Limbo, and other ecosystems

In a book that is probably now out of print, Eric Hobsbawm ridiculed the belief that publication gives a manuscript eternal life. Far from enjoying immortality, Hobsbawm argued, most books and periodicals are consigned very quickly to the back shelves and stacks of research libraries, from which they will be, if they are lucky, briefly brought back to life by curious postgraduate students.

When I was researching my PhD I used to cherish Hobsbawm's words, because they made me feel important. When I pestered the librarians at Auckland university with a request for some obscure title, I wasn't being a smart alec, or a pedant, but a sort of demigod, who summoned texts from the underworld of the library's storage rooms back into the bright light of day - or, at least, into the filtered light of a reading room. 

Now that I'm the author of several books that are well on their way to the underworlds of research libraries, Hobsbawm's insight seems melancholy rather than inspiring.

Back in 2004 I wrote a rambling essay to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the publication of one of my favourite books of New Zealand poetry, Graham Lindsay's The Subject. I wanted to try to summon Lindsay's text out of the shadows of library stacks, but my own essay soon ended up in a limbo of its own. It was published at the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre, but quickly slipped off the edge of that vast website, and turned up in a corner of the chaotic original website of Titus Books. For reasons that remain obscure to me, Titus had made the font of the essay unreadably small.

I thought I would summon my essay about The Subject into the dim light of this blog, because twenty years have now passed since the publication of Lindsay's masterpiece, and because I've been in trouble, since the beginning of the election season, with Mark Harvey. Mark, who used to live across the road from me here in West Auckland, is renowned for performing onerous dances, and on facebook and in the comments thread beneath one of my blog posts he has good-naturedly taken on the onerous task of convincing me that I should vote for the Green Party. Mark feels that I don't appreciate the Greens' environmental policies; I'd prefer to believe that I have a different sense of what words like 'environmental' mean. 

In the essay on Lindsay I link the poems in The Subject to the ideas of Geoffrey Park, the visionary natural scientist and prose poet who gave New Zealand two great books, Nga Uruora: the Groves of Life and Theatre Country, before his early death in 2009. Although Park had close links with the Green Party, I think that his critique of the artificial distinction many environmentalists make between nature and humanity and his unease with the pursuit of an unattainable, untainted 'wilderness' would make him sceptical about some of the rhetoric and imagery the Greens are employing in this year's election.

Poem as Ecosystem: five meandering notes on Graham Lindsay's The Subject

1. 'The painter should be painting'

The Subject is not a famous volume of poetry. Published by Auckland University Press in 1994, the book received some tepid reviews, and has barely appeared on the radar of critics and anthologists. The Subject's neglect can perhaps be related to its author's peculiar position in New Zealand's literary industry. Graham Lindsay is often identified with what Alan Loney has called New Zealand literature's 'other tradition': his first book was published by Loney's Hawk Press, and his short-lived Morepork was one of the most loved of New Zealand's 'little magazines'. But over the years Lindsay has published extensively in 'mainstream' outlets like Landfall and the Listener, and his work has always had a sense of place which seems to tug at the nationalist and regionalist themes that have dominated our literary history.

By the early 1990s postmodernism had become very fashionable in the English Departments of New Zealand's universities, but most of the work published by the big presses remained immune to the influence of Barthes and Derrida. Visits by Language poets Charles Bernstein and Lynn Heijinian polarised the literary community.

It is difficult to relate The Subject to the quarrel between the 'two traditions'. Lindsay's recalcitrance may have irked the mainstream, but his rather rustic subject and strong individual voice would make him an unlikely postmodernist.

Neither wing of the literary community is likely to have been impressed with Lindsay's obsession with the problem of representing reality in language. Lindsay refused either to take his language for granted, or to surrender to the free play of the signifier. Reviewing The Subject in Landfall, Margaret Mahy signalled her impatience:

Lindsay is least enjoyable when he is gazing at his navel, worrying about reality and language, and at his best when he is describing the world around him. Instead of worrying about his palette, the painter should be painting.

