New Zealand Poet Laureate

A new Laureate

2013-06-14T12:10:00.001+12:00

11

If I wanted to translate
silence I would have to be
deaf, to remember silence
I would have to recognise
its opposite, for instance
singing, a miracle, not
too much to ask I hope, and
why wouldn’t I hope, why not?

Shadow stands up, stanza 11

Nominations are open for the new Poet Laureate

Kia hiwa ra!
Kia hiwa ra!

It's time to find a new New Zealand Poet Laureate, for the 2013-2015 term.

As ever, we invite your nominations for the role. Tell us who you believe can best represent poets, poetry, and those who love it.

Nominees must have made an outstanding contribution to New Zealand poetry, and be an accomplished and highly regarded poet. They must also be a strong advocate for poetry, and be able to fulfil the public role required of a Poet Laureate, which includes engaging with a wide range of people and inspiring New Zealanders to read and write poetry.

Everything you need to know about the award and making a nomination

Download background and terms for the award (45KB, pdf)

Download the nomination form (35KB, pdf)

Nominations close on Monday 15 July, 2013.

The Lifeguard #7

2013-05-21T10:00:00.000+12:00

Finally the poems in The Lifeguard (including the ‘Shadow Stands Up’ sequence) have left their uncertain drafts behind and entered the world for better or worse in the book published by Auckland University Press and launched on a drizzly Thursday evening last week at Alleluja Cafe on K Road in Auckland. Now what you will read below isn’t provisional any more.

At such moments I get postpartum blues. I don’t believe the book’s any good. I suspect that people who say they like it are being kind. Worse, I can’t work up the nerve to write something new. I tidy up my workplace. I go shopping but realise when I get home with it that my new shirt is wrong, wrong, wrong. I cook over-elaborate dinners for six when there are two of us at the table. I open another bottle of wine.

Fortunately, Alleluja Cafe has ways of making you get over it. Most Thursday evenings at about 5pm there’s a happily voluble conversation club that meets for coffee and snacks at tables pushed together down the street end. So the book launches take place in a comfortingly immersive babble of talk. Last year, Anne Kennedy’s wonderful book The Darling North was launched there without microphones for the speakers, who were inaudible to all but those craning forward in the front row. This year there were mikes, so the speakers could be heard, but within the cheerful ambient sound-scape of the conversation club and its clattering cups and plates. This enhanced the occasion’s sense of fun, even if only as the result of something like canned laughter at a stand-up comedy routine.

Then, there’s the grove of potted palms in the middle of the cafe. The book-launch snacks were on a table on one side of the palms, with most of the guests and access to the drinks. By accident, I ended up on the other side of the palms, with some members of my family and a couple of friends. Thus, I had no reason to suspect that people were being nice to me, since for the most part I couldn’t see or hear them.

However, I could see and hear the people who spoke at the launch: Sam Elworthy, Director at Auckland University Press; Chris Szekely, the Chief Librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library; and Anne Kennedy. Not far from Sam’s ebullient nexus are the press’s editor, Anna Hodge, its designer Katrina Duncan, its publicist Christine O’Brien, and its assistant editor Poppy Haynes. Close, too, is the book’s cover designer (and photographer) Philip Kelly. These people aren’t just nice, they ask hard questions, which is good for those blues. Chris Szekely represents the extraordinary institutional support provided by the National Library through its poet laureate programme and therefore to this book; within this span of support are two very special people: Peter Ireland, who is the always patient and courteous contact in Wellington; and Reuben Schrader, who looks after this blog. They’re not just being nice, either – they care. I am very lucky indeed to have worked with them all.

Then there’s Anne Kennedy, whose work I greatly admire and who agreed to say a few words about The Lifeguard. Anne’s writing is at once lucid and elusive – what she perceives with great clarity is likely to be a detail most of us will miss. Thus it was that she noticed there are quite a lot of bees in ‘The Lifeguard’ sequence of the book. I hadn’t noticed this, and (prompted by Anne) I’d like to be able to claim it connects somehow with Virgil’s Georgics IV and the story of the dying bees of Aristaeus... but I can claim no such thing. What happened, though, was that I later opened the book again for a quick look at the bees, and found I already felt better about the poems because there was stuff in them I didn’t know about – the stuff that comes from readers, not from me.

From ‘The Lifeguard’

A buzzing in the ears as if bees
were swarming in my thoughts

or as if my head had become
a clearing in the forest

filled with the never-too-late serenades
of cicadas at summer’s end

makes me long for the gritty obscurity
of the west’s waves

or the suave silence of eastern lagoons
through which pouting fish

mutely swim. On the other hand,
if I listen carefully enough

to the sound of my own listening,
I might eventually hear something.

The hum of longing seems to fade at last
into a kind of aural impasto,

thick and bland, without apparent surface
but also without depth.

Neither meniscus nor void, without perspective,
not flat and not profound,

without extent or distance, not able to be touched
and incapable of penetration,

not flattened so as to stack up the shoreline,
the sea, the salty spume, the sky,

but not tricked out as a mirrored infinity
or a beach-walk into the never-never,

neither free nor necessary,
not imaginary and not a law of nature,

not spirit, not matter, without colour
but not the whiteness of all colour,

not abstract, not phenomenal,
not even the kind of paradox

that would let me end this
hapless catalogue, not ‘a jar’

both round and empty that might make
the wilderness gather itself

around a hollow core of form – nothing like that,
nothing like ‘a long-legged fly’

walking lightly on water
as a metaphor for the mind

moving across the surface of silence,
nothing like that –

so what am I saying? That this may be
the sound of consciousness?

But how, then, to imagine the silence
of oblivion, a kind of oxymoron,

since there can be no silence
where its opposite doesn’t equally prevail,

the waterlogged yells of those
whose upraised arms

mark places where the frothing rip
drags forests of kelp

the direction of shipwrecks
whose phosphorescent ribs

flicker above their beds of black iron-sand,
or the hilarious shrieks

of revellers impacting
on the dawn-flushed harbour?

Yes, this could be the no-sound no-silence
of oblivion, but what

would I know? It’s the busy world
that sits outside my window

as if across a table
with wine and food on it.

Indifferent to the buzzing in my ears,
asking only that I listen and respond,

the world tells me stories:
That car whose windscreen glints across the bay

has a sad man in it. That yacht whose bow
pecks the wrinkled harbour

will still be tethered when
the next tide turns. The squawky sound

of talkback radio seems to come
from a patch of sunlight

or from the cat that basks there.
I want to call out to my lifeguards,

the one who watches my hope
flailing at the rip, the other

incurious as I loll in dismay:
Over here, guys. Find a seat. Fill a glass. Help

yourselves. Does anyone ever tell you how
lost we are without you?

It’s never too late, though
you’re not going to believe that.

Dave Kent

2013-05-02T10:00:00.000+12:00

Dave Kent, one of the founding members of the Wellington Media Collective (WMC) which was active between 1978 and 1998, died on Saturday 27th April after a long illness that left his body paralysed but never his mind. I visited him at his home in Wellington a week before his death. He was no longer able to type on the iPad that had become his mode of conversation, but his wife Kathy used the iPad to make sentences from Dave’s minimal thumbs-up responses to spelling questions: vowel or consonant; a?e?i?o?u? – b?c?d?f?g? It was thus that Dave commented on his own appearance, which he compared to a wooden-faced Picasso figure. Given time, such conversations could have been the equivalent of slow-cooked dialogue, seasoned with humour. Sadly I didn’t have enough time for slow-cooking that day. Dave’s description of himself as ‘wooden-faced’ was pretty accurate, but didn’t tell the whole truth. A vestige of his lovely, self-deprecating smile was there, and many will remember it well.

My diary tells me that Saturday 27th April was Resistance Day in Slovenia and Freedom Day in Zambia. These anniversaries have only coincidental connections to the two decades of work by the Collective – and yet it would be hard to find a calendar of such dates that didn’t seem to spell out a slow-cooked statement about the kind of work and commitment WMC is known for; though its focus was local, its comprehension of the politics of engagement was international. When the exhibition of Collective work opened at the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington in October last year (Dave drove his wheelchair up the hill) one of the most striking items on display was a two-storey high banner list of WMC clients and causes; pretty much any cause worth fighting for over the 20 years of the Collective’s life was on that list. The book recording the Collective’s work, We Will Work With You: Wellington Media Collective 1978-1998, published by Victoria University Press in February 2013, was launched when the exhibition closed. Dave was there – he couldn’t drive his wheelchair up the hill this time, but he did sign many copies of the book, which was dedicated to him.

In the book a common theme emerges: the importance of Dave Kent not just as a gifted designer but as a mentor and conscience within the Collective. Though he never asserted or claimed a leadership role, he clearly had a leading influence, even if he preferred to lead ‘from behind’. I wasn’t a member of the Collective, nor one of its clients, but its presence encouraged and challenged me and a great many others, and I was lucky to have known Dave Kent as a friend whose modesty and conviction I admired.

