The Little Ache (2022)

Tracey Slaughter, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2022 (March 2022)

Reviews:

Ian Wedde

Ian Wedde. The Little Ache – a German notebook. ISBN 978-177656-426-2. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2021. RRP $NZ30. 144 pp.

Ian Wedde: The Little Ache – a German notebook (2021)

The thing to ask about a burlesqued wink or a mock sheep raid is not what their ontological status is. It is the same as that of rocks on the one hand and dreams on the other – they are things of this world.

The quote comes from anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s famous essay ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.’ Or rather, it comes from the notes at the end of Ian Wedde’s latest volume of poems. In the poem itself, he includes only the last 16 words, which I’ve italicised. Wedde explains the passage as follows:

The term ‘thick description’ … became, Geertz wrote … ‘a position and a slogan I have been living with since.’ I have gone on reading and admiring these essays for many years and want to acknowledge that the concept of ‘thick description’ was my passport to the state of mind I hoped this book would occupy, where ghosts could be encountered in the everyday, material world, and in the phantom fragments of language which seemed to collate its meanings. [131]

There are, of course, other names for this state of mind: in a fictional context one might refer to it as ‘Magic Realism.’ But is that what Wedde means by his own methods of ‘thick description’? What exactly is it, for a start? Another of Wedde’s Geertz quotes may be helpful here:

Believing … that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. [133]

So, for example, in poem 51, Wedde sees Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet Ran, who died in Moscow in 1963, sitting at a German café in 2014, and carefully tabulating his reactions to:

the perfect pitch of exile
a tone found somewhere in the chord combining
the demonstrators over at Wienerstraße
the expostulations of his Turkish companions
and the voice of the German coffee commentator
on the café’s big screen
during the quarter-final
between German and France. [86-87]

Shades of Geertz’s famous example of the need to account for the difference between a twitch and a wink (“as anyone unfortunate enough to have had the first taken for the second knows”)! Geertz’s essay goes on to add a third actor who chooses to parody the others’ winks, and whose behaviour is therefore even more culturally layered and needful of interpretation than theirs.

Wedde, a New Zealander in temporary exile from his native land, and eagerly trying to discover tendrils of ancestry in Germany, imagines – or sees (need the apparition of a ghost always be taken as pure imagination?) – the author of the epic Human Landscapes from My Country carefully modulating his own way through all these various voices and layers of cultural entanglement.

On the surface, then, Wedde’s book – which might otherwise be taken as a simple amalgam of travel notes and genealogical jottings – is actually something far more ambitious: an attempt to decode of the levels of significance to be encountered by someone of his complex background in an already immensely overwritten cultural matrix.

He has certain advantages, mind you. Some of his not-too-distant ancestors were themselves poets – one had a few poems set to music by Brahms, another was famed as ‘the founder of Plattdüütsch dialect literature’ – so their works can be interrogated with this concept of distant kinship in mind. With these advantages, however, come risks:

it’s the ghost of a smile I see
when I read what Joseph Blos thought
of Johannes Wedde’s poems
which though ‘often very beautiful
didn’t sink in with the wider public
on account of the scholarly ballast
with which they were packed’. [45]

There’s a certain amount of ‘scholarly ballast’ in this Wedde book, too: 10 pages of notes and another 3 of acknowledgments. Personally I’m inclined to think that there should be more notes, not fewer – not all of the German tags and quotations, most of them admittedly explained in the context of the poems they adorn, are actually translated, let alone referenced. That may not be every reader’s view, however.

If there is a universal applicability to be sought in Ian Wedde’s complex web of encounters and experiences during his Berlin residency, I suppose that it comes by analogy rather than directly. Speaking personally, I find his struggles with communication in a strange land quite poignant, given my own halting German.

However, Wedde certainly gives as good as he gets to an arrogant librarian in poem 53:

Failing to find it in the loan stacks
I said to the narcissist of small differences
as he glared at this Ausländer
across his Ausgabeort barrier
Ich kann den Buch nicht finden
at which
having got it
he pushed the book against my chest
and jeered
Hier ist der Buch!

Books are das not der [89]

Given that this particular book – the second volume of Johannes Wedde’s Collected Works – had not been taken out for 111 years, he feels (not unreasonably) justified in unleashing the full force of his poetic fury against ‘the thick-browed bureaucratic Nationalismus’ of this ‘bored pedant.’

Exile and displacement are subjects much on our minds at present. 2013-14, when most of these poems were written, seems now like a distant golden age, when free travel was still permitted (to holders of the right passports, that is), and the refugee crisis in Europe – though dire – was not yet catastrophic.

There are echoes of these things – the rise of extreme nationalism in Europe, for instance – in some of the poems, but it’s to Wedde’s credit that he hasn’t allowed second thoughts to distort the clear mirror of this particular experience.

This book appears 50 years after his first, Homage to Matisse (1971). What a career it’s been! Wedde has always been one of the most internationally focussed of New Zealand poets (witness his translations from Arabic poet Mahmoud Darwish, also published in the early 1970s).

There’s a (much-quoted) phrase in Anna Akhmatova’s Poem without a Hero: “the bitter air of exile.” Wedde knows better than to borrow such an expression for his own voluntary sojourn abroad, his own constituting merely a “little ache.” These letters from exile do, nevertheless, remind me of their distant prototypes, Ovid’s Sad Poems and Letters from Pontus, written from his own place of official banishment on the shores of the Black Sea to the centre of culture in Rome.

•

(1-3/8/21)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2022. ISBN 978-1-991151-11-7 (March 2022): 353-56.

[1104 wds]


Joanna Forsberg: Ian Wedde with Pete


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Mezzaluna (2021)

Tracey Slaughter, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2021 (March 2021)

Reviews:

Michele Leggott

Michele Leggott. Mezzaluna: Selected Poems. Auckland University Press, 2020. RRP $35. 216 pp.

Michele Leggott: Mezzaluna: Selected Poems (2020)

One of my students wrote an essay for our Creative Nonfiction course discussing the use of the senses in the work of two prose writers. The first she discussed, a local blogger and essayist, turned out to rely almost exclusively on visual cues: everything depended on colours, shapes, and things one could see. The second, an international memoirist and cultural commentator, was far more variable in her use of all five senses: touch, taste, sight, scent and hearing — almost (in Sigmund Freud’s phrase) polymorphously perverse in her sensuous appreciation of the world around her. That student was blind.

The relevance of this anecdote to Michele Leggott’s comprehensive selection from more than 30 years of her poetry is not as simple as it might appear. Yes, Michele is blind. Macular degeneration has gradually robbed her of her sight. Yes, she is one of the most acutely sensory of contemporary poets: from her very first book, Like This? (1988), to her latest, Vanishing Points (2017), reviewers and critics have commented on her tendency to restate abstractions in concrete terms.