2. Daring to see?

But there is little word-painting in The Subject, even when Lindsay is not 'gazing at his navel'. Most of the book's poems are constructed out of fragments of description. Lindsay's fragments are always more than tangentially related, partly because almost all of them are drawn from the 'real world' of the South Island of New Zealand, but mainly because of their author's artfulness. The Subject reminds me of Pierre Reverdy, who tried to create a 'Cubist' poetry out of bits and pieces of language. A Reverdy poem is a sort of grid: its images do not make narrative or descriptive sense, but they may 'charge' each other, to the extent that they are interestingly juxtaposed:

A fading star

A woman's dark hair

The lantern of the departing train

Another name worth mentioning is Tomas Transtromer, whose work might easily have influenced The Subject. Robin Fulton has discussed the method of Transtromer's early poems:

A series of contrasts is described — light-dark, dreaming-awake, stasis-motion, interior-exterior — and they are related to each other in such a way as to define the limits of an area at whose undefined centre some sort of epiphany is experienced...the poet seems to say 'I have aroused your expectations in the right direction; the rest depends not on my further definition but on your imagination and experience'.

But, as Margaret Mahy noted with dismay, Lindsay cannot resist 'further definition'. Again and again The Subject worries about the difficulty of relating language and reality. 'Cloud Silence' is typical:

The point is

to stop writing. Stop

using language to protect

yourself from the full

implications of the world — the world says

Look at me, I dare you to

I dare you to see

Lindsay complains about the difficulty of finding words to fit reality, and fantasises about getting 'beyond' poetry altogether by accessing a reality 'before' language. It's no wonder Mahy treated him like a frustrated landscape painter. Yet Lindsay's practice as a poet belies the naive realism of his ruminations on language: the poems of The Subject are not simple attempts to 'take down' some pre-existing 'reality', but very artful constructions which shape as well as apprehend the reality they reach through language.

3. Tuning in

How can we theorise the poet's practice, when the poet himself has been unable to do so? I turn to the term abstraction, which I learned from Bertell Ollman's book Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method. Ollman argues that humans think in abstractions snatched from an almost infinitely complex reality:

You use abstraction all the time. For instance, when you go to a concert, or listen to a piece of music for the first time, you might focus first on a single instrument, or a single part of the performance, to get a preliminary sense of the whole. Once you have done that, you will probably go on to 'tune in' to other instruments, and other parts of the composition. 

For Ollman, dialectical abstractions distinguish themselves by including the 'change and contradiction' that gets left out of 'the tidy categories of ideology'. Ollman emphasises the flexibility of the dialectical method: because reality can only be accessed by abstraction, and abstraction is always partial, different abstractions can cover some of the same reality. We must abstract again and again, from different vantage points in time and space, to understand any complex phenomenon. 'Common sense' or ideology may insist on the identity of reality and a single abstraction, but dialecticians know better. Ollman is a Marxist, but he's happy to acknowledge that plenty of non-Marxists have thought dialectically, from Heraclitus to William Blake to Roy Bhaskar. EP Thompson has ventured that all visionary poetry is dialectical, and that Blake's command of the method easily rivals Hegel's.

In The Subject, Lindsay abstracts details of the world he lives in, and creates larger abstractions by putting these details together, or by leaving them lying around together. The best poem in the book deploys a series of powerful abstractions to apprehend a reality than can rightly be called visionary:

Backwater

Sun above sea

bush out back. Raising a hand —

remote as a moon or star

stunning glib

3D effect, like a frame

of mind behind a mirror image.

Herekino, Matapouri,

Anaura, Waimarama, Okains —

a flock of names commercialising

the scenery, screening

ineffability.

'Come on in, the water's fine!'

Where do we get such ridiculous

lines? The STS Spirit of New Zealand

mainmast doubling as a funnel

motors sideways into the stream.

Going off on a note

notebook on forearm

like a waiter taking orders:

the seagulls want fat tuatua

waves complain of sand

in their sandwiches.

Shell crockery tinkles

in the backwash

'Backwater' is a poem which pulsates with 'contradiction and change', but whose ambiguities and instabilities speak to the complexity of its subject matter, not of any hankering after 'difficulty' for its own sake. Lindsay's opening sentence gives us a couple of the most recognisable motifs of New Zealand literature: following a title like 'Backwater', they suggest that we are about to be treated to an extra thick slice of Kiwi pastoral realism. But the poem's second sentence introduces an unexpected self-consciousness which is all the more disturbing because it does not carry a great deal of self-confidence. Lindsay is like an artist who paints himself into his picture, but then begins to doubt his own likeness.

