Private Bestiary: Selected Unpublished Poems, 1944-1993

By Kendrick Smithyman

Kendrick Smithyman was regarded as one of New Zealand's most important poets. For decades, though, the uncompromisingly intellectual, relentlessly experimental Smithyman had to endure marginalisation and even ridicule at the hands of conservative editors and critics. Some of Smithyman's work was so far ahead of its time that it can only now hope to find a wide audience. Private Bestiary consists of poems discovered by Scott Hamilton during his exploration of the massive collection of private papers Smithyman bequeathed to the University of Auckland library. These previously-unseen pieces illuminate aspects of Smithyman's life and work that were hitherto obscure, and help us appreciate the extent of his achievement as a writer and a man.

 

The editor of the book Dr Scott Hamilton, who is himself a widely-published scholar and poet, has complemented the poems with an introduction and extensive notes. "These poems are taonga", Hamilton says. "They show us that Smithyman was a poet not just for the twentieth but for the twenty-first century. The rest of us are in some ways still trying to catch up with him." Associate Professor Peter Simpson of The University of Auckland, who knew Smithyman as a friend and colleague and edited his Selected and Collected Poems, praises the new book for adding to our understanding of Smithyman. "Smithyman is the Walt Whitman of New Zealand" Simpson says. "He contains multitudes, because his interests were so vast. In many ways he is a mountain we have yet to climb. I hope this book helps find him a new generation of readers, and delights established Smithymaniacs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Titus Books
• Release date: Aug 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781877441868

Book preview

Private_Bestiary_Hamilton.jpg

Private Bestiary: selected unpublished poems, 1944-1993

Kendrick Smithyman

Edited by Scott Hamilton

ISBN: 978-1-877441-86-8

©Kendrick Smithyman 2010, 2020

©Scott Hamilton 2010, 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 2010

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Cover image: Dragonfly over Rangitoto by George Bourne, used with kind permission from the Auckland Museum.

Cover Design by Ellen Portch

Published with the assistance of Creative New Zealand

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Contents

N.B. Poem titles also serve as hyperlinks to the note that discusses that poem (if applicable), and the title of the note links back to the poem.

Introduction

A note on Smithyman’s ‘magic box’

First Steps Into a Private Bestiary

Surplus to Requirement

Swanson

Coastwatcher

Liberators

The First Liberator

Liberator Milk Run

Grounded Liberator

Inspecting

Aircrash in Antarctica

Domestic Apocalypses

Weekend

‘Phases of absence, I explore...’

Conspiracies

Letters Fall Like Feathers

Knocking at the Family Tree

Jimmy the Rat

Fiction Fact

Whom He May Devour

Sheffield

Without Plinths

Tohunga

Pakeha Maoris

At Jacky Marmon’s Grave

Letter About Hemi

Fountains

Open Day at the Dig

Visions

Moth, He Said His Name Was

The Old Man of the Hills

About Romantics

Take Five

Anzac Day

Something in the Air

Conference

Browning

Who

In the Gap

In the Gap

Silences and Spaces

Poem as Arrangement of Spaces and Silences

Edwin Morgan at Prayer

Oiseaux Exotiques

Notes on the poems

First Steps into a Private Bestiary

Swanson

Coastwatcher

Liberators

Inspecting

Aircrash in Antarctica

Weekend

‘Phases of absence, I explore...’

Conspiracies

Letters Fall Like Feathers

Knocking at the Family Tree

Jimmy the Rat and About Romantics

Fiction Fact

Whom He May Devour

Sheffield

Tohunga

Pakeha Maoris and At Jacky Marmon’s Grave

Letter About Hemi

Fountains

Open Day at the Dig

Moth, He Said His Name Was and The Old Man of the Hills

Take Five

In the Gap

Poem as Arrangement of Silences and Spaces and Edwin Morgan at Prayer 

Oiseaux de Exotiques 

A Note about the Editor

Introduction

Kendrick Smithyman was one of New Zealand’s most prolific and successful poets. During his lifetime he published a dozen volumes of verse, the first book-length study of New Zealand poetry, and a stream of book reviews and essays. Since Smithyman’s death in 1995 his oeuvre has continued to grow, as volumes of previously unpublished poems have appeared. Smithyman continues to attract commentators: the University of Auckland’s English Department has in recent years devoted a Masters paper to his work, in 2003 the literary journal brief produced a special issue about him, and important New Zealand intellectuals like CK Stead, Gregory O’Brien and Peter Simpson have published essays about his work.

Yet interest in Kendrick Smithyman remains confined to a relatively small circle of readers. Smithyman is popular with other poets and with scholars of literature, but he has never achieved the renown amongst the general public that some other Kiwi poets – his contemporaries James K Baxter and Hone Tuwhare, for instance – enjoy. Smithyman has often been viewed as a ‘difficult’ or ‘academic’ writer.

