Dougal McNeill

As the bus was between Gledenning Ave and Buccleugh St on North Rd this morning I turned to see Sacred Heart Church and, in the morning light, it looked as if Robin White had painted it, the hills and bush behind it, the hedge to its side. A man, troubled, got on at the next stop and, with his eyebrows and lined face, seemed as if he were a figure in a Jeffrey Harris painting. A glimpse through a window on the early part of the walk up North Rd showed a scene, ‘imagined in the context of a room’, as if framed by Joanna Margaret Paul.

If the poets teach the free man how to praise then the painters teach us how to see. It’s been a day when the gift of all of that seeing has been clearer than usual, and I’m grateful to them all.

Would you like to learn how to utilise Co-Pilot, ChatGPT and Claude? I would prefer not to.

And Brad East reminds me that I am free to say “no”.

Terry Eagleton, writing in COMMONWEAL:

“The scholarship boy typically feels that he has betrayed his parents, not that he has done away with them. Was I glad that my father was dead, as well as distraught? Was his end necessary so that I might begin? When I became a don I was the youngest fellow of my college since the eighteenth century, an era to which some of my colleagues seemed anxious to return. I had set my foot on the escalator that was to bear me up and away from the speechless man I had left on his deathbed. Then I moved to Oxford, uncertain whether I should reject the place in my father’s name or embrace it for just the same reason.”

I’ve not kept up with Eagleton’s books these past years, but I’ll be reading A DEATH OF ONE’S OWN.

Nate Wooley’s tribute to Sonny Rollins at n+1 reminded me I’d never listened to anything more than Way Out West, and, to fix that gap, I’ve been listening to The Cutting Edge, a live album of Rollins at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1974. And that (in the closing track, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”), took me to Rufus Harley, the only jazz bagpipe player I think I’ve ever heard. Glory be.

A found poem:

I think that’s a negative view, to be honest.

Like: we’re entrepreneurs and

business people, and

I get it.

You know, if you’re not retooling and radically disrupting your

business,

you ain’t doing the job.

You know, you have to disrupt yourself aggressively

before you get disrupted by global events,

and if you keep thinking you want

the same business model,

the same customer mix,

the same margin structure,

you know you’ve got to be

retooling and

refinancing and

rehoming, and

that’s just the reality of

business people

all around the world.

So, my job is to make sure I’m setting up the conditions

for you to be able to go create that growth.

And I think some of the subtext and assumption in your question is that

I think in New Zealand

I’ll be honest with you as a

business person who was …

I sat in Illinois for six years in Chicago, and the last person I wanted to ever talk to as a CEO was the government.

I didn’t sit there in Chicago saying I wonder what the government thinks and I wonder what they’re doing to help me for my business?

Can I get some grant money to do something?

No!

No.

I’m a business person.

I’m building a kick-ass company that actually has

commercially superior returns,

great customer experience, and

awesome internal culture.

That is the job of what makes a great company,

not a good one,

a great one.

And so that was my mentality.

Come home to New Zealand, and there’s a parent-child mentality.

I have literally sat in boardrooms across New Zealand,

The conversation goes: I wonder what the government’s going to do?

I wonder what the government’s going to think?

Who cares what the government thinks or does?

Our job is to be adult,

adult,

adult.

The business leaders,

the political leaders, and

the community leaders

working together,

doing things differently.

I set up the operating system.

You go out there and smack it and

go create the road, and

the community leaders see the pain,

the hurt,

the need, and

the frustration, and

the three actors do different things

(but complementary things)

to deal with the challenges and

the opportunities.

I am sorry to read in THE POST this morning that Ian Jamieson has died.

Ian taught in the English Department at Otago when I was there as an undergraduate, and was an inspiring, eccentric, lively and completely winning lecturer. I wasn’t at all keen to do Middle or Old English, compulsory subjects in those days, but was quickly converted to the pleasures of both - and to the wonders of Chaucer - by his energy, obvious delight in his subject, nicely controlled zaniness. Lots of it, I realise now, was a carefully-prepared performance and presentation aimed to win and keep our attention. It worked! At the time it seemed like a free-wheeling, improvisatory and slightly messy ramble through the works of writers Jamieson talked about like they were old friends. Lecturing needed more showmanship and dazzle in those pre-PowerPoint days, and Ian was a great razzle-dazzler. I’ll try and read some Robert Henryson this weekend in his memory.