If there’s a paradox there, it revealed itself early on. When you think of an oeuvre that includes Journey to Portugal (2007), a sumptuous limited edition of poems accompanied by hand-made Gretchen Albrecht collages, as well as a series of books whose shape, size and aesthetic characteristics show an obsessive concern with detail more common to workers in the visual arts, it’s clear that — for Michele — poetry is a thing which transcends any narrow formal definitions of ‘for the page’ or ‘for the voice’. The present book is no exception. If I had to declare a theme in any overview of Michele Leggott’s protean poetic project over the past 30 years, it would be dualities. The North American / New Zealand double focus displayed by the simultaneous publication of her selected poems in both places is nothing new in her work. When she returned to this country in 1985, having completed a doctorate in Canada on the work of American poet Louis Zukofsky, it was apparent at once that she’d imbibed a good deal of his intensely compressed aesthetics in the process. If not a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, she was at any rate already one whose relation to contemporary poetics as well as poetic practice was intimate and assured.

That first book, Like This?, won a number of awards, not least the International PEN First Book of Poetry award. It was both accessible and scholarly. When I say that her poetry embraces dualities, it’s important to stress that I don’t mean dichotomies: it’s never either/or in Michele’s work — always both/and.

The first and most irritating label her creative work to date has had to endure is ‘academic poetry’. Those of us who happen to work in the tertiary-education industry — in this country, at any rate — have to get used to complaints about living in ‘ivory towers’ and a supposed preoccupation with poetics over everyday life, style over substance, experimentation over mainstream accessibility . . .The only real answer to such accusations is the quality and durability of the work in question. Michele’s poetry has always seemed to me to constitute the perfect answer to this particular bugbear.

Her third book, DIA, succeeded in combining her academic interests in recuperating the voices of neglected local women writers with the formalist techniques she’d picked up from a battery of writers, local and international, Zukofsky, Ian Wedde, Susan Howe, and a host of others. The result was a tour-de-force of stunning visual design combined with sensuous imagery — the kissing lips of ‘Micromelismata’ being the most famous of many examples. There were so many levels on which one could read these poems that they almost defied criticism. Above all, though, there’s nothing particularly ‘ivory tower’ about pointing out examples of gender discrimination past and present.

The flexible instrument of Michele’s intellectual interest in such ‘lost voices’ — whether they belonged to Ursula Bethell, Eileen Duggan, Iris Guiver Wilkinson (Robin Hyde), or (more recently) Alan Brunton and Emily Harris — has informed her poetry ever since, but also resulted in a series of essays and editions of their work which have assisted in rewriting the map of New Zealand letters.

As the first National Library-appointed New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2009, Michele started to compose a series of poems meant more for the ear than the eye — collected in Mirabile Dictu (2009) and Heartland (2014): both well sampled from in the present volume. Once again, though, she confounded expectations of more in the same vein with her latest book Vanishing Points, a collection of prose poems and lineated pieces designed to engage more systematically than ever before with history itself: her own, as in her alternate-past piece about her mother’s painting career, ‘Self-Portrait: Still Life. A Family Story’ (alas, not included here), and New Zealand’s, in ‘The Fascicles’ and ‘Emily and Her Sisters’ (both included in full).

The very last poem in the book, a hitherto uncollected piece called ‘the wedding party’ (first published in Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2019) continues this theme with its imagery drawn from the Taranaki war of the 1860s, and its effortless shifting from Māori to English to Latin (intentionally garbled for safe transmission by government spies).

Thirty years on, Michele Leggott’s work continues to give ‘academic writing’ a good name. Why not read a poet so attentive to sources; to the sound and texture of the past; to the sensuous realities of beach, sun, sand which are our heritage in these islands; to the aesthetic patterning as well as the careful sounding out of words; to the dark which we come from — and return to — and the light which we try to shed while we’re here? I can’t think of a good reason. Can you?

•

Original text:

Like This?

Michele Leggott. Mezzaluna: Selected Poems. ISBN 978-0-8195-7907-2. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2020. RRP $US18.95. 216 pp.

Michele Leggott. Mezzaluna: Selected Poems. ISBN 9-781-86940-907-4. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2020. RRP $NZ 35. 216 pp.

Michele Leggott: Mezzaluna: Selected Poems (2020)

One of my students wrote an essay discussing the use of the senses in the work of two prose writers for our Creative Nonfiction course here at Massey. The first she discussed, a local blogger and essayist, turned out to rely almost exclusively on visual cues: everything depended on colours, shapes, and things one could see. The second, an international memoirist and cultural commentator, was far more variable in her use of all five senses: touch, taste, sight, scent, and hearing – almost (in Sigmund Freud’s phrase) polymorphously perverse in her sensuous appreciation of the world around her.

That student was blind.

The relevance of this anecdote to Michele Leggott’s comprehensive selection from more than thirty years of her poetry is not as simple as it might appear. Yes, Michele is blind. Macular degeneration has gradually robbed her of her sight over a period of decades. Yes, she is one of the most acutely sensory of contemporary poets: from her very first book, Like This? (1988) to her latest, Vanishing Points (2017) reviewers and critics have commented on her tendency to restate abstractions in concrete terms.

I recall an old essay of Michele’s on Robert Duncan where she began by remarking how the recurrence of a certain term in his poems which sounded a bit like the name of the dog next door made the latter come barking up to the fence on a regular basis throughout the summer – rather like the repetition of the word ‘caddy’ which attracts poor Benjy Compson to the fence of a neighbouring golf-course, thus prompting the long reverie about his lost sister Caddie which opens William Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury.

If there’s a paradox there, it revealed itself early on. When you think of an oeuvre which includes a sumptuous limited edition of poems accompanied by hand-made Gretchen Albrecht collages, Journey to Portugal (2007), as well as a series of books whose shape, size, and aesthetic characteristics show an obsessive concern with detail more common to workers in the visual arts, it’s clear that – for Michele – poetry is a thing which transcends any narrow formal definitions of ‘for the page’ or ‘for the voice.’

The present book is no exception. I happen to be privileged to own copies of both the American and New Zealand editions of Mezzaluna. Strange to say, given they have the same pagination and essential layout, the two books look quite different. The American edition uses thistledown to divide up the various sections, as well as adorning the front cover. The New Zealand edition uses long meandering riverine shapes to achieve the same object.

