NZ Poet Laureate

travelling tapa

2008-10-07T10:35:00.004+13:00

Here’s Rachel Blau DuPlessis settling in at Durham, North Carolina, where she and partner Bob DuPlessis are visiting fellows for the North American academic year at the National Humanities Centre. Rachel is flagging the recent publication of Ron Silliman’s monumental work The Alphabet (U of Alabama P, September 2008), a long poem published serially over 30 years and appearing now in its full 26 parts. She’s also sitting under a beautiful piece of Tongan tapa that travelled from Auckland to Umbria in June when we went to stay for a few days with Rachel and Bob at their summer place in Italy. There it is (below) unrolled in full on the terrace.

It was at this point we learned that Bob is an authority on, among other things, the history of textile production in central Italy (what he doesn’t know about wool, linen and the farming of silkworms isn’t worth knowing). But the bark cloth from the Pacific, involving a different kind of mulberry tree, was new to him and to Rachel. We’re glad to see the tapa is still travelling and look forward to having the roving Americans in our part of the world. They’ve been to Australia twice and they’re keen to come here. Text and textiles could be the drawcard.

Images from top:

Rachel Blau DuPlessis with The Alphabet.
Photo credit: Bob DuPlessis

Rachel and Michele with tapa.
Photo credit: Mark Fryer

for the record

2008-10-01T10:51:00.004+13:00

A catch-up on events and activities winter through spring:

5-7 July NZSA/CNZS conference in Florence, Italy, keynote presentation ‘Talking to the Future in the Mountains of the Star’ and presentation with Brian Flaherty of nzepc’s LOVE, WAR AND LAST THINGS: A Digital Bridge for Florence.

18 July Poetry Central at Auckland City Library, launching New NZ Poets in Performance and Bob Orr’s Calypso on Montana Poetry Day.

4 August Hand to Hand: Five Laureates at Writers on Mondays, reading with Jenny Bornholdt, Bill Manhire, Elizabeth Smither and Brian Turner at the National Library, Wellington.

13 August Chancellor’s Lecture ‘Resuming folding life’ at Massey University, Albany campus.

28 August Mollie: On the Track of the Ohakune Elephant 1957-2008, University of Auckland.

5-7 September The Press Christchurch Writers Festival, panel discussion with Bill Manhire, Bernadette Hall and Brian Turner.

20 September Poetry off the Page, presentation with Helen Sword at Going West literary festival in Titirangi.

Images:
Top: With Penny ('Crone Queen') Somervaille.
Bottom: Penny chalking
Photographs by Renee Liang.

the ohakune elephant

2008-09-29T16:31:00.002+13:00

There’s an elephant buried in Ohakune. The locals know about it, and some of them were there in 1957 when Mollie, one of nine elephants touring with Bullen’s Circus, ate poisonous tutu and died. An account of her death appeared in the NZ Herald 18 December 1957 where Derek Challis, then a technician with the zoology department at the University of Auckland, read it and requested permission from the circus owner and government officials to remove the elephant’s skull for the university’s biology museum. Permission was given and Derek caught the train to Ohakune a couple of days later. With the help of locals Eric Fetzer and Peter Jenkins, the elephant was exhumed, the head cut off and cleaned then railed to Auckland where it was prepared for display as part of a teaching exhibit about elephant dentition. When the biology museum was disestablished in the mid 1990s, the dentition display disappeared.

Martin Edmond was a five year old living with his family in Ohakune at the time of the elephant’s death. Over the years he told the story to many people, without knowing exact details or that the head had been removed. When he started to research Bullem’s Circus last year, Australasian circus historians told him there was no record of an elephant death at Ohakune. But teacher and historian Merilyn George interviewed half a dozen residents who took her to the gravesite and were in no doubt about the circumstances of the poisoning.

It seemed time to tap institutional memory. I said I would ask after the skull and went over to the School of Biological Sciences earlier this year with photographer Tim Page. Fortunately, the biologists were able to locate the dentition display, locked away in a dark cupboard. But they knew nothing about the provenance of the two skulls it contained. We took a lot of photos and I sent two off to Martin in Sydney captioned: ‘Maybe this is Mollie?’

It was. She was upside down and minus her display stand, but she was there. The biologists contacted their retired colleague Joan Robb to get a positive identification. Joan described the bleached colour of the skull and a knife cut in the bone (Mollie was 13 when she died and her bones were relatively soft). Plans were put in place to bring Mollie out of the cupboard in time to coincide with Martin’s visit to Ohakune and Auckland at the end of August.

