Home // May.31.2018 // Vlad Savich

With Suspicion for Hierarchies: An Interview with David Howard

Russian ex-pat Vlad Savich is a playwright, director, and impresario in the Montreal theater scene. For this interview, he caught up with David Howard from New Zealand, whose books include The Incomplete Poems (Cold Hub Press, 2011), which was 35 years in the making; The Ones Who Keep Quiet (Otago University Press, 2017); and, as editor, A Place To Go On From: the Collected Poems of Iain Lonie (Otago University Press, 2015). Howard has held the Robert Burns Fellowship at Otago University (2013), the Otago Wallace Residency (2014), a UNESCO City of Literature Residency in Prague (2016), the Ursula Bethell Residency at Canterbury University (2016), and the Writers' House Residency in Pazin, Croatia (2017), and has collaborated with the composers Brina Jez Brezavscek (Slovenia), Marta Jirackova Czech Republic), and Johanna Selleck (Australia).


Howard at LitLink, Zagreb, in July 2017.

Vlad Savich: What are you writing these days?

David Howard: I write slowly so my poems stretch over months, even years. They rarely begin with one incident, usually eschew autobiographical detail, and remain wary of the confessional—there seems to be too much special pleading in the occasional poem for me. Yet a voice—call it mine—is directed outwards. Christmas was given over to the ghost of the photographer Francesca Woodman. I made, in three parts, a shadow-play to mark what would have been her sixtieth birthday on April 3. Words can't resurrect but they always recall because language is the history of being human. Every sentence is both a footstep and a fingerprint—but not of the author. Each word belongs to the millions who have previously used it; a good poem is good in part if and when it acknowledges this.

VS: You just said, “Words can't resurrect.” If they could, what would you resurrect?

DH: Every luminous moment—whether it comes from intellectual enquiry, religious apprehension, or sexual surprise. In Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams has Blanche DuBois reflect that “soft people have got to glimmer and glow.” I want the muted, downtrodden passers-by to be lifted up from their gutters by language. But this is beyond me. Anyway, that impulse is dangerous because it is sentimental; it shows a need to bring out the innocent child inside the fallen adult.

Yet how innocent are children? Such innocence as they have it is due to the purity (but not the virtue) of their intent. Children feel desire and its immediacy more intensely than even adults do. Every day is a litany of wants and those wants are already the measure of each child's imperfection. As we get older, our wants multiply but drop off in intensity. The previously youthful and enthusiastic litany, with its echo of the sacred, is reduced to the scribble of a shopping list. Want is commodified for profit.

VS: What do you think poetry is? Words that are beautifully collected, like flowers in a bouquet? The ability to rhyme words? Deep thoughts that are recorded by words? The useless fun of a well-fed man?

DH: A poem is the offspring of inspiration and craft. ‘Inspiration' is the name we give to a privileged kind of listening; listen long enough and the poem will announce itself. The poet's task is to take direction from the silence that is specific to each piece. As I wrote in “The Vanishing Line”:

Each night a spider's web grows
it is made of absence.
Between, that is where the poem grows
between the visible, the invisible.
Only the invisible owns every thing
we measure the seen.
The invisible, then. And that spider.

Poetry can be a corridor to a circus, an operating theatre, a museum—the location changes for each reader, which is why poetry is a democratic art; not because everyone can write it well, but because everyone has equal access if the poet is honest, dogged, and clear without being condescending to either ideas or readers. After all,

The politician promises to kick down the door
the door is open, when it was closed so was his mouth.
The priest believes the gates can be oiled, they're off their hinges
when they were barred he demanded our indulgence.
Whatever, the poet prefers a window.

(That's “The Vanishing Line” again.)

Yet I don't enjoy emotionally evasive writing. Rather than respecting each reader's uniqueness, an ironic elliptical poem does not leave the reader free to explore the self-in-world because confusion is not an opportunity worth pursuing. Nor do I believe that the New Zealand poet Bill Manhire is correct when he claims that people don't want to be preached to. People demonstrably want to be preached to, but they don't only want to be preached to. No one wants to be treated as a fool, especially the foolish. So a rich clarity is what engages me most in poetry.

