Modernism!

My plan of introducing poetry and poetics to my preparatory students in bite-sized chunks (two lots of two weeks) is working very well. Having encountered Wyatt, Shakespeare, Keats and Auden along the way, today we found ourselves alongside Allen Curnow.

What strikes me about Curnow’s poetry from the forties, in particular, is how acutely of that period in New Zealand’s literary modernism it seems, and how personal to Curnow’s own arc of faith and loss. The idea that what was being articulated was the universal, refracted through an individual writer, seems a long way away; instead, the poems seem burnished artefacts of a particular sensibility in a particular time.

Always the loss of faith, the sense of a world with a god-sized hole in it, looms large, along with a cynicism about the possibility of human happiness in that here and now—as if the suburbs themselves were eating the poet alive. For students reading Curnow for the first time, with the death of the author behind them, I observe that the texts no longer have the power to scare, to shock, to menace and frighten, that they did when I was taught by people who’d been taught by the man himself.

It strikes me too that Curnow’s ability to defend not only his reputation but also his interpretation against those who cast it in alternative lights did much to maintain a systematic reading of his work (even allowing for the inverses and contraries to this reading) until his death. Now, without his insistence that here was poetic truth, and here reality, many poems seem to me to fix on the very things they decry or reject: the suburbs and their rituals, the quotidian of the common man, the rent in the cosmos that refuses to stop taking the shape of God.

Out of Sleep

Awake, but not yet up, too early morning
Brings you like bells in matrix of mist
Noises the mind may finger, but no meaning.
Two blocks away a single car has crossed

Your intersection with the hour; each noise
A cough in the cathedral of your waking—
The cleaners have no souls, no sins—each does
Some job, Christ dying or the day breaking.

This you suppose is what goes on all day.
No one is allowed long to stop and listen,
But takes brief turns at it: now as you lie

Dead calm, one gust in the damp cedar hissing
Will have the mist right off in half a minute.
You will not grasp the meaning, you will be in it.

Tagged as: Curnow, poetry