The upshot was Mollie and Friends: On the Track of the Ohakune Elephant, an afternoon of talks and readings in the Old Biology Building at the University of Auckland, 28 August 2008. It was an extraordinary event. Joan Robb spoke eloquently about the founding of the museum by Professor WF McGregor. Mandy Harper and Mary Sewell showed archival images of the Lippincott-designed building and its displays. Derek Challis and Peter Jenkins reconstructed the exhumation and decapitation with gripping detail. Martin and his sister Frances Edmond spoke about the circus tour and the impact of Mollie’s death on Ohakune. Some of our poetry students read the archived news reports. Tim and I retraced the trail that led to the discovery in the cupboard. Everyone trooped along the hallway to see Mollie now restored to daylight, and then Martin’s new book of poems, The Big O Revisited (Soapbox Press, 2008) was launched in the SBS foyer.

What next? Mollie’s skull is back on display in the Old Biology Building. Her unmarked grave in Ohakune is the subject of conversations about how to commemorate what happened and to connect up the parts of a story that begins in northern Thailand in 1947 with the sale to Stafford Bullen of not one but five baby elephants for shipping to Perth.

Photographer: Tim Page

historic!

2008-08-11T14:22:00.001+12:00

It hasn’t happened before but it should happen again: the gathering of laureates in Wellington last week for Writers on Mondays was a landmark occasion. The National Library put out 270 seats and there were people standing shoulder to shoulder at the back as Chris Szekely and Kate Camp got the evening underway.

John Buck detailed the 2008 Te Mata wines we’d been putting away in the foyer beforehand (poetry for the palate). He then launched the two CDs (Bornholdt and Manhire) that inaugurate a series of spoken word recordings from Braeburn Studio/Jayrem Records. Jacob Scott brought the National Library’s tokotoko onstage and explained its design before handing it around for everyone to see and hold. He also introduced Hone Tuwhare’s tokotoko, the famous dipstick made from a piece of an old Te Mata wine press and now in the permanent collection of the Southland Museum in Gore.

Then the laureates were called one by one to give an account of their personal tokotoko before reading. My transformed pool cue (Te Kikorangi) was followed by Brian Turner’s hockey stick (yes, says Brian, it’s a functional walking stick that got him around after a hamstring injury). Jenny Bornholdt’s tokotoko features female symbols of nurture and growth that did not deter her children from using its carved grip as a makeshift gun (these sticks live in the world and take their chances). Elizabeth Smither’s elegant cane, surmounted by part of a Holden gearshift and a carved whale tooth, was next. The poet admitted she liked driving fast but left us to work out the tooth for ourselves. Finally Bill Manhire spoke about the gravitas of the sticks and their function of focusing concentration and eloquence. His tokotoko, the first of the Te Mata sticks, was made from a piece of that same wine press to commemorate Te Mata’s centenary and the inauguration of the laureateship in 1996. There’s a sizeable stone from the Tukituki river on top of it and Bill has become expert at wrangling the stick through airport security post 2001.

The poetry? A great pleasure to hear everyone read, and an audience to die for. Some of the poems that were read appear below, courtesy of the poets and their publishers.

Pictured from left: Brian Turner, Jenny Bornholdt, Bill Manhire, Michele Leggott, Elizabeth Smither. Photographer: Caroline Garratt. National Library of New Zealand

2008-08-11T14:20:00.000+12:00

Life

This new
quiet life.

At the end of the day -

three lines
a cake
Peggy's son's
peas, Jane's damson
jam.

Jenny Bornholdt
From Mrs Winter’s Jump (Random/Godwit, 2007).

2008-08-11T14:19:00.000+12:00

Visiting Europe

We rush around and look at famous stuff.
Once in the Louvre, late afternoon with my six-year-old son,
— he has truly had enough — we meet the Mona Lisa.
It’s 1981. I lift him above the world’s admiring heads.
That lady, I say — we don’t know why she’s smiling.
What do you think she’s thinking about?
Money, he says. Money.

Bill Manhire
First published in The Times Literary Supplement.

2008-08-11T14:18:00.005+12:00

The Way Is Is

That you love nature is easy to say
until you learn that unless you act accordingly
it will call you to account in the end.
That’s why
we’re required to make the connection
between the sound the wind makes
when it starts the leaves quivering
and the way the white canes of sunlight
line the spaces between the trees
on a summer’s morning.
It’s a case
of working out what’s here
for the long haul
and if we want to be part of it.
It’s marvellous, abominable, confusing,
exultant: the way things are,
the way is is.