I guess if I had to declare a theme in any overview I’d care to provide of Michele Leggott’s protean poetic project over the past thirty years, it would be dualities. This North American / New Zealand double focus is nothing new in her work. When she returned to this country in 1985, having completed a Doctorate in Canada on the work of American poet Louis Zukofsky, it was apparent at once that she’d imbibed a good deal of his intensely compressed aesthetics in the process. If not a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, she was at any rate already one whose relation to contemporary poetics as well as poetic practice was intimate and assured.

That first book, Like This?, won a number of awards, not least the International PEN First Book of Poetry award. More to the point, it was both accessible and scholarly. When I say that her poetry embraces dualities, it’s important to stress that I don’t mean dichotomies: it’s never either/or in Michele’s work – always both/and.

I suppose the first and most irritating label her creative work to date has had to endure is ‘Academic poetry.’ Those of us who happen to work in the tertiary education industry – in this country, at any rate – have to get used to complaints about living in ‘Ivory Towers’ and a supposed preoccupation with poetics over everyday life, style over substance, experimentation over mainstream accessibility …

The only real answer to such accusations – which can admittedly have a certain validity at times – is the quality and durability of the work in question. Michele’s poetry has always seemed to me to constitute the perfect answer to this particular bugbear.

Her third book, DIA, succeeded in combining her Academic interests in recuperating the voices of neglected local women writers with the formalist techniques she’d picked up from a battery of writers, local and international, Zukofsky, Ian Wedde, Susan Howe, and a host of others. The result was a tour-de-force of stunning visual design combined with sensuous imagery – the kissing lips of ‘Micromelismata’ being the most famous of many examples. There were so many levels on which one could read these poems, that they almost defied criticism. Above all, though, there’s nothing particularly ‘Ivory Tower’ about pointing out examples of gender discrimination past and present.

The flexible instrument of Michele’s intellectual interest in such ‘lost voices’ – whether they belonged to Ursula Bethell, Eileen Duggan, Iris Guiver Wilkinson [Robin Hyde], or (more recently) Alan Brunton and Emily Harris – has informed her poetry ever since, but also resulted in a series of essays and editions of their work which have assisted in rewriting the map of New Zealand letters.

As the first National Library-appointed NZ Poet Laureate from 2008-9, Michele started to compose a series of poems meant more for the ear than the eye – collected in Mirabile Dictu (2009) and Heartland (2014): both well sampled from in the present volume. Once again, though, she confounded expectations of more in the same vein with her latest book Vanishing Points, a collection of prose poems and lineated pieces designed to engage more systematically than ever before with history itself: her own, as in her alternate-past piece about her mother’s painting career, ‘Self-Portrait: Still Life. A Family Story’ (alas, not included here), and New Zealand’s, in ‘The Fascicles’ and ‘Emily and Her Sisters’ (both included in full).

The very last poem in the book, a hitherto uncollected piece called ‘the wedding party’ (first published in Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019) continues this theme with its imagery drawn from the Taranaki war of the 1860s, and its effortless shifting from Māori to English to Latin (intentionally garbled for safe transmission by Government spies).

Thirty years on, Michele Leggott’s work continues to give ‘Academic writing’ a good name. Why not read a poet so attentive to sources; to the sound and texture of the past; to the sensuous realities of beach, sun, sand which are our heritage in these islands; to the aesthetic patterning as well as the careful sounding out of words; to the dark which we come from – and return to – and the light which we try to shed while we’re here?

I can’t think of a good reason. Can you?

[1172 wds]

•

(25-29/8/20)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021. ISBN 978-0-9951354-2-0 (March 2021): 352-54.

[997 wds]


Michele Leggott & Olive (2011)


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Poeta (2020)

Johanna Emeney, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2020 (March 2020)

Reviews:

Cilla McQueen

Cilla McQueen. Poeta: selected and new poems. ISBN 978-1-98-853128-1. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2018. RRP $39.95. 296 pp.

Cilla McQueen: Poeta (2018)

Like Pat White’s Watching for the Wingbeat, Cilla McQueen’s Poeta is a kind of collected/selected poems, together with some new work. Like White’s book, McQueen’s spans almost 40 years of published poetry, and no doubt some years of practice before that.

She herself is clear on her intentions for the collection, specifying that:

These poems have been grouped . . . in rooms, where they have had a chance to converse, being related in my mind to one or another of my preoccupations as a poet. Arranged as a span rather than as a timeline, the sequence remains roughly chronological, with idiosyncratic exceptions.

One very useful convention she has adopted is the inclusion of ‘the date of first book publication or, where poems have not previously appeared in a book the date of composition’ at the end of each poem.

This is one of those brilliantly simple ideas which are so immensely helpful to scholars and common readers alike — a little like the device of including the date and age of the subject on each page of a biography — that it’s difficult to understand why everyone doesn’t do that.

The point about the rooms seems a useful one, too. When I think of McQueen’s poems, I think first of meeting her at her house in Bluff during a 2006 poetry symposium — mainly because I’d had to send down some books for the occasion and hers was the only fixed postal address the organisers could muster.

I remember the slightly bemused courtesy with which she accepted this commission and greeted this comparative stranger, and the amusement with which she regarded each new invasion of poets on their way up the hill to the marae: rooms, yes — beautifully composed and uncluttered rooms, with their harvest of paintings and books from her many years at the centre of so much of the creative life of the region she lives in.

I have to confess to having had some doubts about McQueen’s last substantive book, her poetic memoir In a Slant Light (2016). Its reticence puzzled me somewhat, as I said at the time. I’m glad to say that this is not the case with this wonderful new collection. There has never been any doubt that McQueen is supremely adept at the complex, many-layered lyric, and this is the best place to find the very best of them.

More to the point, however, the extracts from In a Slant Light included here seem to me to work very well as lyrics — or lyrical narrative excerpts, if you prefer. I guess I was too busy reading it as a memoir, and so failed to see that it was actually just an adjunct to this many-roomed mansion that she has been constructing so carefully over the years.

What are the particular highpoints, for me? Well, I’ll never stop loving ‘Homing in’ and ‘Timepiece,’ but then they can be found in anthologies — and even in the memoir itself. What was most exciting about reading through this new collection (and it really does make a difference that her publishers have given her a wonderfully resilient hardback to hold these nearly 300 pages of poems) were the unexpected gems, which I should have known already, but in many cases didn’t.

Poems such as ‘Kids on the Road’, for instance:

you know, I would like to kick
t.s. eliot in the head
because you shouldn’t have to pass
english exams to love poetry

I like particularly that conspiratorial ‘you know’ at the head of that passage. How many of us have felt similarly oppressed by some such GOM (Grand Old Man) or GOD (Grand Old Dame) of poetry? They may have been wild themselves once — perhaps are wild still — but not in the embalmed form with which we are forced to unwrap them from their mummy bandages in some dreary classroom.