VS: Imagine there's no heaven. Imagine there's no countries. Imagine no possessions. Can you, David?

DH: Millions of us can, however we typically adopt partisan positions. I believe John Lennon's anthemic lines are describing, unintentionally, the dead. Only the dead want for nothing because sentience delivers every individual into desire.

Utopian visions have informed our most powerful societies, yet a zealous overview has inherent dangers. Both Marxist Leninism and National Socialism are disastrous examples of an ideal that is contemptuous to the individual. Much contemporary poetry focuses on the personal—that is one of its strengths, although it can be problematic. If language is, as I earlier claimed, ‘the history of being human', then words are inherently political. They have an ethical and moral compass irrespective of authorial intent. Of course, that is why artists were and are oppressed by totalitarian regimes. Addressing the Russian poet Tatiana Shcherbina, whom I had the privilege of publishing in the 1990s, I wrote:

Snow, now my motherland belongs to bulldozers
I miss white roses the most
so leave some, secretly, in a jug of holy water.

The wall where I fell was not a ruin, I did not call
Madonna! like a character from Bunin
when I saw an enormous sky.

The heavier the frost the stronger the sun, they say.
Nothing doing, it is chilly as a tax collector's grin
when things don't add up — but nothing does –

it is a perfect circle, a bullet hole.

I believe in ghosts; I don't believe in people…
Not the heroic figure in the tapestry, just one loose thread
pulled under, put up against the wall.

After cleaning the rifle he removed my boots—
were they finer than his coarse-grained leather?
Soon he'll know, going home after dark.

[‘L'Histoire Du Soldat']

I take it as a given that heaven is like the horizon, something you look towards but can never arrive at. Human beings naturally impose borders. This process begins when an infant recognizes stimuli as either part of its body, the emergent self, or generated from outside. Countries are a governmental extension predicated upon possessions: creation, acquisition, disposal—in other words, the market.

If I don't believe in heaven, it is still a more inspired idea than Adam Smith's “invisible hand.” How can the corporate world maintain that the unintended social benefits of self-interested action are greater, indeed preferable, to wider societal programmes of targeted assistance when millions die from malnutrition and preventable diseases? Unfortunately, the citizens of many third world countries don't have to imagine no possessions, they wake to none.

VS: Issues of social justice are important for you. You raise them in your work. Art for art or art to improve our lives?

DH: Art for art's sake is a betrayal of art. To reduce poetry to an egocentric showroom, to have language serve the self rather than the self serve language, is to ignore its redemptive potential. Every sentence that is memorable takes us beyond the commonplace even as it honours our daily experience. Poetry is so much more than entertainment, but it is also (and necessarily) entertaining.

Still, a poem is not what happens when an author stands on a soapbox; instead it is the unexpected gust of wind ( afflatus ) that upsets authorial intention, causing a leap of faith. A printed poem is both the artefact of the writer's leap and the coaching manual for the reader's leap.

VS: David, do you think writing will disappear in the future?

DH: Because it is impossible to think without language writing will not disappear unless humans do, which seems likely given our delight in dancing with our shadow until the ground crumbles under our feet.

VS: If you had a time machine and returned to your past, would it be the same as you remembered it?

DH: Every poem is a time machine, taking each reader to a different place. Even without art, the past is continually recreated. Traces, tagged to cause and effect (and therefore narrative), inform our present and condition our decisions. To visit the past is something we do everyday, making it and our selves newish.

But to revisit the once-seen—for instance, the kitchen of a childhood friend with its imitation woodgrain formica table; or to re-enter the 1960s news agency run by M.P. Lyng, who was never seen without his green waistcoat—that should be a rush because so much more detail would move and therefore change the watching self. So the past would be different because, through the act of me looking on, it would modify my present.

VS: New Zealand for me is the end of the world. Do people who live on the edge know something about Russian literature?