Dave was also a poet, though his modesty meant this has remained a more or less secret activity. With the permission of Kathy, and their two children Kirstie and Eli, here is one of Dave’s poems. Dave was a golfer, and here he’s walking along a beach belting a golf-ball ahead of him with a seven iron. And those commas at the end of each line – each one reads like a whack. As with the driving range set up below the urupa at Ralph Hotere’s tangi, it seems appropriate to remember Dave this way. I’ve never had the golf bug, but there’s something about the flight of the ball, at once chancy and planned; and the combination of mindfulness or Buddhist sati, and its companion state, when the mind empties and rests.

A walk spoiled

Seven ironing along,
The firm sand strand,
I scan the surf circus,
For a ray’s flag,
A beaching whale.
Treading the air,
Beak full,
A black-backed gull,
Cockles a casual eye at the ball,
Drops the pipi,
Follows it down.
Working the sand,
With their scarlet probes,
The oyster-catcher couples,
Gimlet eyed,
Watch the ball roll past,
And variously stalk away,
Shrill with disdain.
A successful strike,
High and straight.
A flowering puff,
Where it pockmarks the sand.
Another and another and,
I’ve driven over miles.
Punctuating the tracery,
Sharp and subtle,
Of lopers and interlopers,
Indigenous and invasive,
Recreationers and miscreants,
Walking talkers and debaucherers
Prey and predators,
Katipo and red-backs.
Between the firm,
Tide rummaged foreshore,
And the sparrow clouded,
Marram built dunes,
Lies a soft desert,
Densely littered with,
A bleached tangle,
Earth’s wrack,
Swept up by storm surges,
A chaotic and seductive decking,
Netting the coastline,
In a sand anchoring matrix,
As it idles westwards,
Narrowing the Ditch,
By centimetres a year,
Or quakes upward,
By metres rarely,
When our chief architect blinks.
Striking my way back,
Over the toes of the land,
A dark and green island,
Humps into view,
Swathed in vaporous trails,
Of death and retribution,
Shrill with songs,
Of waste and restoration.
Following a line of flight,
I see storm ghosts tramping,
Above the Tararua treeline,
Two friends holed in one,
By a wayward slice of winter.
The strand weaves,
Dark and shining,
Light and patterned,
Warping,
With a shuffling mosaic,
Of foaming sheets.
As they draw back,
Into the spouting maw,
Black iron blossoms and rains,
A two dimensional cloud chamber,
Of sparkling grains.
Spoiling a walk,
With an iron and ball,
Over the earth’s wild(e) floor,
I see so much more.

Shadow Stands Up #16

2013-04-05T15:26:00.000+13:00

Today, some months after this poem was written, the windows of the picture-framer’s warehouse building ‘over the road from our place’ have new signage on them, announcing that the building’s for lease. The loading bay’s roller door grinds and clatters up every morning to reveal a dwindling pile of stuff advertised on an impromptu sign as ‘Garage Sale’. My guess is that the framer’s been there for a long time. He’s been there long enough to accumulate a lot of junk. His sign announcing reduced-price mirrors has been outside long enough to have developed a harsh, Mars-like surface. From time to time, people have walked out of the place gingerly carrying thickly wrapped parcels – restored and reframed artworks perhaps, or perhaps mirrors from the apparently inexhaustible supply within. What will replace the picture framer – or rather, who will replace him? And when he’s gone and the building and its once timelessly optimistic signage have been transformed, will we remember how he used to come out and stand in the sunshine on the footpath, looking up and down the street for the inevitable onrush of custom today, tomorrow, next week? And how long will we remember that?

The picture framer over
the road from our place comes out
in his sensible apron
and takes his signage inside –
it’s evening and the mirrors
he’s been offering at knock-
down prices ever since we
moved in have yet to depart
his inventory. Reflect
on this I do knowing I’m
seduced by the obvious
reflexivities at hand
but also by the sunsets
blazing from the racks inside
his dim shop whose restored gilt
frames and crisply mitred mats
are empty of the content
even the anonymous
passers-by could furnish if
they’d only glance sideways at
themselves burning behind the
window where the mirrors are.

Going Home

2013-03-15T15:46:00.000+13:00

On Friday March 1st four poets met at Blenheim’s Millennium Gallery to talk about home, and to read poems that addressed, or asked, questions raised by this complex subject. Cliff Fell came over from Nelson with his partner Pammy; they were in time for a long talkative, preparatory lunch among the grape vines out at Rockferry, in a landscape that looked nothing like the nibbled pasture of my childhood. Dinah Hawken and her husband Bill also made it to lunch; they came over the hill from Waikawa Bay around from Picton, where I spent much of my childhood in a backwater that, then, had almost no houses, no marina, and a gravel road that petered out just past the boatshed where my grandfather’s clinker dinghy waited to be pushed to the water along manuka rollers. Cressida Bishop, the Director of the Millennium Gallery, also got to lunch; the gallery wasn’t there when I was a kid, but the Memorial Clock Tower was, just over the road, along with the floral clock, both of them structures of awe inspiring grandeur to my eyes in 1953, when the Queen visited and laid a wreath (I couldn’t see her). John Newton couldn’t make it to lunch as he was moving house (home) on Waiheke Island, but he tore through the door of the gallery with minutes to spare before the evening reading and would have been happy to see that copies of his marvellous new collection, Family Song Book, were for sale.

In John’s book, home territories radiate out from Robinhood Bay at the entrance to Port Underwood: back inland to what used to be called Beavertown (or ‘more/ fancifully still’, Beaver Station) – now Blenheim – in one direction, south from there to the Dashwood Pass and North Canterbury, or west through twists and turns through the Rai Valley to the Whangamoa Saddle, which my grandmother, Agnes Horne, was the first woman to drive a car over on the way to Nelson. We were all in our different ways trying to find that grid of locations, circumstances, memories, and relationships that located us in some way somewhere.

In Cliff’s case he was able to point out, from a perspective that had more to do with historical amusement than whakapapa or with what John characterises as ‘homesickness’, that his great-great grandfather Alfred Fell was responsible for surveying the town that would be called Blenheim, and named a disproportionate number of its streets after his children. Cliff came to New Zealand in 1997 and on visiting Blenheim for the first time may have found himself going along Francis Street, which his ancestor had originally called ‘Frances’ with an ‘e’ – but it was the ‘with-an-i’ version that I grew up in. Whenever I go to Blenheim I always try but can never find Francis Street at first. Then I adjust my scale, stop walking nostalgically towards the yellow Wither Hills, and there it is, so much closer to the centre of town than it seemed to be when I was a kid; and there is number 32, a slightly the worse for wear California bungalow, my childhood home.

Dinah Hawken says that for her, being at home is at once utterly tangible: ‘this room, this actual house – and garden, neighbourhood, coastline, town, country and world’. But also intangible: ‘the state of being at home with myself and with others’. I know what she means; after the reading, a woman my age came up and asked if I remembered her, Glenys. We used to play together. My answer had to be evasive to be truthful; no, I didn’t remember her or the startling escapades she then reminded me of; but yes I did remember, because the name and the place we were in again after sixty years were drawn towards each other without quite making meaningful contact: at once somehow tangible and intangible, incongruous and even comic, as in Cliff’s historical frame; and also melancholy, as in John’s sense of ‘homesickness’. We had a great night – interesting, funny, sad, simple, complicated.

The following day I caught an early flight up to Kaitaia, got a rental car and drove down to Ralph Hotere’s tangi at Mitimiti. There, it was said often over the three days before Ralph was laid to rest in the beautiful urupa on the hill above Matihetihe marae, that he had come home. On Sunday morning I walked up the next valley to Moetangi with Ralph’s brother Robin. This was where the family had lived when the kids were little. It’s hard to imagine a place more remote from the world Ralph would go on to be ‘at home’ in. What did it mean to say that he had come home? The answer was up the valley where no material trace of his childhood home remained aside from a stand of old self-propagating lilies, an incongruous flash of colour in the desiccated scrub – the place’s apparent emptiness was what made it feel right. The answer was also on the marae where hundreds of people came to welcome their relative or friend back; and it was also on the promontory below the urupa, where a driving range had been set up for those descending to the marae. You could choose one of Ralph’s favourite drivers and whack a golf ball out into the wide blue yonder across the beach.

Recordings from Blenheim

Cliff Fell, Dinah Hawken, John Newton, and Ian Wedde read their own and others' work.

