PATERSON, Alistair (Ian Hughes)

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Nationality: New Zealander. Born: Nelson, 28 February 1929. Education: Nelson College, 1943–47; Christchurch Teachers College, 1948–49, diploma 1949; Victoria University College, Wellington, 1951–52, B.A. 1953; New Zealand Armed Services Command and Staff College, Whenuapai, 1969; University of Auckland, Dip.Ed. 1972. Family: Married 1) Karen Hope Edwards in 1954 (divorced1978); three daughters and two sons; 2) Alison Jean Blaiklock in 1985. Career: Teacher, Auckland Point School, Nelson, 1950, and Taita North School, Wellington, 1953; Instructor Officer, rising to rank of lieutenant commander, Royal New Zealand Navy, 1954–78; dean of general studies, New Zealand Police Department, 1974–78; education officer, New Zealand Education Department, 1978–89. Consultant, American Institute of Police Science, 1977–78. Editor, Mate, 1973–77, and Climate, 1978–81, both Auckland, Pilgrims, Dunedin, 1981–82, and Poetry New Zealand.Awards: Fulbright fellowship, 1977; Reid memorial award (University of Auckland), 1981; Katherine Mansfield award for fiction, 1993. Address: P.O. Box 9612, New market, Auckland, New Zealand.

Publications

Poetry

Caves in the Hills: Selected Poems. Christchurch, Pegasus Press, 1965.

Birds Flying. Christchurch, Pegasus Press, 1973.

Cities and Strangers. Dunedin, Caveman Press, 1976.

The Toledo Room: A Poem for Voices. Dunedin, Pilgrims South Press, 1978.

Qu'appelle. Dunedin, Pilgrims South Press, 1982.

Odysseus Rex. Auckland, Oxford University Press, 1986.

Incantations for Warriors. Auckland, Earl of Seacliffe Art Workshop, 1987.

Novel

How to Be a Millionaire by Next Wednesday. Auckland, David Ling Publishing Ltd., 1994.

Other

The New Poetry. Dunedin, Pilgrims South Press, 1982.

Editor, 15 Contemporary New Zealand Poets. Dunedin, Pilgrims South Press, 1980; New York, Grove Press, 1982.

Editor, Garrett on Education. Wellington, Tutor, 1981.

Editor, with James Laughlin, New Directions 46 (New Zealand issue). New York, New Directions, 1983.

Editor, Short Stories from New Zealand. Wellington, Highgate Price Milburn, 1988.

Editor, with Stan Bell and Tim Cloudsley, Coincidence. Glasgow, Open Circle, 1995.

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Alistair Paterson comments:

After commencing in the traditional New Zealand lyric/pastoral mode, I moved into a study of contemporary American verse, a study that resulted in the development of a style and technique based on open form as expounded by Pound, Creeley, and Olson. This interest led to my arranging for Robert Creeley to visit New Zealand in 1976 and assisting with the Robert Duncan visit a little later. It also led to my writing poems of the longer form (about four hundred lines) as typified by The Toledo Room, Qu'appelle, and Odysseus Rex. More recently I have been working in the short story field as well as in poetry. As an editor and reviewer I have tended to concentrate on the encouragement of postmodern writing in open forms and on its extension into the work of other New Zealand writers. My most recent interest is in the relationship between postmodernism and semiotics.

(1995) During the last few years I have become more interested in fiction and in 1993 won the Katherine Mansfield award ($5,000) for fiction. My first novel—social commentary in the main—was published in 1994.

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Alistair Paterson's first book, Caves in the Hills, was very much the conventional collection of the postwar years—thirty or so pieces more or less well made on a variety of subjects in a variety of forms, fairly impersonal, modern in tone and language (no romantic poeticizing), each poem a discrete item. There was the feeling of a man looking around for subjects on which poems might be written. But there was one item that stood apart. The sequence called "The Metropolis" is an early Paterson attempt, not altogether successful, at what later become characteristic of his work. The language, one feels, is struggling to gain ascendancy over the statement the poem is making, so that reference, meaning, the poem's "subject," will be only one element in a total poetic structure.

In his second and third books, Birds Flying and Cities and Strangers, we can see Paterson experimenting, reaching out for freer forms. His subject remains on the whole what it was for the Wellington poets of the 1950s—a rather gloomy realism about domestic, urban, and suburban life and about human relationships. Again in the best of the poems, however, there is an attempt to make the movement of the language, the flow of syntax and grammar, more than direct statements or imagery, carry the feelings that spring from the occasion or event that is the subject. This is a distinct advance from the mode in which Paterson began, in which poets too often seem to feel that they can do the fiction writer's job in a few dozen lines, summing up a human action (and particularly human failure) in smart, well-organized images and phrases. It seems that Paterson found his way out of that mode by a close study of the postmodernist American poets, and it was from their work that he acquired his interest in open form and sequences.

The Toledo Room combines Paterson's characteristic subject with his developing interest in open form. It is a dramatic work in which a number of characters speak, none of them clearly identified. They seem to talk about their lives, their love affairs, their failures, and the political climate. They are concerned about, and caught up in, the roles their circumstances impose. But the adopting of roles, the assuming of masks, is the game of life itself, and the whole vision, though perhaps negative, is also wry and amused and is gathered into a music—the structure of the poem itself—that has beauty. This is Paterson writing at his best.

Summer
& the sounds of summer—
	we should all be accustomed to it
	but the sun throws down such heat
it seems like dying (or death)
fading, falling into silence
	seizing the albatross in its flight.
Outwards we follow the horizon
		the sweep of the bay
		  inwards translate
what's seen and said into another language
	    into some kind of script
	words, phrases, pages with footnotes:
	   Marsden's weather-worn cross
	in that far country above lonely water.

Having found his method and established his form, which he called "double margin field form" (using margins justified to the right and left of the page), Paterson went on to write three long poems—Qu'appelle, Incantations for Warriors, and Odysseus Rex—that were meant ultimately to form a single major work. Practical difficulties, however, resulted in their publication separately, in the wrong order, and with different publishers, so that the full force of the experiment was not seen between single covers, where certain inter-connections of theme and method would be more striking. One can say, however, that the poems show a cumulative force, revealing once again that Paterson's poetry, though somewhat narrow in range and consequently repetitive in its effects, speaks with an authentic and individual voice, at once bleak, lyrical, and nostalgic.

—C.K. Stead