Lindsay is not shy of alluding to philosophy, and whether he intends it or not his second and third lines remind me of GE Moore's famous attempt to prove his own existence to an audience in a Cambridge lecture hall in 1925. Defending the possibility of 'propositions that are known for certain to be true', Moore raised his arm and said 'I know this to be part of my body', adding 'I know that my body has always existed on or near the surface of the earth, and never on the moon'. Lindsay links scepticism about the physical with scepticism about the 'frame/ of mind, behind a mirror image'.

The poem's third sentence shifts the focus, as Lindsay abstracts a 'flock of names' whose import seems somewhat mysterious. Perhaps 'Herekino, Matapouri/Anaura, Waimaramara, O'Kains' are all 'Backwaters': why, though, should they be guilty of 'commercialising/ the scenery'? Because they are busy 'screening ineffability'? Are they broadcasting ineffability, or blocking ineffability, or both?

Instead of answering our questions, Lindsay throws us the 'ridiculous' line 'Come on in, the water's fine!' I remember a similar phrase being used as the punch line of a TV advert — for sunscreen, no less — in the early '90s. A flabby middle aged man lay on a beach, fell asleep, and got so badly burned he turned into a lobster: his daughter splashed in the shallows, shouting 'Come on in Dad, the water's boiling!'

Is a shipping line ridiculous, in a backwater like Lindsay's? The Spirit of New Zealand moves sideways, like any sensible line of poetry, but where could it be going? How many steamships ply the Herekino harbour these days? The first half of 'Backwater's' penultimate sentence gives us a clue to Lindsay's method: acknowledging 'going off on a note', he nevertheless asserts that he is responding to the demands of his subject matter, 'like a waiter taking orders'. When 'waves complain of sand/ in their sandwiches' though, we know that the poet is looking at the page as well as the world. The tinkling of the last two lines seems to linger, as Lindsay denies his poem a full stop.

Why linger over Lindsay, when he writes like this? 'Backwater' is undeniably a difficult poem, because the relationships it brings into view are difficult to grasp, or let go. The poem is a like a very dissonant remix of some of the most-whistled tunes of New Zealand literature. Mansfield's 'At the Bay', Glover's maritime poems, and Curnow's despatches from Karekare are all in Lindsay's sampling box. The achievement of 'Backwater' only becomes apparent when we consider some of the less ambitious poems in The Subject. With its string of entertaining conceits 'Pear' resembles the 'Martian' poems of Craig Raine, or Bill Manhire's early, 'Anglo-Saxon' work:

I put down the pen

and raise the pear to my lips again, notice

canal patterns, dust ripples

and star craters. Highland green meadows with children

in traditional costume playing near rocky

streams, wading through yellow flower.

Lots of broken dots like full stops

a broken headland where the stalk ripped off.

The pear leans like Pisa

or a drawing of a cannon by Leonardo da Vinci

'Pear' is a pleasure, but few readers will feel the need to revisit it, any more than they will wish to hear the same joke twice. 'Backwater', on the other hand, is almost endlessly rich, even if it gives up its riches more reluctantly than 'Pear'. 

4. Welcome to wherever you are

If we read Lindsay as a sort of 'dialectical' poet — as a poet shaping as well as apprehending reality — then we can understand poems like 'Backwater' as critiques as well as constructions. Geoffrey Hill has argued that a good poem can be seen as an 'exemplary action'; I believe that many of the poems in The Subject can be called exemplary constructions. In place of the 'ridiculous lines' of debased speech and mediocre poetry, Lindsay offers us his strange new details and their elliptical intersections. 'Backwater' can be read as a riposte, not to Mansfield or Glover or Curnow or Manhire, but to the exhausted tradition of sentimental localism that mistakenly claims their patronage. 

I will always associate The Subject with Nga Uruora: The Groves of Life, a book published by botanist Geoff Park in 2002. I reread The Subject earlier this year, at the same time that I was discovering Nga Uruora, and the books seem to belong beside each other on my shelf. Like Lindsay, Park is much concerned with the intersections between humans and the 'natural world', and with the way we think about nature.

