Jan Kemp: Dancing Heart (2025)

Jan Kemp: Dancing Heart (2025)

Introduction
Jan Kemp: Dancing Heart: New and Selected Poems 1968–2024

Jan Kemp (1949- )

It was always going to be a delicate matter to try to make a balanced selection from the collected poetical works of an old friend.

I’ve known Jan Kemp now for more than 25 years. We worked together on the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive from 2002-2004, and then again on the three audio / text anthologies of New Zealand Poets in Performance published by Auckland University Press between 2006 and 2008.

I’ve admired her work as a poet for far longer than that, though. As I look at my set of her books to date, including all nine of her poetry collections, published between 1976 and 2020, they seem like a time capsule of New Zealand writing over the past five decades.

Perhaps the easiest thing would simply be to list them here:

1. Against the Softness of Woman. Dunedin: Caveman Press, 1976.

2. Diamonds and Gravel. Wellington: Hampson Hunt, 1979.

3. The Other Hemisphere. Springwood, NSW: Butterfly Books / Auckland: Brick Row Publishing, 1991 / Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1992.

4. The Sky’s Enormous Jug – love poems old and new. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2001.

5. Only One Angel. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2001.

6. Dante’s Heaven. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2006.

7. Voicetracks: Poems 2002-2012. Auckland: Puriri Press / Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2012.

8. Tripstones: A Selection of Poems. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2020.

9. Black Ice & the Love Planet: Poems 2012-2019 / Glatteis & der Planet der Liebe: Gedichte 2012-2019. Trans. Susanne Opfermann & Helmbrecht Breinig. Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2020.

Each one of these books is a thing of beauty. They speak to the typefaces and design features of a particular epoch: the ampersands and back-slashes of the 1970s, the florid exuberance of the early 2000s.

I suppose if I had to play favourites, it would have to be for the meticulously designed and produced volumes created by John Denny at the Puriri Press in Auckland. The Sky’s Enormous Jug, with its delicate hand-binding and sumptuous illustrations, is a particular pleasure to leaf through. Dante’s Heaven, too, is a wonderful piece of book-art.

I had to make some hard decisions early in the selection process. The first had to do with foreign languages.

Dante’s Heaven, for instance, exists in several forms. Jan and her husband Dr Dieter Riemenschneider, to whom so many of her books are dedicated, have a particular interest in poetic translation, and this book has now appeared in German and Italian dual-text editions:

• Dante Down Under / Gedichte aus Aotearoa/Neuseeland. 2006. Trans. Dieter Riemenschneider. Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2017.

• Dante’s Heaven / Il Cielo di Dante. 2006. Trans. Aldo Magagnino. Poggio Imperiale: Edizioni del Poggio, 2017.

Jan and Dieter also worked together on an important anthology of contemporary New Zealand poetry for German readers:

• Wildes Licht: Poems / Gedichte aus Aotearoa Neuseeland (English-German). Ed. & trans. Dieter Riemenschneider. Kronberg: Tranzlit, 2010.

So it’s no anomaly that Jan’s latest collection, Black Ice & the Love Planet (2020), was actually published in a dual-text English-German edition. Most of the poems there were translated by Susanne Opfermann and Helmbrecht Breinig, but a few of them were originally composed in German.

All of this is clearly an important part of her practice as a writer, and not something that should be overlooked even in a selected poems, but it is a little difficult to do justice to it in so limited a compass. Accordingly, I’ve included only one poem here of the several she’s written in German and subsequently transmuted into English. It is, however, a crucial one: “Stolpersteine / Tripstones,” from the volume Voicetracks.

The second difficult decision I had to make had to do with the overall structure of some of these collections: once again, Dante’s Heaven is the best example.

The book as a whole plays with the notion that Dante’s Mount Purgatory, located at the precise opposite side of the globe from his Inferno, which the poet enters in the Northern Hemisphere, might well be imagined to be in New Zealand.

Doing justice to such an extended metaphor in a book such as this would be difficult. Also, given that Dante’s Heaven itself already expresses it fully, what would be the point?

I’ve therefore, in the present selection, stressed the individual lyric voice over the more extended sequences and technical experiments contained in many of Jan’s earlier collections.

My idea from the beginning was not so much to exhaust the possibilities of the poetry Jan has written and published to date, as to provide a sampler which could do double duty by inspiring readers to go back to the original volumes.

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Your cats are coloured light-marmalade
like your terracotta terrace Buddha bust.

We must get it a plinth, set it
into the reeds to sit, Sphinx-still,

high above the pink & white-walled
garden lotus pond, watching you.

Jan has handled this matter of – at least temporarily – ceding control over her poetic back-catalogue with her usual consummate grace.

The other day she did write to me, though, to say:

Jack dear, might you insert for Werner Jaksch under the title of the Plinth for a Buddha poem – I forgot it! Werner is my German ‘son’, now 62, whom I met in Hong Kong when he was 22 ... He’ll be so pleased you chose it. Happy Sunday to you.
Ngā mihi nui
Jan

Naturally I was happy to oblige. It’s interesting, though. Nothing about the poem demands any knowledge of its dedicatee. As a confirmed ailurophile myself, I was of course happy to see the reference to the “light-marmalade” cats alongside the “terracotta terrace Buddha bust,” but the reason I included it was because it seems to me an almost perfect lyric.

The voice is relaxed, conversational, adroitly concealing the close attention which must have been paid to such felicities of phrasing as “terracotta terrace” and “Buddha bust”. The picture it paints is idyllic, like a Chinese lyric from the T’ang era, but it’s still very much of our own time.

I like the poem a lot, in other words. It doesn’t hurt that one of our own beloved cat companions rests under a similar statue of Buddha under a small home-made mosaic out in our own backyard.

But it is always salutary to be reminded of the backstory and context of the poems which poets send out into the world.

Is it their job there to make new friends for the writer? No doubt. But it’s also, perhaps primarily, to offer new possibilities for perception to the reader. The last poem in the present selection, for instance, “Leftie”, speaks very much to my own feeling of perplexity at the world’s woes and our inability to influence – let alone solve them.

Say not the struggle naught availeth ... We acknowledge our perplexities in order to surmount them. And, if it’s to live, your work does have to end up belonging to others.

Jan has understood this, and her lifetime of poetry writing, reading, performing and teaching has – in my view at least – resulted in a truly wonderful body of work, which I believe richly deserves to catch fire in the minds of new readers as well as the memories of already established fans.

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(23/10-29/11/24)

“Introduction.” In Jan Kemp: Dancing Heart: New and Selected Poems.
Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2025. xiii-xvi.

[1203 wds]


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