Brian Turner
From Footfall (Random/Godwit, 2005)

2008-08-11T14:15:00.002+12:00

Cole dresses his mother

Like Elizabeth I in the film with Helen Mirren
undergoing a gynaecological examination. The

sleeve of her dress comes off, a petticoat is yanked up
a bodice divided. So does dresser Cole, aged

two, assemble and bring to his mother who
has dressed him for 735 days, buttoning

his sleep suits, the necks of his T-shirts
with unknowable slogans, tying the tapes of

his track pants (size 3, leg length 30cms)
her bra, her jersey, her knickers, her jeans

not in the royal order. He hands the jersey
first and indicates she should lower her head

then the knickers, tiny and lace-edged,
the bra, wire-stiffened. He drags

a teddy from a drawer, an angora
bolero, sequin-edged. And she, laughing

like an hysterical queen – she can conceive
the august Elizabethan doctors say

she is found fertile still and can produce an heir –
bra over her shoulder – Cole has brought two –

jeans hastily pulled over knickers, undoing
his precedence – hugs him to her, her delight

who returns delight to her every day
in the reciprocity of mutual dressing.

Elizabeth Smither

2008-08-11T14:09:00.000+12:00

FROM poppies and plane trees

two nights ago we missed
a question about a cricket team
we called them the Immortals
they were the Invincibles    the difference
between undying and unconquerable
mori et vincere    we were close
but we were not perfect    the question
slipped between two possibilities
a good guess and much on our minds
the question of mortality
where we are going when we’re going
to the island between sea and sky
cerulean a word I liked a lot less
when I learned where the emphasis went

now we look ahead
from the deck where the sound of doves
carries through the trees    what
are their names    have they always
made this flight between possibilities
hanging on tight to a perch
that might be a globe or a prow
or the start of a seedhead that falls
whump onto the roof in autumn
we journey we are lost and found
over under behind around
preposition proposition no position
so clear as the conversation
of the department of conversation
on a day-trip forever to come

the soft red wine
with the beautiful name    big funnels
and two notes on a French horn
to clear a way through the sails
of the five o’clock races    a child
waving about in the tree-tops
the dog snoring under my feet
in one head is a winged victory
in one hand a stick that bounces chisels
filled with strangeness
we begin the simultaneous paths
scent of picked basil extending
delicately through a notebook
making for the front gate    heat
under salted water coming
to the boil    and the curious weight
of granite hollowed for a stone pestle
holding on tight to the world

Michele Leggott
Forthcoming in The Centre for NZ Studies Bulletin.

hand to hand: five laureates at the national library

2008-08-01T10:39:00.002+12:00

Poet laureates Jenny Bornholdt, Bill Manhire, Elizabeth Smither, Brian Turner and I are scheduled to gather at the National Library in Wellington on Monday 4 August to read and to honour the seven tokotoko (talking sticks) associated with the laureateship. Jacob Scott, who carved the tokotoko, and John Buck from Te Mata Estate will also speak.

Hone Tuwhare’s stick has been brought to Wellington for the occasion and CDs by Jenny Bornholdt and Bill Manhire will be launched. If the winter storms let up sufficiently to allow more than seagulls into Rongotai on Monday, a great night of poetry and stories about sticks is in store.

Free entry, all welcome.

Reception at 5.30 pm in the Main Foyer of the Library, followed by reading and launches 6 – 7.30 pm in the Ground Floor Reading Room. MC Kate Camp. Hosted by the National Library as part of IIML’s 2008 Writers on Mondays series.

Image:
Matua tokotoko of the New Zealand Poet Laureate Award
Artist: Jacob Manu Scott
Photography: Julia Brooke-White

poetry day and all

2008-07-23T11:30:00.003+12:00

Bob Orr at Poetry Central 08 (photo Renee Liang)

Congratulations to Janet Charman and Cold Snack, winners of the 2008 Montana Poetry Award announced as part of Poetry Day, Friday 18 July. Janet was reading with others at Lopdell House in Titirangi that evening to a packed house. Across town at Poetry Central 08 in the Auckland City Library we were launching Bob Orr’s Calypso and the third of Jack Ross and Jan Kemp’s CD/text anthologies, New NZ Poets in Performance. Great to hear Chris Price, John Pule, Therese Lloyd, Mark Pirie, Anna Jackson and Jack read from their own work and then for someone who wasn’t able to be present (Anne Kennedy, Robert Sullivan, Jenny Bornholdt, John Newton, Greg O’Brien and Olivia Macassey respectively).

