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Hone Tuwhare's Socialist Poetics Edinburgh Research Explorer “Art for me is not a hothouse flower”: Hone Tuwhare’s socialist poetics Citation for published version: Keown, M 2008, '“Art for me is not a hothouse flower”: Hone Tuwhare’s socialist poetics', Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics, vol. 6. Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Published In: Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics Publisher Rights Statement: © Keown, M. (2008). “Art for me is not a hothouse flower”: Hone Tuwhare’s socialist poetics. Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics, 6. General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 25. Sep. 2021 5/23/13 Michelle Keown - ‘Art for me is not a hothouse flower’: Hone Tuwhare’s socialist poetics - ka mate ka ora - nzepc essays & interviews | archive | soundnz | poems | nz lit file | authors new zealand electronic poetry centre features | about us | what's new | links | home issue 6, september 2008 index ‘Art for me is not a hothouse flower’: Hone Tuwhare’s socialist poetics With Hone Tuwhare’s recent passing inviting retrospective evaluations of his oeuvre, this article offers a reassessment of Tuwhare’s political poetry, with particular attention to the pervasive influence of Tuwhare’s socialism upon his poetics. It draws, inter alia, upon Janet Hunt’s invaluable 1998 biography of Tuwhare, which incorporates a range of his political poetry not included in any of his published anthologies, as well as additional information on Tuwhare’s political views drawn from his private papers and from taped discussions between Hunt and Tuwhare.Aspects of Tuwhare’s literary socialism (such as his friendship with Communist Party comrades and fellow authors R.A.K. Mason and Noel Hilliard, who helped to instigate his career as a poet) are well-documented, but Hunt’s biography draws attention to a lesser-known inspiration behind Tuwhare’s political poetry: the British Marxist writer Christopher Caudwell, whose work is explored in more detail below. Tuwhare’s political poetry, particularly that which is most overtly Marxist, has often been less well-received than much of his other work, no doubt due in large part to the widespread assumption that political poetry is a lesser form of art which sacrifices aesthetic refinement for bald polemic.[1] Tuwhare himself conveyed an ambivalent attitude towards his political poetry over the years, arguing in 1987, for example, that with a couple of exceptions, his political poems ‘never work’ and were not among his ‘favourites’.[2] At various other points throughout his career, however, Tuwhare emphasised the centrality of his political beliefs and activities to his poetics, expressing disappointment that his political poems were often considered his ‘worst’, sidelined by anthologists who ‘play it safe’ by selecting ‘flower milk & honey’ poetry instead.[3] It is notable that those political poems which have received wider critical and popular acclaim have tended to be those which engage with issues surrounding Māori self-determination (such as ‘Papa-tu-a- nuku’ and other works emerging from Tuwhare’s involvement in the Māori Land March and the Māori Cultural Renaissance), or with anti-nuclear, anti-war and environmentally conservationist poems (such as the perennially popular ‘No Ordinary Sun’) which express views putatively shared by a large proportion of the New Zealand public (Chamberlain 49). Yet Tuwhare at times expressed frustration at the way in which the political impetus behind even his more popular poetry was sidelined in favour of a focus on the lyric, elegiac qualities for which his work www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko/06/ka_mate06_keown.asp 1/11 5/23/13 Michelle Keown - ‘Art for me is not a hothouse flower’: Hone Tuwhare’s socialist poetics - ka mate ka ora - nzepc (particularly the early poetry) is often celebrated. During his tour of Northland in 2002, for example, Tuwhare is reported to have objected to a musical rendition of ‘No Ordinary Sun’ as a ‘sad, yearning ballad’, declaring that it was ‘a protest poem, not a “sweet nature study”’, and proceeding to recite the poem ‘almost in a rage, punching the words out as if he was in the front line of a demo’ (Welch). Where the lyric intensity and natural imagery of ‘No Ordinary Sun’ (which is, after all, redolent to some degree of the work of Romantic and Victorian ‘nature’ poets[4]) leaves the poem open to such contrasting interpretations, it is notable that many of Tuwhare’s lesser-known political poems – particularly those written during his period as an active member of the Communist Party (1942-56) – are much more overtly (and prosaically) polemical. His poem ‘Song’, for example, which was published in the communist magazine People’s Voice in 1950, hammers home its anti-capitalist message in a predominantly demotic, ‘working man’s’ register: in anticipating a proletarian revolution, Tuwhare envisages a mass uprising of workers ‘chant[ing] in unison. / You’re through. You’re done. You’re finished…. Peace, we want, / Bread, we’ll have, / Land, we’ll take!’