First half

Cliff Fell
(mp3: 17MB)
Dinah Hawken
(mp3: 18MB)
John Newton
(mp3: 19MB)
Ian Wedde
(mp3: 18MB)

Second half

Cliff Fell reads Ruth Stone and Frederick Seidel
(mp3: 7MB)
Dinah Hawken reads Rachel Bush
(mp3: 4MB)
John Newton reads Henry Lawson
(mp3: 4MB)
Ian Wedde reads Ted Berrigan
(mp3: 7MB)

Full recording

Listen to the entire session
(mp3: 112MB)

The Wreck of the Orpheus

2013-02-07T10:00:00.000+13:00

On 7 February 1863 the steam corvette H.M.S. Orpheus, a warship carrying stores for Her Majesty’s ships on the New Zealand station, ran aground on sandbanks at the Manukau bar and went down with 189 out of 250 officers and men drowned. This disaster, the worst in New Zealand’s maritime history, is being commemorated at Whatipu this year. The organisers asked me to write a poem for the event. I’d been out at Whatipu with my son Carlos and grandson Sebo, and I thought about the shipwreck with this happy beach-day in mind – a remembrance of the sailors who lost their lives, a hope for Sebo’s safety; and also a homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s great poem The Wreck of the Deutschland (1876). Some of Hopkins’s rhythms and alliterations are echoed in my poem, and some of his most striking and terrifying lines are quoted in italics. My thanks to the organisers of the Orpheus commemoration, especially Lynton Diggle, for the opportunity to contribute.

The Wreck of the Orpheus

From the summer beach my grandson Sebo sees
what he thinks are seagulls swarming and swirling out there
where the sea humps up across the lumpy horizon
but that’s not birds I tell him it’s waves breaking as wind and tide
shove seawater across shifting sand-shallows, gull-white water
chopping every-which way where the ghost-ship breaches
and breaks up at the bar, the silty river pouring into the bay
one way, the tide the other, sand-banks heaved sideways,
the tricky channel shifting across the sea-floor.
Man’s useless maps can’t stop them, stall them, make them stay.
Shifting sands tricked and trapped the Orpheus that day.

In a rock-pooled gut cutting the headland at low tide
Sebo finds broken, barnacled boat-timbers with rusted bolts,
splintered beams and bulk heads clustered with mussels,
and in the gale-battered cliff above, look! – a rock-faced giant
guarding the wreck, eyes and mouth wind-hollowed
for birds to nest in, a pastoral forehead ... but there was no shelter
for Orpheus
prey of the gales, of the bleak-about air, the breaker,
sway of the sea that storms and stars deliver, the goal
was a shoal, the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow,
the combs of a smother of sand and the inboard seas
run swirling and hawling, the rash smart sloggering brine.
One hundred and eighty-nine men dragged down to the shifting sand.

Sebo and I build bright-mica’d channels and sea walls
and watch the tide wash them away, and our footprints as well,
the gentle swell pushing sand up the beach
and sucking it back when the tide turns,
smooth-slicked shine of sea-glazed sand sun-baked, lifting
off then in dry whirlygigs, ghosts of shoals blowing away
into summer’s heat-haze, mirages of masts and shining sails
appearing and disappearing the length of the ship-wreck coast.

And other phantoms Sebo sees, surfers shimmy to shore
in the shimmer of sunshine, vague in the salty air,
and crash back under the rip-curl ... gone! Have they? Gone under?
But back up they bob, Sebo, look! – as I hope you always will,
and never know the shifting sands that drowned
poor Orpheus’ crew whom we standing here on hard ground
mourn and remember, and their brave brothers
who gave their lives to save them when all was lost.

NZ 6-seater: Ian curates a chapbook

2013-02-04T09:00:00.001+13:00

Melbourne-based online poetry journal Cordite invited Ian to pull together an online chapbook (a pocket-sized book, rather like this Paradise lost, and paradise regain'd), populated by 6 voices of his choosing.

Ian introduced his selection by admitting

I faced the usual short list of questions we all try to avoid answering:

What do you mean, ‘local’?

What do you mean, ‘Pacific’?

Can I invite my friends?

Friends were scrambled, and poems by Selina Tusitala March, Anne Kennedy, Michele Leggot, Murray Edmond, John Newton, and Sam Sampson corralled.

Read the chapbook's chapters on Cordite, along with Ian's delightful introductions of his fellow poets.

The Poem in the World: Katie Carey

2013-01-23T09:37:00.000+13:00

More from the students of the Poetry off the Page programme at the University of Auckland, who took stanzas of Ian's 'Shadow Stands Up' into the world.

'Shadow Stands Up' on the Link Bus at Rush Hour

Katie Carey

Our part of the poem was stanza 9 and stanza 10.

Discovery

The poem 'Shadow Stands Up', by Ian Wedde, discusses the notion of what daily life is, and how it can be both ordinary and beautiful at the same time. Our group was given the ninth and tenth stanzas, and we decided to work around the idea of ‘Distribution,’ inspired by the phrase:

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...

From this phrase, we each devised our own way of getting the stanzas out into the wider community, perhaps to those who might not ordinarily experience poetry. We decided to set out into our own communities in order to get the stanzas out as far and wide as possible, and to all have a postage element to our strategy.

I chose to focus more on the tenth stanza, while keeping this idea of distribution. Where the ninth stanza is firmly stated in ordinary, daily life, the tenth is more whimsical, lending itself more to the imagination with lines such as "historical tide that flows" and "rainbows of effluent hope / swirling in the same spring-time." From this, I found the idea of discovery. In terms of 'the package,' discovery is a vital part of the experience; opening to a thing which may bring surprise or despair. This unknown element sits well with the idea of the whimsy which is demonstrated in the tenth stanza.

I decided to deliver the tenth verse through a 'message in a bottle' kind of way, in order to solidify both the imaginative qualities of the poem and the static norm. The message in a bottle was once used as a way to communicate by both the British Navy in the sixteenth century and in World War Two. However, this piece of history also inspired several pieces of art, such as Edgar Allen Poe’s 'M.S. Found in a Bottle', and the Police’s hit, 'Message in a Bottle'. This blend of scientific fact and poetry made me think of the article written by Peter Forbes, where he says how both poetry and science complement each other, both in large and small ways. He also comments on how these two different concepts can be combined in one human being - such as Leonardo Da Vinci. He is a man who is placed within an everyday society, who single-handedly possesses the perfect blend of art and science.

I find the idea of a normal man holding something overworldly and mythical inspiring, and this helped my thinking in how I was to construct the bottle itself. I found myself layering both whimsy and reality upon one another; the whimsy of the written poem is printed on the static societal paper, enclosed in the familiar norm of the beer bottle, which itself is enshrouded in this mythical notion of the 'message in a bottle.' I think that this has created a complex conversation as to how the 'discovery' element operates. Although the receiver is finding a 'normal' item, he is also discovering the imagination enclosed, and vice versa.

I chose everyday beer bottles (Corona and Hagan) and inserted a small paper version of the tenth stanza. Because I was to be planting these bottles at the beach, I decided only to use the tenth stanza, as this has direct connections with water and land. Lines such as "the grass / beside the water" made me think immediately of Rothesay Bay beach, where the water is lined with a bed of grass. To enforce the idea of 'distribution' and the notion of postage and parcels, I dressed the bottle up in societal constructions, such as the labels "For You" and "Love Ian Wedde," and the twine bow at the top of the necks.

I placed the bottles on a table, on a bench and in the sand of the actual beach, and waited. I watched as a boy picked up the bottle and read the paper inside. He frowned, and gave a small smile (which I hopefully didn’t imagine) and captured this moment of discovery with my camera. He sat reading it for a while, before placing the poem inside his pocket and walking away.

I feel like our distribution of Ian Wedde’s poem was successful. Getting poetry out into the wider community is important in terms of the longevity of 'the poem,' and I am glad to have done what I could to help.

Bibliography

Forbes, Peter. 'Science and Poetry: greatness in little.' Nature 434 (17 Mar 2005): 320-323.

Wedde Ian, Shadow Stands Up. 1-10. NZ Poet Laureate. Aug 2011-May 2012.

Biography

Katie Carey has just completed her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Auckland, majoring in both English and Drama. She is currently working on a play called The Uncertainty Principal, which will be performed early in 2013 as part of the Auckland Fringe Festival. Past this the future is somewhat uncertain, yet poetry will most definitely be an integral part of life to come.

The Poem in the World: Sam Goodchild and Chesney McDonald

2013-01-16T12:22:00.000+13:00

More from the students of the Poetry off the Page programme at the University of Auckland, who took stanzas of Ian's 'Shadow Stands Up' into the world.

'Shadow Stands Up' on the Link Bus at Rush Hour

Sam Goodchild and Chesney McDonald

Our part of the poem was stanza 1 and stanza 2.

Taking the poem into the community

'Shadow Stands Up' is a poem that has many allusions to memory, surfaces, reflections, depths and text. In the first two stanzas fragments of aurality, visuality and memory create a narrative that has punctuated areas of heightened response to the world that the poet inhabits, much like the alighting of people at bus stops - images mix and merge. This apparent movement and lingering is part of the essence of the poem, it reflects the process of its creation as disparate entries through the medium in which it was first published - the NZ Poet Laureate blog. The stanzas are posted there in between other bits and pieces of Ian Wedde’s musings and so on its first reading on the site it isn’t possible to interact with the poem without picking up other chunks of text and therefore experience. To take these stanzas out into the community we - Phoebe, Tara, Chesney and I, decided to give a public performance of them on the oft mentioned green link bus in the afternoon rush hour past Victoria Park. The poem which was originally embedded on the (digital) page and whilst there, Charles Bernstein would say, remains soundless and inert, was to be heard by being vocalised. In this instance a performance for the community on the bus and at the same time it was going to be recorded and digitally archived on the Poetry off the Page website.

