New Zealand Poet Laureate

Shadow Stands Up #9

2012-05-01T15:27:00.000+12:00

Writing a poem about memory and then showing (here, in ‘real time’) a section of the poem dealing with one of the memories contained in it that’s a full seasonal cycle (spring then, autumn now) later than when it was written, and seven years later than the remembered occasion (in summer) with the Australian poet Barry Hill and his wife the singer Rose Bygrave at Colabassa in 2005 – what’s ‘going on’ here?

And then, inside these foldings of time, is the memory contained in the song Rosie sang that afternoon after a long, cheerful, nattering lunch, to thank the women in the kitchen who’d loaded our table with food and wine; and the memory contained in the song the women sang back, which had (has) remained current over several centuries.

David Shields describes memory as ‘the past rewritten in the direction of feeling’.

The first day of spring arrives
with the sound of the Link bus
(it’s green) whooshing past the end
of our street, past the early
risers at Cartune Auto
who begin to sing in the
rain as their roller door clangs
open – soon, I pass them as
I cross the parking lot at
the back of the post office
where I tap in secret
code on the keypad, unlock
our box, and lo! A gift for
the first day of spring, two books
sent from the beautiful house
above Swan Bay in Queenscliff,
where Baz and Rosie live in
rooms full of songs. What about
that time we finished lunch at
Collabassa, when Rosie
went back to the kitchen and
brought the women out, and sang
for them, Deep in my heart and
deep in my soul, and then they
sang back with glasses raised, a
song about the utter use-
lessness of men, how they crowed
at dawn but were crestfallen
by the time their lunch was served.

At Matahiwi marae

2012-04-11T15:29:00.001+12:00

Photographs from Matahiwi

On Friday March 9 John Newton, Robert Sullivan, my son Jack and I drove down from Auckland to Matahiwi marae near Hastings. Jack had flown in from Melbourne the day before, John had caught the 8 a.m. ferry from Waiheke, and Robert emerged from his house in Arch Hill with a can of cat-food for his neighbour who was keeping an eye on things while he was away. John’s wife Robyn was flying in from Wellington that evening. Donna was flying down from Auckland that night. Michele Leggott, Mark, her guide-dog Olive, and the visiting American poet Rachel Blau duPlessis and her husband Bob were driving down from Auckland. Hinemoana Baker was flying up from Wellington in between sessions at the Writers and Readers Festival. Cilla McQueen was flying up from Bluff. A large contingent from the National Library in Wellington was driving up, in particular the tirelessly courteous and reassuring Peter Ireland and Keith Thorsen. My son Carlos, Sarah, and our grandson Sebo were already up from Wellington, staying with friends in Napier; they turned up at the marae at the appointed hour on Friday. Other sons couldn’t make it: Penn had gone to Melbourne for a friend’s wedding, Conrad was with The Phoenix Foundation at gigs in Wellington, and Mischa, Laura and our grand-daughter Bella were too busy with work in Auckland.

'How can I write about Matahiwi?' I ask Donna, having got this far and ground to a halt with the sense that I’ve written a list.

'Affectionately,' she replies.

She’s right: when I look at what I’ve described, it’s a convergence of good-will around an event that I found moving and humbling in ways I couldn’t have anticipated and find hard to describe.

Robert, John, Jack and I got to the assembly area outside the wharenui Te Matau a Maui in the nick of time at 4pm. I dropped them off and took my leave. Donna and I, and several others including Cilla, would be welcomed on to the marae the following morning. I spent the evening in the lodge above Te Mata, looking across a landscape of vineyards that should be familiar by now but still isn’t. I picked Donna up from the airport at Napier about 11 pm – there were families in pyjamas and dressing-gowns meeting the Auckland flight.

The next morning we were welcomed on to Matahiwi marae, the laureate tokotoko carved by Jacob Scott was presented, and people spoke, recited, and sang. The poet Marty Smith, and the young poet and song-writer Amy Barnard had joined us earlier. After the formalities of the powhiri were complete, John Buck of Te Mata vineyard talked passionately about what the laureate project meant to him, and about the importance of the association between Te Mata, Matahiwi, and the laureate. When Jacob Scott spoke about the tokotoko he’d made, the weeks of preparation and the many flight-paths of those who’d come to Matahiwi seemed to converge and settle.

I’d spent time with Jacob some months earlier, and had given him a couple of pieces of stone from Otanerau Bay on Arapaua Island in Cook Strait. I have a small black and white photograph of an elegant little sloop moored somewhere near Otanerau in 1939, the year my mother and father married, before my father went off to the war. I’m pretty sure the sloop was the boat they honeymooned on. I told Jacob how, some years after my parents’ deaths, I’d dropped my mother’s ivory bracelet and one of my dad’s old Seamaster watches into the sea off Dieffenbach Point by Tory Channel; doing it located them in the place I associated with my childhood sense of belonging somewhere. Jacob knew the names of my sons, and we’d had a yarn session about their ancestors one night on the porch of his house near Havelock North, and another session over lunch earlier on when he visited us in Auckland.

Carlos, Conrad, Mischa, Penn and Jack have their names delicately cut into the top of the tokotoko’s shaft, which is made from the dense, heavy maire timber of the old Te Mata winepress. The two stones from Otanerau (greywacke and obsidian) that I gave Jacob are inlaid adjacent to the boys’ names, together with additions by Jacob: a piece of whale ivory (reminiscent of my mother’s bracelet), a piece of unpolished pounamu, and a piece of granite which he’d brought back from Peru. Together, these represent both the home places and the wandering ways that characterise both my living family and its ancestors. From each inlay a delicate silver chain descends – linked stories – and between the five silver chains are five delicately inscribed panels, each of which recounts a story I told Jacob; so he says.

