I heard about Organ Stop Pizza from a radio show i was listening to last night. I can't seem to find the "dancing cats" (maybe i got drowsy & misheard?), but it still looks like a cool site.

My Life As A Fake.

I have recently been following an Umbrist blog, "The Nacreous Oughts" by Ken Springtail, & now he has an issue i wish to comment upon. One of his readers sent him a poem with a line borrowed from somebody else, & he is taking quite excessive umbrage, IMHO, to this strategy. All i can do is quote back at him a passage he recently linked to by Bill Manhire:

" In the December 1966 issue of Landfall, the second-to-last which Brasch edited, there appeared two poems by a certain C.G. Gibson. They had pride of place at the front of the magazine. The first was called ‘Low Paddocks and Light’. Here are the first three of its seven stanzas:

I think it is in Otago, that place
That lies upon the eye of my mind
Now, like a grey blade set to the
Sea’s shifting oneness,
Like a glass plain touching,
Crowning all that is.

Crowning, but capped by its own
Cloth of morrows: how still it lies.
The long paddocks run out
To the sea there. The bush is not dense.
The flat paddocks, dark between fences, run
Out to the pale snug of the mapped water.

And the fences go on up, rising slowly,
With a sheep-bird halfway, on a stunted
Post, watching. (Birds take some knowing.)
– Watching how the light slides through them
Easy as weeds, and the tall wires sighing.
How sharp the salt seems, how
The grasses cluster.

The only problem is that anyone at the time who had read much contemporary American poetry would probably have come across a poem by W.S. Merwin, called ‘Low Fields and Light’. The difference between ‘field’ and ‘paddock’ in the two titles fairly sums up the difference between the two texts. Here are Merwin’s opening stanzas:

I think it is in Virginia, that place
That lies across the eye of my mind now
Like a grey blade set to the moon’s roundness,
Like a plain of glass touching all there is.

The flat fields run out to the sea there.
There is no sand, no line. It is autumn.
The bare fields, dark between fences, run
Out to the idle gleam of the flat water.

And the fences go on out, sinking slowly,
With a cow-bird halfway, on a stunted post, watching
How the light slides through them easy as weeds
Or wind, slides over them away out near the sky.

Needless to say, Merwin’s poem pre-dates the work of C.G. Gibson.

My assumption at the time was that someone had set out to make a point. Perhaps C.G. Gibson was really one of the poets anthologised in Charles Doyle’s 1965 anthology, Recent Poetry in New Zealand. Perhaps C.G. Gibson was ‘C.G. Gibson’. More recently, however, I have realised that the dust-jackets of an expatriate novelist, Colin Gibson, offer a biography (born in Invercargill, advertising copywriter in London and New York, etc.) which accords with the Landfall note on the poet C.G. Gibson. Presumably novelist and poet are closely connected.

Whatever the origins of C.G. Gibson, Landfall itself never acknowledged that it had printed a pair of American poems in error. I believe Charles Brasch thought there was nothing to apologise for. He had accepted the poems in good faith: that they turned out to be, more or less, by well-known contemporary American poets merely confirmed the acuteness of his taste."

What do you say to this, Mr Springtail?