Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'New Zealand poetry'

This thesis analyses the poetry contained in anthologies published between the 1940s and 1980s in New Zealand and that of some later anthologies that retrospectively covered the same period. I wanted to find out what subject matter preoccupied poets during these times, to monitor changes in the content of that poetry and to observe what techniques were used and the evolution of styles. Complimentary to the study of the poetry is an evaluation of the intentions of the editors of the anthologies and how much their selections were directed by their tastes and knowledge to form a kind of 'construct', or representation of the publishing of poetry. From my reading, I conjectured that the literary canon with regard to poetry was formed in New Zealand by the mid-1970s, on the strength of publications from Penguin and Oxford University Press. The 1945 and 1960 anthologies by Allen Curnow were extremely influential - particularly the second of these two - and the editors of future anthologies from the larger publishers diverged comparatively little from his choices. Curnow's anthologies are the subject of Chapter One, and in Chapter Two, I look at Vincent O'Sullivan's series of three anthologies for Oxford (1970, 1976 and 1987), which confirmed and expanded that canon. However, from the mid-1960s, and especially in the early 1970s, new trends emerged in New Zealand writing, linked to a consciousness of post-modernist literary theory. Some of the new trends, together with material that supplemented existing perspectives on poetry, are discussed in Chapter Three. The greater degree of acknowledgement of writing by women poets - which began in the late 1960s in smaller literary journals - reached a point where the first anthology of women's poetry, Private Gardens, could be published in 1977. The first major anthology to be edited by a woman appeared five years later. The gradualness of these changes is stressed, however, with regard to women's poetry included in the larger anthologies themselves. A new bias emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s in favour of work from the University presses. Nevertheless, anthologies that presented some alternative point of view on our literary history proliferated at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Taken together, the anthologies Big Smoke and Real Fire form a more holistic picture of what went on in the 1960s and 1970s and are discussed in Chapter Four of this thesis. Concluding remarks focus on the prejudices that appear to have guided the publishing of poetry in New Zealand anthologies, the influence of major poets, and the possibilities for further study of this body of literature.

This thesis examines one woman's attempt at revolution in New Zealand poetry. It will suggest that we may need to re-assess our perception of Blanche Edith Baughan - as a nascent "modern", rather than a "colonial" poet. The generally accepted view is that significant modern poetry emerged in New Zealand in the nineteen-twenties, and came to full flowering in the nineteen-thirties, and that Blanche Baughan was a "forerunner". She has achieved a modest reputation as an innovator in New Zealand poetry, perhaps as our first "true colonial voice ". This thesis proposes that Baughan was more than simply a "forerunner", that she had in fact, by 1908, introduced many of the changes currently credited to New Zealand poets of the succeeding generation. The title "Making it New" alludes to the catch-cry of Modernist poetry ("Make it New!") as expressed by Ezra Pound. Although Baughan is in no way connected to the Modernist movement, her directive to creative colonials, "Be thou new!" (from "Maui's Fish") has obvious Parallels. Two major factors account for the difference between Baughan and her New Zealand literary contemporaries - her mysticism and her freedom from the prevailing "Anglophilia". Baughan was reluctantly English at a time when pro-English sentiment was pervasive in both the life and the literature of the colony. This significant pre-condition of her "modernism" has been barely touched on, and the reasons behind it unrecorded, by literary historians and critics. A short biographical background will account for her attitude and reveal some hitherto unpublished facts. Baughan considered herself a mystic. Her mysticism, her classical education, her interest in philosophy and in social reform, together gave her a close empathy with the writings of the American Transcendentalists and of Thomas Carlyle. Their influence, which may be traced both in the message, and (occasionally), in the style of her texts, is supported by her possession of personal copies of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, his On Heroes, Emerson's Essays and Representative Men, and Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas and Other Papers. The significance of Baughan's transcendentalism - indeed its very existence - has been over-looked by critical comment to date. This thesis views it as a key factor in her empathy with the American Transcendentalists, and flowing from that, it sees in Whitman's "New Worldism" as defined in his "Democratic Vistas", Baughan's main stepping-stone to "modernism". Accounting for Baughan's markedly different outlook and its effect on the matter and method of her poems required the inclusion in this thesis of four inter-related themes: her biographical past; her mysticism; her education (in the broadest sense, including the influences, particularly of the American Transcendentalists, on her poetic thought); and, finally, her conversion of transcendentalist concepts and precepts to the "modern" elements in her work. The thesis is organized in two related halves. Part A (chapters one to three), deals with the influences on her work. It includes, as well, an examination, from hindsight, of Baughan's "modernism" in relation to that of the main New Zealand poets of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. Part B (chapters four to eight), consists of an exploratory study of her major poetic texts, the five very long works I have termed "colonial allegories": "ShingleShort", "A Bush Section", "Maui's Fish", "Burnt Bush" and "The Paddock". In Part B, I will seek out the poems' transcendentalist underpinning, their debunking of "Anglophilia" - and of conservative attitudes in general - and the practical spinoffs of Baughan's emphasis on change and newness at the level of the text. This study is confined to the allegories. Baughan's other works, whether in poetry or prose, are mentioned only where necessary either to illustrate her development or to clarify some point in the thesis.

