamb, both of them And contributors. Among those who indicated a preference for women's writing, there was a strong demand for specifically feminist writing and a much smaller one for theoretically inclined feminist writing.

In other words, the process that And initiated has made small but significant inroads. In the long term, the outlook for journals and institutions that prefer to imagine no change has taken place is not good. Landfall will no doubt survive by allowing itself to become a place where the various competing literary interests can do battle, where sparks can fly. So long as it retains support from the Caxton Press and the literary funding system it will be able to afford the luxury of its quality production. After all, there is some advantage in having a magazine that doesn't rapidly fall to pieces on one's shelves. The small magazines will come and go, but there will be more of them and it will become more and more difficult to write off their importance on the grounds that they are 'marginal'. The opprobrious weight of that epithet has been greatly lifted by the intervention of And.

NOTES

(1.) C.K. Stead, 'On the Margins,' review of The New Fiction, edited by Michael Morrissey (Auckland: Lindon Publishing, 1985), in Islands, new series, III, i, 37 (August 1986), 73,78.

(2.) C.K. Stead, 'He Sing Fr You,' review of Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby, by David Mitchell (Auckland: Stephen Chan, 1971), in Islands, I, 1 (Spring 1972), 67-69.

(3.) C.K. Stead, 'From Wystan to Carlos: Modern and Modernism in Recent New Zealand Poetry,' Islands, VII, v, 27 (November 1979), 467-486; reprinted in Stead's In the Glass Case: Essays on New Zealand Literature (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1981), pp.139-159 (p.147). Murray Edmond contests Stead's notion that Wedde was an initiator of Freed in 'Creating a Potent Image: Notes on the Magazine The Word is Freed,' Span, 16/17 (April/October 1983), 58.

(4.) Idem, pp.147-148.

(5.) Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (London : Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), pp.80-81.

(6.) Stead, 'On the Margins,' pp.76-77.

(7.) Idem, p.77.

(8.) Simon During, 'Towards a Revision of Local Critical Habits,' And, I (August 1983), 75f.

(9.) Allen Curnow, 'Olson as Oracle: "Projective Verse" Thirty Years On,' New Zealand Through the Arts: Past and Present, The Turnbull Winter Lectures 1981 (Wellington : Turnbull Library, 1982), pp.31-44.

(10.) Alan Brunton, introductory polemic, The Word is Freed, 1 (July 1969), n.p.

(11.) Murray Edmond, editorial, The Word is Freed, 3 (n.d.), n.p.

(12.) Ian Wedde, Introduction, The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, edited by Ian Wedde and Harvey McQueen (Auckland: Penguin, 1985), p.25.

(13.) Ian Wedde interviewed by David Dowling, Landfall, XXXIX, 154 (June 1985), 163.

(14.) See Leonard Wilcox, 'Postmodernism or Anti-Modernism?' Landfall, XXXIX, 155 (September 1985), 350-352.

(15.) Wystan Curnow, 'Post-Modernism in Poetry and the Visual Arts,' Parallax, I, 1 (Spring 1982), 21.

(16.) Curnow's essay is studded with references to Art Journal, Boundary 2 and Artforum, all quoted as final authorities on postmodernism: see idem, passim.

(17.) See Murray Edmond, 'Creating a Potent Image: Notes on the Magazine The Word is Freed,' Span, 16/17 (April/October 1983), 61.

(18.) Allen Curnow, letter to Islands, VIII, iii, 29 (June 1980), 164.

(19.) Stead praises the 'musical' qualities of Mitchell's verse consistently in his Islands review (see Note 2).

(20.) Leonard Wilcox, 'More Versions of the Pastoral,' Journal of Popular Culture, XIX, ii (Fall, 1985), 116.

(21.) Edmond, editorial, Freed, 3, n.p.

(22.) See Allen Curnow, 'New Zealand Literature: the Case for a Working Definition,' in Essays on New Zealand Literature, edited by Wystan Curnow (Auckland: Heinemann, 1973), p.146.

(23.) Curnow compares the writer's need to mediate his vision through the 'second body' of his country to the mediation of his personal body and the agonizing limitation of his private individuality, in 'New Zealand Literature,' p.141.

(24.) Curnow, 'Olson as Oracle,' p.31.

(25.) Roger Horrocks, 'Off the Map,' Parallax, I, 3 (Winter 1983), 248.

(26.) See C.K. Stead, 'Wedde's Inclusions,' Landfall, XXXIX, 155 (September 1985), 289-302.

(27.) Alan Loney, 'Some Aspects of C.K. Stead's "Walking Westwards" [sic],' Islands, VIII, iii, 30 (October 1980), 240-250.

(28.) Stead, 'From Wystan to Carlos,' p.156.

(29.) Idem, p.142.

(30.) Horrocks, 'Off the Map,' p.251.

(31.) Roger Horrocks, 'An Essay About Experimental Film That Ended Up As An Essay About New Zealand,' Parallax, I, 1 (Spring 1982), 84.

(32.) Idem, p.87.

(33.) Ibid.

(34.) Idem, p.84.

(35.) Idem, p.87.

(36.) Alex Calder, review of Islands, n.s.I, 1 (July 1984), et al, in Landfall, XXXIX, 153 (March 1985), 101.

(37.) See my article 'And and the "Understanders": Recent Developments in New Zealand Literary Journals,' to be published in Proceedings of the Conference on Literary Journals, Australian National University, 8-11 May 1987, edited by David Carter (Oxford University Press), forthcoming.

(38.) Leigh Davis, 'Wedde Out of Fashion,' New Zealand Times, June 24 1984, p.11.

(39.) Leigh Davis interviewed by Hugh Lauder, Landfall, XXXIX, 155 (September 1985), 315.

(40.) Leigh Davis, 'Set Up,' And, 1 (August 1983), p.7.

(41.) Idem, p.3.

(42.) Ibid.

(43.) Leigh Davis, 'Solo Curnow,' And, 3 (October 1984), p.61.

(44.) Idem, p.62.

(45.) Roger Horrocks, 'The Invention of New Zealand,' And, 1 (August 1983), p.23.

(46.) Leigh Davis, 'Roger's Thesaurus,' And, 2 (February 1984), pp.49-60.

(47.) Davis, 'Set Up,' p.6.

(48.) Ibid.

(49.) Leigh Davis talking with Alan Loney, And, 1 (August 1983), 39-61.