Only I can’t possibly have told him as much as appears on the tokotoko. It’s hard to describe the extent to which both it and the hospitality of Matahiwi exceed my sense of entitlement. I feel very privileged to have been welcomed into Te Matau a Maui, to have slept, eaten, and celebrated at Matahiwi; to have taken part in the readings with Robert, Cilla, Hinemoana, Marty, John, and Amy at Hastings on Saturday night; to have become part of a special relationship between Matahiwi, Te Mata, and the National Library – a relationship characterised by obvious, deep affection.

My heartfelt, affectionate thanks to Jacob Scott for the tokotoko, Tom Mulligan the kaumatua at Matahiwi marae, Tama Huata for blessing the tokotoko and for his work with the kapa haka group Kahurangi, John Buck of Te Mata, Peter Ireland and Keith Thorsen at the National Library, Marty Smith as poet-mc at the readings and performances, Amy Barnard and her friends Julia and Maude Morris as JAM, and to my friends Cilla McQueen, John Newton, Robert Sullivan, and Hinemoana Baker for their poems.

'This has been hard to write about,' I say to Donna.

'Then just say why.'

It’s hard because the experience was at once extremely personal, and not. I was moved by the kindness and hospitality extended to me; but what matters more isn’t about me at all; what matters is the shape of the event, the kinds of relationships it provides for, the kind of future it anticipates with hope.

Matahiwi marae is associated not only with Maui and his brothers and sister, but also with a time in modern history when Maori seasonal workers came over to the Coast for jobs in the freezing works and orchards. Matahiwi had a policy early on of making these people welcome. My son Carlos remarked that the swallows which were perching on phone and power lines all around the marae resembled people seated at the powhiri. The swallows came here from Australia. Perhaps, before that, they came from North Africa. Now they’re at home here. This nice fact should be left alone and not crammed into a sentimental analogy. But all the same.

Photographs from Matahiwi

2012-04-11T15:26:00.000+12:00

At Matahiwi marae

Jacob Scott, Cilla McQueen, Michele Leggott, Olive, Ian Wedde

Powhiri, Matahiwi marae

Hinemoana Baker at Matahiwi marae

Robert, Donna, Ian, Cilla, Michele (hidden), Mark

John Newton in foreground, dinner at Pipi

Jacob Scott, Matahiwi marae

Powhiri, Matahiwi marae

Donna Malane and Robert Sullivan

Amy Barnard

Marty Smith and Hinemoana Baker at the readings, Hastings Art Gallery

Ian Wedde, Jacob Scott, Tom Mulligan, at Matahiwi marae

Hongi how-to

Remembering Leone Hatherly

2012-03-19T12:55:00.000+13:00

It’s been a long time between blogs, for both sad and glad reasons. The glad reasons include laureate-related events at Meow in Wellington last month, and at Matahiwi marae last weekend (more on these soon). The sad reason concerns an old friend. On Sunday 12 February Leone (Lee, Leo) Hatherly phoned from Paekakariki to say she was sorry she wouldn’t be able to get to the Words on Edge poetry reading at Meow in Wellington the following Wednesday as she’d fallen and hurt herself – one eye was ‘sticking out like an aubergine’. The aubergine touch was typical of Lee, at once melodramatic and droll. The following Wednesday I was in Meow having a pre-reading lunch with fellow poets Lynn Jenner, Aleksandra Lane, and Amy Brown over from Melbourne, as well as David Weinstein of Wellington’s Klezmer Orchestra, and our friends Peter Ireland and Keith Thorsen from the National Library. It was there that we heard Leo was critically ill in hospital – the fall (and the aubergine) had been the precursors of a stroke.

I went to see her the morning after Words on Edge before flying back to Auckland. This was a familiar routine. Lee had battled cancer twice and won, transforming her periodic returns to hospital into opportunities for wicked anecdotes. A hospital visit to Lee during the cancer years usually resulted in loud laughter, and always drew a good crowd. When I visited this time she was unable to speak, but a flicker of that wonderful laugh moved her lips when I said, lamely, ‘Lee, we can’t go on meeting like this.’

Lee was an actor, comedian, queen of late-night radio, her rich, 'double Drambuie' voice beloved of late-shift taxi-drivers and lonely insomniacs. She’d have adored Lynn Jenner’s performance of her poem about Mata Hari on Wednesday night, with the Klezmer Orchestra backing, ‘a hint of tango and a dash of schmaltz’.

As a performer, Lee was always generous to her audiences, but she was herself the most generous of audiences, always the first to laugh at a joke, appreciate a good story, listen with sympathy and attention. She loved to go to shows as well as give them, and could be counted on to sing along lustily from the best seats when a musical came to town. On the morning before she died, Donna and I together with her daughters Trina and Lindy gathered at her bedside to sing some of her favourite Stevie Wonder numbers, to the astonishment of the hushed ward.

Lee’s writing and acting credits are extraordinary, beginning with a role at the age of sixteen in a cast of including Peter Finch in the film Robbery under Arms. When she died, she had almost completed writing an opera with Gareth Farr about Edmund Hilary’s climb of Mt Everest. Much laughter was generated around the serious challenge of transforming ‘We knocked the bastard off’ into an extended Sprechgesang aria.

For several years, Lee, Trina, and Lindy were our neighbours. Led by Lee, the trio would emerge into the morning and perform their affirmations outside overlooking Evans Bay, chanting ‘I want to live, live, live!’ at the tops of their voices. Later, she was a greatly loved member of the Paekakariki community, where she lived with her devoted mother-and-son dogs Bella and Baxter, ‘in a lovely home overlooking the mortgage’. She died peacefully at 3.15pm 21 February 2012 at Wellington Public Hospital, aged 73.