When Charles Brasch died, in 1973, he specified that his private papers - his diaries, letters, and many of his manuscripts - be placed under embargo for thirty years after his death. The external details of his life were, by this time, well-known. He had become a high-profile figure in the field of New Zealand literature, through his critical writings, his role as 'patron', and particularly his twenty- year editorship of the periodical Landfall. Yet his reputation as a poet, although established, was neglected both then and now. His poetry is one of central relevance to a contemporary scene; as clearly as any, it reveals the difficulty of writing for, and about, a society which still laboured under the weight of a 'colonial' stigma. By tracing the movement from his juvenilia to his mature poetry, from his teenage years to adulthood, this study examines the effect of Brasch's personal development on his writing. Partly because of the embargo on his papers, partly because of his secretive nature, his private life has remained a shadow behind poetry which is itself often ambiguous; yet his creative progression was largely determined by the events of this life, both external and internal. Previously, little has been known or written about the decade and a half he spent in Europe. These were crucial years, both in shaping his editorial vision, and in the discovery of his own poetic voice. By means of personal interviews, and recourse to letters in private collections, his story is told: from his arrival in Oxford in 1927, to his final acceptance of New Zealand as his home, in 1945. The first chapter outlines the three years he spent at St John's College, and the general literary context in which he began to write. Chapter Two covers his brief foray into archaeology, and the resultant poetry and unpublished fiction. The importance of German literature - particularly that of Rilke - to his work becomes the focus of Chapter Three. As a direct result of this influence, the second half of the 1930s was dominated by his search for a voice, and a subject, of his own. Chapter Four details this struggle, and the first tentative New Zealand element in his work. A teaching job at Great Missenden - the subject of Chapter Five - temporarily distracted Brasch from developing this theme, yet sources reveal that the country of his birth was never far from his mind. Chapters Six and Seven deal with the effect on his poetry of the growing unease in Europe, the difficult split of allegiances to two hemispheres, and his subsequent commitment to England for the duration of the war. Throughout 1944-5, he became involved in script-writing, and the eighth and final chapter examines the extent of his success in this new genre. His return to New Zealand, late in 1945, marked the apparent beginning of a career which, nonetheless, had its origins in experiences half a world away.

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his (or her) feeling through words. This may sound easy. It isn't ... . It's the most wonderful life on earth. Or so I feel. e. e. cummings: 'A Poet's Advice'. (1-3, 27-28) Fifty years ago poetry was a key element in the English programme in most secondary schools. Today it is marginalised, with many teachers avoiding teaching poetry as far as possible. The consequence is a cycle of disadvantage whereby many students, never having studied, let alone attempted to write a poem in school, leave without having encountered literature at its most intense and concentrated. Since the study of poetry can also be avoided almost entirely in university English departments, such students will, in their turn, when they themselves become educators of the next generation, similarly avoid teaching poetry. This thesis investigates the pedagogical and curricular contexts within which English has been taught in New Zealand since 1945, and within which poetry has become increasingly marginal. Surveys of and interviews with students past and present, teachers and teacher-educators enable me to identify a range of reasons why this has happened, and a cycle of deprivation has developed. The thesis also identifies, however, ways in which the cycle of deprivation can be broken, and the teaching of poetry made central to the teaching of written, oral and visual language in accordance with the principles of the current New Zealand curriculum for the teaching of English.

