How to write New Zealand’s best poems

Post-contact New Zealand poetry has never been much to write home about, even when the first pakeha poets were doing just that – sending their creaking, stumbling verse about their antipodean experiences back to Mother England. Our sole world-famous-out-of-New Zealand author, Katherine Mansfield, abandoned the colonial backwater of her birth for the centre of the Empire at the age of 20 – before she had published any of her short stories or poetry – and never returned. The rest of our post-contact versifiers are all “L&P poets” (world famous in New Zealand), with James K. Baxter the only 2.25-litre bottle amongst them.

The man most responsible for setting back the cause of New Zealand poetry in the 20th century was Allen Curnow, who took it upon himself to tell the nation what New Zealand poetry was and how it should be written. His monumentally flawed Introduction to his 1960 anthology The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960) is excruciating to read. Curnow was a man out of touch with his times and his opinions on poetry would be laughable if they hadn’t been so crushing of poets who had the temerity to write as if they were living in the 1960s.

In the 21st century the “Curnow Curse” has evolved into the “Manhire Makutu” and New Zealand poetry is still having the life squeezed out of it by the poisonous poetics of one man. Bill Manhire’s crimes against poetry are so heinous and so numerous that when he finally shuffles off this mortal coil he will wake up in Hades, where he will be force-fed his artless and patronizing verses by the Muses for all eternity. Manhire conveniently showcased all of his most damnable faults in the unadulterated bullshit he calls “The Oral Tradition”, which has been roundly derided in these pages before.  

Manhire is director of Victoria University’s creative writing department which has the astonishing braggadocio to call itself the “International Institute of Modern Letters” – a name so pretentious that even Simon Prast would say, “You must be joking, you can’t seriously be calling it that.” Every year this meatless sausage factory publishes Best New Zealand Poems, which has the same effect on the development of New Zealand poetry as elephant tranquilizer on a toddler.

And this is where you, dear reader and budding poet, come in. What follows is a copper-bottomed guide to writing New Zealand’s best poems. In no time at all – and with minimal effort – you will be composing poetry so poetic that it will be selected for the International Institute of Modern Letters’ Best New Zealand Poems 2011.

While a different editor is appointed by the Institute each year, all of them have the same qualification for the job: a poetic sensibility that bears an incestuously close relation to Manhire’s. With this established, we can be absolutely certain that the poetic predilections of the 2009 editor, Robyn Marsack, will be shared by those who come after her (2010’s selection had not been posted online at the time of writing).

Marsack’s suitability for the job is obvious only to someone of Manhire’s Lear-like judgement. While she recently co-edited an anthology of 20 contemporary New Zealand poets she is not a poet herself; she was born in New Zealand but has since emigrated to Scotland where she has been director of the Scottish Poetry Library since 2000; she has translated French novels into English – with this pedigree how could anyone have their finger more precisely on the pulse of New Zealand poetry than her?

To write the best New Zealand poetry you must not stray beyond the following subjects:

1)      flora and fauna

2)      overseas experiences

3)      reminiscences of childhood

Indeed, Marsack’s selection of 25 poems reads for the most part like a humourless pseudo-verse summary of My Family and Other Animals padded out with unedited excerpts from undergraduate travel diaries.

The poems that are explicitly about animals ascend no higher up the slopes of Parnassus than the winning entry of an under-10 poetry competition. They are proof that the infantilization now spreading through all aspects of New Zealand society has not spared its poets and the poetry they feel compelled to write. Were it not for the fact that the editors of Best New Zealand Poems honour childishly naive poetry like James Norcliffe’s “yet another poem about a giraffe” year after year, this state of affairs would merely be sorry, not scandalous. Norcliffe concludes a note on his poem with “I thought it would be fun to imagine a giraffe in Russia.” My 5-year-old niece once thought it would be fun to imagine a giraffe in her bedroom but even she would think twice about composing a poem about such a fleeting fancy; within seconds she had moved on to imagining an entire zoo in her classroom and thus advanced well beyond the scope of Norcliffe’s poetic imagination.