Her funeral at Old St Paul's in Wellington on Sunday 26th was packed with a huge crowd of her friends and fans. Lots of her best known jokes were told: ‘Inside every fat woman is a thin woman trying to get out, and outside every thin woman is a fat man trying to get in.’ This could be the only funeral I ever go to which is frequently interrupted by clapping and laughter. It will probably be the only one at which the coffin is carried out to loud applause.

For years, Lee and I had an unofficial arrangement whereby I’d sometimes write a poem for her birthday on condition that she’d refrain from introducing me to her guests as ‘the poet’. Here is one of the poems, reworked in The Commonplace Odes so as to partially conceal the doggerel within – reprinted here in memory of Leone Hatherly. She loved the ‘ghost buffaloes’.

To Leone

I’m sad, Leone, and filled with remorse, because
On your birthday I pump out doggerel
And make you cry. It’s an old arrangement we have.
Moonlight ices my neighbour’s roof. Somewhere
In North Dakota thousands of ghost buffaloes

Are on the hoof, and despite the fact that I’ve just
Written two of them my relationship with lines of poetry gets more
And more aloof. It’s been this way
For years now, a sense of fraudulence, an excess
Of sacred cowness, the shit-detector quivering

Madly every time I step up to the footlights
Of language and take my bow. So it was
With a feeling approaching dread that I entered my sweetheart’s
Fabulously organised writing shed, switched
On the computer she daily overheats

With great stories, and clutched my aching head.
Outside (it was midday not night,
The moonlight-and-ice thing was just me
Trying to get my tone right, and the ghost
Buffaloes were there because I wanted my rhyme

On time) some rows of coloured plastic
Clothespegs pleased my sight, and I remembered
With affection the plain wooden ones our Sunday
School teacher used to explain the nativity,
The Joseph and Mary pegs dressed in paper.

The Joseph and Mary pegs dressed in paper
Stood before an expressive backdrop cut
From a sturdy Weetbix packet, a crèche we pelted
With acorns while making an unholy racket, which I’m sure
God loved because we were innocent then

Though the Presbyterian Sunday school teacher often
Didn’t hack it. The innocence we lose as we accumulate
Adult qualities like irony – that loss
Brings with it an admission that language can be
Completely insincere, and even the writers

We most revere are capable of horrid cynicism,
Self-service, and a kind of nodding compliance
Which is probably what I fear I’ll find in myself
One day, which is why I’ve kept poetry
At bay for a few years now, seeing

Language as a kind of virus which infects whatever
It was I was trying to say. Of course there’s only one
Antidote for this, and it’s love. When push comes
To shove and the glittering bead of water hanging
From the tamarillo or the sense of sap crazily

On the move in the tangle of jasmine on the back fence –
When stuff like this has to have sense made
Of it with words, it will only happen when love
Has cleared a way through the dense thickets of mistrust
And we find ourselves again in the midst of a must-

Happen sense of what’s right, and so we do
Even though we know it’s all dust
In the end, like everything words name, like you,
Like me. And now we’ve come to the nitty-
Gritty, dear Lee, which is where I thank you

For the fabulous birthday present I’ve got from you,
Which is that I’ve been made free again
By love to write a poem for you on your birthday
And to know it’s true and simple and can be trusted,
Like our old friendship, darling, inexhaustible, bountiful,

Memorable, true blue. Whereupon I now
Consign the ghost buffaloes of North Dakota
To a bin reserved entirely for the fraudulent quota
Of words uttered in bad faith, and I ask you
All to raise your brimming glasses to dear

Leone and to salute her. These solemn rites,
This smoke drifting from the sacrificial meats,
These hands that swipe away tears
From world-weary eyes, this sentiment
Hastened by the vine, this recourse to memory,

These familiar faces into which we peer as though
Into mirrors, seeing the shadow of time pouring
Towards the silvered surface like night
Across the festive garden – these portents
Say, Do it now and do it right.

Shadow stands up #8

2012-01-30T16:41:00.002+13:00

Those famous, or notorious, ‘seer’ letters that Rimbaud, aged seventeen, wrote in 1871, first to his earliest mentor Georges Izambard and a couple of days later to the young poet Paul Demeny, in which he rehearsed the phrase he had clearly impressed himself with, ‘I is somebody else’ – ‘Je est un autre,’ (to Izambard on May 13, Demeny on May 15) – have become the exhausted levers of critics and theorists wanting to open up the gap between the selves who write (the subjective ‘voice’) and the language that writing employs, that employs writers. Rimbaud himself, in the hyperbolic manifesto tone of the Izambard letter, pronounced that ‘subjective poetry’ would always be ‘horribly dull’. The dérangement or disordering of all the senses that Rimbaud advocated did involve intoxications, but more importantly the ‘reasoned’ (as he described it) abjection of the self. He wanted to observe himself experiencing and perceiving, to be used by language that had the classical precision of Racine – as he wrote to Izambard, ‘It’s false to say: I think; one ought to say: I am thought (on me pense).’ His great metaphor for this is the ‘drunken boat’ of the poem also written in 1871 which, having drifted rudderless out to sea after its crew was killed by ‘yelping redskins’, asks:

Do I long for European waters? Only a sullen pond
Where a small, demoralised boy, crouching
In the musk of a provincial evening
Launches his unsteady boat: a butterfly in May.