I read the first stanza of the poem and Tara the second on a moving green link bus whilst it was recorded by Chesney and Phoebe who had mounted a transparency of the stanzas on the bus window to create worded shadows during the ride. The words would be silhouetted, reflected and projected on the inside of the bus. I was positioned at the front of the bus whilst Tara was towards the aft. Two readers were chosen in two different places to enhance an effect that the poem was both being derived from the community and being given back to it. The performance was to 'ameliorate a state of poverty [of public poetry] and provide for the needs of those who were without' as described as part of the gift economy (Joel Harrison).

The performance competed with the noise of traffic and the sound of the bus’ engine, and though every effort was made to deliver a clear performance it may well have been fragmentary for some of the audience. Sound bouncing off the hard windows with the added noise of traffic, as well as the jerking of the breaks required me to hold up my body against the prevailing velocity, creating the potential for the words to get squeezed out forcefully or fade in the humdrum just as chalk words faded away under the weather and underfoot in our earlier poetry on the pavement assignment - creating unintended partial readings from the disparate fragments. The bus too is an iconic representative of the city, a location where "we undergo connections and disconnections" with a mass of conflicting experiences (Paula Green). The performance highlights the transience and temporality of communities we form on a bus. The articulation of the poem at that time and place highlighted the shared geography of the city with all its diverse states of mind focused on the sense of place and community, giving a snap shot of the mind of a commuter’s experience of what appears to be the mundane bus ride and to my mind and hopefully others reminded us that we all inhabit these little worlds, cocooned by our thoughts and memories even in such a public place. Reading the poem in that time and place added "another semantic layer to the poem’s multiformity" its untotalisability, because "to perform... is to recompose it, to change it, to move it" and to be heard it must be sounded (Bernstein). Hopefully the community heard.

Bibliography

Bernstein, Charles. 'Close Listening.' Introduction to Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (Oxford UP, 1998). Rpt. Electronic Poetry Center, SUNY Buffalo.

Paula Green, 'Curating the city.' Poetry on the Pavement 2005. nzepc feature.

Harrison, Joel. 'Web poetics and the gift economy.' Ka Mate Ka Ora: A NZ Journal of Poetry and Poetics 2 (July 2006).

Wedde, Ian. "Shadow Stands Up", "Shadow Stands Up #2", and "Shadow Stands Up #5". New Zealand Poet Laureate.

Biography

Sam Goodchild is a recent graduate of the University of Auckland in Geology, Biology and English. He has a keen interest in the natural world and how we humans fit into it and create our own spaces. The way we convey our experiences in the world is highly modified by language-hence my interest in English. Poetry and literature in particular provide an avenue to explore the continuum of our existence by their reflexivity.

Chesney McDonald is in the process of completing his final year at the University of Auckland, studying English and Film, Television and Media Studies. After University Chesney will be diving head first into the working world and writing for film and theatre.

The Poem in the World: Phoebe Watt

2013-01-09T10:34:00.000+13:00

Ian Wedde visited Poetry off the Page students at the University of Auckland in September 2012 to talk about his role as NZ Poet Laureate and to read the first ten sections of his evolving poem 'Shadow Stands Up'. Later the 21 students formed up in groups to devise strategies for taking stanzas of Ian’s poem into a community of their choice. They spread out across the city, documenting their performances and distributions for upload to the course website as their final assignment for the semester.

Ian’s poem appeared in neighbourhood letterboxes, on the Link bus, on wine bottles in a local Glengarry store. It went to a city pub quiz, to Poetry Live at the Thirsty Dog in K Road, to Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Fictionpress and Tumblr sites. It morphed through an email chain and it went to the beach in a beer bottle. Our students report that getting poetry into public places is (yes!) demanding but ultimately satisfying work, full of unexpected challenges and moments of sublime serendipity (the commuters who pulled out their phones to video the performers being videoed on the bus...).

We are proud to present a selection of work from the assignment, and we wish to thank Ian again for the generous use of his poem.

Michele Leggott and Helen Sword,

Convenors, English 347 Poetry off the Page at the University of Auckland.

'Shadow Stands Up' on the Link Bus at Rush Hour

Phoebe Watt

Our part of the poem was stanza 1 and stanza 2.

Taking the poem into the community

When, in August 2011, Ian Wedde introduced in "hesitant draft form" these first two stanzas of his tentatively named sequence, Shadow Stands Up, he indicated that, thematically at least, the poem would be preoccupied with 'memory'; specifically, "how memory stitches time into patterns and narratives that can’t exist in rational ways". This theme of memory is subtly conjured by the imagery contained within these early stanzas, whose references to 'shadows', 'dreams', 'imprints', and 'outlines' seemingly denote the memories or residues of more tangible things. It occurs that the poem’s Link bus is the literal vehicle whereby these things are 'stitched' (or, perhaps more appropriately, 'linked') into a more rational narrative. It was, therefore, this same Link bus journey that my group sought to reproduce in taking the poem into the community.

As mapped out in my exhibit (comprised of seven photos and a video, all taken in-transit and attached as hotspots to the streets they depict), our Link bus moved us along Victoria Street and past Victoria Park — locations made all the more familiar to us by their presences in the poem. Travelling this route was thus comparable to travelling through the poem as a reader, with both activities evoking Alan Brunton’s work on walking, wandering, and the conception of poetry. In Remarks on the Future of Poetry, Brunton refers to the "intoxication [that] comes over those who wander through the streets", and, subsequently, the way a text grows "step by step as the poet walks". Although the sense of 'wandering' in Shadow Stands Up seems, at least in the opening stanzas, less to do with the feet than with the mind, it arises that Brunton’s sentiments are largely transferable to this more philosophical wandering that Wedde seems to specialise in. Having blogged about his tendency to always be 'looking at something in [his] head', it is unsurprising that Wedde’s poem is pervaded by the concept of interiority. The decision to simulate Wedde’s daily commute between Three Lamps and the University of Auckland would, we hoped, allow us into the interior spaces of both poet and poem, making our dissemination of it all the more meaningful.

The 'main event' of our dissemination strategy was exactly that—making the text, in the words of Alan Brunton, an 'event' through performance. As a kind of antithesis to this 'spectacle', however, we felt it was important to pay homage to the poem’s introspectiveness. We printed the poem onto an A4 transparency sheet and adhered it to the Link bus window, so that commuters such as the man featured in the 'Victoria Street West' photo were permitted a more intimate engagement with the text which, conveniently, served also as a lens through which the text’s landmarks could be viewed. Additionally, the use of the transparency was a reference to the ghostly presences that, according to Wedde, constitute another of the poem’s motifs. Levitating in the window of the bus, the 'ghost' of Wedde’s poem flitted around the city while my attempts to capture it in motion (see Victoria Street, Albert Street, and Britomart photos) produced only indistinct, ghostly blurs. It interested me to see that in both the 'Victoria Street' and 'Customs Street' photos the figures outside the bus were also reduced to ghostly blurs, and this caused me to consider how I too might be perceived as ghostly by those on the outside, looking in. At this point, I was drawn to a tension between two lines of the poem — "I see this from the Link bus window", whose 'I' implies a grounding in reality, and "a Link bus goes past with me in it", whose estranged, omniscient tone seems more suggestive of an out-of-body experience. This tension struck me as a version of the poem’s contrasting of tangible items with memories, shadows, and ghosts. In a larger sense though, I took it to represent the active/passive binary inherent in the text as a whole — a binary which was at the forefront of our minds when we took the poem out into the community.

As already implied via my exhibit and its emphasis on mapping and navigation, our means of taking the poem out into the community was inspired by the poem's very specific relationship to place. In Hannah's exegesis, she refers to the group's decision to "keep the poem within its established environment", this environment being, once again, the blocks between Three Lamps and the University. Echoing an idea of my own, Hannah addresses the importance of staying true to the poem's sense of 'the local'; as a matter of necessity, however, the poem was taken beyond its 'locale' of the Three Lamps area, traveling with me on my route home to Parnell after the group itself parted ways. Eerily, just like the voice in Stanza Two's "hollow chamber", I soon found myself to be the only passenger in the bus' "hollow chamber", and I documented this with the Beach Road photo captioning my image with the relevant line from the poem as was consistent with the rest of my exhibit. To me, this "eerie" experience epitomised, more than any other aspect of our 'performance', the senses of interiority and introspectiveness that we, as a group, had tried to evoke for the community. It was a shame, I thought, that this experience could not possibly have been staged for an entire bus full of commuters. Nothing, however, could take my moment from me.