Lachlan Brown read, and talked about, winningly, his sonnet “Listening In” at ASAL in Brisbane last month, and I ordered his books from Marsden Books that night. They came this week and both confirm all the stirring and sense of pleasurable anticipation “Listening In” set in motion. Established and in the world, Lunar Inheritance (2017) and Limited Cities (2012) are new for me and full of surprises.

Lunar Inheritance I’ll be thinking with for a while longer but, on my second reading of Limited Cities, what’s sticking in memory are all of Brown’s striking similes. Some of these are charming in their unexpected rightness (the job of a simile, yes?): a rubbish truck “setting down its bins / like a triumph of empty glasses”; a train seat snapping shut “like a sharp rebuke or a director calling cut.” Even theorists “lining up late like Thursday / night wheelie bins”. Nice!

Something else is going on in this collection too. A simile is a comparison that, in its vividness, is always admitting to an _un_alikeness, and drawing attention to the way things aren’t identical. As if . . . like . . . as . . . like . . . the chain, really, loops endlessly and never settles. Simile in Brown seems to be a kind of default way of trying to capture things as they are and also experiencing things in motion and fleetingly. That’s partly to do with thinking in and with the suburbs (“this part / of the city that is not / the city”) and thinking in and with trains and commuting and being in between work and home, “somewhere / in between”. Brown is good about these experiences (these are good poems - beautiful poems - to read if you’re interested in trains and public transport and train networks as things of wonder on their own terms), and he’s also a good poet with them. A profusion of similes - of things being like another and admitting their unalikeness, and of suburbs being as and of and like the city without ever quite being the promise of the City - feel, in ways I’m not quite sure I understand yet, to do with the lasting damage of the Howard years, and what that meant for our generation in Australia (we’re contemporaries), and what those long years of low interest rates and big mortgages and politics built on both did to collectivity, solidarity, location. Brown writes of a “chessboard suburb”, where “every lung expands and contracts / with its own economy; each breath another / loan repayment”. There’s a lot of property talk in these poems too, a sign of someone taking contemporary Australia seriously.

Compassion, too, but. I prefer Brown’s “Petrol Stations, or Nine Vouchers Without the Optimism” to Bishop’s “Filling Station” - a poem it is like, and one I appreciate all the more because it prompted me to read Bishop’s again with fresher ears and eyes - because it never lets its humour become judgement, and because it dispenses with optimism for that more difficult quality, Hope. Brown is a poet, I’m sure, reading these poems, determined to believe that Somebody does love us all. The tricky part, in this world, is finding the right ways to make that belief in Him meaningful here, in this world of tollways and hubcaps “left on a / roadside, / spinning like a coin.”

About a year ago I found I couldn’t be on social media any more. There wasn’t anything particularly high-minded or principled about this; I’m someone easily distracted and with many people I love living abroad, so the trivial things lots of people complained about over the years (all those photographs of what others were eating for breakfast) always appealed. And still would, if I could find them again. That was part of what stopped working, as others better informed than me have written about: the “enshittification”, the automation, the corruption of good human habits. I’ve never been a particularly good or thoughtful friend but have always felt that I ought to be one, or at least try to be better. Before Facebook I was bad at remembering birthdays; after it I stopped trying. The distress and distressed distraction that came from the hyper-presence of images of genocide and injustice and suffering didn’t mobilise me to greater action or clarity about those injustices, either; cumulatively, the images acted as barriers to action. And the strange hyper-public of these commoditised spaces (everyone a holder of a “platform”!) made meaningful speech harder to attend to or to form.

More difficult, and more significant, was the overall “context collapse”. Patricia Lockwood’s “The Communal Mind” should have been a warning. I don’t want my mind to be structured in the ways that essay so brilliantly explores, and don’t think it needs to be. I haven’t Lockwood’s agility (or intellect), for one thing. For another, I’m less sure that we need, as writers and thinkers, to accept that this is the cultural logic of the age or the way the structure of feeling is to be found. Those with money to make from all of us being on their platforms all the time want us to think it’s the “Age of AI”, or the “digital era”, or whatever. Maybe. Active social media use fell sharply in Britain last year, the FT reported. Perhaps this is the beginning of an end rather than the end of a beginning. Either way, it’s not for me anymore.

