5 A Home in Language

— ½¾ — The (Meta)Physical World of Janet Frame’s Poetry

VALÉRIE BAISNÉE

It was in my second year at Waitaki Junior High School that, making up my mind to be a “poet” when I “grew up”, I began to write poems regularly in my small railway notebook.1

OR YOUNG JANET it seemed logical that the act of writing poetry should lead to the corresponding persona: one just needs F to write poetry to become a poet. Yet Frame’s autobiography tells how this youthful poetic practice never resulted in the longed-for identi- fication. The word “poet,” distanced by quotation marks, already places this identity in doubt. What is it to be ‘a poet’? Can I become a poet with- out fulfilling someone’s expectations of what it is to be one? Despite her ongoing writing practice, Frame never took her identity as a poet for granted. The same ambivalence can be found in the criticism of her work. Frame is praised as a novelist, but less often as a poet. In The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, Elizabeth Caffin writes: “It is prob- able that Frame never thought of herself very seriously as a poet.”2 Her

1 Janet Frame, To The Is-Land (1982; Auckland: Random Century New Zealand, 1989): 73. 2 Elizabeth Caffin, “Poetry, Part Two: 1945–1990s,” in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, ed. Terry Sturm (1991; Auckland: Oxford UP, rev. ed. 1998): 470. 90 VALÉRIE BAISNÉE contemporaries have labelled her poetry “strange” or “unpoetic.” C.K. Stead judges it inferior to her prose:

Frame is inventive, she can be fluent, her best effects are sparks and flares of her genius in prose. But seeming uncertain where her own poetic strengths lie, she displays the limitations as well as the licence of the uncommitted.3

Frame herself added to this reputation by disparaging her poems. In her youth she found her own poetry too conventional, and, later, her analogies far-fetched. Michael King quotes part of a letter she sent to George Braziller, the New York editor/publisher of The Pocket Mirror:

Re-reading [the poems] with detachment I pronounce them pusillani- mously pastoral, gently Georgian, and not at all the sort of verses I dream of writing. They are technically poor, also with jiggety-jig instead of concealed rhythm …4

Yet poetry, in the form of set verse, and, more generally, poetics as the self-reflexive use of language are at the heart of her creative process. Poetry is everywhere in Janet Frame’s output, and not limited to the only book of poems she published during her lifetime, The Pocket Mirror (1967). Literary quotations, poems inserted within a narrative, and folk- rhymes create an intertextual web of cultural references that run through- out her work and act as original viewpoints on her fiction. In the novel Intensive Care, poems are like a Greek chorus that link the various strands of the story. The autobiography itself, with its numerous quotations and the inclusion of Frame’s first poems, can also be read as an exploration of poetic discourse, and foregrounds Frame’s first ambition to become a poet. In 2006, the posthumous publication of a book of poems, The Goose Bath Poems, revealed that poetry-writing had accompanied her all through her life.5 It seems that the poetic discourse is needed to break the

3 C.K. Stead, “A Retrospect: Janet Frame’s Pocket Mirror,” in Kin of Place: Essays on 20 New Zealand Writers (Auckland: Auckland UP, 2002): 271. 4 Frame, quoted by Michael King, Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame (Auckland: Viking, 2000): 311. Thanks to Pamela Gordon for permission to reprint. 5 Janet Frame, The Goose Bath: Poems, ed. Pamela Gordon, Denis Harold & Bill Manhire (Auckland: Random House New Zealand, 2006).