Bob’s new book is trenchant and full of delights. Try these (courtesy of Auckland UP):

Purple Octopus

I didn’t sail away because of Helen
she meant nothing to me in particular –
I had always found her vain
self centred and shallow.
Certainly she was beautiful
but no more so than any other Greek celebrity.
No I didn’t sail away because of Helen
as it happened she was just my great escape
away from my wife’s stony silences
from ploughing the poor soil of a rocky island
from mending nets ripped apart by sharks
from the small talk of fishermen
down at my local tavern –
that was the reason I sailed away.
thanks to our Greek drama queen Helen.
When she turned her face toward Troy
her nose like a beautiful rudder
altered the course of my life.
In her eyes there were peasant girls dancing
but when she smiled a viper slithered out of her lips –
to think that she gave birth to my twin epic poems.
I signed on with Odysseus
first as an AB and later on as bosun –
our spars made a forest all the way to the horizon.
As for Troy it was a plain of dust and death
best forgotten –
the retsina was so bad I took to lacing it with opium.
What a joke
we had to build a wooden horse as a weapon of mass destruction.
Drunk in a back street I was rolled for my last euro.
Blinded and left for dead after a battle
a veteran of that mad mid east adventure
in the guise of an old hag
I begged the long and lonely road home overland.
Sometimes in a village I would recite a poem for a salt sardine
and always in the back of my mind this crazy story getting bigger
like a purple octopus when it floats up to the surface.
This sharp beaked fair timbered well caulked deep sea epic.
I now sit bent in a dark question
by the salt violet Aegean.
A very old part of me sleeps beneath this pine.
A sadder and a wiser man
in the loom of these waves
I hear the living and the dead both speaking out of time.
Listen while I spin
this yarn
thalassa.

An Orange Tree in Lebanon

I was not the burning girl in Vietnam
the ghostly child of starvation in Africa
neither was I the freedom fighter rotting in a field of sugar cane
in Nicaragua.
I was not buried in a mass grave in Bosnia
tortured in a stadium in Chile
neither was I impounded in a dog kennel in Cuba.
I was not beaten to death in a police cell in Soweto
and I was never shot beneath the innocence of an orange tree
in Lebanon.
Yet all these disappearances have happened in my time.
In the back streets of my soul
which is a country with no name
poppies always bloom beneath the wall of midnight.
Therefore I must call the girl in Vietnam my daughter
the child in Africa my son
the freedom fighter in Nicaragua I could have known as a brother.
In a mass grave in Bosnia I saw the face of my best friend
the woman tortured in a stadium in Chile could once have been my lover
the forgotten man held in a cage in Cuba my neighbour.
In Soweto the blood on a police cell wall
was the last painting of my sister.
In Lebanon the orange tree was the tree of my own garden.

love, war and last things

2008-06-16T08:10:00.003+12:00

       Now let’s talk.
       What city would you finally say we are?
       (Rachel Blau DuPlessis)

Where do we go when we enter a poem? what kind of space is poetic space, and who is there with us as we journey through it? These are some of the questions which prompted Brian Flaherty and I to assemble an array of poems and prose and make a digital bridge between here (Auckland, New Zealand) and there (Florence, Italy) for presentation at the 15th annual conference of the New Zealand Studies Association in Florence, 2-4 July 2008.

When we launch the site in Florence, a few hundred metres from the Ponte Vecchio, a roomful of people at the conference will become the first travellers on our bridge. They will choose which city (Auckland or Florence) to depart from, step into its digital grid and select a poet and a poem to travel with. The trip may include audio, text and/or visuals. The poet may be contemporary or historical, and the material relevant in a variety of ways to New Zealand connections with Italy. Our objective in Florence is to find out what happens as breathing travellers engage with digital presence. We called the project ‘Love, War and Last Things’ to accommodate the multiple foldings of time and space that might ensue.

When our first travellers reach the end of their trip, they will find themselves in the other city (Florence or Auckland) surrounded by more poets and poems for travelling back over the bridge. They (and those who come after them, logging into the site anywhere in the world) may continue crossing and recrossing digital space for as long as they wish. When travelling ceases and reading begins, there is a list of authors, titles and full texts to consult.

Who is on the bridge? We began by asking four poets with an established digital footprint and New Zealand or Italian connections for work that we might transform for presentation on the web. New Zealanders Paula Green and Jack Ross, who read and speak Italian, contributed recent texts and worked with us on their digital transformations. American Rachel Blau DuPlessis, who spends part of each year in Umbria, wrote a text in anticipation of her return visit to Australia for a poetry conference at almost the same time as ours. Nga Puhi writer Robert Sullivan who supervised the University of Hawai’i’s 2007 summer study programme in Florence contributed work from a sequence drafted there in his Tapa Notebook. That notebook joins the collection at the University of Auckland as another one goes to Rachel Blau DuPlessis ahead of her departure for Melbourne. Perhaps the crossing and recrossing of poetic trajectories will continue for a while yet.

’Love, War and Last Things’ is an nzepc feature and will go live 4 July 2008.

every bravery coming

2008-05-23T16:21:00.004+12:00

Photo Credit: Tim Page

At the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival last weekend Chris Price and I spent an hour hauling up material words from my writing and trying to see where the visualist left off and the poet began. We had all kinds of litter onstage: stencil-stamp valentines, a heart box, a ribbon text, old school lettering exercises. Then there were the beautiful objects: Tara McLeod’s poster size printing of ‘thé dansant,’ Bronwyn Lloyd’s prototype pop-up for ‘hello & goodbye,’ the Holloway Press edition of Journey to Portugal (Tara Mcleod again, with Gretchen Albrecht’s collages). It was a lot of fun and I am grateful to Chris for sending me back into old folders and dusty boxes to find things. We did make the leap to digital space but it’s the ballast of those big letters and shaped poems that seems most interesting now.