Worst, really, were the things I thought I needed most (book talk and politics talk, in my case). Speed and the hyper-availability of opinion and response and opinions-in-response made both more and more confusing the more they poured through. Pope Leo writes about this, indirectly, in Magnifica Humanitas:

The third major challenge is intellectual and concerns knowledge. Without careful attention, an educational system lacking in a love for truth may emerge, in which an incessant flow of information replaces the essential exercise of research, reflection and discernment. As knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented, it becomes difficult to grasp reality as a whole, to ask profound questions about meaning, or to develop authentic, critical and creative thought. Many educators already report signs of dehumanization, where people may “know many things” but struggle to find direction in their lives, partly due to an inability to connect information with deeper knowledge or maintain a sense of purpose. A genuinely healthy attitude is needed, requiring rhythms that incorporate silence, in-depth study, reading and judicious analysis, for without these elements inner freedom may be compromised.

I was becoming one of those people. I’m trying, in my writing life and in my teaching (and my political commitments elsewhere) to re-establish some context, some distance, some silence. It feels important, at the moment, to know how to talk together about not-knowing. And the kind of criticism and literary theoretical-work I want to write I want also to be neither the “hot take” nor the puff piece. Trying to think about everything all at once - getting into the habit of forming opinions as I was encountering the material for thought itself - was training me in both kinds of deformation. Magnifica Humanitas uses the word “discernment” a lot. That’s a word with a particular meaning in the Catholic tradition, sure, and can’t be taken wholesale from its connections to the search for God’s will but, all the same: that’s what I want to learn how to find and to write towards.

Micro.blog is nice because it doesn’t have analytics or replies or any way in particular for me to worry over or get distracted by who is reading. Writing is something I need to do because it is how I think. Reading, if it is useful for you, is something you’re welcome to but can do in a sphere separate to mine. We’re engaged in an anti-social media.

If it hadn’t been raining I wouldn’t have looked down as I walked to the bus and, if I hadn’t looked down, I wouldn’t have seen this plaque. Robin Hyde lived here, on Northland Road, and left the spot ninety-eight years' back. Twenty-four years, off and on, I’ve been living in Wellington and still, in good ways, I’m discovering its part and remembering that it feels unfamiliar, out-of-the-ordinary, not at all my place.

I bumped into Dave Wilson from Te Kōki at the Hautapu at work this morning (Matariki visible, just, through the mist and city half-light and then, all of a sudden, it was dawn and light and day). And he told me about Callum Allardice, and Allardice’s “Hotere”, a composition responding, and paying tribute, to Tuwhare’s poem. It’s the opening track to [The Rodger Fox Big Band plays Hone Tuwhare], and I’d half-remembered it from that performance but, in Allardice’s own hands, is something altogether stranger, more mysterious, enchanting, alive. I’ve been listening to it on repeat all morning since.

This past week I’ve been in Brisbane, attending the Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference. Academic conferences often leave me feeling dispirited and glum; this one has me elated and full of scholarly pop and crackle. Five splendid days in fine company – learned, friendly, irreverent, open-minded and welcoming. It felt a model of what I’d like to present to people as what academic life should be.

Highlights? Michael Falk and Dylan Chng talking on fictions of and in AI (Michael offered a particularly exhilerating reading of a single word in a Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker story). Anita Heiss’s keynote on Black words and resistance. Sarah Holland-Batt’s the next morning on the histories of poetry and diplomacy, and how they intertwine. Holland-Batt’s collection THE JAGUAR I found in a store the next day; its opening poem will be worrying at me a while still. Dashiell Moore, Kedong Liu, Jiayi Wang and Brenda Machosky spoke on “Narrating Indigenous Pasts and Futures”. Susan Lever was witty and wise launching Julian Croft’s NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (and then Julian was wise and witty launching Susan’s LIFE of A. D. Hope). Graham Ackhurst! He was in conversation with Julieanne Lamond, and then I read his novel BORDERLAND in more-or-less one go in my hotel room that night. Darby Jones, Grace Lucas-Pennington and Rhianna Patrick offered challenging thoughts about First Nations literary criticism. Jeff Sparrow got us excited to read his LIFE of Lesbia Harford. Eugenia Flynn spoke on “Sovereignty in Practice: Indigenous Writing and Literary Culture in the Era of Artificial Intelligence”. Susan Lever was (again) witty and wise on A. D. Hope, this time on his writing to and from Fay Zwicky. Giacomo Bianchino poked and prodded at how poetry might fit in postwar socialist realism (oddly, was his conclusion). Wayne Bradshaw won me over completely to his case for “a vernacular renaissance” in the “Ocker highbrow” (take that Max Harris!). Lachlan Brown and Verity Oswin are new names for me as poets, and ones I’m glad to be following up in the weeks to come. And plenty more: my notebook is full of books and articles I’m now to follow up.