Janet Frame (1924-2004) is known for being one of the most prolific, translated, and unconventional New Zealand novelists. Her work, however, includes a vast production of poems, which scholars and translators have ignored or, at least, not considered worthy for a comprehensive approach to her. Frame's work has undergone the further limitation of a strongly biography-based hermeneutics: from the gossiping around her alleged schizophrenia, to the popularity of the filmic version of her autobiography (An Angel at My Table) by Jane Campion, and the countless legends that have sprung around her, she has often been stigmatised and labelled the 'mad writer' of Campion's movie. This thesis links the risks of the life/myth-driven perspectives to the current lack of interest in Frame's poetry. Her poetic production is here presented as a fundamental part of her oeuvre and her idiosyncratic approach to writing. Therefore, this study aims to fill this gap in the literature on Frame and thus reconfigure her role as a poet. Through a combination of methodologies grounded in literary and verse translation theories, creativity and genre studies, poststructuralism and postcolonialism, this thesis investigates the most significant traits of Frame's prose and poetry, particularly the traits shared by both. It critiques past translations of Frame's prose into Italian where these have not taken into account the poetic value of her work, and suggests strategies for the translation of her verse into Italian, arguing that an informed approach to her poetry in translation may greatly contribute to a reconfiguration and re-evaluation of her legacy.

This thesis comprises a book-length creative work accompanied by a set of essays. It explores how poetry might bring together spiritual and scientific discourses, focusing primarily on philosophical Daoism (Taoism) and contemporary physics. Systems theory (the science of complex and self-organising systems) is a secondary focus of the creative work and is used metaphorically in theorising the writing process. The creative work, “A coat of ashes”, is chiefly concerned with the nature of being. It asks, “What is?”, “What am I?” and, most urgently, “What matters?”. To engage with these questions, it opens a space in which voices expressing scientific and spiritual worldviews may be heard on equal terms. “A coat of ashes” contributes a substantial number of poems to the small corpus of Daoist-influenced poetry in English and adds to the larger corpus of poetry engaging with the sciences. The poems are offset by a metafictional narrative, “The Dream”, which may be read as an allegory of the writing journey and the struggle to combine discourses. The four essays articulate the poetics of “A coat of ashes” by addressing its context, themes, influences, methodology and compositional processes. They contribute to both literary criticism and writing theory. Like the creative work, they focus on dialogues between rationalist or scientific discourses and subjective or spiritual ones. The first essay, “An introduction”, discusses the thesis itself: its rationale, background, components, limitations and implications. The second, “Singing the quantum”, reviews scholarship discussing the influence of physics on poetry, then examines figurative representations of physics concepts in selected poems by Rebecca Elson, Cilla McQueen and Frederick Seidel. These poems illustrate how contemporary poetry can interpret scientific concepts in terms of subjective human concerns. The third essay, “Let the song be bare”, discusses existing Daoist poetry criticism before considering Daoist influences in the poetry of Ursula K. Le Guin, Randolph Stow and Judith Wright. These non-Indigenous poets with a strong awareness of the sciences have, by adopting Daoist-inflected senses of the sacred, been able to articulate the tension engendered by their problematic relationships with colonised landscapes. Moreover, the changing aesthetic of Wright’s later poetry reflects a struggle between Daoist quietism and European lyric commentary. The final essay, “Animating the ash”, reflects on the process of writing poetry, using examples from “A coat of ashes” to construct a theoretical synthesis based on Daoism, systems theory and contemporary poetics. It proposes a novel way to characterise the nature and emergence of the hard-to-define quality that makes a poem a poem. This essay also discusses some of the Daoist and scientific motifs that occur in the creative work. As a whole, this project highlights the potential of both the sciences and the more ancient ways of knowing — when seen in each other’s light — to help us apprehend the world’s material and metaphysical nature and live harmoniously within it.

