ROBERT HANDICOTT

THE WORLD IN HIS MARTINI: C. K. STEAD'S GEOGRAPHIES

C.K. Stead, Geographies. : Auckland University Press! , 1982. Paper NZ $9.50. 84 pp.

"Can someone name me the Australian bookstore where I might keep current with what happens in New Zealand?" The rhetorical question is put by Tom Shapcott in a review of Rob Jackaman's Solo Lovers.' Shapcott's point is the unfairness of our lack of reciprocity. "I have walked into a Christchurch bookstore or an Auckland bookstore," so he testifies, "and found nearly all the current Australian verse titles." No less impressive a discovery for an Australian on such a visit, he might have noted, is the array of New Zealand verse titles. They offer better value in mementos for the traveller than any weight of greenstone rings or paua shell tikis. For her small population, New Zealand at present can boast a remarkable crOp of published poets. Poetry Australia has been conspicuous for featuring their poems as well as reviewing their books; and subscribers to that magazine may recall Bruce Beaver's review of C.K. (Karl) Stead's third book, Quesada,2 or, more importantly, the 18-page poem, "Walking Westward", which appeared in Number 62 (February, 1977). "Walking Westward" provided the title for Stead's fourth major book of verse, and Geographies, which follows close behind it, is the fifth. By virtue of his position as a professor of English, and through his practice and standing as a poet, C.K. Stead has been a prominent participant in the debate in New Zealand concerning "Modernism" (or "Post-Modernism") and "Open Form". From what I have read, the debate seems to be carried on in that country - where the issues are formulated somewhat differently from here, the term "Open Form" often covering a multitude of modernisms - in a more earnest and more personally respect- able manner than has sometimes been the case in Australia. Stead's major theoretical contribution is the article, "From Wystan to Carlos: Modern and Modernism in Recent New Zea- land Poetry", which was published in Islands in 1979. The

104 carefully arrived at description there of the elements of Modern- ist poetic practice is lucid, concise, and genuinely helpful, and not only for understanding some of Stead's own poems: We have.., first the lack of logical or narrative structures, and in their place the aggregation of radioactive fragments within a 'Field'; second, the scoring of speech patterns to create a music which must predominate over any externally imposed form; and third, the use of suggestion, approximation, a care- fully judged incompleteness as a way of engagin g the reader in the action of the poetry itself - all these combinin g ideally to

increase the sense of an achieved reality. 3 Stead admits to a preference for Modernist poetics ("or perhaps for my own poetics as I derive and formulate these from Mod- ernist texts"); he believes that the tide of literary history flows inevitably in their direction; but he avoids any "with-us- or-against-us" stance, and here as elsewhere shows respect for talented practitioners of traditional poetics and for good poems they have written. (The courtesy has not always been returned.) "From Wystan to Carlos" was originally presented as an address to a Writers' Conference; and Stead has always been more con- cerned with the practice of poetry - with assimilating hints he knows instinctively may be fruitful - than with the justification of any exclusive set of prescriptions for it. For this reason I doubt that he was disturbed by criticisms from more radically Modernist poets, to the effect that (in "Walking Westward", for example) he is never "placing himself at any formal risk", 4 but merely adopting "the post-modernist manner, the open form thing" as an expedient option, which retains, for all his skill, "that self-conscious taint of being an imitation rather than a discovery". (As if the latter might not also be said for much theorising and phiosophising which exalts Post-Modernist writing in the 1980's!) Nor, I think, is Stead embarrassed by the fact that he draws more inspiration from the examples of Pound, Eliot and Williams than from anything produced by more recent but, apparently, less congenial Mod- ernists. The truth seems to be that in the works of these poets - very thoroughly digested - Stead has found the opening of the way he needs to progress and yet remain himself. Alan Loney is right that Stead is always a "presence" in "Walking Westward"; Murray Edmond is right that "the literary voice of the poet" dominates every other element, so that the poem is really "a

