Kiwi 6 6 Printed by the Acme Printing Works Ltd. Published by the Auckland University Students' Assn. Body Type in 8pt. and lOpt. Times Roman Light. Headings in 18pt. and 24pt. Bodini Italic. OLD OO anywhere Simmery, summery heat and the cool refreshment of D.B. Waite mata. What better way to go through summer. Take Polar Packs home today. Enjoy your D.B. Waitemata. Cold, anywhere. WAITEMATA P il*| ill in u'l Brewed by the Brewery that brin'^ ybu W foft Mr'" .'JIIUH imwa jqn nrm ITpn m Tamtam Notes The editor extends his thanks to Christine Moir, for much invaluable advice and assistance, and for reading proofs. Gray Cameron, Business Manager. Grant Hammond, Advertising Manager. John Staniford, who designed the cover. All those who produced material at the editor's request. Acme Printing Works, for their patient co-operation. His sympathy to Rodger Mitchell, who was to have edited the magazine, but was unable to do so. It is unfortunate that Dr. Curnow, who was one of six poets asked to comment on a ques- tionnaire, was unable to do so, since he was preparing for a lecture tour of the U.S.A. But we wish him success. 3 Contents Notes 3 Editorial 6 The Editor Polemics 'Kiwi in the Closet' or The Possibility of a New Zealand Philosophy 10 Rosalind Hursthouse Comments on a Questionnaire 15 Louis Johnson 16 Mark Young 16 C. K. Stead 18 K. O. Arvidson 17 Peter Bland The Idea of a University 20 Walter Pollard Prospects of a Professional Theatre in New Zealand 23 Chris Smithyman Art Three Drawings The Director 28 Perhaps Enlightenment 29 Nun 30 Nikolai Juriss 4 Poetry To a Friend 31 Juliet Batten Five Senses 32 Alan Trussel-Cullen The First and the Last 33 Alan Trussel-Cullen A poem 34 C.H. The Days Black and White 35 Francis Pound Doubt 38 Dave With Against the Dreamtime 46 Mike Jackson What the World is Wearing this Year 47 Mike Jackson Two poems 48 Margaret Watson 49 Margaret Watson Sonnet 50 Ian Wedde Prose The Last Morning 40 Tony Norris Reviews 'Stand in the Rain' by Jean Watson 52 Susan Moller Collected Poems A. R. D. Fairburn 54 Olive Johnson 5 Editorial There are at least two reasons not to be satisfied with this magazine. The first is plain enough. The magazine purports to give a representative selection of student writing at Auckland University. This it does not do; to the best of my ability I have excluded bad poetry and prose; and I had, for reasons of space, to exclude some good material. The second reason is less innocuous. As a punc- tuation mark in the book of student writing, 'Kiwi' is at best a tentative comma. It would be extreme to see the typewriter as modern man's answer to the Inquisition — as a sinister device which extracts ideas and then stamps on them with its neat jackboots. And it would be equally extreme to see 'Kiwi' as the culminating point of a year's writing. Its usefulness lies somewhere between these two extremes. It's a pretty accidental event. Art, one hopes, goes on. There is at present something of a vogue for decrying the excess number of first publications. But obviously enough, if one wants to, one has to start somewhere, and this is the peculiar function of a magazine such as this. Which can be both a good and a bad thing: the magazine can easily be a vehicle for the jejeune, the pretentious and the unskilled writer; but (as Olive Johnson reminds us in this issue) it can also contain the first appearances of poems by writers of the calibre of the late A. R. D. Fairburn. It is always necessarily a hazardous enterprise. The standards of any literary magazine are set by the material available. But in our case we can neither draw primarily on the work of established writers, nor hope for the same quantity of material from which to make a selection. We are in a state of constant and rapid flux. Which, again, is potentially either a good or a bad thing. However, even taking into account these obvious limitations, the amount of material submitted was very small. One always had the feeling that It Must Be Here Somewhere. But as the manuscripts trickled thinly in, it began to look as if the creative sphincter of the University was slowly and irrevocably seizing up; and even the minor flood over the last few days before copy closing did not dispell this impression. One was reminded of Peter Bland's remark in Charles Doyle's 'Recent Poetry in New Zealand,' that in our Universities 'We badly need an active and accessible sophistication.' This magazine does not claim to provide an instantaneous stimulus: nor, I hope, at the other extreme, is it an example of literary bedwetting. But it is