Leigh Davis - January
2002
These notes examine taste in some New Zealand poetry in its
mid-twentieth century form. They are directed at how this poetry
appears to have asked itself to be read, and at how it was asked
to be read by its exemplary readers. Aspects of this asking one
can say yes to now, and other aspects, no. These habits of mind,
in an aggregate of writers and therefore readers, make mediation
visible. That is, they show how a common framework of expectations
regulated reading and writing. The poetry was this mediation’s
ventriloquism.
Allen Curnow’s powerful category making role is thought about
again. The work of Sidney Nolan and Rosalie Gascoigne is addressed
in passing. James K Baxter’s, as well. The key moment in time
is taken to be 1972, approximately, when Allen Curnow’s writing
exploded, and James K Baxter’s imploded. In a dramatic expansion
of his work Curnow came to exemplify problems of representation,
in vernacular language, as New Zealand Poetry.
