WEDDE, Ian

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Nationality: New Zealander. Born: Blenheim, 17 October 1946. Education: Auckland University, M.A. (honors) 1968. Family: Married Rosemary Beauchamp in 1967; three sons. Career: Formerly forester, factory worker, gardener, and postman. British Council teacher, Jordan, 1969–70; poetry reviewer, London Magazine, 1970–71; broadcasting editor, New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, 1972; writer-in-residence, Victoria University, Wellington, 1984; art critic, Wellington Evening Post, 1983–90. Awards: Robert Burns fellowship, University of Otago, 1972; Arts Council bursary, 1974, and travel award, 1983; New Zealand Book award, for fiction, 1977, and for verse, 1978; Victoria University writing fellowship, 1984. Address: 118-A Maidavale Road, Roseneath, Wellington 1, New Zealand.

Publications

Poetry

Homage to Matisse. London, Amphedesma Press, 1971.

Made Over. Auckland, Stephen Chan, 1974.

Pathway to the Sea. Christchurch, Hawk Press, 1974.

Earthly: Sonnets for Carlos. Akaroa, New Zealand, Amphedesma Press, 1975.

Don't Listen. Christchurch, Hawk Press, 1977.

Spells for Coming Out. Auckland, Auckland University Press, 1977.

Castaly and Other Poems. Auckland, Auckland University Press-Oxford University Press, 1980; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981.

Tales of Gotham City. Auckland, Auckland University Press-Oxford University Press, 1984.

Georgicon. Wellington, Victoria University Press, 1984.

Driving into the Storm: Selected Poems. Auckland, Oxford University Press, 1987.

Tendering. Auckland, Auckland University Press, 1988.

The Drummer. Auckland, Auckland University Press, 1993.

Plays

Eyeball Eyeball (produced Packakariki, 1983).

Double or Quit: The Life and Times of Percy Topliss (produced on tour, England, 1984)

Radio Plays: Stations, music by Jack Body, 1969; Pukeko, musicby John Rimmer, 1972.

Novels

Dick Seddon's Great Dive. Auckland, Islands, 1976.

Symmes Hole. Auckland, Penguin, and London, Faber, 1986.

Short Stories

The Shirt Factory and Other Stories. Wellington, Victoria University Press, 1980

Survival Arts. Auckland, Penguin, and London, Faber, 1988.

Other

How to Be Nowhere: Essays and Texts, 1971–1994. Wellington, Victoria University Press, 1995.

Editor, with Harvey McQueen, The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Verse. Auckland, Penguin, 1985; revised edition, with McQueen and Miriama Evans, 1989.

Editor, with Gregory Burke, Now See Hear! Art, Language, and Translation. Wellington, Victoria University Press, 1990.

Editor, Dream Collectors: One Hundred Years of Art in New Zealand. Wellington, Te Papa Press, 1998.

Editor and translator, with Fawwas Tuqan, Selected Poems, by Mahmud Darwish. Cheadle. Cheshire, Carcanet, 1974.

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Critical Studies: "Loathing the Golden Arches: Ian Wedde and Postmodernism" by Cynthia Brophy, in Landfall (Dunedin, New Zealand), 42(1), March 1988; by Jonathan Lamb, in Dirty Silence: Aspects of Language and Literature in New Zealand, edited by Graham McGregor and Mark Williams, Auckland, Oxford University Press, 1991; "Beyond All Law: Ian Wedde's New Zealand Settlers" by John McLaren, in Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada (Prince George, British Columbia), 7, June 1992; by Linda Hardy, in Asian and Pacific Inscriptions: Identities, Ethnicities, Nationalities, edited by Suvendrini Perera, Victoria, Australia, Meridian, 1995; "The Re-Emergence of a Nation: Ian Wedde's 'Symmes Hole'" by Laura Moss, in Revue Frontenac Review, 12, 1995.

Ian Wedde comments:

Poems are ways out of solipsism, not necessarily the poet's. If the poems are any good, then the poet through writing and the readers through reading are transported. Poems are not mirrors but creations, where "creations" is understood as a kind of present participle. I am myself skeptical about the perfectibility of people; I think they change to remain the same. For this reason, and because of what I have said above about poetry and because poetry is not discrete but a function of people, I am not interested in poems as objects, potentially perfectible, but as processes that involve us. Naturally, the ways in which they do this are not unimportant. But the notion that poems order the world interests me only insofar as they may be said to do this by bringing us, through the intercourse in which they involve us, to cognition of varieties of the world's disorder. This disorder, after all, can be every bit as shapely as the most exquisite poème bien fait, so called. My own impulse in writing poems is to inquire rather than describe. At the same time I am attracted by the idea of a forma formans, a shape or the ghost of a shape that, as Yves Bonnefoy has pointed out in his notes on translating Yeats, can determine the as yet uncertain content of which it becomes, reciprocally, an aspect. Mathematics can show us an exact principle of symmetry shared by one of the very oldest creatures, the nautilus, by a Greek temple, by innumerable supermarkets. With luck, poetry can offer us a similarly continuous and vital perspective.