�Every poet who takes language seriously is working against a culture of clear marketable meanings and commodified production� states New Zealand novelist, essayist and poet Gregory O�Brien. This statement is the motivation for research that is explored in a collaborative ethnographic study of brand culture perceptions in New Zealand. It takes its inspiration from The Poetics of Space (Bachelard, 1978) and provides intimate lyrical insights into the experience of brands and brandscapes. Gregory O�Brien describes the artists that inspire him as: �Those who resolutely stand on their own creative terms, working towards their own objectives, as oblivious as they can be to any market forces.� O�Brien�s observations are relevant to the research project in two essential ways: first to cast light on a shared cultural commodity construct such as a brand from its proposed opposite cultural site of individual imagination and secondly, to accept the poetic in the form of the undiluted voice of vocational poets as valuable media in their own right to achieve insightful interpretations. Critical marketing projects have the duty to generate an alternative �marketing gaze� sufficient to the task of �revelation� (Brownile & Hewer, 2007). With regards to individual artists and poets specifically, critical marketing concepts implicitly pose the main research question as to the scenarios that are conceivably available to consumers: how does �working against marketable meanings� imaginatively work? The project proposes the new construct of co-imagination as the co-active mental and spiritual engagement of consumers with the cultural artefacts of brandscapes that invite individual meaning making. It substantiates this individuality in a poetic evocation of brandscapes by thirteen artists. It analyses the holistic imaginative process on the basis of mental models, strategic scenarios and evocative aesthetics, in order to assess how talented consumers work against marketable meaning. It subsequently offers the relationship of co-imagination with existing co-optive concepts in marketing, literature and consumer behaviour, such as co-creation (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004), co-performance (Deighton, 1992) and co-duction (Booth, 1988). It results in a collaborative artistic inquiry that assembles individual evocations of enchantment and disenchantment with the beauty and ugliness of brandscapes, through newly created poetry. The research introduces the new concepts of aesthetic scarcity and aesthetic community and in its collaborative method of inquiry offers an alternative to a poetic tradition in consumer behaviour of the poet / researcher conflation (Sherry & Schouten, 2002). As a result, the project complements the understanding of the individual meaning-making process in brand culture and is relevant to both practitioners and researchers in consumer behaviour and brand strategy. The design of the project included a four month research journey that covered the North and the South Island of New Zealand with the objective of meeting a variety of poets in their local inspirational environments and brandscapes and catalyse an unusual creative cooperation of highly individual radical artists. In the thick description and analyses of the extensive field research, the project implicitly adds to existing work on brand culture (Schroeder, Salzer Morling, & Askegaard, 2006), brand aesthetics (Saizer-Mörling & Strannegård, 2004) and the relationship between artists and brands (Schroeder, 2005). The research includes design elements based on romantic pragmatism (Rorty, 2007a) and cognitive aesthetics (R. H. Brown, 1977), both post-romantic concepts that explore aesthetic perception as perspectival knowledge and aesthetic distance as a means to transcend the dichotomy of objectivity and subjectivity.

The majority of New Zealand's poetry critics take a purist and prescriptive approach to their subject, dividing poems and poets into one of three modes: realism, modernism and postmodernism. Furthermore, critics usually hold up one of these modes as the 'best' way to write, dismissing the others. My thesis argues for an adjustment of that paradigm to allow for poetry that crosses boundaries and combines aspects of more than one mode. C.K. Stead's writing illustrates both of these tendencies: purist theories in his critical work, post-purist practice in his poetry. Stead's career covers a broad cross-section of New Zealand's recent literary history, from 1951 to 1997. Chapter one introduces this period by surveying its critical methodologies, arguing for a shift away from the dominant purist paradigm. This opening chapter also proposes an adjustment in one of the turning points in New Zealand's literary history, the arrival of modernism. Most surveys place that arrival at approximately 1970, ignoring the publication of Stead's "Pictures in a Gallery Undersea" in 1959, likely the first modernist long poem written by a New Zealander. Chapters two and three explore Stead's modernism in theory and in practice, and provide the first detailed critical discussion of "Pictures in a Gallery." Chapter four casts back to Stead's early use and rejection of realism, while chapter five shows realism continuing in a seam that runs throughout his work. Having established a mixture of realism and modernism, Stead then demonstrates his skill with postmodernist techniques, creating a threeway mixture of modes. Chapter six shows how that mixture develops in his poetry, while chapter seven traces a similar pattern in his fiction. Finally, chapter eight explores how the later poems cross these categorical boundaries, developing a poetic that relaxes hierarchical divisions. Stead's practice contravenes the prescriptions of many New Zealand poetry critics—and it particularly counters his own purist critical arguments in favour of modernism. This thesis proposes a criticism that can allow for and describe Stead's post-purist practice. My conclusion suggests that this post-purist approach applies not only to the work of C.K. Stead, but also to some of the recent work by other New Zealand poets, such as Allen Curnow, Bill Manhire and Ian Wedde.

This essay documents a year of exploring how to continue to be creative, experimental and intuitive within an art institution. It provides a context and thus academic shelter for a non-linear, experimental process of making drawings, sculpture and site-specific work. The essay has three layers; the contextual document, images which show the process of making, as well as a narrative written in experimental poetry which describes the embodied process of making through collaged journal writing. The images are interspersed through the essay, while the poetry provides an alternative narrative and is printed on the back pages of the essay. ‘Building’ is used as an active metaphor for the creative process, as well as buildings as sites for research and installation of adaptive sculptures. Building as a metaphor for unchanging narratives will be contrasted with artists whose work challenges the unitary nature of a functional building through their interventions. Using the body to make meaning is discussed in a feminist context, as an alternative this model to linear, rational thinking. This also questions and problematizes the heroic male artist body. Performing the making through a female body will be discussed and issues of privacy and proximity covered. A potential solution to these issues will be explored in using abstraction to create active meaning, thus implicating the body of the audience as well as the artist.