I come back to this poem over and over, to the weird sense it gives now of Rimbaud uttered in the language of the doomed boat (itself speaking in the sensational language of the popular fiction the ‘seven-year-old poet’ had earlier immersed himself in), seeming to experience something that hadn’t happened yet (his adult longing – or not – from Ethiopia for ‘European waters’) – what kind of ‘memory’ is that; is it possible to remember the future? – and remembering a child, a ‘seven-year-old poet’ perhaps, launching the toy that would one day become the language-vessel of the seventeen year-old poet’s consciousness anticipating his own exile from ‘home’ twenty years later – what kind of memory is that?

I was half way down the alleyway between the post-office and Paper Plus, having put the book back in my bag and hopped off the green Link bus at Three Lamps with Rimbaud’s drunken boat and his last letter thinking me, when I ‘came to my senses’, as we say. And there was ‘Khartoum Auto’, on a backstreet in Ponsonby, in 2011. Ghosts, shadows, standing up all around it. What kind of memory was that?

Going in search of lost time
I discover a river
that resembles the White Nile
because it flows as much past
Gordon in Khartoum, the mad
Mahdi, the painted Nuba,
Michel Leiris and Leni
Riefenstahl, leggy models
streaked with spit-moistened ochre –
flows as much past these fragments
of memories I don’t have
as it does past the stains of
vomit and bluish wine, fish
traps in the rushes where en-
tire Levianthans fester.
These are not my memories
but I have them, what Rimbaud
wrote, filigrees and fragments,
Mémoire, his shadow standing
up, ONE LOT: A SINGLE TUSK
ONE LOT: TWO TUSKS/ ONE LOT:
THREE TUSKS/ ONE LOT: FOUR TUSKS/ ONE
LOT: TWO TUSKS. ‘I am helpless
and unhappy, I can find
nothing, the first dog in the
street will tell you that. Send me
therefore the prices of the
services from Aphinar
to Suez ... Tell me what time
I need to be carried on
board.’ Rimbaud’s final letter
composed in delirium
dictated to his sister
Isabelle, 9 November
1891, he died
the following day, and I
read his premonition on
my way down inscrutable
Rivers ... slow deliriums
... archipelagos of stars!

Ian on the Scottish Poetry Library Podcast

2012-01-13T14:55:00.002+13:00

Ian takes a brief detour from text-based presentation to talk to Ryan Van Winkle from the Poets House on the Scottish Poetry Library Podcast.

Head on over to Podomatic to have a listen, and get a preview of Ian's plans for the Laureateship. (Audio autoplays, 27 minutes)

Shadow stands up #7

2011-12-23T09:09:00.003+13:00

I wrote this section of Shadow stands up in winter soon after we’d moved into our new place, which we liked because it had a big flowering tree outside on the street. How quickly we orient ourselves in new situations: the tree was one marker which I’d see in the foreground as I came home through the alleyway off Three Lamps into the car park behind the post office; another was the distant blue-green horizon of the Waitakere Ranges viewed from the Ponsonby ridge across the early evening glitter of house-lights beyond Westmere to Te Atatu. Stepping from our front door into Prosford Street and going in the opposite direction back towards the shops, it was the picture-framer across the road and the auto-repair business at the end of the street that became the markers of that journey.

I was re-reading Rimbaud’s poems and letters at the time, fascinated all over again by the tension between the letters and poems of that miracle year 1871 (‘Je est un autre’), and the letters he wrote from Africa after 1880. Though the tree, the view across to the ranges, the picture-framer, and the auto-repair business had become my memory markers, they were sometimes reoriented through Rimbaud’s words and that amazing ability he had to be other than himself, ‘un autre’, to be at once a subject and an object he observed, even a drunken, rudderless boat; and, in the letters written from Aden and Harar, to be the trader Rimbaud, that shrewd operator looking for the best price for coffee or guns, whose memories of the family home at Charleville must also have been filtered or reoriented somehow by the dusty red sunsets he observed with a mixture of venomous boredom and unquenchable hope.

When he watched his camel-train watering at an oasis, did he also see the ‘black, cold puddle’ where a small boy, ‘plein de tristesses’, launched his boat like a butterfly in May? Where does the present moment stop and a memory summoned by it begin to slide across that consciousness where self and other are not distinct? One chilly morning I saw Cartune Auto up the road from our place through the filter of a ‘memory’ derived from Rimbaud, but also through my own memory of swallows around the old battlements of Fez, and a cat sitting on top of a camel-load of goods just across the Syrian border in eastern Turkey. What present was Rimbaud in when, in his last delirious letter dictated to his sister Isabelle on 9 November 1891, the day before he died, he asked for ‘the prices of the services from Aphinar to Suez’ – when there’s nowhere called ‘Aphinar’ on the map?

And where was I, precisely, a couple of days ago, when Donna and I walked – ‘plein de tristesses’ – through the empty rooms of our lovely old house in Albany Avenue, Mount Victoria, Wellington, for the last time, and locked the door behind us? The rooms weren’t ever empty over more than twenty years, and the moment the door shut on them they began at once to be filled again with the voices I’d always heard there – in a place called something like ‘Aphinar’, perhaps, a place that doesn’t exist (but does); a moment at once melancholy and filled with the unstable, liberating happiness of change.

Khartoum is what I see first
when I step outside into
the street at the front of our
place, with a tree I’m starting
to remember, its shadow
was thickly matt in summer
but now sparse and transparent –
I look past its filigree
at a yellow battlement
scarified with texts and signs
that seem familiar, though the
swallows piercing a sunset
reddened with dust, the hoarse yells
of women beating carpets
flung across the sills of dark
windows, and the open gate
through which laden camels pass
(a cat perches on top of
bales of merchandise) – these I
don’t remember, yet they stand
up clearly in the morning
light where the green Link bus goes
swiftly past Cartune Auto
Service Centre ph 37
60268, its six
dark windows inscribed with texts,
its open warehouse door through
which a ute laden with tyres
enters the dark citadel
past the cat rolling in sun-
light on the footpath outside.