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Ian Wedde is one of a group of New Zealand poets who are graduates in English from the University of Auckland and who have been influenced by the American modernist tradition as it flows from Pound, early Eliot, and William Carlos Williams through Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley. This is a major shift of emphasis in New Zealand poetry, and probably most readers would concede Wedde's place as the leading exponent. At the same time, unlike some of his contemporaries, Wedde does not seem trapped in a narrow and restrictive mode but experiments freely. Most often he lets the feeling determine the shape of the poem, but in an unusual departure he has written a sequence of sonnets in which there is a tight, though discreet and well-concealed, rhyme pattern, a free flow of idea and image, and a predominance of speaking voice, as in Lowell's sonnets. All of this is contained within an exact syllabic count, ten syllables to the line, yet with no line permitted to fall into the old traditional iambic beat. This 1975 sequence, Earthly: Sonnets for Carlos, remains one of Wedde's major achievements.

As a young man Wedde spent time traveling outside New Zealand, and his experiences in Italy and the Middle East, particularly in Jordan, provided the occasion for a number of striking poems. In this connection his translation, in collaboration with Fawwas Tuqan, of the poems of Mahmud Darwish should be mentioned.

Wedde is consistently at the center of his own poetry, creating himself (it might be said) as he goes. He is sensitive, voluble, and full of energy. There is always the sense that more is being registered than can be mastered, more felt than finds expression, and this is the right sort of imbalance for the production of poetry. His poems may sometimes seem overcharged, producing a hectic, even agitating effect, but this is preferable to a smooth Parnassian surface and inevitable in poems that aim to be highly active and to involve the reader in their activity. Wedde's poems are "open," not merely in the sense of finding their forms as they go but also in being deliberately less than complete statements. Readers are invited in, their imaginations engaged to do that part of the work the poet leaves for them. This, I think, is what Wedde means when he writes in an anthology of younger New Zealand poets that "the reduction of quests and discoveries to their essentials makes them more charismatic, more dependent upon the mysterious triggers which we all share to greater or lesser extent, which can propel us violently or as though in a dream into previously unknown or unimagined or misunderstood territories and times." The judgment involved in such a strategy has to be exact.

Wedde's temperament is affirmative. He is expansive, rhapsodic, apostrophizing, ecstatic, which means that he is in more or less constant occupation of that area where a fine line divides the celebratory from the effusive and sentimental. In this, it should be said, he is with Keats, and like Keats he is on dangerous ground. High spirits anywhere can be as offensive to the mean in heart as to the genuinely oppressed, and, New Zealand being on the whole a dour, repressive society, Wedde is likely to run into critical trouble. But if this affirmative energy is the quality that makes him vulnerable, it is also his greatest strength, the source of the continual vitality and sense of freshness in his language or, as Arnold said of Keats, of that "indescribable gusto in the voice":

& what's better to do than celebrate
the fact? Look
			the dark bloom's left your eyes
spring's ripe
the horizon the blue sky
the air pours towards you 	the bean flower's sweet
again that fucking ferryman grates
his rowlocks in mid channel again 	high
clouds are spinning like tops again & I
couldn't ever have enough of all that
 
& you again & again & again: 
waking, quickening, travelling through one
world after another	 through all the weird
stations of the earthly paradise named
for one impossible diamond-backed dream
or another, as though no one else cared

Wedde also has appeared in a new, semiofficial guise as an anthologist of New Zealand poetry, and here his determination to base his selections partly on ethnicity and gender while at the same time declining to relinquish the traditional view that poems in anthologies should be chosen for their excellence, or at least for accomplishment, has involved him in many painful contradictions. This is particularly the case in the representation of poetry translated from Maori, a language he does not know. His introduction to The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Verse is a model of obliquity and lends some weight to those who have argued that the rich confusions of his own poetry are not so much a matter of choice as the reflection of a mind in receipt of more copious impressions, and subject to greater and more diverse moral pressures, than it can easily bring to order. But Wedde has added considerably to the range of New Zealand poetry, and to imagine the scene without him is to imagine it seriously depleted.

—C.K. Stead