This thesis discusses the life and work of the eighteenth-century French composer, Julie Pinel. Pinel’s extant music comprises one collection of music, Nouveau recueil d’airs sérieux et à boire à une et deux voix, de Brunettes à 2 dessus, scène pastorale, et cantatille avec accompagnement, published in 1737, of which a critical edition has been produced in volume II of this thesis. There is little information regarding Pinel’s life and work, however, the preface and privilège included in her Nouveau recueil provide some clues as to Pinel’s biography. Her life and music are examined, with reference to the social, literary and musical environment she was working in. An added dimension is that Pinel was working as a professional musicienne at a time when women were beginning to find their voice and place in professional society. Pinel claims authorship of the majority of the poems in her collection, and the rest come from anonymous sources. Pinel’s literary and musical output illustrates her obvious knowledge of the current trends in eighteenth-century France, with most of her poetry written for a female poetic voice, displaying many of the fashionable themes of the day. Her music displays a variety of styles, ranging from simple airs in binary form, traditionally found in most French airs sérieux et à boire, to the operatic, and the fashionable rococo styles.

The diploma thesis focuses on the poems of Katherine Mansfield and the extent to which chosen themes and motifs reflect her personal life. It also aims at the interconnection of the themes in her poetry with the other genres the writer used. The study is predominantly based on two biographies, collections of Mansfield's poems, letters, diary entries and short stories. Owing to a great number of her letters, diary entries and detailed autobiographies, the thesis presents the life and work of Katherine Mansfield with her sources of inspiration; in the practical part it attempts to connect the themes and motifs from Mansfield's poetry with the events in her life and different genres she chose to use. Key words Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Mansfield's poetry, Katherine Mansfield's biography, Katherine Mansfield's short stories, Modernist Literature, New Zealand Literature

This thesis is based on the oral histories of social workers, birth parents, and adopted people who have personal experience of ‘closed stranger adoption’ in relation to New Zealand Māori. Viewed collectively their histories, and my own analysis, demonstrate the legislative sleight of hand and societal illusions, which bound all parties involved in an uncomfortable and contrived silence. Between 1955 and 1985, over 80,000 children in New Zealand were adopted. The majority of these adoptions were under the state-sanctioned practice of closed stranger adoption. While exact numbers remain unknown, it is widely accepted that a significant proportion of these adoptions involved children of Māori ancestry who were placed into white homes. Although the era of closed stranger adoption, which is now widely viewed as an indefensible social experiment, has been well documented, there still remains very little scholarship and analysis of the adoption of Māori children and their birth parents, during this period. When Māori experience of adoption is discussed, it is usually assumed that the subject is whāngai adoptions. However, closed stranger adoption is almost the antithesis of whāngai, the only similarity being that a child is cared for by people other than their birth parents. This thesis highlights the inextricable links between closed stranger adoption practices, the relevance of ‘race’, and ongoing colonial processes and structures in New Zealand, arguing that while the history of closed adoption begins formally with the passing of the Adoption Act 1955, the wider issues of degradation, disregard and devaluing of Māori people and values that are manifest in this particular policy and practice can be understood as a continuation of the policies and practices of colonisation. The manipulation of identity, the silencing and erasure of self to fit roles described and prescribed by others, the forced assimilation, the infantalising, the expectation of gratitude, and the inter-generational trauma, are all practices of colonisation that are reproduced in the closed stranger adoption of Māori children into white families. Meanwhile, New Zealand publicly maintained the illusion of a progressive, egalitarian society, with an enviable record of race relations. This thesis argues that the impact of closed stranger adoption was particularly onerous for Māori resulting in ruinous long-term, intergenerational consequences on Māori family values, kinship ties, and social organisation. The most debilitating effect for many Māori adoptees has been the inability to trace their Māori parent, and thereby access knowledge of their whakapapa. Many Māori adoptees grieve their unknown whakapapa and feel ‘inauthentic’ and invisible as Māori as a result. However, the silence surrounding the adoption, and more recently the out-of-home care, of Māori children is slowly starting to be addressed. Through the use of testimony, historically contextualised, this thesis provides a space where the burden of holding singular, personal stories of grief and dislocation can be shared. Making private testimonies public, provides a powerful, amplified voice, which requires a wider societal response. This thesis is based on a Māori-centred research approach and incorporates poetic transcriptions in the (re)telling of the narratives.