divided into two sections; the first could be loosely called polemic, the second anthological. This seems necessary if the magazine is to have any dynamic function at all. The polemic section is made up of solicited articles, and has as its selective principle the observa- tion quoted above. The two reviews and the drawings by Nikolai Juriss were also solicited. In selecting the poetry and prose, any critical criteria I had did not so much pre-exist as emerge from the material itself. Many of the poems were weighed down with adjectives. This usually indi- cated one of two things: either the writer had only a vague idea of what he or she was trying to say, or had a clear enough idea but lacked the tools to say it precisely. Form was a major difficulty. Many poems were bad parodies of free-verse constructions. Lines were arranged in a particular order for no particular reason. So-called free verse, to be effective, demands discipline as well as acentual intuition, or whathaveyou. Any reader of Ezra Pound or William Carlos Williams, to mention two very 6 disparate poets, will have found this. Many of the poems submitted to me were just plain untidy, often lacking too the sort of kinetic tension which good use of language and syntax can create. There were two more faults which frequently went hand in glove: difficulty for difficulty's sake was one of the most prominent characteristics of the poems. Not content to let an idea speak for itself, to gather complexity by the very directness of its expression, contributors tended to hedge about their ideas with 'poetic' obfuscations to the extent that not only was the 'Gestalten' behind words and thing obscured, but the thing itself was quite lost — a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees; and with this often came an inability to end a poem successfully. I was sometimes excited by a piece, only to find that the poet took it too far, felt the need to draw some unnecessary con- clusion, could not find the right place for the final full-stop or the right phrase to put behind it. Some protest poetry was submitted. It would have been included if the objections had been couched in original terms. Unfortunately, the suns were all very ordinary. About the prose contributions little can be said, since very few were submitted. Perhaps the odd free verse poet should try this medium. All this of course is unnecessary for the person who wants simply to read the material collected here. I have tried not to pontificate and not to state the obvious. Inevitably I have ended up doing both. The academic has a horny hide; nevertheless his apologues are frequently apologies. So the best thing one can ever do is get on and read the pieces for their individual merit. Remembering in this case that there are no conclusions to be drawn from the literary material as a whole: the poetry and prose is not a coherent collection which can, in choro, tell you anything about the abstraction 'Student Writing.' Ian Wedde 7 STUDENT TRAVEL BUREAU WHAT DOES THE STUDENT TRAVEL BUREAU DO FOR STUDENTS? it works to obtain student concessions on all types of internal or external travel. * organises group tours. * encourages overseas travel. * provides work camps. * supports working holidays. * makes information on travel available to students. * provides facilities in each Universitly for students to make — inquiries and bookings for travel. Specialists in all Forms of Educational Travel INQUIRIES MAY BE MADE THROUGH THE TRAVEL OFFICER AT THE STUDENTS' ASSOCIATION OFFICE 8 SAIL T O PAUL'S F O R BOOKS We will sail to the end of the world to obtain the title you require — (10% Student Discount, of course). PAUL'S BOOK ARCADE 49 HIGH STREET . PHONE 22-203 9 6 Kiwi in the Closet 9 or The Possibility of a New Zealand Philosophy Rosalind Hursthouse When you ask a philosopher to answer the question "Could there be a New Zealand Philo- sophy?" he immediately does a very unsatisfying thing. He sits back in his chair and says, "Well, that all depends on what you mean by 'a philosophy' and 'a New Zealand philosophy' and 'could there be?' and . ." This sort of answer may be unsatisfying, but I submit that it is satisfactory, and is, in fact, the only way to answer such a question. Most people I have tried my first question on, "What do you mean by 'a New Zealand Philo- sophy'," have waved their hands and started talking about what they call "the French Philosophy." I ask them to be more explicit and they mention Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, the Nouvelle Vague films, Existentialism, and so on.