The poem continues:

no more puzzles for clever sleuths
I’d just like to
smile at you broadly
and hand you the whole world
clean on a plate.

You’d have to be pretty jaundiced to resist the charm of that.

I did feel — at the time of reading her memoir — that there was a strong contrast between the seeming simplicity (and actual cunning) of this early lyric voice that might have been vitiated by the many, many poetic experiments — collaborations with artists, captions to photographs, travel poems — she’s conducted over the years.

When one reads such a late poem as ‘Epitaph’, however, such fears dissolve:

Alas shall I in time become
of all no more a part than stone
or blackbird drumming up a worm

And what can worm say in a poem
but dark loam and the sound of rain?

The breathless, run-on diction here puts one a little in mind of Stevie Smith, but a Stevie Smith far less assertive of her own idiosyncrasies. The substance of the poem recalls Wordsworth, I suppose, and (a little) John Clare.

But saying that says little about the poem itself. McQueen has learnt from her lifetime’s work to be supremely herself — reminiscent of other poets at times, as all great and consummate writers are — but instantly recognisable as having been inspired by things and experiences, not simple delving in books:

I remember the look
of the unreadable page

the difficult jumble

and then the page
became transparent

and then the page
ceased to exist:

at last I was riding this bicycle
all by myself.

It would be easy to illustrate — for any sceptics still left out there — the complexity and subtlety of McQueen’s thought, as embodied in these many, many glass cages of words — but, like her, I think it’s better to go on ‘stopping for shivers / woggly trees in puddles / . . . a coin on the road / a rusty key’.

This is a beautiful book by a wonderful poet.

Poetry NZ Yearbook 2020 Booklaunch (10 March, 2020)

(30-31/7/19)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2020. ISBN 978-0-9951229-3-2 (March 2020): 300-03.

[997 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2020


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Watching for the Wingbeat (2020)

Johanna Emeney, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2020 (March 2020)

Reviews:

Pat White

Pat White. Watching for the Wingbeat: New and Selected Poems. ISBN 978-0-473-44420-4. Lyttelton: Cold Hub Press, 2018. RRP $39.95. 164 pp.

Pat White: Watching for the Wingbeat (2018)

Pat White’s new book of selected poems covers 40 years of his writing life, from Signposts in 1977 to Fracking & Hawk in 2015, together with some uncollected and unpublished work.

The first impression it gives is continuity. White’s preoccupations have, it seems, always been what they are now: landscape, love, history, the natural world.

A great deal of care has clearly gone into winnowing out the best pieces from this lifetime of work. It would be very hard to find a false note. It is nevertheless true that there’s an austerity about the earliest poems here which has been modulated and complicated by White’s experiments with the long line in more recent times. Take, for instance, an early poem such as ‘Paperbacks’:

That was the summer
when the paperbacks grew mould
from the damp
of the outhouse floor
. . .

when graduation took its leave
of student flats
with cheap editions
of expensive ideals . . .

This is a wonderful piece: spare, telling, making the single image of these ‘grubby books / that fed our empty heads’ stand for a whole world of adult responsibilities, leavened by a spine of humorous selfdeprecation.

And yet, when you contrast it with a more recent poem such as ‘Getting out of the car, Danseys Pass’, you can see how much these years of practice, of constant circling in on that central mystery of concise expression, have done for the strength and flexibility of his idiom:

A shingle road winding through mist on hills
tussock beside the cutting, silhouette against
a drop down to Maerewhenua Stream
cutting deeper than epiphany
through schist
and the other side of the road
in drizzling rain

This evocation of the joys — and complexities — of ‘following this road / in search of God knows what’ is on a different order of suggestiveness and complexity than the early poems, fine though they are.

There’s nothing ‘simple’ about the experiences presented here, and nothing casual about the musical skill with which the words are modulated, almost like one of Beethoven’s late quartets.

But what is Pat White about as a poet? Pastoral, once a byword for escapism and irrelevance, has become one of the central modes of our time: whether in the guise of dystopian ‘eco-poetry’ or utopian nostalgia. Is that why White seems suddenly so relevant? So armoured by integrity against the accusations of complacency and self-regard that can afflict other poets attempting so comprehensive a summing-up of their achievement?

I would argue that pastoral concerns have only ever been part of his worldview. In a poem such as ‘For my children’, for instance, he scores a rather dismal and unsought rhyme with some very topical concerns:

One year when things were tight
that old rifle was sold. It was no
accident, but contemplation of
cut throats, fascination
with destruction has marked
itself into the marrow
of too many generations.

Gun enthusiasts can’t understand why the rest of us show so little sympathy when they moan about the compulsory loss of their pretties. My father was a gun-nut, so I think I know a few things about the type. To him, an old rifle or musket was a miracle of applied engineering, a beautiful piece of craftmanship with only the most tenuous relationship to its original function. To me, it was an instrument of death which I could hardly bear to put my hands on. It reeked of blood.

White’s poem concludes:

If you visited me now, there
is a garden to sit in, a drink
to share, and talking to do.
Across the bay, a bluff
where rock crumbles, is
shaping trees’ stubborn growth.

There’s no heirloom to argue over.
There had to be a time to halt
the darkness of such bitter games.

By no stretch of the imagination could this be described as a propaganda poem, but it is, I suppose, polemical in these times of compulsory buybacks of firearms in the wake of the March 2019 Christchurch terror attack. But it makes its point so gently that it would be hard to reject the idyllic vision of those last few lines.

The point is that White knows. He knows why people love their guns. I don’t love them, but I did love my father, and I respect the sincerity of his attachment to the aesthetics of these ambassadors from a not-toodistant past. Those ‘bitter games’ at the end of the poem ring very true, also.

It’s a commonplace that Scottish families always fall out over wills and heirlooms (not that I suppose it’s a purely Scottish trait). I had an aunt who went mad when she wasn’t left the pieces of furniture she wanted in another of my ancestors’ wills.

Guns, bad blood — it’s all in the poem. That’s one of the many reasons why I love Pat White’s work, and find it a continuing source of inspiration. It feels very close to me.

I’ll conclude with some lines from another one of his great this-is-the- state-of-things-for-me-now poems, ‘Elemental’. Midway through, he evokes ‘a poet who wrote / hawk-like, no longer in need / of predatory advice, able to spiral / onto a stray word, sneak it from the set’. The words could apply just as easily to White himself.

Like that poet (T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes? — certain internal references to Four Quartets would suggest the first), he’s very definitely ‘not shovelling bullshit’:

It’s difficult to forget how much we know
and look at the site as if for the first time
to catch the flow but not the flood
nobody told me
it never got easier, this putting on the page.