Shadow stands up #6

2011-11-23T12:19:00.002+13:00

Last Wednesday I was up in the attic of the old house in Wellington where I’ve stashed boxes of stuff connected with writing. Some of it goes back a long time, to the late 1960s – earnestly labelled notebooks. I didn’t look at them. It was a bit like crossing the road to avoid someone you quite like but don’t want to have to talk to. Mostly, though, the boxes contain drafts of books that I kept because I thought I might want to come back to them and use bits that had been edited out. I never have. Now, their uselessness is a kind of comfort. No pressure!

Because I’ve made my living precariously as a freelance writer for extended periods of time, there are lots of boxes irritably labelled 'projects'. Some of these 'projects' saw the light of day, many didn’t. I guess I kept the strike-outs for the same reason I kept drafts of books – in case they might be worth coming back to. They never are. This, too, is comforting. New ideas may not always be better, but they are always more optimistic.

There are boxes of things evasively labelled 'treasures'. One contained a sliding-lid pencil-case with funny hot-poker drawings on it that my son Carlos made when he was at primary school thirty years ago, the wooden mould-template for a car universal joint that Frank Stark gave me as a birthday present about as long ago as the pencil-case, and other objects about which floats a miasma of vague guilt – objects that should have been thrown out years ago but weren’t because I couldn’t bear to; and their close relatives, the objects that I wanted to throw out but knew I’d be cursed if I did (neither the pencil case nor the wooden mould template belong to either of these categories, though one is useless but interesting, while the other would be useful if I needed a pencil-case, but is in fact also useless but, in its case, emotionally beautiful).

There are boxes labelled 'family snaps' that I know will reveal weirdly scrambled narratives of time and place when I get around to looking into them, which, I swear, I will, some day, sooner or later.

Because we’re leaving, 'the kids' have cleared their boxes of junk out, and there are strange bare rectangles on top of the MDF flooring which are like the ghosts of evacuated secrets, which I suspect will haunt their hoarders for years to come, until they finally give up and toss the collections of beer-cans, munted hardware, and dysfunctional video cameras.

Boxes of tax returns, of long-ago-anachronistic exhibition pamphlets and catalogues, of 'research material' whose purposes have been gnawed into filigreed ruins by the industrious silverfish of the redundant. Boxes that I suspect (but am not going to check) contain things I was meant to do when I got time.

I imagine what a liberation it will be when I get up in the morning and the attic in my head will be full of a new day’s early morning sunshine and precious little else. But I also know this isn’t going to happen – not, at any rate, until the condition quaintly known as AD (suggestive of an immensely long time-span of memory) sets in, when the pencil case and the wooden universal joint will come into their own, since it won’t matter anymore whether they signify anything or nothing. For now, I furtively look for a place where they can stow away.

I get up early hoping
I’ll encounter the line drawn
under night time, the red streak
that bisects the shadow of
dawn standing up, horizon
of dark buildings in the east
whose windows begin to flash,
the gassy aquamarine
sky pouring itself into
the gaps between high-rise glass,
laser-streaks of gulls lit by
the afterburn of early
sunrise over there where hope
appears inevitable
and unwise, but worth getting
up early enough for, to
remember why you do this.

Shadow stands up #5

2011-11-02T12:39:00.002+13:00

Last week we sold our big old house in Wellington. Everything in it will be moved out by the end of the year. We’d lived there for some twenty years by the time we left, and some of our kids as well as a grand-daughter went on living there when we came up to Auckland at the beginning of this year.

We kept a room in the house, and came and went most months. The first time I went back I realised it wasn’t my place any more, it was Mischa, Laura, and Bella’s; it was Penn’s, and Conrad’s. It was also in a way the place of people I didn’t know – they were there having dinner and greeted me politely, as if I was an unexpected guest; which I was. This was okay: the old place was doing a good job and had adapted to it quickly.

What was stranger was that the kids had installed a number of household rituals which I recognised as tribal, and which in the past they’d sometimes accepted with a certain amount of resignation. The big meal around the table that Carlos and I had made, for example, the extended family plus hangers-on. Now, they were dismayed and even culturally offended when I sometimes preferred to slip out and sit alone in a corner at Kazu, like an exhausted ethnologist needing a break from field-work.

In the house, I noticed those standard signs of family memory, such as the pencil marks on the door-frame marking off the startling growth of boys. The French doors at the back had been gnashed into strange contours by Vinnie, our Rhodesian ridgeback, when he was a lonely, locked-out pup. His bones are in the garden, along with those of several eccentric cats. I recognise some scrape marks on the floor, about which the less said the better; some scorch marks on the deck marking a crisis of oblivious hospitality; an olive tree gifted by our friend Abe when we first moved in against his advice (the place was a wreck); and the huge, ancient, sprawling taupata that has fed a million birds but which one neighbour wanted to fell.

There’s the window I used to look out of when I was working in my room upstairs; another neighbour used to see me staring out of it, and would sometimes swish the drape across their kitchen window. But I wouldn’t even have seen them or their kids mucking about – I‘d have been looking at something else, something inside my head not inside their kitchen.

The old house is literally an archive – there are lines of boxes in the attic, along with kids’ stuff that will have to move on somewhere else. But now the house is beginning to resemble the place in my head, the one my former neighbours didn’t know about, a place I’ll be looking into with that not-here expression of someone moving memories into a kind of defile, at the end of which they will fall into patterns they may never have had when they were events that were taking place in the house, when we still lived there.

I imagine myself pulling down the blinds of the house we live in now, because that weird bugger over there is staring at me – who does he think he is?