Bibliography

Brunton, Alan. "Remarks on the Future of Poetry". NZEPC.

Wedde, Ian. "Shadow Stands Up", "Shadow Stands Up #2", and "Shadow Stands Up #5". New Zealand Poet Laureate.

Biography

Phoebe Watt is about to start the final semester of her BA, having majored in English and minored in Writing Studies. Upon completion of her degree she wants to study English at postgraduate level, the plan being to begin a BA(Hons) in mid-2013. Currently she is working on a research project entitled 'Frank Sargeson: Portrait of a Reader,' which she became involved with via the University’s Summer Research Scholarship programme.

Phoebe writes: "In 2011 I took Ian Wedde’s stage two English paper ‘Writing Selves’, and it remains one of the most memorable courses I have taken at university. It was a privilege to work with his poem ‘Shadow Stands Up’ as part of Poetry Off the Page."

Shadow Stands Up #15

2012-12-19T13:31:00.001+13:00

It seems unintentionally appropriate as the coming days of feasting approach to remember how, when I lived in Jordan in the late 1960s, I noticed that people would touch a left-over bread crust to their lips and then place it on a wall where 'the birds' could find it.

Season’s greetings to all. What a year it’s been.

There’s one of those early birds
in the (green now) tree outside
our bedroom window – you know
the kind, they get started in
the dark just when you think it’s
safe to try and dream again
but the dream’s gone already,
a transport hub was it, or
a place where people gathered
to hear the news, a battered
bus was leaving but waited
while the poet spoke on the
radio, the imbriqui
paused while the poet spoke,
and then the coffee was poured,
one of the weeping listeners
put his breakfast crust on
a low parapet by the
bus station so the birds could
make sure nothing was wasted –
was this what my early bird
was singing about in the
dark before dawn, or was it
a memory pretending
to be a dream I couldn’t
wake up from in time to go?

Young Knowledge on record

2012-11-19T14:56:00.000+13:00

On Friday 26th October, in front of a screen on which was projected the extraordinary 1936 photograph by Spencer Digby of Iris Wilkinson – the poet who called herself Robin Hyde – five of us sat down to talk about a single poem of Hyde’s, ‘Young Knowledge’. A good-sized audience was there in Auckland Central Library’s whare wananga, including Hyde’s son, Derek Challis, and his wife Lynn.

All of us had particular interests in Hyde’s poem. Apart from Derek Challis seated in the audience, the two with the most obvious authority to talk about ‘Young Knowledge’ were Michele Leggott, editor of Hyde’s collected poems; and Mary Edmond-Paul, editor of Hyde’s autobiographical writings. Michele detailed the painstaking editorial work involved in assembling the poem from typescript pages whose coherence had been compromised; and locating it in the circumstances of Hyde’s life. At an early stage, then, we encountered the puzzle of what might appear to be two separate poems or at least two separate impulses spliced together; Michele argued for their coherence. So, by implication, did Mary, in terms of subjective or psychological coherence rather than manuscript evidence – though of course the text and its affects are not separate.

Though Iain Sharp modestly disclaimed any such direct connection with Hyde’s poem, he too had good credentials for talking about it. As the author of a superb illustrated biography of the explorer and artist Charles Heaphy, Iain was able to map the historical circumstances of the poem’s strange ‘turn’, the moment when its succession of intense, sometimes hallucinatory takes on what constitutes knowledge abruptly shifts to two historical moments and places in the nineteenth century. The first of these picks up and even cuts-and-pastes a fragment of Edward Markham’s account of settlers felling ship-building timber in Northland; and then relocates without transition to a place near the Arahura River on the South Island’s West Coast, visited by Heaphy in May 1846. Here, while looking for good arable land, the explorer seems to be ambushed by the poem at the moment he encounters a Maori community of ‘Greenstone people’ until then unknown to European settlers.

It’s at the moment of this encounter, at once vividly imagined by Hyde and factually documented in Heaphy’s journals (which Hyde had read close to the time she wrote the poem), as well as in a subsequently published magazine account, that Hyde’s poem releases its extraordinary burst of energy – its key moment of ‘mindfulness’, as Mary described it. Mindfulness is a concept used in modern clinical psychology since the 1970s, but related to much older Buddhist concepts of knowledge as acute awareness of and attention to the presentness of things, the present moment – sati in Pali, in Sanscrit smrti. Ranged against sati are the kinds of negative forces of anxiety and delusion with which Hyde was familiar.

Hyde was also familiar with ideas from Buddhism and translated them into her concept of ‘presentism’, which Mary referred to during the session. This interest was a factor in Hyde’s decision to travel to China in 1938. Her therapy under the enlightened ‘unselfish kindness’ of her psychiatrist Dr. Gilbert Tothill must have heightened her mindfulness of the ways those polarised conditions of acute perception and imaginative rhapsody sometimes complemented each other and sometimes clashed. The poem moves through strongly contrasted states of mind, sometimes blissful, at others filled with anger and despair, in strongly contrasting scenes and voices; so that the ‘Heaphy moment’, when it arrives in the narrative, has the impact of a dramatic crisis, the moment when the trajectory of the story pivots and changes direction, after which the voice or character of the poem is transformed, and moves or is impelled towards the closing resolution.

In the case of ‘Young Knowledge’, this crisis also seems to propel us into the present, and into an imagined scenario in which Heaphy decides not to reveal the whereabouts of this sanctuary, this unspoiled place, this Eden – but of course he does so in the end, as we know, because Hyde read his account of it, and we read hers.

Murray Edmond’s take on the poem suggests that it represents a new kind of historiography, a new way of knowing the past in the present; that a political or politicised poetics may provide the means by which poems become agents of ‘presentism’ and allow us to be mindful of the past now. In a sense, this poetics also resembles the concept of sati. It suggests that, whether the radical break in the poem at the Markham/Heaphy moment was wholly intentional, or partially the product of a fortuitous alignment of texts, its consequence is a moment of vivid knowledge, a heightened political consciousness of the impact of colonisation, and – implicitly – of its inevitable consequences in the present.

My thanks to the participants in this conversation for their marvellous contributions, and for their subsequent patient and tolerant help as I attempted to summarise what had been a fascinating and complex account of this extraordinary poem. And thanks, also, to the partners in this event: the National Library, Auckland Central Library, and the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) at Auckland University.

The recording of this session is made available here through the partnership with nzepc. If you’ve never visited this great resource, now’s your chance. And a special thanks to Tim Page, who expertly takes care of nzepc recordings, and who recorded this session on Robin Hyde’s ‘Young Knowledge’.

Introduction and Reading of Poem
(mp3: 11MB)
Panellists' Commentaries
(mp3: 40MB)
Discussion and Response
(mp3: 17MB)
Full recording
(mp3: 70MB)

Shadow Stands Up #14

2012-11-14T16:19:00.000+13:00

“Oh youth ... pass the bottle,” runs a refrain in Joseph Conrad’s great story Youth, in which an old, world-weary Marlow tells a table of friends the story of a defining experience in his youth, breaking his narrative from time to time to say, “Pass the bottle.” I’ve been fascinated by this story ever since I first read it, probably when I was about ten or eleven. My father loved Conrad’s stories, especially those like Youth and Typhoon that had tough old sea-dogs such as Captain MacWhirr in them. I think he also encouraged me to read them because they might be character-forming – they probably were, one way or another. Youth is filled with a mixture of droll nostalgia for the optimism of youth, and the world-weariness of age. Among the shadows that ‘stand up’ with us or even within us are our young selves. Mine was there with me one day when I walked past Victoria Park, remembering myself arriving in a dusty bus outside the old walls of the Moroccan city of Fez, in 1969. But being simultaneously young and older hasn’t driven me to drink yet, except in celebration – which includes raising a glass to my ‘old man’, Frederick Albert Wedde, an inveterate adventurer all his life.

I’m back in a light jacket
walking past Victoria
Park without the heavy drape
of my winter coat and the
grey drape of the chilly sky
and he’s walking inside me,
two thirds my weight, the skinny
kid who called it a day in
1969 and went
to see the swallows at dusk
darting through the red-dusted
air above the battlements
of Fez – what is it that weighs
us down, not the adipose
illusion of wisdom, not
the gravity of habit,
not – his shadow stands up in-
side me, the light kid I was,
we walk along as one past
the personal trainers at
the park and their wards who want
to be forever young and
without heavy memories
of how different that was.

Young Knowledge

2012-10-24T10:42:00.003+13:00

At Auckland Central Library, Friday 26 October, 5.30pm for 6pm start

A public conversation about Robin Hyde’s poem ‘Young Knowledge’ (1936?), with Murray Edmond, Michele Leggott, Mary Paul, Iain Sharp, and Ian Wedde.

Produced for the National Library of New Zealand’s series of events in the New Zealand Poet Laureate programme, in partnership with Auckland Central Library and the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc).