If you are intending to read Pat White, this is the book to buy. If you’re not, I have to say that you’re missing a treat: a collection that brings together poems that are beautiful, unassuming and perfectly paced, all at the same time.

Poetry NZ Yearbook 2020 Booklaunch (10 March, 2020)

(30-31/7/19)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2020. ISBN 978-0-9951229-3-2 (March 2020): 330-33.

[1004 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2020


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Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019: Editorial (2019)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019 (March 2019)

Editorial:
What makes a poem good?

Manawatu Writers' Festival
[Photograph: Jenny Lawn (8/9/18)]

It’s a somewhat absurdly ambitious premise for an editorial, you may think. Certainly I did, when I was booked to speak on the topic at the 2018 Manawatū Writers’ Festival.

I won’t attempt to reprise everything I said on that occasion (vanity —— not to mention sanity —— forbids), but I thought I might mention a few points. First up is a quote from Robert Graves, one of my favourite poetry gurus:

The most popular theory advanced to account for the haunting of houses is that emanations of fear, hate or grief somehow impregnate a locality, and these emotions are released when in contact with a suitable medium. So with a poem or novel, passion impregnates the words and can make them active even divorced from the locality of creation. (On English Poetry, 1922)

You see what I mean? What a man! Graves, fresh from the trenches of the Western Front —— and even fresher from the psychoanalyst’s couch —— went on to argue in favour of the even more sweeping opinion that ‘Art of every sort . . . is an attempt to rationalize some emotional conflict in the artist’s mind.’

If the work created as a result succeeds somehow in resolving or at least exteriorising the conflict in question, he claims, then it can be said to be successful —— for that artist, at any rate. There is, however, no automatic reason to expect this success to translate to others. If, by some stroke of luck, it does, then we have what is commonly thought of as a ‘work of art’; i.e. something that speaks meaningfully to the emotional conflicts and traumas of others, as well as to yourself.

Certainly, as an editor, I have to acknowledge a certain futility in most of my attempts to make objective judgements about poems. A. E. Housman said that he always knew the real thing because it made the hairs on his chin stand up while he tried to shave. In other words, even that most austere of Classicists had to resort to a physical reaction rather than any more reasoned definition of poetry.

As my father grew older, and especially after his first stroke, we began to see a more emotional side of him (the exact words the doctors used were ‘emotionally labile’ —— apparently a common symptom of cerebral damage). In layman’s terms, he would burst into tears at the drop of a hat. Any mention of war sacrifice, moral courage, or bravery of any kind, would have him sniffing away in a manner that would probably have embarrassed him profoundly as a younger man. It certainly embarrassed us as the more-or-less standard products of a repressed Kiwi upbringing.

Even at the time I felt ashamed of this embarrassment, and tried to persuade myself to look on at such displays with joy and affection. It’s hard to overcome the conditioning of a lifetime, though.

Now it’s happening to me! I have always been pretty susceptible to uplifting speeches or noble acts in movies —— that moment in Rabbit Proof Fence, for instance, when the little girl pulls herself up off the sand to struggle on for just a few yards more with her sister in her arms . . . Pretty much the whole of that movie, in fact. I could make a list. Jimmy Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington (‘Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for . . .’); Cher in Mask (‘Now you can go anywhere you want, baby’); Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird (‘Stand up, child, your daddy’s passing’). You know the sort of thing.

It’s starting to affect my poetry reading, too. It’s not that all the poems I like now have to be tragic or elegiac: humour is a pretty strong emotion, too, and everyone needs a good laugh from time to time. It’s just that I’m no longer afraid of being moved by them —— by the last lines of Brett Gartrell’s ‘After the principal calls’, for instance:

The dogs broke into the hen house
stringing two birds out in bloody feathered scraps.
My son cornered the panting terriers
washed the blood from their lips
as they licked the tears from his eyes.

Or, for that matter, by the whole of Wes Lee’s extraordinary ‘The Things She Remembers #1’, which is almost the only poem I could imagine knocking Brett’s into second place in our annual Poetry New Zealand competition:

Standing looking in the mirror saying:
No, No / The cold orange lipstick of the
Big Nurse / The patient who screamed like
a bird / her mouth wide as the abyss /
The patient who jumped on my back, kicked
in her heels, tried to gee me up like a
donkey / The painful embarrassment of being
thirteen / The laughter of the nurses / At
a terrible time I believed / At terrible times
I still believe / There are still things left to
sell / On the bus a wasp and a homeless man.

My God, there’s some pain in that poem! I hope that it had some success in working out certain traumas for its author (as prescribed by Robert Graves). Whether it did or not, it certainly works for me.

It’s not that I sit here boo-hooing as I read through all the submissions for each issue —— but every now and then something in one of them sits up and looks alive, persuades me that something is being worked out there that might be relevant to others simply because it seems so relevant to me.

It must have been very difficult for A. E. Housman to shave without constantly cutting himself. Every time he thought of ‘Into my heart an air that kills / From yon far country blows’ or ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun / Nor the furious winter’s rages’, up the little hairs would go.

I wouldn’t trust myself to read out loud either Brett or Wes’s poems —— or quite a few of the other wonderful poems I have included in this edition of the Yearbook, either —— but I’m very glad the poets wrote them. Glad to have had the privilege to read them and to present them for the rest of you to fall for as hard as I did. (That’s if you’re not still stuck at the embarrassment-before-strong-emotion stage of your development. You wait: the time will come when you, too, find your face wet with tears when the townsfolk burst in to give their hard-earned savings to Jimmy Stewart at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life.)

Housman called poetry ‘a morbid secretion’. Graves, too, sees it as the necessary working-out of a repressed trauma or complex. Whether or not that helps as a tentative answer to what makes a poem good, I don’t know. I just know that spotting the real thing has become, for me, as much of a somatic as a psychosomatic matter.

•

So, to reprise, the winners of the third annual Poetry New Zealand Poetry Prize are as follows:

First prize ($500):Wes Lee,
for ‘The Things She Remembers #1’
Second prize ($300):Brett Gartrell,
for ‘After the principal calls’
Third prize ($200):Natalie Modrich,
for ‘Retail’

I’ve already given you some idea of what I found so extraordinary in the first two of these poems.
The third is a complete change of pace. Natalie herself refers to it as ‘a very therapeutic poem’, and while it did make me laugh like a drain —— for which I thank her profoundly —— it also made me think a little about all the rest of the people doing what she calls ‘soul-crushing’ retail jobs. I don’t know if reading such things helps at all, but I’m prepared to believe it might. After all, Housman said that his poetry was meant for the ‘ill-treated . . . / For them to read when they’re in trouble / And I am not.’

This time the three poems have been printed separately, in their own section of the journal.

