Title

Artistic Representation by Gregory O'Brien

Creator

O'Brien, Gregory

Description

Gregory O’Brien writes of his piece: sometime in the mid-1990s I discovered the poetry of Frank Kuppner. It was Robyn Marsack who pointed me in said direction. And so begins this merry dance. I remember being impressed when I was later informed—it must have been by Robyn—that Frank Kuppner worked as an electrician. Or maybe he was an electrical engineer? In recent years, I have been unable to find any mention of those occupations in Kuppner’s numerous biographical notes on-line, and I am now wondering if I invented (or perhaps misheard) this biographical fact. That said, I have decided to persist with it.

My unwrapping of Frank Kuppner’s email correspondence with Michael Schmidt was prefaced by a note from Jessica Smith, at the John Rylands Library, informing me that much of this particular poet-publisher interaction had in fact taken place over the telephone or by letter. This I did not take as an impediment, figuring I was on the look-out for something fragmentary rather than a grand, roiling literary continuum. Also, bearing in mind Kuppner’s real/imagined working life amongst electrical and electronic gadgetry, I found his perceived preference for earlier communication systems something of a relief. A blizzard of emails was the last thing I wanted to be heading out into.

In formulating a ‘response’ to the correspondence I resorted to that stock-and-trade of the electrical profession, the circuit diagram. Three years ago, upon my father’s death, I inherited a hardbound, handwritten workbook dating back to World War II, much of which he had spent as a wireless mechanic, working on Sunderland flying boats, based at the appropriately named Mechanics Bay on Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour. Like my imagined version of the ‘electrician’ Kuppner, my father had—for a time, at least—a substantial knowledge of electrical systems. (That said, by the end of the 20th century, he was totally flummoxed by the new-fangledness of the world and its technologies. He struggled to master the CD-player, let alone the home computer. The hundreds of scrupulously hand-drawn circuit-diagrams contained in the mid-century workbook had, it would seem, done nothing to prepare him for the digital age.)

My Kuppner/Schmidt circuit diagram appropriates phrases from both sides of the e-conversation. You’ll have trouble guessing who said what. As in the best conversations, both figures are amply present in what the other says/writes. As a rebuke to the technology of laptop and internet, I have installed a reading lamp—that staple of readers and writers, publishers and poets—strategically near the middle of the ‘diagram’. I will leave it to Kuppner and Schmidt to ascertain whether this formulation of writerly/editorial energies is in anyway viable, let along representative. I think, like all diagrams, it is really only just a part of a much, much bigger diagram.

Gregory O’Brien is an artist, curator and writer, and designer of covers for Carcanet’s journal, PN Review. He has edited numerous anthologies and art catalogues, and written extensively about New Zealand culture. O’Brien’s work has been exhibited across New Zealand, and he has also illustrated the work of many New Zealand writers.

Date

2022

Holding Institution

Private Collection

Rights Holder (Image)

Gregory O'Brien

Rights Holder (Work)

Gregory O'Brien