. Bold political statements are studded with imagery drawn from the nuts-and-bolts milieu of the working class, with the ‘noise of building and construction / The hiss and crackle of the welding rod / laying the foundation of / Socialism / Side by side with the hammer, the saw / and the concrete mixer’ (quoted in Hunt 58). Although Tuwhare never included ‘Song’ in any of his published poetry anthologies, later arguing that he no longer considered this vein of overtly polemical writing successful as art (Hunt 58), its demotic register and industrial imagery lay the foundations for a socialist poetics which remained important in Tuwhare’s work throughout his career. This aspect of Tuwhare’s writing was profoundly informed by his reading of the work of British Marxist writer Christopher Caudwell (1907-1937), whose 1937 study Illusion and Reality – which seeks to develop a Marxist poetics – was introduced to Tuwhare by a Wellington bookseller in the 1950s. As Janet Hunt points out, Caudwell’s book became a lifelong ‘bedside companion’ for Tuwhare: it provided ‘a philosophic and aesthetic framework that coincided with and supported Tuwhare’s literary thinking’, and as he entered the final decade of his life, he reported ‘going back again and again’ to his densely annotated edition of Caudwell’s text (Hunt 59). Apart from Hunt’s brief mention of Caudwell in her biography, the connections between the two writers have remained largely unexplored, yet Tuwhare’s own statements about his work reveal that his reading of Caudwell – as well as Marx, Engels and other Marxist writers – played a central role in the development of his political vision and poetics. Although Caudwell and Tuwhare came from differing socio-cultural backgrounds (Caudwell – whose real name was Christopher St. John Sprigg – was born into a middle-class, white British family), there are some notable correspondences between their personal trajectories as Marxists. Like Tuwhare, Caudwell left school at fifteen and became an avid autodidact and communist political activist, joining the Poplar branch of the Communist Party in London and choosing to associate with the urban ‘proletariat’ rather than the Party intelligentsia or the left- wing literary establishment (Sheehan). Like Tuwhare, Caudwell also experimented with writing socialist poetry (though he only published one poem in his lifetime), and he also wrote several Marxist theoretical works: the first of these, Illusion and www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko/06/ka_mate06_keown.asp 2/11 5/23/13 Michelle Keown - ‘Art for me is not a hothouse flower’: Hone Tuwhare’s socialist poetics - ka mate ka ora - nzepc Reality, was in press when Caudwell met an early death while fighting with the republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. Illusion and Reality offers a Marxist analysis of literary production[5], seeking to develop a socialist aesthetic which will transcend the putative limitations of ‘bourgeois’ British poetry. Caudwell argues that while pre-capitalist poetry ‘derive[d] its value from its collective appearance, from the effect it ha[d] on the hearts of its hearers and the impact, direct and evident, on the life of the tribe’ (110), bourgeois British poetry of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had entered a phase of commodity fetishism or ‘art for art’s sake’ which separated ‘the world of art from the world of reality’ (109). In the age of ‘mechanical reproduction’ (as Walter Benjamin put it), poetry for Caudwell had lost is ‘social character’: the poet, he claims, writes in isolation for ‘men of whose existence he is ignorant’, and there is a ‘continual contradiction between the tremendous social experience embodied in the poem and the individualistic and anti-social attitude of the poet’ (111). Anticipating the demise of capitalism, Caudwell projects a return to a more socially inclusive form of artistic production, predicting the emergence of a ‘communist poetry’ which will effect a ‘revolution of content, as opposed to a mere movement of technique’, and in which ‘the social associations of words will all be re-cast, and the whole subject-matter of poetry will become different, because language itself is now generated in a different society’ (120).
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