In 1936, the poet Robin Hyde travelled in the South Island, including parts of the West Coast explored by Charles Heaphy in 1846. Hyde wrote ‘Young Knowledge’ with the journals of Heaphy in mind. Her poem opens up an imaginative and political space between the stone memorial to the explorer in Nelson, and the pounamu of Arahura.

"It is a brilliant moment; the explorer refracted through his journal, standing between worlds and made over into poetry." Michele Leggott, from Introduction to Young Knowledge: The poems of Robin Hyde (Auckland University Press, 2003)

Murray Edmond is a poet, and has written about Hyde’s use of Charles Heaphy’s journal. Michele Leggott is a former New Zealand Poet Laureate, and the editor of Robin Hyde’s collected poems. Mary Paul is the editor of Your Unselfish Kindness (University of Otago Press, 2012), a critical edition of Robin Hyde’s autobiographical writings. Iain Sharp is a poet and the author of Heaphy (Auckland University Press, 2008), an illustrated biography of the explorer.

Shadow Stands Up #13

2012-09-26T13:30:00.000+12:00

No shadows for a while now,
nothing standing up, only
a warning about the word
‘trill’ came to mind, then a man
silhouetted against the
sky-line behind the sand-dunes
at St Clair, then the poet
Baxter came to mind, then the
man silhouetted against
the gusty southern sky was
gone, in spite of everything
I didn’t ask of language
birds were ‘trilling’ in the bush
we walked through to get back to
the car parked above the kelp
by the cold salt water baths –
Baxter couldn’t help it, he
always saw more than was there,
always the shadows of things
for instance the swirling kelp
at St Clair wasn’t seaweed,
it was a goddesses’s hair
or some such, a kraken with
its arms around his neck. Me,
I’m back where I started, on
Jervois Road walking past the
Herne Bay Dental Centre whose
signage reassures me it’s
because my smile means so much.

'The Place of Poetry'

2012-09-21T10:41:00.000+12:00

On Thursday 30 August, as part of the National Library’s Laureate programme, a poetry reading was organised in the wharewaka on Wellington’s waterfront. Its principal guest was Andrew Motion, who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009. In 2012 he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, a responsibility formerly shouldered by the American writer Bill Bryson. Andrew teaches poetry as Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, where one of the teaching themes is ‘the poetry of place’. The Wellington occasion, which included memorable readings by Bernadette Hall and Bill Manhire, had this theme in mind in its title, albeit in a tweaked form.

The title, ‘The Place of Poetry’, has a double meaning. Poetry is often associated with places; and it occupies a place in cultures and societies. Are these kinds of location related, and if so how?

Aboriginal song-lines, Horace’s Sabine farm, Wordsworth’s Lake District, Robert Burns’s Ayrshire, the burnt-off country of Blanche Baughan’s ‘Bush Section’, Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil, Pablo Neruda’s Chile, Judith Wright’s Australian ‘Blood Country’, Robin Hyde’s Island Bay, the Gallipoli of Paraire Tomoana’s ‘E pari rā’, Allen Curnow’s Lone Kauri Road, Kendrick Smithyman’s Tomarata, Mahmoud Darwish’s Galilee, the ‘my country’ of A.R. Ammons’s The Snow Poems, Ted Berrigan’s New York City, the place of exile in Bei Dao’s poems, the view from Jenny Bornholdt’s work-shed window, the ‘environs of the goat’ in Sophie Loizeau’s poems...

Some poems seem to have uttered their locations; those of us who know the poems find it hard to know the place without the poem. The experience of place mediated in this way recalls Georges Poulet’s description of reading, ‘I am a consciousness astonished by an existence which is not mine, but which I experience as though it were mine...’ And of course it’s in the place of language that the ‘astonished’ exchange of consciousness takes place.

This exchange can take many forms. A mountain that is one person’s geological feature may be uttered as another’s ancestor. An uttered landscape may ground a spirit of national resistance, a place where blood and language are spilled together. A poem may imbue a place with the vividness of the perpetual emigré’s fascinated gaze. It may become the topos around which an argument or idea is constructed. The poem may be recited over and over in order to call up a place that can no longer be lived in, or that can only be lived in through uttering or writing the poem. The poem may mark the place where whenua establishes an inseparable link between birth and earth. It may equally mark the place where language itself is the poem’s only location.

All these utterances lead to another sense in which poetry is placed: how and where is it placed in culture, what role and significance does it have? Is it an object of delectation in the literary salon, the anthem of popular uprising, the etherised patient of academic forensics, the repository of community memory, the lyric downloaded from iTunes, the challenge at a poetry slam? What kind of esteem does poetry command in the cultures of different societies? And how does this esteem – this cultural location – relate (or not) to that other meaning of ‘place’, to physical location? Mahmoud Darwish’s last public reading in Beirut early in 2008 filled a stadium with an estimated 25,000 people; in Bangladesh, the vast crowds that assemble at the Shaheed Minar on Language Martys’ Day every year on 21 February know by heart Kazi Nazrul Islam’s poem ‘Rebel’, a rallying-cry in the 1971 war of liberation. In these instances, the two ‘places’ of poetry appear almost indistinguishable; the ground you kiss is unimaginable without esteemed language.

My thanks to the poets who took part in ‘The Place of Poetry’, to the National Library for organising it, and to the audience that came along. I didn’t notice an outbreak of ground-kissing afterwards, but it was a great place to be on the night.

‘The Pleasures of Poetry’ at Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, May 2012

2012-08-15T11:03:00.000+12:00

The Auckland Writers & Readers Festival is New Zealand's largest literature event, running for five days every May. They have a dedicated two day schools programme and a three day public programme, which includes great stuff like Ian's talk.

In 2013 the Festival will run 15-19 May.

Sincere thanks to the Festival for providing this video. Their Vimeo channel has hours of wonderful talks and discussions.

The Auckland Writers and Readers Festival organisers asked me to do a session with high school students in May this year. At some point, ‘The Pleasures of Poetry’ appeared as a theme for it. I was happy with that – especially the plural ‘pleasures’, which opened up a pretty wide front.

But nothing is simple, even when – as is often the case with poetry – it looks that way. I soon realised I’d have to cut a fairly narrow channel through the topic, or risk bewildering the audience as much as I almost certainly would myself. I thought I’d go back to my memories of first encounters with poetry of some sort, and try to explain why the pleasures that began then have continued.

When my brother and I were little, our father ‘Chick’ Wedde used to row us around Waikawa Bay in the Marlborough Sounds singing ‘Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream – merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream!’ Without wishing to over-egg this memory, I can say, with my hand hovering a few millimetres above my heart, that the rhyming of ‘stream’ and ‘dream’ seemed to me to make those words flow together into the joining-up word ‘life’, producing a puzzle that stretched the meaning of the rowing-chant between nonsense and something very significant.

At the age of five or six, this is not what I thought; but it’s something like how I thought. Nor did I know, then, that this was a kind of ‘poetry’, but fairly soon afterwards I did begin to know that words organised like this were poetry.

Back then in the old kauri clinker rowboat, exactly where meaning came to rest along that stretch between nonsense and significance was pleasantly complicated by the sunshine and sea, the salty taste of splashes, sometimes by the speckled glitter of fish-scales on Chick’s forearms, and frequently by the rowing-exertion farts he let rip with obvious pleasure. It’s not possible, now, for me to separate the ‘pleasures of poetry’ from these apparently circumstantial factors, nor from the physical nature of the rhythm.

I got similar kinds of pleasure, though probably not as richly sensual, from the meaning-stretch in poems we were read when my twin brother Dave and I were learning to read for ourselves. Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ was one:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Of course, one of the pleasures of this poem, aside from the tantalising hunch that meaning and nonsense weren’t opposites, was the old story of a boy going forth to conquer his fear and winning his father’s praise.

Another favourite was also a Lewis Carroll poem, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’.

The sun was shining on the sea,
    Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
    The billows smooth and bright –
And this was odd, because it was
    The middle of the night.

The joke turns sinister when Carroll, with droll, laconic dramatic understatement, prefaces the paedophiliac Osteidaecide of juvenile oysters with the most famous nonsense in English poetry:

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
    “To talk of many things:
Of shoes – and ships – and sealing wax –
    Of cabbages – and kings –
And why the sea is boiling hot –
    And whether pigs have wings.”

The shudder of pleasure I got from hearing, and then reading, this poem had as much to do with the jokes as with the warning about accepting beach-walk invitations from strangers; with the nonsense as with the sense. What made it work – what made the pleasure special – was the way sense and nonsense, fun and danger, jokes and horror, played together in the poem.