Just down the road was Archive Fine Books, almost as rich and various in its Australiana as Gould’s in Sydney used to be, but somehow a neat and tidy version. I bought a bagful of Thea Astley, Peter Steele, Fay Zwicky.

Brisbane will never be one of my Places: too hot, too sultry, too drawn-out and riverine for a “pallid child” of a “beer-and-whisky / Guilt culture” out of the “Gothic South” like me. But I caught a ferry from one side to the other, saw two pelicans quite self-contented and satisfied in a mangrove shoreline, wondered at a fig tree’s roots and generally managed to marvel at it all.

It’s striking how many of the most exciting younger poets at the moment – Xiaole Zhan, Modi Deng, Cadence Chung, Claudia Jardine – have trained as musicians at the same time as they have developed their writing. Jackson McCarthy is one of this group, too, and I wonder if it’s the discipline of music that has freed them all from the self-defeating New Zealand self-consciousness and awkwardness and inhibition around talent and craft and skill and effort that so often turns a hesitancy to speak into a conscious mangling of what could be beautiful speech. They’re not Fretful Sleepers! And part of what makes McCarthy’s Portrait – a debut collection I’ve just finished reading, and plan to re-read as many times as I can this week – so exciting and so fresh and so alive is its unembarrassed assurance in its own goodness. It swaggers! And it deserves to swagger. Making music is hard work, and the culture of music recognises effort and strain and precision in a way that what passes for reviewing here doesn’t often with literature. All of those competitions, for the players; for us listeners and viewers, less admirably, there’s the wonder of whether it’ll all come together. Watching Yunchan Lim on YouTube is a chance to revel in his brilliance; there’s also a slight thrill in imagining him messing it up. McCarthy doesn’t mess it up, but he’s unruffled either at letting us see the effort involved, the stitching and unstitching that goes into all of this performance of ease and cool. None of the tedium, in this collection, of a poet pretending it’s all just knocked together somehow despite himself. Portrait shimmers:

The yawn I pick up from his

yawn: a memory of a breath

in the surface of the dawn.

I’ve known some of these poems for a couple of years now, but reading them in new company and together as a stand-alone book brings them into a different (and flattering, and re-energising) order. Some of this is to do with musicality. The poems sound good together – they chime – and the different echoes (some, as with Auden and Ashbery, acknowledged; some, as with Manhire, unacknowledged) build to something more than their individual moments. There is the stillness, the music of the collection as the ‘space between the notes’ (the ‘small white horror’ of the ‘bones of a bird / in the grass’ my favourite). A funniness comes out, too, a kind of reckless zaniness that threatens all of that lyricism and stillness and almost – but never quite! – upends it into boyish play. I’ve thought of McCarthy from the beginning as a poet of wit. He’s also funny, quite a different thing. Some of that humour, and some of the swagger, is occasionally aloof and sometimes a little cruel. That’s a right of the young and the gifted and those with the nerve, certainly (just like striking the lacrimae rerum note), and it’s part of the pleasure, and of the wit (in “Uniform” especially). It’s also a little chilling, and a little frightening.

Portrait is interesting about men, too; in romantic ways, obviously (and winningly), but in other ways as well. I was about to write in ‘masculinity’, but that sounds too pious and academic and worthy. I just mean in things manly: the hang of t-shirts, certain tones of voice, ways of being social (and anti-social). Lots of women poets write interestingly about how women relate to other women, but it’s a topic men seem to find harder to approach about other men with the honesty of their curiosity intact. Vincent O’Sullivan ruined some of his most moving poems by getting self-conscious half-way through and deliberately hamming things up to avoid a real confrontation with his own intensities. O’Sullivan’s titles sound so often – it frustrates me no end – like a concert pianist banging his fists down on the keys after playing Chopin’s Études just to show he wasn’t taken in by the show. ‘Trakl, old mate’, ‘Nice morning for it, Adam’, ‘The trouble with reading, frankly’, ‘Disciples, frankly’, ‘Blame Vermeer’. It’s so dispiriting. The comparison might seem odd but, reading Portrait, I kept thinking of O’Sullivan in the moments of his I love best. McCarthy and O’Sullivan are both, in their different ways, Catholic Auckland, both prickly, smart, lyrical, writerly, measured, cagey. McCarthy’s ways of watching men, and thinking about men, thinking about the homosocial, track O’Sullivan’s without the latter’s self-sabotage and good-keen-mannerisms. That’s to do with history and generation, surely; but there’s a shared stance. The choice of Max Oettli’s Silver Star as a cover image (an inspired piece of design) suggests something of this roving, energetic, restless observation.