Journey to Portugal (text) (Holloway Press)
oes & spangs (Andrew Forsberg)
An Hour with Michele Leggott

may day is lei day

2008-05-05T09:40:00.022+12:00

photo credit: Godfrey Boehnke, University of Auckland photographer

There were Morris dancers in Queen Elizabeth Square Thursday morning, waving white hankies and jingling at the knees. People taking cover from the wild weather gathered around the circle of dancers. May Day celebrations are alive and well in the city. At the other end of Queen St, university graduation was getting under way. Tim Page and I packed ourselves into a taxi with a guitar, regalia, the matua tokotoko and my blue stick, and headed for the Town Hall. It was the matua’s first outing in Auckland: an appointment with 2000-odd people under cameras and lights.

Onstage I explained the tangible connection of the matua with Hone Tuwhare and how that connection has rubbed off on Te Kikorangi, the blue stick. We passed both sticks to kuia Merimeri Penfold to look after and then launched into ‘taking it seriously,’ a fairly unserious poem for the arts graduates of Te Whare Wananga o Tamaki Makaurau They seemed to like it, especially when Tim did his bluesy riff for the feast at the end. The biggest thrill was getting half a dozen lei from graduates afterwards. Thanks all!

University of Auckland News (23 May 2008) 'Poet subverts traditional graduation speech' (PDF, 1.59 MB) (Word version)

taking it seriously

what shall I do I asked that stick
Te Kikorangi      write them a poem what else
said the stick and went back to cooking up
a feed of mussels from Kawhia      national treasures
can do that      take a weekday trip
down the coast and go fishing
while the rest of us work for the man
oh and make it funny said the stick
you don’t want them dozing off      and winked
too true Blue I said      the mussels went down
and the feet went up      the giver of advice
and good counsel settled in for a well-earned
nap      why keep a poet and bark yourself?

so I invite myself      into your had-it-up-to-here
lives      it’s rent day I’m working till midnight
three thousand words forty percent out of coffee
out of smokes out of time the computer ate it
and that one doesn’t give extensions
even for dead grandmothers      my tenth
this semester      heartless just heartless
how will my grandmothers cope
with the news of my expiry from Intellectual
Over-Utilisation Syndrome      IOUs
and youse and youse      I am the future
sitting here in academic drag      flat broke
about to get an arts degree
how do you come back from that?

all this fuss has disturbed the stick
who opens one eye and says      build a bridge
and get over it      easy enough for TK
reviewing the back of those famous eyelids
half the afternoon      thinking about
a cup of tea and maybe some of last night’s
whitebait fritters before a walk
to the beach where someone has written
the only land I own is that between
my toes too right says Kikorangi
adding a flourish in blue      hooray
it’s worth a fortune and the ragged artist
struggling to repay student debts
auctions the scrawl on Trade Me
and walks free upon the earth again
in the company of ten grandmothers

you think it can’t happen?
poets to come      orators singers musicians
to come      the stick is really getting going now
thinkers teachers philosophers      and you
the quiet ones who reach for the moon and stars
not today is to justify me and answer
what I am for      but you a new brood      digital
Pacific voyagers understanding more
than any before you about the blue planet
and her breathing multitudes      come forward
for you must justify me      one who saunters
turns a casual look upon you and steps
into the shadows      leaving it to you
to constellate and configure      expecting
the main things from you

Kikorangi I said      you’d better stop
channelling Walt Whitman or Turnitin
will get you      uh huh comes the reply
why don’t you help me get this hapuka
into the smoker      and tell Walt to bring
his grandma as well as a good red
and whatever poems he’s written lately
we’ll have a session      there’s always room
in the world for poems grandmothers
and arts degrees looking for a good time
la dolce vita      la vie en rose      fia ola
May Day is Lei Day in Tamaki Makaurau
don’t you see
the stick is looking for extra glasses
and fairy lights to string along the path
and as smoke curls between the banana palms
new potatoes dance with garden mint
and it’s clear the whole graduating class
has been invited over      here they are now
knocking with their elbows      because
their arms are full of bags bowls and bottles
crates of champagne      dolmadas drums
and diplomas      figs fire and frangipani
ginger garlic grapes and guitars
harps and honeydew      eel and icecream
lamb lutes lemons and limes      melons mangos
mandolins maraccas      okra olives
onions oysters      pork parsley passionfruit
persimmons pineapples pomegranates prawns
roast corn red peppers rhubarb rosemary and rice
scallops and sangria      snapper and squid
taro truffles tabouleh tortillas
venison vineleaves yoghurt zucchini
and crayfish in coconut cream
food of heaven says Te Kikorangi
bring on your poems dance with your grannies
we feast with the gods tonight!