The same is true of the winning entries for the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook student poetry competition. All three of these poems seem to show an almost frightening maturity and skill. The difficulty in judging the competition was not so much in finding merit, as in deciding which of so many good poems to put first.

Aigagalefili Fepulea‘i-Tapuaʻi’s ‘275 Love Letters to Southside’ is a passionate piece of work —— richly imbued with the spirit of her beloved heimat:

When I learnt that no place outside of South Auckland would want to pronounce my name properly
I scraped it off their tongues
So now all they do is spit on us instead . . .
Haven’t my ancestors’ screams been muffled between textbook pages?
Didn’t a white teacher at my South Auckland sch tell us we’re just ‘typical South Auckland crap’?

If that teacher ever reads this poem, I hope he or she feels very small.
Kathryn Briggs’s ‘Earth is a Star to Someone’ is equally passionate, in a very different context. ‘Let —— This —— Matter,’ she pleads:

Let us be heard,
Let us take up the space we deserve in the universe.

Let all this youth, all this idealism, count for something. I certainly hope it does. I guess we all do.

Amberleigh Rose’s ‘Snake’s Tongue’ comes from a very different side of the poetic universe. Here passion has been turned to self-destruction, but there’s an aching residue of hope in there, too, somewhere, I feel:

Last night we slept in our blood stains
and whispered over the sound of our bones
trying to leave our skin and you
were the prettiest girl I had ever seen.
What was that? Not love?

Quite a few of the poems I read while judging this competition frightened me profoundly, I must confess. Where are all the flowers and bunny rabbits we used to write about at school? In fact (as a reviewer once remarked of one of my own books), ‘the spirit of darkness certainly prevails.’

•

There are 100 poets in this issue (besides Stephanie Christie, our featured poet). There are also three essayists and 10 reviewers —— though some of these have also contributed poems: 110 authors in all.

Among the poets I’ve included are such well-known names as Sue Fitchett, Michele Leggott, Stephen Oliver, Bob Orr, Vaughan Rapatahana, Elizabeth Smither and Emma Neale. In her reply to my acceptance letter for the poems she’d submitted, Emma, now firmly established as the new managing editor of Landfall, explains the process of selection better than I could ever imagine doing:

... it’s finally made me realise that rejections aren’t always a comment on literary merit! And it doesn’t even mean an editor dislikes someone’s work, it just means there is chronically limited space.

Quite so. What she said. My long list for this issue was full of beautiful poems which have, one after the other, had to bite the dust for one reason or another. Never assume that your poem didn’t make it into that giant file! And don’t think that I didn’t sweat blood over those rejections, either.

Of course my subjective reactions have a great deal to do with the poems you see before you. As long as I’ve been reading her, which is almost 20 years now, I’ve been impressed and (at times) flabbergasted by the sheer virtuosic brinksmanship of Stephanie Christie’s poetry. It’s great to be able to introduce her poems to —— I hope —— a wider audience than they’ve so far reached in this country. Her fractured word-play —— reminiscent at times of late Celan but with a pop culture edge he never achieved —— can be daunting at first, but I think you’ll see after a while how relentlessly quotable she is:

I hold onto hope because I want something
to do with my hands
(‘-OH’)

Every morning the first word I say is
Yes.
(‘Felt calculus’)

Nothing’s happened. You make me feel
less alone. You’re also real.
That might ruin everything.
(‘Unfinished Objects’)

If you need more evidence, here it is, in the form of a rich selection of 19 recent poems, plus a tell-all interview!

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The reviews section is a bit smaller than in previous issues: not because I don’t think they’re important, but because I want to give them more space on their own. We’ve decided to follow Landfall’s good example and to cover most of the books we receive on our website, the Poetry NZ Review [https://poetrynzreview.blogspot.com/].

The reviews that we do include in the text will now be more in the nature of review-essays, and there will be no more simple notices of books. This also has the advantage of enabling us to include more poems and stand-alone essays. There are three of the latter in this issue, covering issues such as narrative strategies in poetry, Zen Buddhism, mourning, and death, in poets as diverse as Airini Beautrais, Richard von Sturmer and Derek Walcott.

I’m also happy to be able to include here some dual-text poems in Chinese, German, Spanish and te reo Māori. What more need I say? Enjoy!

— Jack Ross
November 2018

(1-13/9/18)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2019. ISBN 978-0-9951029-6-5 (March 2019): 14-20. [Available at: https://issuu.com/masseypress/docs/pages_from_pnzy19].

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Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019


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An Interview with Stephanie Christie (2019)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019 (March 2019)

An Interview with Stephanie Christie
[via email – 8 August-12 September, 2018]

Stephanie Christie

Stephanie Christie

‘I’ve been publishing and performing poetry for twenty years, while living in a lot of different places in Aotearoa. Ten years ago I changed my active name, Will, back to my birth name, Stephanie. I live in Hamilton in the Waikato with my partner and an elegant hound. I work as a creative coach, and also teach adult literacy skills, run community art classes, and edit instructional materials.

The selection in this issue combines new material with (recent) classic hits, to share a sense of my work with you. The pieces show the range of forms I use, along with the voice and vision that run through everything I create.

My creative practice has always been a space in which I can challenge myself to go outside of what I know. This has led me into collaborations, poetry in theatre, sound poetry, visual poetry, songs, installations and video poetry. On a good day, I have no idea what I’m doing and am a hundred percent committed to doing it. This is exactly where I need to be.’

Select Bibliography:

Poetry Books:

• [as Will Joy Christie]. luce cannon. Auckland: Titus Books, 2007.
• The Facts of Light. deciBel Series 001. Ed. Pam Brown. Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2014.
• Carbon Shapes and Dark Matter. Pokeno: Titus Books, 2015.

Zines:

• Ravel (2001)
• Urbane Mysts (2001)
• Orientalisman (2002)
• WA.N/S.TED (2003)
• Femme fatality (2005)
• self [help/harm] (2005)
• Re:[play]er (2006)
• My findings (2008)
• crzy (2009)
• Art-icu-late (2009)
• W.inter (2010)
• So light and so fair (2010)
• The calling (2011)
• Bloom (2014)
• Wingettes (2014)
• First the wheel then the revolution (2014)
• I like the idea I have of you so much (2014)
• Freak out! (2015)
• Nix (2015)
• Runt (2017)
• Fakelore (2018)

Multimedia Projects:

• ‘Arcadia’, collaboration with choreographer Alexa Wilson at Soliton, Auckland, 2003.
• 'Husk', collaboration with composer Alex Taylor, Auckland University, 2012.
• 'Home Heart Land', poetry in devised theatre, Hamilton Fringe Festival, 2012.
• Two video poems with videographer Paul Bradley, featured in HUFF, 2012/2013.
• 'Aubade', installation at Hamilton Museum, Intraspace Project, 2013.
• 'Clean as you go', installation with artist Paul Bradley, Hamilton Arts Festival, 2014.
• ‘Storm Warning’, poetry in collaborative performance, Hamilton Fringe Festival, 2015.
• ‘Why So Normal?’ collaboration in Hamilton City of the Future, 2015.
• ‘True True’ art exhibition, visual poetry installation, Calder and Lawson Gallery, 2017.