105 lyric poem at maximum extension". What does it matter - unless one is searching for a vantage point from which to snipe at an obvious achievement? Precisely on account of his "faults", Stead does not need to beg his readers to completely re-educate themselves (as Alistair Paterson in New Zealand and John Tranter in Australia virtually do in the wearying introductions to their anthologies) in order to be able to appreciate the "valuable" poems presented. "The most important thing," Stead wrote of Quesada, "is that the book is there and that it is authentic . . . I know it to be my own authentic production." 6 Only a critic with an axe to grind could conceivably question the "authenticity" of Geographies. There is absolutely no evi- dence of the "crisis" in Stead's art prophesied by Loney. In 1979 Stead wrote: "the title poem in Walking Westward is . . . conceived of as section 1 of a longer poem, of which the second is already written and the third projected". 7 Although no indication of the relationship is given outside the poetry, it seems plain that the first two parts of Geographies, "Scoria: A Reconstruction" and "YesT.S.: A Narrative", are the sections referred to. "Scoria", as the dust jacket tells us, "relates the geology, legend, and history of the volcanic heart of Auckland to the poet's childhood memories". Whereas "Walking West- ward" was a journey through the poet's "spots of time", 8 in "Scoria" Stead lays "stone on stone" of sharp, fragmentary memory, to reconstruct, in Eliot's phrase from Four Quartets, his "first world" - and to find there his own "still centre". "Scoria" takes us, as does "Burnt Norton", to "the garden (innocence)". 9 For a New Zealander coming to maturity in the 1950's, the "world" lay "westward". The poem "Walking Westward" traced the dawning of the poet's awareness of this world and his first experiences of it. In the luxuriant, pristine "first world", however, we find an earlier stage of aspiration, as the boy in dreams identifies with Icarus and sees himself "for ever walking westward out of Naxos".' ° Aspiration in boyhood finds an outlet in the high-jump (the western roll): success depends on making "that bar your horizon". Later its place will be taken by poetry, "my second best art".'' And yet, in "Walking Westward", the poet asks himself: "when will you learn the trick of living/for living not for the score?" 2 "Experi- ence as it is" is the dimension of the third step, "Yes T.S."; and the conclusion to that poem suggests that the "trick" is at last being learned: 106 Yes t.s. to make real distances real to let be things that are to make do (for example) leaves to fall snow rivers to flow and to bring it (jetting westward) full to the full beginning again here circle.

Clearly, a change in the self-concept and self-confidence of is reflected in the poet's personal progress. I think it only fair to C.K. Stead to offer this glimpse of what I take to be his scheme. Geographies itself, however, begins with "Scoria"; and to be enjoyed this poem requires no knowledge of "Walking Westward". "The wit and visual inven- tion, the openness to sensuous impressions, the verbal music, and the knife-edge clarity of phrase and image" are all, as the cover blurb avers, richly evident. Though he may have been influenced by Four Quartets in the composition of his own extended opus, there is in Stead nothing of Eliot's "Dessication of the world of sense,/Evacuation of the world of fancy" - as the poet underlines with a comic allusion, invoking "cut grass/to purify the nostrils of the tribe". In free verse which is sometimes reminiscent of the half-lines of Old English alliterative poetry, the features of the childhood world appear in pattern, in a way which catches the timelessness of a sanctuary in the memory, and yet, with its vein of Maori legend, does not lack a satisfying development. I find myself repeatedly returning to the opening page of "Scoria", where the reader enters, as the poet re-discovers, the bright "first world":

107 murmur mormorio susurration audible silence picked at in the fowlyard below

earth smell as of wattle root and through their tracery azure puffed with white

That is 'for example' lying in the track through wattles above the vegetable garden in sight of the lemon tree and there was beyond the lemon asparagus beyond asparagus beans and the brown boards of the fowihouse and the grey rocks that were SCORIA stone on stone walls/terracing as of a century's habitation work of one man one decade upper lawns and flower beds lower garden and orchard paths the pergola rotting under its roses stone on stone soft earth sifting between

As the cover blurb (also) explains, the second section of Geographies, the 33-page "Yes T.S.", "collects fragments from a flight around the world into an affirmation of experience as it is". Beginning as it does "at the blue doors/jetting", this poem (a single poem, not a sequence as the cover defensively posits) seems intended to balance "Walking Westward", which ended

a: with "nowhere to jet to" at "the green doors/the runnels of water". Mention of "collecting fragments" at once recalls "The Waste Land"; and, though this may prompt expressions of shock in some quarters, Professor Stead's description of that Open Form classic helps us understand the method of "Yes T.S.":

'The Waste Land' is composed of a series of projections of states of feeling, having no fixed centre but their common origin in the depths of one man's mind. The poem traces in its rhythms, in its music, and in the sequence of its images, the events of that mind at a particular time and in relation to a particular set of external circumstances - circumstances of which we can only know a very little . . . Eliot's intellectual and physical experiences - the books he read, the places he visited - are employed in various ways as vehicles for his feeling. But it is the feeling, not the experience, which is the

poem's subject. 14

It is not then the vision of Eliot's poem - a "waste land" haunted by "hollow men" - to which Stead says "Yes". That would hardly produce "an affirmation of experience as it is"! The "Yes" is firstly to the principle of structural unity offered by Eliot: a "unity of feeling". The poem brings the poet "(jet- ting westward)" full circle through the gamut of feelings arising from the experience of two months' solitary international travel. Readers who have been through that mill themselves will recog- nise the vivid first impressions of the culturally strange, the excitement of confronting what was known only from books or what is being seen again for the first time in many years, the annoying inconveniences of temporary accommodation, the meditative mood on the plane heading home. Yet Stead's journey has significance on a number of levels - a journey is one of the archetypal symbols - and the words of the poet will "echo in the mind" of the reader who has never so much as entered a boarding lounge. Australia, which seemed "the world" to the poet in his twenties, and which therefore featured promi- nently in "Walking Westward", receives scant and scathing notice in "Yes T.S." Within his loose but adequate structure or "Field", the poet leaves maximum freedom for " 'Inspiration', the unwilled creative moment".' The secret is "Not to work at it/but to cock an ear/ at the well's edge". "Yes T.S." contains brief