A green Link bus goes past with
Sorry in lights on its fore-
head, windscreen-wipers dashing
tears from its face, the shadows
of empty seats on fogged-up
glass, and I am, too – sorry –
I’m sorry that life’s too short
and the memory of it
much shorter. Magnificent
obsession sale now on reads
the shop-front signage the next
unapologetic bus
passes not long afterwards
with my confused face looking
out through the wet, blurry glass,
messed up somehow, unable
to settle for sorrow or
jubilation – but then it’s
over, it’s gone, that moment
when I thought I’d remembered
something that reminded me
you just can’t hope to do that –
remember, I mean, too late,
when it’s too late to do that.

Shadow stands up #4

2011-10-10T10:22:00.004+13:00

It was great to see some of the Mix and Mash entries, not just because some small shadows of my ‘Shadow Stands Up’ poem appeared there (though that was certainly interesting), but because they demonstrated what can happen now when the ancient practice of echoing or reworking existing texts (when did the ‘Homeric Hymns’ settle into the written form we know? When did the Mahabharata coalesce?) meets a contemporary practice of assemblage and collage in writing and art, and does so in an on-line environment. The John Ashbery metaphor of the poet riding a bike down a hill, unsure whether he or the bike is doing the propulsion, works here too – but without the material drag of the poem as mass, as pages in a book, somehow bearing all that effort of production beyond the poem itself. In an on-line environment, these cut-ups and re-assembles have a new kind of lightness that’s probably deceptive, though. I was very struck both by the deftness and lightness of Kate Waterhouse’s poem ‘Domus – home, dwelling’, and by the dense evidence of thought and work in it, and by its seriousness.

My first home, which I shared with
my twin brother David, was
our mother’s womb. This is the
first sentence of the book that’s
got me thinking about what
exactly memory does
and what time it does that in,
for example, when was I
‘I’ when I wrote that sentence,
was I in the time of the
tardy twin hanging back in
the warm, shady womb, or was
I out here in the cold light
of day, too late now to say
wait as Dave’s shadow stands up
and moves into the neither
here nor there we live in while
everything remarkable
in the world packs the foreground’s
augmented reality
that never lasts long enough.

Shadow stands up #3

2011-09-17T14:50:00.006+12:00

Augmented reality
was what Donna talked about
on the way to lunch in the
food-court on Ponsonby Road
but I forgot all about
it when she next told me that
the mummified body of
an Egyptian princess had
been diagnosed with a heart
condition at forty years
of age despite a presumed
diet of vegetables,
fruit, and fish, pretty much what
we eat most of the time and
believe we're doing enough
thereby to earn a decent
stretch. Memory, though, what a
shadowy mystery that
is, how it mars the surface
of the present it then stands
up in, augmented, a dead
presence that should have lasted.

At the Albany campus of Massey University last Thursday I gave a talk about the differences - for me, writing them - between essays, fiction, and poetry. Of course they cross over each other all the time, but my basic distinction is that essays begin with a thesis and you think with it or against it, fiction begins with an imaginative situation and uses story-telling of one kind or another to see where that might go, whereas writing poetry is a bit like riding a bike down hill, there comes a point when you can't be sure if you're turning the pedals or if they're making your legs go round. (This is John Ashbery's idea - incidentally a favourite of Bill Manhire's as well, we talked about while we were snowed in at Dunedin a few weeks back.) It's at the point where you're not sure who's driving the thing that the excursion gets seriously interesting and enjoyable, and is probably going ok, though where exactly may not be obvious.

So far so good.

Shadow stands up #2

2011-08-30T19:56:00.007+12:00

On August 4th I was handed the New Zealand Poet Laureate tokotoko in the company of my old friend Cilla McQueen and a gathering of friends, family, and the terrific people from the National Library. Then a crowd of us went and had a long, celebratory lunch. On Friday 12th I went to Dunedin for Ralph Hotere's 80th birthday celebrations and on Sunday joined Bill Manhire and David Eggleton for a poetry reading in Ralph's honour. A good time was had by all. On Friday 19th I went to Wellington for the launch of Peter Black's extraordinary book of photographs, I loved you the moment I saw you. More good times.

The following Friday it was back to Wellington for the launch of my novel The Catastrophe at Meow, followed by gigs from poet John Newton's band The Tenderizers and Damien Wilkins's The Close Readers. The good times were still very good but getting tiring. This Friday in Auckland is the launch of Haka at the Auckland Centre of the National Library of New Zealand, then up to Whangarei with Donna for the Northland Spring Book Fair on Saturday, she to talk and sign copies of her novel Surrender, me to give a poetry reading. I'm sure we'll have a good time. There's more to come - Going West Books and Writers Festival at Titirangi the following weekend, always an enjoyable event.

What I'm noticing is what began on August 4th. I'd have been at all the events this month, and would no doubt have enjoyed them just the same, and felt just as agreeably clobbered, but I've begun to be gently nudged into public view as a poet, and this will take a bit of getting used to. But in the spirit of good will I've encountered this month, taking my cue from the encouragement I've had, I'm posting another section of 'Shadow Stands Up', the sequence of poems I'd just begun to write when I heard about the Laureate award. Nudging it out into view.

Please don't squeeze me until I'm
yours reads the greengrocer's sign
on his ripe avocados
whose enticing location
in a tilted tray on the
footpath outside his shop says,
we live in a country of
ripe words, which is why the im-
print of memory may be
all that mars the surfaces
where the outlines of trees can
seem to rise up at any
time and become the shadows
of runners circling the park
a green Link bus goes past with
me in it, thinking, 'How can
I know what memory is
going to offer me unless
I can feel it's ready to?'