Secondary Sources:

• Alexander, Raewyn. ‘A Sharp Intelligence: Review of Carbon Shapes and Dark Matter.’ Rochford Street Review: A Journal of Australian & International Cultural Reviews, News and Criticism. (February 5, 2016). Available at: https://rochfordstreetreview.com/2016/02/05/a-sharp-intelligence-raewyn-alexander-reviews-carbon-shapes-and-dark-matter-by-stephanie-christie/
• Harvey, Siobhan. ‘A Reduction to the Bone: Review of Carbon Shapes and Dark Matter.’ Landfall Review Online (December 1, 2016). Available at: https://www.landfallreview.com/a-reduction-to-the-bone/#more-3120
• Morton, Elizabeth. ‘Review of The Facts of Light.’ Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 (2015): 251-52. Available at: https://poetrynzreview.blogspot.com/2017/07/stephanie-christie-facts-of-light-2014.html
• Prime, Patricia. ‘Review of Carbon Shapes and Dark Matter.’ takahē 86 (April 2016). Available at: http://www.takahe.org.nz/t86/reviews/stephanie-christie-carbon-shapes-and-dark-matter/
• Samuels, Lisa. ‘Affective mind and blood language and Stephanie Christie.’ Poetry NZ Yearbook 2017 (#51): 214-29.
• Slaughter, Tracey. ‘How the Raptures Slip: Review of Luce Cannon.’ Landfall 214 (2009): 169-75.
• Wright, Tim. ‘Review of Carbon Shapes and Dark Matter.’ Cordite Poetry Review (November 4 2016). Available at: http://cordite.org.au/reviews/wright-christie/

Online Resources:

• Author’s homepage: Stephanie Christie
  https://www.stephaniechristie.xyz/
• NZEPC Six-pack Sound: Stephanie Christie
  http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/six-pack-sound/02/christie.asp

Some of the poems in this selection have already appeared in the following publications: ‘Felt Calculus’ in Atlanta Review (US); ‘Mag[net]ic’ in The Capilano Review (Canada); ‘Unfinished Objects’ in Cordite (Australia); ‘Poverty Mentality’ and ‘Mall Song’ in Landfall (NZ). Thanks are due to the editors of these journals for permission to reproduce them here.

Stephanie Christie: Aubade (2016)

• When did you start writing poetry? The first poems of yours I saw were, I think, in A Brief Description of the Whole World in the early 2000s. Was that the beginning, or was there a long prehistory to those pieces?

I’ve always written poetry, from when I was tiny. I would catch a flicker and then work on it in my head and then on paper until it turned into something. I remember asking my mum to write down for me what I’d created. Then it started rhyming and became very ‘poetic’. I entered a poem about a foal to a Listener children’s poetry page and was rejected because they thought it had been written by an adult. It was very earnest and used words that probably haven’t made it into this century. Then as a teenager it got very dark and I’d write them on my desk at school.

When I was 25 I finally wrote a piece that I considered to be an actual completed poem that could be shared. After that I made my first zine and left it at various bus stops. But my poetry was never like the poetry that I was able to get my hands on. A few years later I was shown L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. poetry, and realised that there was a huge space available to me. This was my most abstract phase, and it was amazing to me when John Geraets of Brief published some poems.


• You already seemed to have a very individual way of writing (and performing) at that stage. Could you say a little about the thinking behind your characteristic word-breaks and lineation innovations?

Although I’m very analytical and logical in my purposeful thinking, my writing is something I feel. It has a physical presence for me. The breaking is a form of liberation from the effects that language and discourse in general has on me. I’m super-sensitive to words, so being able to play with them is important for both my enjoyment of life and my ability to breathe freely. I would love to have theory around it but my mind refuses to engage. I feel poetry and sometimes get instructions, but that’s it. Of course, I have editing processes and hundreds of rules – just no theory.

The clash between the shape of words and their sounds fascinates me. So I’m magnetised towards words that are impossible to say, where the meaning multiplies and gets out of control, or where line breaks show a voice taking the stated phrase in more than one direction, mimicking the true ambivalence of the sure statements we shelter behind.


• I’ve always thought of you as a very political poet – or, at any rate, with a strong ideological bent behind your work. Is that accurate, would you say?

Yes, to the extent that the world is political already and we engage with this or consent to the status quo by accident. Poetry isn’t a form that makes it easy to explore the stuff that I often find myself asking questions or feeling strongly about. I get the sense that for a lot of poets it’s one of their rules – don’t say it directly, use the object as a mirror. But for me, any part of language itself is an available object. And I need to think and feel more deeply about the world, especially because I’m privileged enough to not be forced to do it that much. I want to lead myself through these journeys, and poetry provides a safe process and a way to share the results.

Slam or spoken word poetry is a form that allows the political in, in a way that what you might call ‘high’ poetry doesn’t. Although I like to perform, the spoken word genre has its own rules that tend to conflict with my interests, which are largely oriented not towards my identity but to what I see around me.


• Tell me a little bit about Hamilton as a place to write in. Do you find it hospitable to poets and artists generally?

Hamilton is amazing because it supports you to create what you want; there’s stimulation but also space. I’ve made the effort to find other poets, which is magic. Writers tend to self-isolate compared to people working in other creative mediums, so most of my creative communities are made up of non-writers. This works for me because thinking about other art forms feeds into my thoughts about writing.

One of the most useful things I get out of living in Hamilton has actually been meeting more people who are way different from me. We’re all mixed in together. This brings me language, story, psychic and detail influences that are invaluable to my practice.


• I know that you’ve done a lot of work in various multimedia forms: painting, design, zines, and so on. Is poetry just one of your media of expression, or is it central for you?

Poetry is everything. Or maybe my experience of the world is poetic, and so whatever I make ends up that way. It’s that crystallisation, the way that the vision edits itself down and then inserts that gaps that let us inhabit it.

I like to play around, which is how I’ve ended up doing different stuff. Also it’s a way to keep having that crucial finished object when you struggle to get your work published. I return to page poetry mainly because it won’t let go of me. It’s the fastest surface, the purest, the most ridiculous, and brutal. It makes other things seem easy. Having said that, I’m transforming my ways of making page poetry, so that it can be playful for me.