Quite a few years later, when I was about nine or ten, I completely bewildered myself by obsessively reading Robert Browning’s incomprehensible historical narrative poem ‘Sordello’, which I found by accident in a padded, leather-bound 1907 edition whose binding was leaking its mysterious, woolly stuffing, and whose title page had my grandfather’s name, A.A. Wedde, written on it in fading, elegant handwriting. The pleasure of this doomed enterprise came down to a couple of simple factors anticipated in my encounters with Lewis Carroll. Firstly, I knew nothing about the Italian history in the poem, let alone what Browning was making, or hoping to make, of it; the poem might as well have been about ‘cabbages and kings’ as about Guelphs and Ghibellines; it was non-sense. But secondly, there was an irresistable undertow of significant meaning whose codes I wouldn’t crack simply by finding out who exactly the ‘cabbages’ and ‘kings’ were and what they’d been up to back then. Rather, the pleasurable sense of meaning that kept me reading was in the space between non-sense and something that could be easily explained away as ‘facts’. The non-sense was intriguing but ultimately a blind alley; the explanation of who Sordello was and what he was actually doing was only interesting in the limited way that facts are interesting. What was pleasurable was found in the gap between the two. I came to think quite early on that this was where poetry belonged and where the pleasures of poetry were found. Around sixty years later I still find this to be so.

Another very special pleasure on the day of the Festival event last May was the readings by two poets in the high school audience, which you can hear if you watch the video. There were about 500 students in the audience, and their poets Ben and Hamish got huge applause.

Shadow Stands Up #12

2012-07-30T14:02:00.000+12:00

Last Friday was National Poetry Day and I was invited to take part in the celebration organised by Tony Chad at the Upper Hutt Public Library. I like going to events organised around community centres that are outside or on the edges of larger metropolitan organisations. They’re usually friendly, without the protocol complications of large bureaucracies, and, not least, their hospitality usually knocks the socks off high-end catering consisting of very small things on toothpicks.

Friday night at Upper Hutt was no exception. Tony, a marvellously sociable and at-ease MC and organiser, and himself a poet and musician (he plays in a Celtic band), introduced the mayor of Upper Hutt, Wayne Guppy, who was on a busy round of functions that night but took time to welcome the local poets, and to greet many people he obviously knew by name. In May this year the national news media reported that Mayor Guppy’s Council had rejected a pay rise; its unanimity in response to tough times wasn’t the national norm. I get email news from environmental action groups about the Council’s river restoration programmes; when we lived in Wellington I used to spend a fair amount of time in the hills and rivers around the Hutt catchment.

In the back of my mind is a cultural history that associates Hutt Valley High with the legendary art teacher, artist, and designer James Coe, whose revolutionary art classes from 1945 to 1959 included Bill Culbert as one of several gifted students; Bill is representing New Zealand at the Venice Biennale in 2013. The high school may also take some responsibility for producing writers including Damien Wilkins, Lloyd Jones, and Nigel Cox, not to mention the Nobel Prize winner Alan McDiarmid. Right now it’s the Hutt Valley alumnus Nick Willis who’s in the news; at this time of writing he’s one of New Zealand’s best Olympic medal prospects.

The National Poetry Day evening included a poetry competition around the theme of Upper Hutt as a gateway to the hills, bush, and rivers that partially encircle the city. Ten poets read poems variously extolling the beauties of this place, fearing for its future, or lamenting the harsh treatment it had received in the past. The poems were judged by an audience ballot; one poet had submitted the first poem she’d ever written – partly in response to an encounter with Persian Sufi poetry and the tradition of colour-coding found there. Her poem won the popular choice award, and her children applauded loudly.

In the breaks between these readings, the presentations, and my own contributions, people drank the plentiful supply of very good wine, helped themselves to a generous spread, and talked a lot. Just beyond the function area, the library’s stacks revealed a magnificent poetry collection. I can’t think of a better place to have been on the night.

Through spring-green leaves on the tree
outside our place I can see
the green Link bus putter past
Cartune Auto, in Albert
Park graduates are blooming
in their extravagant silks,
Cook Island fafafine
bedecked with flowers are singing
outside the student food-court
at the university,
my spring-time cough is yelping
like an excited young pup,
likening, get over it,
I can’t, 1968,
the year I packed up and went
in search of the life I was
just going to go on having
the time of my life with,
and here I am having it
now, just look at those flowers,
the way I remember them.

Shadow Stands Up #11

2012-07-09T09:50:00.001+12:00

I’ve just read 296 poems by young poets in New Zealand, for the annual New Zealand High School Poetry Competition. This was an amazing experience, perhaps at the ethnographic margin of reading. The quality of the work was uneven if judged by standard measures of correct writing, and the poems’ default mode was probably personal, anecdotal lyrics addressing a few familiar themes; but what was much more important and interesting was the variety of ways in which these poems were uttered, and at the same time their collective energy, which was overwhelming. It would be silly to claim I encountered some kind of aggregated self here, and equally silly to claim that each poet had a totally distinctive ‘voice’, though there were some marvellous, smart, and original poems in the pile. We speak and write using comprehensive common languages and, within those, in argots and accents that identify us tribally; what distinguishes our individual utterance involves variation rather than uniqueness. The effect of reading so many poems by poets within an age-span of thirteen to seventeen was of being within a dense texture, a layering of variations – a complex social chord; or, as Roland Barthes would have described it half a century ago, reminding us of the etymology of ‘Text’, a woven fabric, a textile. Of course I’m not suggesting that there is a single tribal language for New Zealand high school poets, god forbid: I encountered a great many interlocking variations within the span of English, and even within the span of English as a second language. Rather, what I think I was experiencing was a kind of poetic socio-biology, a situation in which the tensions between diverse tribals and distinct individuals generated extraordinary energy.

I had to choose ten distinct threads from this interweaving of poems, and from that ten a single winner. These are the rules of the competition, which is, after all, a competition; which admirably aims to encourage young poets to write, to enter their poems in the competition, and perhaps to experience the satisfaction and encouragement of making the short list or winning. I think the short listed poems I’ve selected are terrific, and though there could have been other winners chosen, I also think the winning poem is a good one. Pulling these threads out of the collective text does highlight their distinctions, and I hope other readers will enjoy them on that basis; but I was lucky enough to encounter these individuals first-off within a larger, denser, richly textured, highly-strung, sometimes chaotic energy fabric. The ethnographer in me observed this ritualised face-off between cultural loyalty and individual subversion. Then I could look at the best results. That was a special, slightly illicit pleasure, and a privilege.

A response

2012-06-06T12:10:00.000+12:00

A response from Sam Sampson to "Shadow Stands Up #10".

Just read your 'Shadow Stands Up #10'. What a great read. The Ashbery translation of Rimbaud's Illuminations is up there on my reading list, not just for the translation, but Ashbery's introduction. His Selected Prose, edited by Eugene Richie is, to my mind, essential reading for the Ashbery take on an array of writers and artists.

I was interested in your views regarding Goldsmith, and additionally, Perloff's support of the appropriation model. I like Goldsmith and think his uncreative model is, if used at the initial compositional stage a way to reinvent (maybe even reinvigorate?) the subjective, rather than shut it down. His poetry is boring (as he himself admits) but his conceptual framework is not, and does a lot to dismantle the overt subjective nature of what many believe is 'personal' poetry. I see Goldsmith as being poetry's equivalent of Richard Dawkins. The logic is sound, the intellect and argumentation hard to fault, but the absolutism can tend toward a form of reductionism. By this, I mean there's a directive toward a categorical imperative, the Goldsmith credo: select all / copy / paste, with his proviso: ‘the secret’... suppression of self-expression is impossible.

For me, as liberating as it sounds, and it is liberating – to devolve the self not just from its poetic centre but cut the reflexive self from the poetic – it still seems a somewhat circular argument. The imagination, and conscious memory, is present, and ever prescient – it's just to what degree you want to remix / repurpose / or reframe the final product. I also can't see how copying a pre-existing text could not be original. The Goldsmith body of works are original, and are sui generis... it’s just the conceptual framework has done most, if not all of the work, and is more tangible than the finished product.

I think the more important point relayed by Goldsmith and Perloff, via the artist Brion Gysin (who in 1959 claimed writing was 50 years behind painting) is the question of whether writing is still catching up to the art world? Their premise, that in the art world, the avant-garde has been mainstream and innovation and risk-taking consistently rewarded. While in spite of the successes of modernism, literature has remained on two parallel tracks, the mainstream and the avant-garde, with the two rarely intersecting. Now, both Goldsmith and Perloff believe the two have unexpectedly (and fantastically) collided through the conditions of a technology-driven digital culture.

Having a foot in both camps, working as much with visual artists as writers, this seems to me an important distinction and also a correct observation. I’m just not convinced, that ultimately, digital culture will reframe the writer-self, or reprogramme the reader-self. The fact is, words are not like paint or musical notation, however language is moved, cut, sampled... etc. it still rubs up against actuality at every point, and as Samuel Beckett would say, is ‘tainted’.

