Feeding the Gods

By Scott Hamilton

Scott Hamilton's second book of poetry takes us back to the strange yet strangely familiar territory he began to map in his acclaimed debut. In these poems the tyrannies of linear time, Cartesian logic, and geometric space are overthrown, so that a Japanese U boat surfaces in Kawhia Harbour, Hongi Hika attacks twenty-first century Auckland, Ulysses comes home to a South Pacific Ithaca, Ozymandias is reborn as Hosni Mubarak, the Australian Outback fills with water, Philip Clairmont escapes from a police raid by stepping into one of his paintings, and the author returns to the South Auckland of his mispent youth.  

 

Last night I dreamed that history was correcting itself. A huge hand lifted houses off the plain, as though it were clearing the board after a game of monopoly. Cows swelled to the size of hot air balloons, and drifted away over the Firth of Thames. The eels made themselves into question marks, as their ditches ran like mountain streams. In the emptied fields kahikatea got slowly to their feet, stretched their branches, and shook themselves dry, like the resurrected dead on Judgement Day, or swagmen after a kip. All those straight roads were rolled up like barbed wire. I looked down, and saw both my legs dissolving into the cool forest air...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Titus Books
• Release date: Aug 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781877441882

Book preview

Feeding_the_Gods_Hamilton.jpg

feeding the gods

Scott Hamilton

ISBN: 978-1-877441-88-2

©Scott Hamilton 2011, 2020

©Kendrick Smithyman 2011, 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 2011

1416 Kaiaua Road, Mangatangi

New Zealand

www.titus.co.nz

Cover image: Kendrick Smithyman

Cover design: Ellen Portch

Photos used with the kind permission of Margaret Edgcumbe

Acknowledgement is made to the editors of the journals brief, Landfall, Percutio, the Scoop Review of Books, and Jacket 2, where some of these poems first appeared.

Contents

Foreword

I. Rules of Art

Tuwhare

The Worm (for Ted Jenner)

Junkie (for Michael)

The Political Economy of Philip Clairmont

City Life

Self-criticism (for Jen Crawford)

II. Kids’ Stuff

The Suicide Set List

Eeling at the Retirement Home

Shooting the Gods

Papakura: An Anthology

Old Photo

Farm Work

Two Sentimental Pieces

III. Te Kakano Information Centre

Recent Unconfirmed Sightings of Te Whiro

Te Kakano Information Centre (for Leanne Tamaki)

Matariki

Tangaroa

The Hauraki Assignment (for Vaughan Rapatahana)

To Wiremu Tamihana

Moriori

Eripene

The Materialist Conception of History

IV. Churchgoing

Walking to the Dendroglyphs on Christmas Eve

Churchgoing (for Nathan and Amber)

Mister Chick

Knox Church Windows (for Bill Direen)

Reverend Kyle

V. Manuscripts found in a Police State

Elegy for a Survivor of the War on Afghanistan

Blackbirding

Max Jacob at Drancy Deportation Camp

Ozymandias at his Desk

Democratic Kampuchea

Kingseat Notebook (for Peter Olds)

The Deportation of Osip Mandelstam

VI. The Sea Route

Phlebas or Jonah

Seven Approaches to Kawhia

Muriwai

The Inland Sea

Homer and Heraclitus

Antarctica

The Drive Back

VII. Fragments of Thomas Kendall

Fragments of Thomas Kendall

VIII. Flying North

Flying North

Notes on the Poems

The Worm

The Political Economy of Philip Clairmont/The Materialist Conception of History

Homer and Heraclitus

Self-criticism

The Suicide Set List

Eeling at the Retirement Home

Te Kakano Information Centre

To Wiremu Tamihana

The Hauraki Assignment

Moriori

Walking to the Dendroglyphs at Christmas Eve

Churchgoing/Knox Church Windows

Mister Chick

Reverend Kyle

Blackbirder

Max Jacob at Drancy Deportation Camp

Ozymandias at his Desk

Phlebas or Jonah

Seven Approaches to Kawhia

The Inland Sea

Antarctica/Flying North

Foreword

Many of these poems were written while I was exploring the papers of Kendrick Smithyman, and putting together a selection of the previously unpublished texts I found there. When I told her about my adventures in the Smithyman archive, Margaret Edgcumbe lent me a couple of large boxes full of photographs Kendrick had taken, perhaps thinking that they might help to elucidate some of her late husband’s more recalcitrant poems. I arranged my favourite photographs around the house, leaning them on mantelpieces instead of Christmas cards, blu-tacking them to walls and doors, and standing them on the mountain ledge-like margins of overloaded bookshelves. Kendrick’s images crept into these poems. They continue to creep into everything I write.

The notes at the back of this book are not attempts at clarification; they are the maintenance of poetry by other means.

— S.H.

I. Rules of Art

Tuwhare

Tangaroa scuttles whales

and beaches fleets of dolphins,

Rehua flies moreporks

into an overpass,

Tane sends chainsaws

to chew on totara:

let’s face it, Hone,

the Gods are bloody stupid.

They give, and they take

away. They were stupid

again, this week.

I’m drinking Hone Hikoi

in the Harlequin Bar,

watching the TV,

watching them dig your hole.

Hine-nui-te-po was a bird

in the pub at Mangakino.

