Writers in Residence and Other Captive Fauna

By Ted Jenner

Ted Jenner is a poet, translator, and classical scholar who was born and bred in Dunedin. He has spent the last forty years living in Africa, Europe, and the northern parts of Aotearoa, publishing his work in a variety of literary journals. Writers in Residence is a compilation of most of Jenner's short fiction and prose poetry written in the last twenty years in New Zealand and Malawi. It has as its basic theme a search for meaning in a world which is resistant to such a search -- the meaning lies in the exploration itself.

 

Texts that combine a detailed scrutiny of place, and the objects and 'spirit of place', that become rather an archaeological 'dig' in the unstated but present, presence of Herakleitos – where 'deep equals true'.  – Michael Harlow

• Language: English
• Publisher: Titus Books
• Release date: Aug 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781877441813

Book preview

Writers_in_Residence_Jenner.jpg

ted jenner

Writers in Residence

and other captive fauna

ISBN: 978-1-877441-81-3

©Ted Jenner 2009, 2020

This publication is copyright.

Any unauthorised act may incur criminal prosecution.

No resemblance to any person or persons living or dead is intended.

First published by Titus Books in 2009

1416 Kaiaua Road, Mangatangi

New Zealand

www.titus.co.nz

All but one of these poems have previously appeared in the periodicals and books: AND, brief, A Brief Description of the Whole World, Landfall, The New Fiction, New Quest (Mumbai), Parallax, Poetry NZ, The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories, Sulfur (Michigan) and Takahe.

Cover design by Cerian Wagstaff.

Published with the assistance of Creative New Zealand

Contents

For Reality, Against Certainty: an Introduction to Ted Jenner by Scott Hamilton

Writers in Residence

A Quiet Shape

Bachelor’s Tuesday

C5

Beyond the Mezzanine

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Shirt

Arthur’s Pass

The poet’s eyes are lowered

St. Kilda

Doubtful Sound

Itineraries

Inscriptions for East Cape Markstones

Progress Report on an Annotated Checklist for a Motuihe Island Gazetteer of Ethnographical Topology and Comparative Onomatography

In Italy Take Care Not To Miss

Athens: Three Sketches – or what we missed in translation

Constellations

Heidegger’s Instep

Ezra’s Last Ear

Señor Borges’ Index Fingerprint

A Concise Natural History of Southern Malawi

A Text as World : A World as Text: Malawai 1998-2006

Luminous Details : Malawi 1998 -2001

A Millers Chaff : Malawi 2002-2004

A Miller’s Chaff : Malawi 2004-2007

A Brief History of the Muses

NOTES

For Reality, Against Certainty: an Introduction to Ted Jenner

I first encountered the name Ted Jenner in 1991, when I was fossicking in the dimly-lit back shelves of the Rosehill College library. Ted was one of the writers included in The New Fiction, the fat, baffling collection of ‘experiments in prose’ edited and introduced by Michael Morrissey, a man whom I then imagined to be related to the lead singer of The Smiths. The texts in The New Fiction broke all the golden rules we had been taught by our English teachers at Rosehill: there were stories without plots, let alone trick endings, pages broken into multiple columns of texts, and characters whose names seemed to change with every new paragraph.

I duly showed the strange book to my English teacher, a rotund, bearded man who wore braces and loved GK Chesterton. He flipped through a few pages, turned up his bushy eyebrows slightly, and chuckled ‘Ah, yes! The zonked-out-of-one’s-skull in Ponsonby school of writing!’ But the strangest and most compelling piece in The New Fiction was written some distance from Ponsonby, and showed no sign of being the product of mind-altering substances. Ted Jenner’s ‘Progress Report on an Annotated Checklist for a Motuihe Island Gazetteer of Ethnographical Topology and Comparative Onomatography’ seemed to have little in common with the other texts in The New Fiction, let alone the Chesterton stories which our English teacher loved to read aloud.

