New@Sybil
‘The Something Startled Rise of Birds’:A Tribute to Leigh Davis, 1955-2009
Wystan Curnow

... Leigh’s alignment of his poetry with insurgent visual media may be counted a response to poetry’s serious loss of prestige over his lifetime. (Such shifts will often register more dramatically in small, less complex cultures like New Zealand). At the same time he took an active interest in the rapid growth of new digital technologies—Jump Capital favoured telecommunications projects—and what poetry could make of them. Leigh considered poetry publishing in New Zealand had given the medium a bad name, and from Station of Earth-Bound Ghosts on made it clear that he was going it alone: ‘A bad poetry book is one that is instantly recognized as a poetry book. … These books have been banalised, like white bread, with most particularity and character removed. They are cheapened all round as publishers trade down the market in the belief that it is a social duty for these books to carry their precious content cargo despite sad economics’. He objected in particular to the ‘common view that poems come grouped together in small books, like boxes of chocolates that one scans for favourite flavours’. He wanted books that ‘use the physics of poetry not to make various kinds of statement but to make states of reading which are boundaryless in a was at least attributable to their consumption of time’. Longer book length poems have been Leigh’s stock in trade from the outset. This is more than a matter of packaging and design. ‘There must’, he wrote’, be a cogency and mutual reinforcement between a poetry work and its vehicle behaving as an idea. (my italics) … A book is many things besides a bland codex. It is a household object. It is a meter of sequence and therefore time. It is a control device with respect to serial narrative, either accelerating or impeding the flow of sense. It has weight and measure. It is a fan; a turbine, a layering device or series of veils; an onion. It is an environment and a metaphor for culture’.
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