It may be old fashion late-modernism, but the meanderings of Beckett still hold a conundrum for the writer today, as Rimbaud’s did, and still do. Beckett, is closer to the Rimbaud you mention, and Ashbery’s assertion, that for Rimbaud, ‘the self is obsolete’ reminds me of Beckett’s struggle ‘to create a work that is totally autonomous, since it refers to nothing but itself’... he goes on... ‘Is literature alone to be left behind on that old, foul road long ago abandoned by music and painting?... Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of word surface should not be dissolved...?'

iii

Personally, I’m excited by, and use both Goldsmith’s and Perloff’s mixed model of ‘moving information’... this includes: appropriation, elaborate constraint, visual and sound composition, and a reliance on intertextuality. When asked in 2010 about my own practice, I tended toward this mixed model – trying to find ways out of the ‘plain language loop’.

(here's a selection from the 2010 interview text below):

'Although appropriative writing and list poems intrigue me, I’m more interested in striking up a conversation, taking another writer’s words as departure points, whether that includes breaking them up to create rhythmic tension, or responding to the words in the writer’s mode through a rearrangement of their words.

The way the lines are arranged on the page (I’ve subsequently discovered) have a number of parallels with Mallarmé. Cole Swensen talks of Mallarmé’s preface to 'Un Coup de dés', where he states: “nothing new except a certain distribution of space made within the reading.” Swensen also talks of his inherent move towards a fusion of sequential perception and simultaneous perception, to fully engage the eye and ear, as a result pushing poetry in two directions – toward visual art and toward musical performance. I like this distinction, how the physicality of the language – this chopped nervousness, how the line is broken, the spatial repetitions, cause and effect, conflict and displacement – is essential to how the poem is laid out. I feel some of my longer works allow the reader to access the poem at many different points, but once inside the poem, the sonic components, whether it’s a single word filling a gap, or a vowel or half-rhyme sitting directly below a corresponding sound structure are complete in themselves – the idea of a beginning or end neither here nor there. This is not to say I felt poetry (my poetry especially) should ever purely be of the sound poetry tradition. I felt meaning inherently tied at the initial compositional stage, but this structure could be extended, until in some cases only a shimmer of the original meaning was left behind. I always hoped (if interested) the reader would work to solve conundrums, to supply transitions, to make out of a haphazard assortment of building materials, a habitable dwelling.’

As with your Rimbaud spectre, I recently had a similar experience while reading Keats’s ‘Hyperion’. A sense of how sincerely modern Keats could be. How the Keatsian aestheticism and intellect seemed prescient, and (as you say) ready to jab at the surface of the modern...‘the horizon in noise’. It seems Michael Parekowhai was also inspired by John Keats, and his sonnet – 'On first looking into Chapman’s Homer' – with its intimations of departure and return. Parekowhai borrowing the title for his 2011 show at the Venice Biennale, allegedly to give viewers another entry point into his work, and potentially, a contemporary entry point. One line, ‘He star'd at the Pacific’, seemed especially poignant, how it talked to Parekowhai ‘about the positional relationship, of standing on a peak in Darien (Panama), looking across the Pacific in awe of the possibilities – and if they could see that far, they'd see us looking back at them.’

Rimbaud, Ashbery, Keats, your poem... I agree there is the tidal wash, the back and forth; the present recreating the past, but also realigning the past in the present moment. I also think, the resolute vanguardism of Perloff’s (and Goldsmith’s) neomodernist progressive time (as you call it) cannot, and hasn't come ex nihilo, they are also in the wash; reframing, investing in what they believe to be the future of poetry.

Thanks once again for a thought provoking and interesting read.

p.s. a poem of collective memory?

Erasure

history in a nearby tree
isolated sightings ~~(aligned by absence): huia extinct~~

Shadow Stands Up #10

2012-05-28T10:18:00.000+12:00

In the Preface to his wonderful 2011 translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, John Ashbery provides a blurb quote that’s already gone viral: ‘If we are absolutely modern—and we are—it's because Rimbaud commanded us to be.’ Many Rimbaud acolytes including Patti Smith long ago adopted a credo rather like Ashbery’s, but more often than not with an exotic, bohemian line back to 1870s Paris and the radical Cercle des poètes Zutiques who met at the aptly named L'Hôtel des Étrangers where Rimbaud had a third-floor room in late 1871.

Discipleship such as Smith’s tends to be inflected by the decadent effrontery of Rimbaud’s seventeen year-old behaviour and appearance – that sticky thatch of hair, the pale, icy eyes, dishevelled dandyism, pallor, bi-sexuality. This emphasis on Rimbaud’s ‘rebellious’ youthful persona between 1869 and 1875, the period in which we can date all the poems we know about – tends to generate a romanticised reading of the poems that stresses their subjectivity: their introspection, their ‘personal voice’, their lyric emotion. But Rimbaud’s training was in strict Latin verse forms (he won prizes at school); as I noted in a previous blog, he proclaimed his loyalty to the classicism of Racine, and his famous pronouncement ‘je est un autre’ (I is somebody else) is enacted through many of the self-abjecting poems leading up to A Season in Hell (1873), most notably perhaps in ‘Drunken Boat’. He wrote to his mentor Georges Izambard, ‘subjective poetry will always be horribly cloying’. The ‘disordering of all the senses’ that he advocated (misrepresented in the hallucinating 1960s) came with the rider ‘reasoned’. The Season in Hell poems seem to renounce this early manifesto – but Rimbaud’s intense struggle to think about the presence or abjection of the self in what he was writing continued into the Illuminations. What we now encounter is a profusion of selves and points-of-view, and a variety of ways of locating (and distancing) them; much of the poetry’s extraordinary energy comes from this rather than from what Frank O’Hara meant when he wrote something like, ‘Subject matter, how I hate it.’

Then, to a modern reader, it’s as though Rimbaud transported his self from an imaginative geography to a physical one – to Ethiopa, for example, whence he wrote not poems but letters, mostly signed straightforwardly ‘Rimbaud’, as if he’d finally got that straight. It’s as though, in writing the poems, he’d produced a mechanism that made the struggle with subjectivity redundant; he stepped through the mirror of the reflexive self and went elsewhere. Job done, he debouched for Djbouti. Thank god he was adventurous (not to mention in need of an income); even, perhaps, thank god the selfhood-ennui he struggled with in his poems wasn’t the banal product of coddled academic tenure.

It’s clear that Ashbery the poet-translator isn’t particularly interested in Rimbaud’s appearance or behaviour, less still in the mythology of romantic rebellion associated with his poetry – its lyric temperature. In his Preface he writes that, for Rimbaud, ‘the self is obsolete’. It’s also clear, however, that Ashbery doesn’t intend this to mean anything as absolute as, for example, the American Kenneth Goldsmith’s dogmatising in Uncreative Writing (2011) of such writing strategies as those used, or played with perhaps, by writers such as the wonderful Georges Perec. Perec, whose ‘story-making machine’ generated Life: A User’s Manual, and whose agonising exploration of traumatised memory produced the recast selves of W, or The Memory of Childhood, wouldn’t make it past Goldsmith’s border control, which turns back any non pre-existing, any ‘original’ text. In many ways, it’s writers such as Perec associated with the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle – workshop of potential literature) who explain what Ashbery means when he says that we are modern because Rimbaud commanded us to be.

The prolific American scholar and polemicist Marjorie Perloff, emerita Professor at Stanford University in New York, has been an influential advocate for a modernist trajectory of poetry whose sources run from Rimbaud and into America through Gertrude Stein, and subsequently poets including Susan Howe and Ron Silliman associated with magazines such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in the 1970s. Her latest book, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (2010) moves her polemic in favour of ‘appropriation, elaborate constraint, visual and sound composition, and reliance on intertextuality’ much closer to Goldsmith’s resolute rejection of original writing – of inventio as Perloff characterises it, by which I assume she means the rhetorical strategies linking personal experience to argument, rather than flights of fancy or ‘inventions’.

It’s about here that I feel the stretch from Rimbaud beginning to tear free of Perloff’s narrative. What Ashbery credits as Rimbaud’s push into the modern certainly incorporates the inventio that Perloff, and more emphatically Goldsmith, now claim to reject. But inventio was there the day I walked along Cox’s Bay creek and sensed some kind of my-self under a murky transparency on which the tidal junk of time washed in and out, and which might be pierced at any moment by – what, memory? Another presence? Arthur Rimbaud? The resolute vanguardism of Perloff’s (and Goldsmith’s) neo-modernist progressive time neglects the tidal, which also washes back out; which washes back and forth, not just onward.

There he was, all right, the seven/seventeen/one-hundred and thirty-one year-old poet, beady-eyed and on the look-out, ready to jab at the surface of the modern.

Kingfisher on a branch
above the Cox’s Bay creek
and a menacing heron
stalking the shallows below –
their shadow stands up over
the small fry in the murky
historical tide that flows
back up the channel to where
storm-water drains disgorge junk,
stains of domesticity,
oily rejectamenta
of home-making, the dreamy
rainbows of effluent hope
swirling in the same spring-time
sunshine that casts the shadows
of twiggy trees on the grass
beside the water, as if
we were all dazzled under
the surface of something we
can’t seem to see past but think
we remember what’s up there,
those shadows, waiting for us?

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.