Jenner’s text had been composed while he wandered around Motuihe, the two hundred hectare island nestled between Waiheke and Motutapu in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf. Jenner discussed the topography and history of Motuihe in a series of numbered paragraphs, and provided a carefully-drawn map to help his readers.

As I read for the first time through the ‘Progress Report’ I decided it must be an excerpt from one of the textbooks we had to read in geography classes, a piece of dull, pedagogical prose which had unaccountably been mixed in with the wild experiments that filled the rest of The New Fiction. I soon noticed, though, that the text’s careful structure and sober tone hid all manner of tricks and treats. The author was liable to interrupt a solemn discourse about one of Motuihe’s coves or cliffs with a story from Polynesian mythology, or a sudden invocation of a long-forgotten Mediterranean god, or a description of events occurring before his eyes. Layer upon layer of fact and allusion built up, as Jenner created a portrait of Motuihe Island that included his own, very subjective response to the place. Jenner seemed to ridicule the pretensions of his text, even as he added more and more detail to it:

12. A grove of forty olive trees, said to have been planted by Sir Logan Campbell, who farmed the island in 1843. Perhaps the largest plantation of olives in Australasia, the trees are authentically gnarled, the fruit is bitter. (Quotation here on the civilised and destructive impulse of nostalgia.)

Despite or because of the weight of his knowledge, Jenner was superbly alert to the scene before him, as he wandered across Motuihe:

7. A brilliantly screen-printed silk falcon swoops over the slender isthmus linking Hine-Rehia with Turanga-o-Kahu; here several groups of SE Asian ESL students establish pockets of cultural identity almost immediately upon disembarkation.

Jenner’s extraordinary text made me realise for the first time that there is no Chinese Wall between different types of writing, and that the ‘technical’ languages of subjects like botany, linguistics and geography can be as poetic as Keats’ nightingale and Wordworth’s daffodils. Long after I had forgotten about the other pieces in The New Fiction, I remembered Ted Jenner’s ‘Progress Report’, and wondered what else the man might have written.

Years after my escape from Rosehill College, I encountered Jenner’s name again, at the bottom of a series of contributions to the journal A Brief Description of the Whole World, which was founded by Alan Loney in 1996 and nowadays bears the less cumbersome moniker brief. Jenner’s gifts to A Brief Description of the Whole World included of translations of obscure, fragmentary poems written fifteen hundred years ago in Greece, and long, impressionistic accounts of life in modern-day Malawi. The ‘Notes on Contributors’ page at the back of Loney’s journal claimed that Jenner was teaching Greek and Latin at the University of Malawi, and had only intermittent contact with his literary friends in New Zealand. I found the idea of anybody teaching Homer and Plato in the hinterland of Africa surreal, and wondered if either Ted or Alan Loney was perpetrating some quirky postmodernist joke, but texts like ‘Luminous Details: Malawi 1998-2001’ were convincingly full of vivid detail:

Early morning mist dissolving over last season’s maize. Dry, shrivelled stalks rustling in the breeze like the pages of a Latin Grammar, rattling off their responses at the first hint of rain…Pied crows on campus scratching the blister domes of the library’s roof.

It was only after Jenner’s return from a decade in Malawi in 2006 that I finally got to meet him, and to learn more about the life that lies behind the texts in Writers in Residence. Jenner grew up in the working class South Dunedin suburb of St Kilda, where his father practised medicine. In a recent interview he remembers wandering the windswept streets of his neighbourhood with gangs of friends, then going home and lying awake for hours in bed, listening to the waves pounding the dunes of St Kilda beach, worrying ‘that the vastness of the Southern Ocean might wash over me’. The St Kilda boy soon developed a fascination with the world of classical antiquity, largely because ‘it seemed so distant and exotic’. ‘If I’d grown up in modern Greece or Rome, then I probably would have been fascinated by Polynesia’, he suggests.

In the middle of the sixties the young Ted Jenner enrolled in Classics and English