Shadow Stands Up

2011-08-04T11:55:00.005+12:00

(The National Library warmly welcomes Ian Wedde to the position of New Zealand Poet Laureate. We think he’s going to do rather well.)

Mix and Mash has returned for its second year, offering big prizes and instant fame for the best remixes and mashups made with New Zealand content. Ian has kindly made his poem below, “Shadow Stands Up”, available for use in (or out of) the competition.

Shadow Stands Up

Shadow stands up under the
trees in Victoria Park
whose own filigree shadows lie
across matted russet leaves
on the sodden green turf that
the morning’s tai chi moves
barely mar – I see this from
the Link bus window as we
cross the intersection at
the bottom of the hill where
Kathmandu’s winter sale fails
to persuade me there’s much to
gain from any promise of
warmth other than what I get
when, while rain rattles against
the bedroom window at dawn,
I press my ear to the smooth
skin between Donna’s shoulder-
blades and hear, in the hollow
chamber where she’s making dream
words, a voice that’s not the
same as hers say eerily,
‘Shadow stands up.’ It’s morning.

“Shadow Stands Up” is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 New Zealand (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).

This is a first hesitant draft of what may be the first poem in a sequence of poems I now plan to be writing over the Laureate term. For me it’s been a great coincidence, to get the news about the Laureateship at pretty much the same time I’d begun to think about this sequence, which at this early stage is called "Shadow Stands Up" – which could easily change.

At the moment I think its themes are to do with memory, first of all – how memory stitches time into patterns and narratives that can’t exist in rational ways – and also to do with ghosts. Enough said. I am breaking one of my own rules here, by showing a version of something I’ve only just begun to write. With luck and some persistence, what seems to be getting under way here will grow and change into something else that I can’t anticipate at this early stage.

- Ian

The search is on

2011-05-16T14:23:00.004+12:00

He slipped the potato off.

Strangely shaped potato
Reference number: 114/266/04-G

Thank you everyone who made a submission. Nominations for 2011-2013 are now closed.

Who should join the ranks of Cilla, Michele, and the other amazing New Zealand Poets Laureate? The National Library is inviting nominations as we start the appointment process. The next Laurate will hold the position from July 2011 to June 2013, as a representative of and advocate for poetry. Nominees will have made an outstanding contribution to New Zealand poetry and be an accomplished and highly regarded poet. They must also live in New Zealand.

Lovely Gloves

2011-03-21T09:00:00.004+13:00

This, my last post, responds to a two-part visual essay by Peter Ireland, comprising images from the National Library's collection.

I am grateful to the National Library for their kind support and advice during my enjoyable and productive time as New Zealand Poet Laureate 2009-2011.

Cilla McQueen

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Lovely Gloves

Reverse glove ripple over reflection geometries stretch turn signs,
heart image histories this day's wattle and daub, schist, seaward heading hero dazzle in shelter handmade translucent shadow long-leaved cygnet pendant,

Chrysalis carefully unmove woman brush-tip in winter mist and shady earth floor
roof door the walker boots. Be in house and a rushing dog eye soldier bush illegible ladder to and fro, rare grace parts quiet child knee rock in language time.

Rest easy silence - all silent foot of sea-creature spring shy, clean tree, whale, blue illuminated vellum. Rearranging space fluent or beginning inside noble tussock listening to larks, this calm.

Calm cannon's here war distance singular between a coast a journey a quiet tarn touch, untouch a hoof to water as window lilts a lady and her dog
Slide asterisk wind dunes sign hat
And return celestial glow warps love in it once more white taffeta wings.

Sea-creature foot water, cairn and hillside turning bent thin trunk to
prayer language dawn a graceful woman. Mountain crumble coal-fired
steam-powered rock crusher noise rhythmic slow exposures, flash flood -

So in paint language book on knee speak akin to balancing dancer speed
a picnic in spacetime - shifting travel above ice obelisk say and meaning all together struggles wind-blasted,

Views with reserve stained glass flowering light through.

Touch, untouch, a hoof to water tranquil tarn in caterpillar ripples leaving all brave lilts a lady in space between reflection store under listen talk arrows this way and that fleet tracking dog,

Thinks poised one bud opening precious qualities mirror wind gesture, peer down mantis pictogram at happy hour to view the ice dancer one open

Starry mist message slice on a gauze rubble-wreaker iron business -
might instead strange poetry -
caught in a word game, skin to hand signature.

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Envoi

Day's narratives strung
on thought-lines

Supermarket to happy hour,
chrysalis to vista,

Each a step on a way
and a world of its own

Before and after
time stilled at shutter-fall.

References

1 Photographer: William Price
Premises of Green and Colebrook, Huntly, circa 1910
Ref: 1/2-001760-G

2 Photographer: Tesla Studios
Unidentified employee of (Wanganui Sign Company?) creating advertisement for ‘Wear Right’ gloves
Ref: 1/1-022322-F

3 Photographer; Samuel Heath Head
The French Mission visiting the Sign of the Kiwi, Christchurch, January 1919
Ref: 1/1-007521-G

4 Photographer unknown
Chinese miners with the Rev. Alexander Don, Tuapeka, circa 1900
McNeur Collection, Ref: 1/2-019148-F