Not the blonde,

not the brunette, whatever

their names were —

the other one,

the one with the dampness

of the earth in her veins.

The one with the blackhead

on her chin —

the one filling an ashtray

in the corner of the pub,

under the dartboard

that had lost its numbers.

You ignored her,

but she was watching.

At closing time she sidled home

to sew you a suit.

She had to leave room,

knowing you’d fill out,

with Common Room sausage rolls

and literary dinners,

with Kaka Point homebrew

and with hot air.

Years, decades passed,

but the suit was waiting.

You’re wearing it now

as they squeeze you into the hole.

To write is to take

some little thing from death,

from Hine-nui-te-po,

the Great Lady of Night.

You took a dozen toi toi

and the rain on

a corrugated roof;

the Southern Ocean

and the walk down Highway One.

You left her a mound of earth

on the edge of Kaikohe,

and noon traffic backing up

to Ngawha Springs.

The Worm (for Ted Jenner)

I feel stupid, cooking a feast like this, even after fasting for a week.

A whole chook, caked in gravy thick as farmyard mud. Cobs of corn the size of forearms. Potatoes as big as fists. Perhaps I should set a place for another diner?

I pissed the worm out of Lake Malawi. I remember stumbling out of my tent and down a clay bank, then aiming the yellow stream into dark water beside a big rippling moon. It was at the embryonic stage, then the specialist explained, scratching his second chin. Small enough to shimmy up a jet of piss, crawl into my cock, into my stomach. It’s a little bigger now. Agreed. The thing looked like an extra intestine. I pushed back the X-ray and retched into an imaginary bucket beside the door. You needed to see. It’s feeding off you. There’s only one way —. I retched again.

I fill my plate, sit down, open my mouth. Perhaps I should say grace? What harm would it do? Dear Lord, I thank thee, I think to myself. Not quite right. Dear Lord, we thank thee. I can feel it now, uncoiling, loosening its grip on the lower intestines. Smelling the hot chook, the gravy, the buttered cobs, remembering the taste of food after seven days’ famine, sliding through my stomach, into my oesophagus. For what we are about to receive. Filling my throat, pushing greedily between my jawbones, filling my mouth, sliding over my trembling tongue toward the table and its mountainous plate. Suddenly I close my mouth, and cough, and retch. In a second the worm recoils, sliding backwards down my throat and through my empty stomach, until it sits still again in my intestines, an indigestible meal.

I stop retching, and part my lips again, but before the worm can respond my right hand begins to move by itself, picking up a fork and shovelling a potato into my mouth.

Junkie (for Michael)

Whenever you shot up

you had to shit.

You remembered that night

at Christchurch Central:

the cops pouring a spotlight

for you to squat in,

laughing, grabbing their noses,

then leaving you in the cell

to eat your words,

or your shit,

or the pot of steaming porridge

that tasted like confession

and smelt like shit.

Now you tell me about the poems:

how they are not important, not a cure,

how they change nothing, how they change

everything. You tell me

about last Tuesday

at the pub, in Matakana:

you sitting, with a pen and paper,

for five, for six

hours, on a cup of cold coffee,

absorbing the stares of the publican,

of Headhunters, plainclothes

Angels — bikies like overgrown gnomes

filling the beer garden — writing, writing,

revising: changing nothing, changing

everything. About that feeling,

that moment

before the fix —

the hand on the pen,

the pen descending on paper (1B5

size, with red margins and blue lines),

the five fingers, becoming conscious

as they form a fist,

the pen becoming conscious

as it touches paper —

about how everything is gathered

into a moment,

and that moment is always a word away.

The Political Economy of Philip Clairmont

Philip rolls himself a joint on the second-floor balcony of Auckland Trades Hall, then turns his back on the view of Ponsonby’s renovated slums. A short, extravagantly bearded man is shouting silently on the other side of the glass door. As he shouts the man waves his arms about, so that it looks like he is trying to catch flies in his fists. Behind him, at the back of the improvised stage, Aotearoa Marxian Political Economy Association Conference 1981 is painted in gold on a large red flag. Philip pulls a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and runs down the schedule. 5 pm: Owen Gager, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production and Contemporary Polynesian Struggle. 5.30 pm: Philip Clairmont, Art and Activism in Aotearoa Today.

Philip blows smoke away from his face and squints at the banner behind Gager. Just off the centre of a deep, rough, almost undulating field of red paint — mid-period Matisse — a black fist grasps a gun. A Kalashnikov, most likely. The weapon of freedom fighters, of Mozambique and Nicaragua. Of Baader and Meinhof. The painter blundered — the barrel and handle are almost at right angles. Perhaps he or she was stoned. Perhaps the conference wants to catch up with Braque and Malevich, and reject the laws of perspective along with the law of profit. Is the fist holding the gun aloft, or crushing it? Is the gun sprouting out of the fist, like the crosses that grew out of opened palms in Tony Fomison’s student paintings? A young man wearing spotless dungarees and a summer holidays beard steps onto the balcony and reaches for the roach of Philip’s joint. You’re on, comrade. I’ll finish.

Philip begins slowly, scratching his beard and thumbing his note-book. Some of them have seen him at Palmerston North.

Some of them have seen him on the barbed wire at the edge of Auckland