With its complex structures and layered meanings, Smithyman’s poetry has always attracted the ire of some reviewers. When Bob Lowry’s Pelorus Press published a chapbook of the young Smithyman’s sonnets in 1946, an anonymous reviewer in The Listener complained about their lack of ‘simplicity’, reminding Smithyman that ‘obscurity is not a virtue’ and that poetry existed ‘to satisfy the soul and senses’, not to ‘exercise the intellect’. In a response to Smithyman’s 1974 volume The Seal in the Dolphin Pool in Landfall, Peter Crisp condemned Smithyman’s ‘braininess’, and his ‘obsessive commentating patter’. Discussing Dwarf with a Billiard Cue, the follow-up to The Seal in the Dolphin Pool, for The Listener, Lauris Edmond sparked a series of angry letters by suggesting that Smithyman’s work was so obscure it did not really deserve to be considered poetry. In his review of the 1986 book Stories About Wooden Keyboards for Landfall, Iain Sharp echoed Edmond’s judgment when he proclaimed that ‘Smithyman has all the ingredients of a great poet, except the poetry itself’. 

Some of Smithyman’s supporters have attempted to turn the criticisms we have been discussing on their head, by arguing that his poems are not about ‘life’ so much as ‘language’, and that it is therefore pointless to criticise them for being obscure. In a 1988 essay for Landfall, Reginald Berry argued that Smithyman’s poems are really an elaborate study of syntax. According to Berry, Smithyman is a sort of postmodernist, who wants above all to show how hard it is to communicate anything very coherent in poetry. With friends like Berry, Smithyman hardly needs enemies.  

The truth is that Smithyman was not some convoluted, self-absorbed word-geek, but a man with a great deal to say to his fellow New Zealanders. If the language of Smithyman’s poems is sometimes difficult, this is only because the society he is dealing with is complex, and he wishes to do justice to this complexity. The best of the poems Smithyman left behind are carefully crafted, multi-faceted portraits of New Zealand’s past, present, and possible futures. They should be seen as part of the cultural inheritance of every Kiwi.   

To understand Smithyman’s literary achievement, we need to recall a few of the details of his life, and of the world he inhabited. Smithyman was born in Te Kopuru, an old timber milling town on the western bank of the lower Wairoa River, a few kilometres south of Dargaville, in 1922. He would always regard Northland as home, despite the fact that in the early thirties his family moved south to the working class Auckland suburb of Point Chevalier.

Smithyman’s father had been an activist in the Industrial Workers of the World and the ‘Red’ Federation of Labour in the turbulent years before World War One, when workers’ militia and government paramilitaries fought gun battles in the streets, and the old radical sometimes blamed his politics for the trouble he had finding regular work in the 1920s and 1930s. Smithyman enthusiastically followed his father into the Grey Lynn branch of the Labour Party at the end of the 1930s.

The Smithymans lived in poverty in Point Chevalier, but Kendrick enjoyed the suburb’s seaside setting, its library, and its movie theatre, and as a teenager in the late ’30s he made what would become a lifelong friendship with Keith Sinclair, who shared his enthusiasm for poetry, history, and girls. 

Smithyman entered adulthood in troubled times. After doing well at school, he was admitted to Auckland Teachers Training College in 1940, and soon managed to publish his first poems in the college’s stylish magazine, Manuka. But the spectres of war and repression hung over the young man. In 1941, with the war in Europe going badly for the Allies and conflict looking imminent in the Pacific, the former conscientious objectors who led the Labour Party made a policy U-turn and drafted emergency legislation authorising the conscription of huge numbers of young men into the military. Mass public meetings called to oppose conscription were broken up, and prominent critics of the policy were jailed. As the government began to crack down on what it called ‘subversion’, even the cultural journal Tomorrow, which had been one of the few places where serious New Zealand writers could publish their work in the late 1930s, was forced to shut up shop.

The wave of repression soon washed over Auckland Teachers Training College. In 1941 students at the college, and at similar institutions throughout the country, found themselves at the centre of a witch hunt, as the large and politically influential Returned Servicemen’s Association alleged that a ‘fifth column’ of teachers was undermining the war effort by spreading ‘pacifist’ and ‘communist’ propaganda amongst children. After the RSA’s attacks on teacher training won wide media coverage and some support in parliament, the Auckland Education Board condemned pacifism and communism, and stipulated that all trainee teachers must demonstrate their loyalty to New Zealand by saluting the flag before they were allowed to graduate. A number of students who had finished their training and were due to graduate refused to perform this ritual, and were forced to find new careers. Other trainee teachers were sacked, after members of the public heard them expressing left-wing sentiments and reported them to the Education Board.

As a young man with left-wing views, a strong interest in the arts, and no inclination to volunteer for military service, Smithyman can hardly have been cheered by the coming of conscription, the crackdown on centres of liberal culture like Tomorrow, and the persecution of trainee teachers with ‘subversive’ politics in 1940 and 1941.

Smithyman was called up for a limited period of military training in 1941; while he was in camp the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, and he found himself conscripted indefinitely. Smithyman trained initially as an artilleryman, but in 1942 he requested a transfer to the Air Force, where he became not a pilot but a storeman. For three years, Smithyman’s unit was marched and trucked across New Zealand, from Auckland through the