photo credit: Godfrey Boehnke, University of Auckland photographer

laureate at work

2008-04-08T07:57:00.004+12:00

It’s term-time and Poetry off the Page is in full swing at the University of Auckland. Colleague Helen Sword and I co-convene the course, now in its fourth year and with a committed and enthusiastic 2008 enrolment. We started off in the rain, chalking poems on pavements around the university and documenting responses from passers-by. Then LOUNGE #1 debuted this year’s reading series at Old Government House with an enlivening mix of student readers and local poets. Also part of the line-up was Chris Price, the inaugural Michael King Centre/University of Auckland Literary Fellow.

Now the students are wrangling their webpage assignments and making digital transformations of a print poem of their choice. After the mid-semester break, we go into the University Library’s Special Collections to look at how poems move from manuscript to multimedia environments. The students will then assemble selections of archival material for presentation on the course website.

So we’ll be busy for a while yet. Here’s a webpage Helen and I made recently as the class was asked to consider ways of presenting digitally the famous variant lines in a poem by 19th century American Emily Dickinson. We started by getting the different versions down in chalk (sunny weather this time) before going on to talk about how they might appear in virtual space.

Photo credits: Tim Page

photos from matahiwi and hastings

2008-03-12T15:40:00.005+13:00

Te Matau a Maui (The Hook of Maui), the wharenui at Matahiwi Marae with carved representations of Maui’s family on the paepae (forecourt)

Maui hooking Te Ika, the big fish of Aotearoa New Zealand

John Buck addresses manuhiri and tangata whenua at Matahiwi

Guests with Jacob Scott at Matahiwi

Penny Carnaby, National Librarian, and Hon Judith Tizard with the two tokotoko

Michele Leggott with matua tokotoko and Te Kikorangi, the blue stick

Jacob Scott and poets at the mouth of the Tukituki river

Pipi Café – poets and poetry-loving people

Same again, another table

Pipi Café – more poets

I Say Te Mata: Jack Ross at the Hawke’s Bay Opera House Assembly Room

I Say Te Mata: Selina Tusitala Marsh

I Say Te Mata: poets and tokotoko

matahiwi, hastings, te ahi tapu

2008-03-03T10:24:00.007+13:00

It was a big weekend, for everyone. Jack Ross has written about it here. Hawke’s Bay Today profiled the occasion and the local high school readers who were part of the 14-strong line-up for I Say Te Mata at the Hastings Opera House. Poets and librarians ate for free at Havelock’s Pipi Café (thanks guys). And Rowley Habib read his epic poem The Raw Men for video before we left on Sunday morning.

At the heart of it all were the two tokotoko made by Jacob Scott and presented by Ngati Kahungunu to the National Library. One of them, the matua tokotoko, is carved from black maire and lasered with designs that tell interrelated stories of sacred fire-making (te ahi tapu). It also contains literal means of making fire if you unscrew it and apply one part (hika) to a special groove (kaunoti) in the other. Jacob says he tested it there on the banks of the Tukituki; it works.

This stick, with its abalone and paua insets, has gone to Wellington and will be displayed in the National Library. Laureates will use it there, and everyone who picks it up should be able to feel its mana. It also commemorates the passing of Jacob Scott’s good friend Hone Tuwhare: deep in its interior is a Tuwhare poem.

The second tokotoko (and the seventh Jacob has made) is the one I will keep and treasure. It’s sky-blue, with laser-etched white-on-blue designs towards the top end surmounted by chased silver that references flames. Because it’s a converted pool cue, it also comes apart in four pieces which means I can take it travelling without setting off major security alerts in airports. There is plenty of tactile surface and it was fun watching people run their fingers over it, exploring and connecting up the design elements. Its stories have just begun.

It was a big weekend, for everyone. But perhaps the biggest thing of all was the gift of Jacob Scott’s deeply thought-out representations of creative process: serious, sparky, a challenge to make more fire. Thank you Jacob; it’s a lot to live up to.