• How, in fact, would you define the term “poetry?"

The mapping of psychic dance routines through patterns of presence and nothingness.


• I notice that your work – your recent Tinfish chapbook, for instance – often receives a better response overseas than here in New Zealand. Do you feel there’s a certain innate conservatism to the poetry scene here?

I struggle to recognise the response to my work. I haven’t carried the flag for my work in the way that would have made it accessible to any wider audience – I was too self-conscious. And it doesn’t serve me to make decisions about the nature of the local scene that might protect my ego but close me off from connecting.

I can see logically that the difficulty in getting less conventional poetry published in the bigger journals must limit the development of the New Zealand poetry scene. There was a period where I tried to write in a more ‘normal’ way to be able to be published. The effects were awful – I hated my work, it was mediocre and I lost my confidence. Then I started to get positive responses to my first (wildly experimental) book, which taught me the meaning of the word ‘bittersweet’.

Finally I thought, “I’m still here, still writing, so now I’m going to do whatever I want and stand by it.” Learning how to do this has been a crazy journey that’s changed my sense of myself and the world. I’ve had to go right to the foundations and teach myself skills around self-esteem, and build structures to support my practice.

I’m incredibly grateful for the help and encouragement I’ve gotten from particular people – Jack, you’re one of them – because when you need to write to feel like a person and you have to write what is calling you but you don’t know how to share that work, people clearly articulating that they like your work makes a huge difference.

I’m excited to know people here now who are writing experimentally, and sharing it in a bunch of ways. It motivates me to make the work I want to make and to get it to the people who hunger for it, whoever and wherever they may be.


• There’s a narrative expansiveness in poems such as “Bode” (included in the group chosen for your Poetry New Zealand feature) which I, for one, find very exciting. Is that a new direction for you, or would you say that’s been part of your poetry from the first?

Sometimes I see poetry as music, with or without lyrics. So a poem with a narrative element is like music with lyrics, and a poem without a narrative element is like music without lyrics. It brings a world and makes its own sense. I’ve always made both. They don’t feel different to me but I can see that they could be very different to experience. In narrative poems we ask: ‘Who speaks and what is the relationship between their words and the truth of their world?’ In non-narrative poems something else is going on, and it’s useful to abandon that question and give over to whatever happens as you encounter the poem.

I have more options than page poetry as a medium now, and perhaps that makes me take less joy in the pure destruction of the form. I don’t feel constricted and like I need to lash out. I want my poems to do something else.

Sometimes the amount of narrative comes from how the poem is created. “Bode” was generated out of fragments created from directing attention towards one big thing while writing over a long period. Other poems are resonant pieces thrown into a room together to see what happens in the editing process – more like a party than an expedition into a specific question.

I’m glad that you’re excited about it. Sometimes I want a crystalline moment and sometimes I want to explodify. I need both and the tensions and webs between them.


• Are there any writers – local or international – you feel have been particularly important for you, or influential on your work?

I take my poetry where I find it. Phantom Billstickers have a poster of a poem by Sue Wootton that I just read – amazing. And right on the street!

I’ve often found it hard to read poetry – like I can’t generate the right kind of attention – but when I can it all sticks to my brain and reappears later. I’ve had phases of reading Tusiata Avia, Ian Wedde, Baxter, Czeslaw Milosz, Gertrude Stein, Rilke, Adrienne Rich, Raymond Carver … I can’t see how these poets influence my work, but they all share a capacity for devastating accuracy. The poets I know personally have a big influence on me, because I think about their work and imagine what it’s like to be them writing poetry, and I think about what they say to me about poetry. My favourite thing is that if I read enough then I get the poet’s voice narrating my world for a week or two.

In the last few years certain poets have inspired me by giving me hope that I can make the work that interests me and find the people who want it. Ya-wen Ho, Lisa Samuels and Essa Ranapiri all have an attitude to sharing their unconventional work that is engaging and open, in contrast to my traditional approach of choosing to give so few fucks that you risk spiralling into a black hole of nihilism. And their work makes my poetry brain happy.


• What other sources of inspiration do you find particularly valuable to you as a poet and an artist in general?

Lyrics. Theory. Other creative forms. Conversation. Errors. Questions.

I love science, psychology, all languages, listening, and wondering about reality. And mainly people – their battles for meaningfulness. These things pour into my work.


• What drives your interest in abstraction?

In the more abstracted poems, there is no single entity standing in a stable ground and narrating emotional shapes through lines and line breaks. The poem itself is the flesh and blood, the whole entity, built out of swarming words. This reminds me of the strangeness of the experience of consciousness, and the beauty of broken forms is that the seeping in of unconscious elements can be made visual.

Poetry that lets go of narrative and narrator is challenging to make. On the one hand, you are free to do whatever you want, when we know that restrictions can be creatively motivating. On the other, it’s hard to make something that comes alive. It’s easy to end up like a frustrated Dr. Frankenstein, with phrases lying round in heaps. You work and work towards internal coherence, agile tension, and movement. When the heart starts to pump on its own, it’s a form of magic.

An important part of abstract poetry is that it can be a relief from the manipulation of narrative that saturates our linguistic encounters. Play is a delight and refreshes us. Meaning is something we make, so let’s investigate the guts of the machinery.


• What influences the style of your work?

There are two things that consistently guide my work. The first is the question I’m carrying around. It may be philosophical, social, psychological, political, or emotional, and I’ll be holding on to it while I live my life and looking at the tiny moments through its lens. This then bubbles up into my writing. The second is something I don’t have a word for (so if you know the word please tell me). It’s that thing that poetry zones in on - a thought feeling or a felt thought, an atmosphere, an emotional environment. Every poem I make has its own and this guides the editing process.

I realise that sometimes my poetry can seem cold or harsh. Part of this is my aesthetic. In other people’s work, I’m often drawn to intense, challenging work with a strong flavour. It’s unexamined emotional cliches that offend me, not the work that someone else has generously done to lead me out of my normal world into spaces where I receive new visions. I also love the dirty aesthetic, things that are wrong and awkward and imperfect and still full of force.

My work is often anti-heroic; I actively resist the heroism that is so common in poetry. I change the pronouns to give the ‘I’ the damning judgements that began as ‘you’, because we are all raging messes on the inside. I generate conflicted pauses instead of happy endings, because I align to the mad complexity of reality, and believe that meaning needs to be constantly adapted to be useful, and that the arts are one manifestation of the human urge towards that.

(6/8-12/9/18)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2019. ISBN 978-0-9951029-6-5 (March 2019): 22-25; 68-74.

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Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019


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