I love also McCarthy’s willingness to think about tradition as something to be evoked and played with and followed – Auden, Glück (ganz glücklich!), Ashbery, all in the universal dance. And I appreciate very much his willingness to think in public and in art being both Māori and Pākehā, and about the intersecting and interlocking lines of art, tradition, story and meaning being inseparable there. It’s a quietly determined stance and one that, without much fanfare, issues some challenges to readers and to critics. As it should.

What next? The (considerable) charm and beauty of this as a debut lies, for me, in its sense of order, of balance, of music. The contrast between a poised form and a disordered content is a constant, and does fine work. What would happen were the poet next to really allow himself ‘down the streets’ of his mind to ‘just look / at the people’s sudden faces’? McCarthy has shown he can write leggierio; can he let in some formal mess and disorder con brio? Is there room for affirmation through doubt? A few of the poems here felt, to me, a little too poised, a little too sure of their performance. ‘The Earth’ comes close to a kind of unpleasant jeering, closing itself and turning away from the sacred (or from me as a reader and my hopes to know the sacred, anyway). What of the encounter with a ‘sacred being’ that Auden puts at the heart of creation in ‘Making, Knowing, Judging’? ‘It may be noble or something unmentionable in a drawing room, it may be anything it likes on condition, but this condition is absolute, that it arouse awe’: there’s plenty of wonder in Portrait but, to my ears, it’s not a collection ready (yet) to let ‘awe’ in fully. That’s for what’s to come, I hope.

And that’s an early judgement from an early setting of readings; already I’m doubting myself. And the poems ask to be read again. They’re at work in the memory and in the ear.

An editorial gripe. Reality must be local and special at the point where we pick up the traces. That includes our bottoms. Someone at Auckland University Press ought to have insisted that the ‘ass’ in ‘dress pants’, the curving ‘ass’ in ‘the night / full of stars’ and the ‘beautiful white ass’ in ‘Santa Monica’ be corrected to arses. All of my Orsmans are at work and so I’m having to rely on Deverson and Kennedy’s much less charming New Zealand Oxford Dictionary, but even they are clear on the matter. Some editor couldn’t be arsed. They should of.

James Norcliffe, in his Landfall review, calls Manhire’s title “at once disingenuous and somewhat mischievous”. Maybe. I’ve started to suspect, re-reading the collection this weekend gone, that it’s best, sometimes at least, to take these poems, and this poet, as straight as you can. So much of the best of this book is “a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure”. It’s written using “the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation”. It is the “honourable characteristic” of this poetry that “its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind”, especially, in this case, Dunedin: its Botanic Gardens (“Our History lecturer”), its mysteries (“Explaining Dunedin”), its surroundings (“Outram”). There’s a hint at balladry in more than a few places - snatches of stories, at the least - and what I hear as an insistent kind of lyricism, a hovering around almost and not-quite-rhyme. Anne Kennedy writes somewhere (where?) about Manhire’s “distillations”. Lovely word! They’re on display here, too. And childhood, plenty of it. And melancholy. Manhire is “stepping westward” now, just like he always was.

The sound of the lyrical O!, bound to child and man by ‘natural piety’, is all through this collection, as is its terser counter-sound of “oh.” O is the signature Manhire vowel (“eventually we all shall go / into the dark furniture of the radio”), and the way O can sound elation, exhalation, deflated recognition and dismissal - from O! to ohhh to oh - is as good a guide as any to what I love about what’s at work here:

The world begins to drone.

You’re on your own.

Something was stopping my parents' garage door closing, so I had a poke about to find out why. This is what came down and, as it did, my mind went to the “bereft elaboration” of the poem in Vincent O’Sullivan’s Seeing You Asked (1998). “It is one thing”, the poem says, to tell a child that birds “have their reasons”. It’s quite another, seeing the “cracked spilled work of instinct” to know that this is all, for them and for us, a mystery, the nest a message “franked / from places we do not understand, but fear.” “The child”, the poem ends, “consoles the cup of woven air.”