Hawke’s Bay photos coming soon

More about the tokotoko

Hawke’s Bay Today laureate event profile 23 Feb 2008

Jack Ross, Hooning around in Hawke’s Bay, I Say Te Mata

Pipi Café and Poesy Bread

Tim Page audio The Long Lunch, Fast Talking PI (with Selina Tusitala Marsh), Wild Light (with Michele Leggott)

laureates, locals and out of town poets in Hawkes Bay

2008-02-21T08:43:00.000+13:00

Drums are beating, email is running hot and phonecalls are criss-crossing the land as the folk at the National Library coordinate the first Laureate event for 2008 in Hawkes Bay. NatLib, Te Mata Estate Wines, Matahiwi Marae, Scott Design, Creative Hastings and the Hawkes Bay Opera House are all working towards Saturday 23 February when the new matua tokotoko (carved speaking stick) will be presented at Matahiwi Marae in a ceremony that will also honour the achievements of Hone Tuwhare. Laureate Elizabeth Smither will be there, as will a host of readers and speakers with words, stories and songs for Hone. This is Poetry at the Pa, Matahiwi-style, 10 am to 2 pm.

In the evening the focus shifts to the Opera House in Hastings for I Say Te Mata: Poets at the Assembly Room. Keith Thorsen and I will co-host, starting at 8 pm with a glass of Te Mata and processing through the line-up of poets in town for the event. Some young Hawkes Bay talent should give laureates and others a taste of the poetic future and we’re expecting to have a very good time indeed. Anyone left standing will be directed to Dancing on the Green, running till midnight at nearby Kohupatiki Marae.

So we’re fine-tuning our offerings and packing toothbrushes and sleeping bags here in Auckland in anticipation of the Great Poetic Hikoi to the Bay. Some are flying, others driving; but we’ll all be there as the action gets underway. Look, isn’t that the National Library bus pulling in from Wellington with a bunch of poetry-loving librarians hanging out the windows?

Remembering Hone Tuwhare

2008-02-20T17:00:00.004+13:00

Tributes, thoughts and memories of Hone Tuwhare are in the links and posts below. I will be adding more links and posts to this post as I receive them.

Brian Poitiki

2008-02-20T16:00:00.000+13:00

i can feel you making holes in the silence, rain
i can feel you making holes in my brain, hone
in my brain
hemi & ani are gone -
jean, harry & ron -
but i won't wait until you're gone to say
you're my old man, hone
you're my old man
(brian potiki, written 1980)

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

2008-02-12T07:59:00.000+13:00

Universal Hone

Well fuck it man
that’s the bucket well and truly
kicked (I was a lonely pisshead
on the rebound from Oz in the year
of 1970 I think it was when I bought
a copy of Come Rain Hail from
Peter Hooper that great West Coast
intellectual in his Albert Street Greymouth
shrine to Thoreau, Walden Books)! O

yes: you are the universal Hone
and you really are to blame
my kupu came from far away
no more

they came from here and there
Kaikohe, Karl Marx, old fishguts
Shakespeare and the Friday Flash, from
rhythms in your soul they flared
those karakia soused in jazz. Tekoteko
totem man, you handed me my tongue
and said ‘Let’s sing! Let’s put this hoha
country back in tune!’ My ticker thumps

to think of yours all done. Go have a feed
of mussels, man – you won. You won
the biggest raffle ever run: the Universal Hone.

16 January 2008
First published in the Press (Christchurch)

Jeffrey writes:
The day he died I found myself singing at the clothesline, ‘He's the Universal Hone and he really is to blame, my kupu come from far away no more...’ to the tune of Donovan's most-likely forgotten 60s ballad, ‘The Universal Soldier.’ What a brain.

That got me going – I'd been thinking how with Hone, a universe had just disappeared, the same thought I had when my mother died in 2005. The rest, the kick-off, was just me swearing my way into the house of death, I guess.

The reference, ‘my ticker thumps’ is from his poem to Baxter – ‘no more thump in the old ticker,’ which I quoted to Roger Steele on the day Mum died, when I rang to cancel a dinner in the Green Parrot.

I now have the dubious reputation as being the first person to get the word ‘fuck’ into the Press, and on the Obituary page at that. Hone would laugh at this distinction, I reckon. But as you will intuit, it's a splash of condensed emotion, not an attempt at obscenity – I knew kicking the bucket would follow right on.

Penny Somervaille

2008-02-07T07:59:00.000+13:00

Letter to a Dead Poet

Kia Ora Hone,

Do you remember the night we met?
In Grey Lynn? At Jan’s house in Cooper St?
You said to me that there was no point me keeping my poems in a box under the bed.
You come back here tomorrow, you said,
you bring your poems with you,
and you read them to me.

No-one disobeyed an order like that from you, Hone.

I brought my poems the next night, even though I wasn’t invited,
and I did read them to you.
You listened, you really listened, and
you said, read them again,
and you said, send them off to so-and-so, tell them I told you to,
tell them I said they must publish them.

Well, I didn’t do that, didn’t have that much courage.
But, Hone, you know, you started something for me,
it’s because of you that I’m doing all those papers at Uni,
it’s all your fault that I stand up and read places,
meet so many people I love.