109 passages of lyrical beauty. The part beginning "The Chinese mother . . ." (p. 27) might well be a iyric of W.C. Williams, catching and ennobling a tiny, loving gesture. Very different is the "concrete" celebration of a birthday spent largely on trains between London and Paris, with the carriage wheels clickety- clacking throughout the trip: 1148 48 48 48 48 48". There are passages in Chinese, French and German (I detect one mis- print in the latter). More than a quarter of all words are provided by substantial excerpts of literary prose, which I assume are all genuine, simply embedded between sections of the verse. This technique derives more from modern fiction than the allusive "Waste Land", and reminds us that "Yes T.S." is subtitled "A Narrative". The poem also contains elements of the traveller's journal and the tourist's scrapbook. Items of realia indulged in include "Notices in the Lavatory, 1st floor,/Hotel Richeliue (one star)". And of Stead's "particular set of external circum- stances" the reader, at "particular times", learns much: Did a nightingale (etc) in Berkeley (etc) but this is the poetry of fact viz 21/9/80 6.20 a.m. cock crow audible (x4) at WC1N 2AB Here documentation of the "trivial" experience seems to leave feeling totally excluded. But what of "cock crow"? the conno- tation of "denial"? The "centreless", columnar verse form here - words placed as if appearing at the edge of silence - is used for most of the 75 segments of the poem. In "Yes T.S." Stead speaks in the voice unashamedly as well as unmistakably his own. The numerous quotations - documentary and commentary - are in their different ways perfectly integrated. While "The Waste Land" was written, as its author confessed, as "the relief of a personal and wholly insig- nificant grouse against life",1 6 here Stead's exuberance perco- lates all. There are showers of puns, games with language, and

110 jokey allusions - especially to Eliot. My favourite describes three skinheads in a London all night post office, "leaning! 'eadpiece filled wiv Rock". No doubt some of these tricks were defences against the pain - even for an experienced traveller - of separation and alienation; but caught in the poem, like flies in amber, they are offered as objects of curiosity and entertain- ment. While many readers may feel that Stead gives expression to their own thoughts and feelings, no-one is likely to pay him the honour often paid to Eliot, of considering his poem a grave, sage comment on civilisation. Apart from anything else, "Yes T.S." is too much fun. If it still be objected by arch-Modernists that "Scoria" and "Yes T.S." are too orchestrated and conclusive - that chance and idiosyncrasy have been curbed, and that the reader is offered an artefact, not invited to complete an open-ended process - it need only be said that a poet has the right to take from Modern- ist, or from any other, poetics what he needs and may use. Stead has long been fascinated by the possibilities of "musical" composition. Open Form has permitted an abandonment to this fascination and a development of the possibilities beyond any- thing he might once have imagined. Stead has always written "energised" poetry, alive with "things, scenes, sounds, voices, particulars - a real teeming world".' 7 Open Form - in parti- cular "Field" theory - has made it possible to get more and more of this world into his work. The most "open" printed poem, after all, is never a process, but the record or image of one. Even if the page were a miniature screen, where words and other symbols flashed as if at random, the spontaneity would stifi be a programmed fiction, the content limited by the tech- nology at hand. On the cover of Geographies there is wisely no attempt at justifying techniques which many readers may seldom have encountered, and which those in the know might understand differently. The only measure offered - and the only one relevant - is "enjoyment". The third section of Geographies, "The Clodian Songbook", consists of fifteen adaptations from the poems of Catullus, "new poet" of first century B.C. Rome. Not only do these adaptations "work as poems" as the cliché requires, being readily comprehensible for the reader who probably lacks a classical education, but there is also no question of their being included - as translations or "variations" sometimes do seem included