5 Photographer: Gordon Burt
Bond Street, Wellington, 1956-1961
Ref: 1/2-037223-F

6 Photographer unknown
Interior of ‘The Talkeries’, business of Thomas Dwyer, Masterton, circa 1909
Ref: 1/2-043062-F

7 Photographer unknown
Display window of DIC, Wellington, 1944
Ref: 1/4-015034-F

8 Photographer unknown
Premises of J. Goodwin, Plumber (Upper Hutt?) circa 1912
Ref: 1/2-107542-F

9 Photographer unknown
Maori Battalion’s mobile canteen, WWII
Ref: 1/4-028490-F

10 Photographer unknown
Man painting a sign at entrance to Kilbirnie Stadium, Wellington, 1929
Ref: 1/4-032457

11 Photographer: Albert Percy Godber
Opening of the new Silverstream Fire Station, 1938
Ref: 1/4-038919-G

12 Photographer: Evening Post
Sign asking for ‘Silence’, Brass Band competition, Wellington Town Hall, 23 April 1951
Ref: 114/283/04-G

13 Photographer: George Kaye
Street sign in Taranto,Italy, November 1943
Ref: DA-04493-F

14 Photographer: George Kaye
Signs, including the diamond sign of the New Zealand Division, near Rimini, Italy, 16 September 1944
Ref: DA-06654

15 David at Prayer
Leaf from 15th century Book of Hours, Eastern France, circa 1460
Ref: MSR-02-F108R

16 Photographer: Max Oettli
From series of photographs of Dunedin, Wellington, and Auckland, 1967-1971
Ref: PADL-000145

17 Photographer unknown
View of Pahiatua, showing the ‘Club hotel’, circa 1910
Ref: PAColl-5671-24

18 Photographer unknown
Premises of RH Wyche, Shoemaker, Wellington, Date unknown
Ref: PAColl-6001-51

19 Photographer: Steffano Webb
Public telephone box, Christchurch, with Cathedral in background, August 1912
Ref: 1/1-004088

20 Photographer: Steffano Webb
Mansfield’s monumental mason’s yard, Christchurch, circa 1910
Ref: 1/1-004356-G

21 Photographer: William Archer Price
A stall at trade fair (Auckland?) with promotional stand for ‘Neopost’, 1930
Ref: 1/2-000266-G

22 Photographer: Evening Post
Two butchers outside Roseveare & Son, Wellington, 8 March 1951
Ref: 114/266/09-G

23 Photographer: Free Lance (magazine)
Manawatu Automobile Association road sign, 1955
Ref: PAColl-7171-35

24 Photographer unknown
Levin Rally Hall, date unknown
Ref: PAColl-6388-02

25 Photographer: Thelma Kent
Monarch butterfly chrysalis on a swan plant, circa 1930
Ref: 1/4-003592-G

26 Photographer: Thelma Kent
Flowering cactus, circa 1920
Ref: 1/4-003659-G

27 Photographer: Thelma Kent
Ice skater, Lake Tekapo, 1938
Ref: 1/2-009527-F

28 Photographer: Thelma Kent
Rees Valley, Otago, circa 1939
Ref: 1/2-009689-F

29 Photographer: Thelma Kent
Steam shovel excavating a cliff face, location unknown, circa 1939
Ref: 1/2-010277-F

30 Photographer: William Williams
Lydia Williams in doorway of house, Carlyle Street, Napier, circa 1880
Ref: 1/1-025645-G

31 Photographer: William Williams
Figurehead of the ship ‘Northumberland’, location unknown, circa 1880
Ref: 1/1-025693-G

32 Photographer: William Williams
Dunedin Telegraph Office, 1893
Ref: 1/1-025835-G

33 Photographer: William Williams
Taieri River, Otago, circa 1890
Ref: 1/1-025866-G

34 Photographer: William Williams
Man making walking sticks, Leith Valley, Dunedin, circa 1899
Ref: 1/2-140223-G

35 Photographer: William Williams
Gun emplacement, Fort Balance, Wellington, circa 1884
Ref: 1/2-140344-G

36 Photographer: William Williams
Shotover River, Otago, 1890
Ref: 1/2-140459

37 Photographer: William Williams
Obelisk and group at Green’s Point, Akaroa, circa 1910
Ref: 1/2-140545-G

38 Photographer: William Williams
Near Highcliff, Otago Peninsula, Dunedin, 23 September, 1894
Ref: 1/2-140629-G

39 Photographer: William Williams
Lydia Williams with stereoscope and cards
Ref: 1/2-141215-G

40 Photographer: William Williams
Cabbage tree in fog, Port Hills, Canterbury, 1938
Ref: PA11-147-003

41 Photographer: William Williams
Picnic, Leith stream, Dunedin, circa 1893
Ref: PA11-160-01

42 Photographer: Thelma Kent
Photomicrograph of a section through a Virginia creeper, circa 1930
Ref: PAColl-3052-21-01

43 Photographer: Thelma Kent
Dead tree, circa 1930
Ref: PAColl-3052-02-04

44 Photographer: Thelma Kent
Log attached to cable, Aorere River, circa 1930
Ref: PAColl-3052-01-07

45 Photographer: William Williams
Couple looking down on Lake Wakatipu from summit of Mount Alfred, December 1893
Ref: PA11-159-02

Words at the edge of the mirror

2011-03-14T09:00:00.008+13:00

Words at the edge of the mirror 12

2011-03-11T09:00:00.000+13:00

Words at the edge of the mirror 11

2011-03-09T09:00:00.000+13:00

Words at the edge of the mirror 10

2011-03-07T09:00:00.000+13:00

Words at the edge of the mirror 9

2011-03-04T09:00:00.000+13:00

Words at the edge of the mirror 8

2011-03-02T09:00:00.000+13:00

Words at the edge of the mirror 7

2011-02-28T09:00:00.000+13:00

Words at the edge of the mirror 6

2011-02-25T09:00:00.000+13:00

Words at the edge of the mirror 5

2011-02-23T09:00:00.000+13:00

Words at the edge of the mirror 4

2011-02-21T09:00:00.000+13:00