For a few months I saw you around,
drove you down from Shirley’s place at Pakiri once,
discovered for myself the warmth and charm that drew us to you, made us laugh.
Made me feel I was more than I thought I could be.
Two or three years later,
after you moved to Kaka Pt,
I saw you again,
you didn’t remember me,
but
I will always remember you,
you are like the rain
I can feel you in the air.

Farewell Hone, Arohanui, Penny

Michele Leggott

2008-01-25T11:06:00.001+13:00

work for the living

one by one they come out
the piece of paper with the poem transcribed
at five in the morning and folded
into the driver’s pocket
another with the words of the song
the Yorkshireman doesn’t need
he’s brought cucumbers from his garden
she found puriri around the corner
I’m looking up the Latin for big flower
or maybe really big flower
and pulling it from the tree

too many funerals but the road
is clear to the north      the driver
puts his foot down
the words in his pocket speed
the conversation the weave of
bad singing bad hearing bad eyes
stopping only for a bad joke
across the road from the Hundertwasser
toilets      they call me mellow yellow
the tourist train rolls up the main street
someone takes a picture on a phone
stories flash by     Ruapekapeka Ohaeawai
Culloden the Spanish Armada
the wars the families deaths and clearances

at Te Kotahitanga we find him
whose words have brought us
to the north     wheear 'ast ta bin sin'
ah saw thee     he asks silently
did you clean up the shattered teacup
the milk spilling onto the floor?
the Lake Poet walks in trailing clouds
the Persian Ecstatic takes a spin
around the room and King James
does benison in both languages
body and soul     light and air
puriri grieves and the Really Big Flower
opens its lemon soap heart     Ephphatha!
the birds in the trees are suddenly uproarious
and then we hear rain outside

it’s gone by the time
we emerge and the van has him
safely on the road to Wharepaepae
we are slower getting up there
the carter on the horizon calls out
in the arms of the road     a translation
anyone might understand
replying to the voice in the wind
as the old lady opens her arms
and takes him into the earth

lost children
and talk that goes on into the night
around a table in a house on another hilltop
where an old friend pulls out the first book
and inside it another piece of paper
with a handwritten poem she reads
remembering where it came from
taking the path between that coast
and the travellers she is feeding tonight
the cucumbers went into the salad
more books more history more wine
the driver’s poem is unfolded
as a full moon gets up over the valley
A red libation to your good memory, friend.
There’s work yet, for the living.
in the morning a bird will call from the trees
visible invisible     riro she explains
to the man without a hat who knows
the song but can’t sing it now
to save his life     riro riro little stranger
the wars the deaths the clearances
one who intrudes into my shadow
I don’t recognise shadows     his face
a translation anyone might understand

John Buck, 21 January 2008

2008-01-21T09:52:00.000+13:00

The thing to remember about Hone is that he grew up first on the King James Bible and then on Shakespeare. So he heard that magnificent poetic language over and under and around his own ways into Polynesian storytelling and Polynesian song. He took the animism of the Maori world – everything in it is alive and has a voice – and he wrote that world, those voices, hearing as he went the echo and cadences of the classic English tradition. His poems sound so good, they’re wonderful to hear out loud, and not just because Hone was a wonderful reader of his own work. A poem like ‘Rain’ will still be around when we’ve forgotten almost everything else. It goes straight in, it’s everyone’s poem to learn and remember. My children’s children will be taught ‘Rain’ and I think Hone knew that. He knew very well what his poems could do: But if I / should not hear / smell or feel or see / you // you would still / define me / disperse me / wash over me / rain.

Lauris Edmond

2008-01-21T09:22:00.000+13:00

Lauris Edmond, from Late Song (Auckland University Press, 2000).

Afternoon at Akatarawa
for Frances and Hone

It was there, a silence within the wind, brushing
lightly across that dedicated hillside
holding its dead in its arms, each one’s
eternity contained in the long sleep of the earth.

It was a colour – or no colour – in the quiet sky
as we three knelt or sat on the grass looking down,
my hand on the carved stone of her name,
her years written there in brief relentless strokes;

it was our tears, our shared remembering,
our close-leaning bodies; it touched our skin
with the wind, held us close in our stillness.
It was – a mysterious knowing beyond knowledge;

or perhaps the earth itself, where we will all
one day lie with her, the voice of its silence.
Then we stood up, heads bent, and meandered
over the grass. But – there was one thing more –

he broke, turned, breathed hard, his great voice
suddenly filling that cathedral of hills with
a muscular shouting, strange harsh music as though
coming from some deep place beyond even himself.

He ended. We walked to the car. Miles down the road
in the silence we drew round us, each peering
inwards to see what we could of her long-ago face,
he told us: ‘A salute. For a chief only. For her.’