Marsack endorses similarly juvenile excrescences about a deer (“a possible journey” by Kerrin P. Sharpe), a fox (“The Fox” by Bernadette Hall), a horse (“Dylan Thomas (b.2003), Coolmore Stud, New South Wales” by Gregory O’Brien) and trees (“Certain Trees” by Ashleigh Young, an effort so unashamedly childish it even copies Sesame Street’s “One of these kids is doing her own thing” format). It is impossible to imagine anyone over 12 getting anything out of reading these poems. They are so amateurishly conceived and so feebly executed that it is equally impossible to believe they were written by full-grown adults.

The second major theme you will need to address in your poetry is “overseas experiences”. The best way to do this is to travel somewhere off the beaten track, like Mongolia (as John Gallas did before writing “the Mongolian Women’s Orchestra”) or Russia (as Tusiata Avia did before composing “Nafanua goes to Russia and meets some friends from back home”). Once there you will need to increase your sense of self-importance to such a degree that you can write as if no one had ever visited your destination before. Then you do one of two things: either appropriate the music and poetry of another culture like Gallas (half of “his” poem is made up of the lyrics to a Mongolian song) or, like Avia, ham-fistedly foist figures from your own mythology onto a society and culture you are making minimal efforts to understand.

Of course the easiest way to have an overseas experience is to get someone else to pay for it. “At the Villa dei Pini” was written by New Zealand’s most convincing cadaver impersonator C.K. Stead while “holding a Bogliasco Fellowship at the Liguria Study Centre in Bogliasco, near Genoa”. Now Stead cannot be lumped in with the kindergarten poets discussed thus far; he is on the cusp of 80 after all. He was one of just two youngsters to be included (and patronized) in Curnow’s Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse and at least took the trouble to study the craft of poetry before giving vent to his lukewarm talent.

The third and final theme you’ll need to nail is “reminiscences of childhood”. I have already drawn attention above to the plague of infantilization that infects every walk of adult society in New Zealand. It is unsurprising then that many of New Zealand’s best poems in 2009 were unmemorable trips down memory lane: Lynn Davison’s “Before we all hung out in cafés” bores you to death before you get to the end of the title; Marty Smith’s “Hat” is too threadbare to cover anything effectively; and Louise Wallace’s “The Poi Girls” is Mansfield without maturity.

The most important thing to take from the foregoing paragraphs is this: under absolutely no circumstances should you write a poem that addresses adult themes; reads as if it was written by an adult; or displays any awareness of poetic construction or devices.

Only two of the 25 poems – Stead’s and Michele Leggott's – display any genuine, as opposed to counterfeit, poetic imagination. The remaining authors couldn’t tell you how verse differs from prose if their lives depended on it. Most of Marsack’s poems are nothing more than chopped-up prose, displaying poetic effects no more dazzling than the tiresome splitting of a sentence across two stanzas. There is minimal sense of rhythm and an almost complete ignorance of verse forms (these poets seem unaware that “free verse” still needs to be formed with poetic imagination). Some of them might know who T.S. Eliot is, but all of them are ignorant of his advice: “No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.” In sum, all you need to do is arbitrarily decide on a line width, say five words or 4.5 centimetres, and chop up a few short sentences accordingly, remembering to split at least one sentence across two stanzas.

Every year Manhire’s State-subsidized hirelings reward writers who are the poetic equivalent of a bus driver who thinks he’s got all the skills necessary to race in Formula 1. These poetry-bludgers don’t want to work at their craft – and why should they when the State will not only support them financially but give them laurels to rest on as well? The end result is a perpetual bowel motion in which lazy pseudo-versifiers are lionized by lazy unqualified judges, all of whom are being paid by Creative New Zealand, i.e. you. Until this insidious status quo is altered, poetry will continue to be tortured by Manhire and his moronic goon squad. But all is not lost: thanks to New Zealand Gerald you can now score yourself a tax rebate by writing the best poetry in the country.