111 with original compositions - to suppiy a want of volume or variety. Some of Stead's poems take little more than a hint from Catullus, and then develop in a parallel but independent direc- tion of relevance to the contemporary situation. Thus Catullus's charge to the "twin sodomites", Furius and Aurelius, that they have falsely deduced his morality from his poetry, becomes Stead's complaint that the "dizzy pricks" have "rendered unusable" the "indispensable, irreplaceable" word "GAY". Other adaptations follow Catullus more closely; and here the reader would need to be familiar with the Latin poems or be willing to read the new ones, as I did, beside a book of transla- tions,1 8 if he wanted to appreciate the inspired ingenuity with which Stead has brought Catullus to New Zealand in the 1980's. In Stead's third poem, based on Catullus's fourth, for example, the beloved yacht on which Catullus returned to Italy from Bithynia and which he subsequently kept at his villa as a memento of his travels, becomes the prow of a Maori canoe "given over to calm and reflection" on the shore of an inland lake, though once it knew "long nights straining under bellying moons/northward to Suva". Of course, it remains a symbol - and a very effective one - of "hot youth" gone by. Readers more familiar than I with the New Zealand literary scene and Professor Stead's personal circumstances may find some pleasure in deducing for themselves who are meant by Clodia, Cornelius, Asinius, Furius and Aurelion, and (probably, especially) Suffenia. The poems do not depend on this facility, however, any more than do the poems of Catullus himself, whose unidentified, unannotated characters are mostly accept- able in context as types. The outstanding Clodian Song is the final one, evidently addressed to the poet's dead brother. Nothing will indicate more clearly the authenticity and empathy of Stead's adapta- tions - the fact that they are anything but lifeless exercises - than this haunting poem, here quoted in full: tanus I'm camped a hundred yards from your bones. The moths attack the lantern and die as surely as you did on that asphalt strip near home we used to burn up with our eager wheels. Defeated in love and in my dearest ambitions I've come to visit one who took the last blow first.

112 The world's sweetest when it offers us nothing. Remember our eel-trap that summer polio closed the schools and drove us north? These tears are happy. I wish you manuka on the eternal winds. 'So long' we used to say, not knowing what it meant. The final section, "At Home: Weathers and Coastlines", presents six short, self-contained poems, all related once again to Auckland and environs, but capturing different aspects of that beautiful city from those emphasised in "Scoria". The sparsely punctuated stanza form used in this verse, with line- breaks more arbitrary than in much of "Yes T.S.", irritates and confuses somewhat at first reading; but tone and tenor in these poems are just right, not only for the poet's immediate purposes, including a wonderful tribute to the late Frank Sargeson, but also for the movement of Geographies as a whole. The journey which began with a boy in an Auckland back- yard - sensitive to the sounds, smells, sights and history around him - pauses with the middle-aged poet at his beach house (Karekare Beach, on the black west coast, where at sunset "you have it all before you"), feeding two young possums "I've taught to trust/me as their St Francis". The first two slices, he tells them, are Sin and Death. When they press for more, he offers "our political leaders": "that cheek-/scarred Caesar and his lame/well-meaning rival":

Enough I think but those pink twitching noses

tempt saintly excess so again it's back to the breadboard a slice each to represent my worst critics and I name two mean-

spirited half-men who write under the by-lines of Style and Content. Fingers shut tooth- machines click into action

I see the critics slowiy chattered away and still the big round moon-reflecting eyes are clear and perfectly neutral. 113 NOTES

1 Tom Shapcott, "Rob Jackaman: Solo Lovers", Poetry Australia 88, June 1983, PP. 69-70.

2 1n Bruce Beaver, "Some recent poetry by New Zealanders", Poetry Australia 65, December 1977, pp. 67-71.

3 Quoted from C.K. Stead, In the Glass Case (Essays on ), Auckland University Press/Oxford University Press, 1981, P. 153.

4 Alan Loney, "Some Aspects of C.K. Stead's Walking Westwards", Islands 30, October 1980, pp. 240-250. s Murray Edmond, "Please Classify & File" (review of 15 Contemporary New Zealand Poets, ed. Alistair Paterson), Islands 31/32, June 1981, pp. 16 1-166. The quotations are on P. 163.

6 Quoted from "On Quesada' In the Glass Case, p. 272.

7 Thid., P. 277.

8 cf. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book XII, 11. 208 et sqq.

9 C.K. Stead, The New Poetic, Hutchinson, 1964, P. 172.

10 Geographies, p. 16.

Quoted from the poem "Crossing the Bar", in C.K. Stead, Crossing the Bar, Auckland University Press/Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 26.

1 2 Quoted from "Walking Westward", Poetry Australia 62, February 1977, p. 59.

1 3 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Faber, 1959, p. 18.

14 The New Poetic, p.151.

15 lbid., p.176.

16 Quoted in Valerie Eliot (ed.), The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Tran- script of the Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, Faber, 1971, p. 1.

1 7 See the postscript to "From Wystan to Carlos", In the Glass Case, p. 159.

18 Peter Whigham (trans.), The Poems of Catullus, Penguin, 1966.

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