DH: Yes. As long ago as 1952 Charles Brasch, founding editor of New Zealand's ground-breaking literary journal Landfall, published Geoffrey Ryan's translation of Pushkin's “The Monument” 1966 saw the emerging Josef Brodsky profiled in translations by Nicholas Zissermann. Brasch worked with Peter Soskice to translate Sergey Esenin's Poems (Wai-te-ata Press, 1970); this has recently been reissued by Cold Hub Press, which also has chapbooks of Mikhail Aizenberg, Nikolai Baitov, Aleksey Porvin, and Tatiana Shcherbina, transated by Jim Kates.

Cold Hub's support for Russian poetry was prefigured by a journal I co-founded with Sandra Arnold; the editorial of our Takahe 3 (Autumn 1990) came from Shcherbina and R.V. Smirnow— The New Zealand Project, an open letter sponsored by 42 Russian signatories, and called for an autonomous laboratory of new artists, gamely asserting:

The geographical place where this autonomous laboratory will meet the new age, and perhaps be realised in its integrity, we call New Zealand. This is a land out of fairy-tales, belonging to the Queen of Great Britain and to God in equal measure, islands at the «end of the world» which, compared with the rest of the world, are governed with more ecological sensitivity, which have preserved a culture and a political purity that quite miraculously turn out to be parallel, new and independent in relation to the rest of the world. So it is to this country that we would like to present our computer-bucolic project of a community of free people.

I went on to publish Curtainless Windows: Contemporary Russian Writing (Takahe 5, Spring 1990), presenting poems from Aizenberg, Shcherbina, Alexandra Sozonova, Ludmila Stokowska, and Sergey Stratanovsky, all translated by J. Kates. New Zealand readers learnt that the Cyrillic alphabet abbreviates ‘emergency ration' to ‘N.Z.', but for Shcherbina:

N.Z. is now only New Zealand.
Once it made me think of emergency rations,
I mean, a touch of the commie state—not its ill-wishers
but its orphans (that obscene look never wears thin)
a touch ever more unfeeling, without strands of wool
on its pelt, nor birthmarks.
You can love a hag's eyes and touch eyelids
where the eyelashes have fallen out, white and iris –
shot off into space at an enemy.
Only a single husk left over, a foil
with the superficial depth of a hologram.
You can scrutinize it, and wait until it revives,
skewer it on a Finnish knife –
the way spectators got into silent movies,
now that N.Z. is an antique canvas.

VS: “… belonging to the Queen of Great Britain and to God”, hmm. I'm an anarchist; what political views do you follow? Do you think that the poet must be a rebel like John Lennon?

DH: Having attended a primary school where a few pupils wore no shoes and had to scavenge scraps of food from rubbish bins, I grew up as and remain a leftist. However, there have been memorable poets from every political persuasion—Mayakovsky was a prominent Bolshevik, Tsvetaeva died in exile; D'Annunzio influenced Mussolini, who gave him a state funeral, while Pavese was imprisoned by Il Duce; Pound was a fascist, Oppen a communist, and Stevens a Republican—I could go on but the point is obvious: poetry is an activity that utilises ideas but it is not a belief system. The relationship between politics and poetry? I put it this way in ‘Prague Casebook':

Stalin did not discover zero until he fell in love
with nothing. Then, whatever the number, he added zeroes
to measure Earth; calculating how to reach Heaven above
he settled on a pile of bodies. Eventually he rose

as a statue, pointing the way. Today I stare at that statue and recognize
my ambition as a translator: to own every sentence
passed. I want my version to be the original, my lies
to convince you they are necessary, even common sense.

VS: Thanks for the interview, David. What do you want to wish our readers?

DH: I hope your readers treat hierarchies, including literary ones, with suspicion. Status and influence change nearly as often as wind direction. Yesterday's arbiters are laughable creatures; those who seek to be tomorrow's gods are already tragic.

Editorial assistant Nicholas Rodelo contributed to the editing of this interview.

Banner graphic: "Manawhenua Seats" (cropped) by Emily Karaka, oil on canvas, 182 x 213 cm, 2007. Used here under fair use guidelines.