Nga Uruora is the record of a series of expeditions to coastal lowlands where native forest thrived before the colonisation of Aotearoa. Park examines the disastrous impact of 'the agriculture industry' on the lowlands, and considers the history of attempts to save their forests. A quotation conveys the quality of Park's book better than any summary of its subject:

If it was just a matter of plants, I could be in a stream in the English countryside. I could round the first bend without noticing white seashells sliding down its collapsing bank, the only clue to what was once the cream of the Hauraki Plains' river pa. Not until the flow is about to take me out of the Hikutaia into the Waihou do I pull into flooded cow tracks and make my way ashore. I climb up onto a grassy flat vanishing under a yellow tide of ragwort and spreading blackberry. An abandoned milking shed flaps its rusted iron roof in the wind. A harrier arcs up and away, grasping for currents of air. There is not a native plant to be seen. Once, before the hooves of the dairy economy, you could have plunged your hand into loose, pliant humus. Now my feet are quickly clogged with the gouged, clayed ground of a meaner soil.

Park is critical of the 'industrialist' ethos of colonisation and Kiwi capitalism, pointing to its indifference to the ecology of islands that had been uninhabited longer than anywhere else on earth. More surprisingly, he is unimpressed with the 'cult of virgin nature' espoused by the Victorian 'Scenic Reserves movement', and by today's Department of Conservation. Park argues that virgin nature is a concept created by the industrial revolution, and is predicated on the alienation of humanity from nature.

Park's first chapter visits the Hauraki Plains, where the forest of huge kahikatea 'discovered' by Cook has been replaced by a set of very productive dairy farms. The Kaimai Ranges that rise at one end of the Plains remain heavily forested, and are designated as parkland today. I grew up not far from the Hauraki Plains, and regularly tramp in the Kaimai Ranges. I had always imagined the farmers' plains and the forested hills as two different and differently necessary zones, one consecrated to production and the other to the 'preservation' of nature.

For Park, though, the hills and the plain represent two sides of the same alienation. He recalls that Hauraki Maori lived amongst the lowland forest without destroying it, and shows how Maori intent on 'exploiting' their old forests, like the Tuhoe people of the Ureweras, have repeatedly suffered at the hands of the 'guardians of virgin nature'. Park wants his readers to renounce terms like 'virgin nature' and 'wilderness', and to think in new ways about their relationship with the world:

The 'empty places' that led Monte Holcroft 'straight back to the unknown' are like Cook's 'mild and conveniently vacant' plains...The Western approach to conservation sets nature aside as large tracts of land in a state of imagined innocence...settler culture was utilitarian, but they liked ferny glades, waterfalls, and forest clearings for bush picnics. The scenic reserve was just another masthead on which the empire could fly its banners...it marginalised ordinary nature.

In pursuit of his ends, Park seeks to renovate the concept 'ecosystem'. He makes it clear that, to him at least, an ecosystem is a human concept, designed to apprehend reality, and open to use in different ways for different purposes.

Of course, Geoff Park's arguments will only become influential if they find expression in some sort of social and political movement. Will Nga Uruora lose its whiff of fatalism, and read instead like a manifesto, or a prophecy? During the seabed and foreshore hikoi I marched over the Auckland harbour bridge close to a group of Hauraki Maori holding a banner which read OURS 4SURE — TO EXPLOIT AND PROTECT. Reading Park's book helped me to understand that slogan.

5. Constructing ecosystems

Can we relate 'Backwater' to Geoff Park's condemnation of the 'cult of wilderness'? We have seen that Lindsay's poem refuses any sentimental treatment of 'bush and sea'. Lindsay's bizarre anthropomorphisations — his waves that 'complain of sand/ in their sandwiches' — ridicule the solemn and pompous personifications of nature so common in New Zealand poetry. The double meaning of 'screening/ ineffability' suggests the important role that the cult of the 'unspoilt' backwater plays in 'commercialising/ the scenery' of this country.

Would it be going too far to argue that the best poems in The Subject can be read as elliptical, highly compressed 'ecosystems': that is, as constructs that attempt both to approximate a recalcitrant reality and to break through the old categories New Zealanders use to think about their relationship to their surroundings? Graham Lindsay does not, of course, present his book in this way. He sees himself struggling with the limits of language, not with the limitations of one or another social construction of reality. He offers metaphysical complaint, not social criticism. But the best poems speak for themselves, and they speak more eloquently than ever, ten years on:

A reread discovers

soft spots like this

where text covers

an underground spring. Billowing

waterbed for verbalists

to jump on.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]