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.

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New NZ Poets in Performance: Preface (2008)

Jack Ross, ed: New New Zealand Poets in Performance (2008)

Preface

Arthur Baysting, ed: The Young New Zealand Poets (1973)

Strangely enough, one of the most difficult things about editing this anthology has been finding a suitable title for it. When, almost five years ago now, Jan Kemp and I first began discussing the idea of publishing a set of CDs giving a historical overview of New Zealand poets performing their own work, the project seemed to fall naturally into two halves: Classics (roughly representing the traditional Kiwi poetic canon: Fleur Adcock, James K. Baxter, Allen Curnow, Hone Tuwhare and our other poetic elders.) and Contemporaries (the poets who came to the fore in the late sixties and seventies: Sam Hunt, Bill Manhire, Ian Wedde and Cilla McQueen prominent among them).

So many voices began to crowd in, though – so many poets and poems demanded to be listened to and heard – that it soon became apparent that two books (even with a double-set of CDs each) were not enough to contain them all. The only possible solution seemed to be a trilogy. Hence this book, the third in the series. But what to call it? What does come after “contemporary” in chronological sequence?

The Young New Zealand Poets was the title used by Arthur Baysting for his 1973 Heinemann anthology. But a brief consultation of the birthdates in our Table of Contents will reveal to you that all of the poets here are over thirty, and a few were born before the Cuban missile crisis. Nor do I think it would really be feasible to select effectively from poets less advanced in their careers. Our teen and twenty-something poets have their own post-millennial anthologies and virtual reality webcasts to come. So, somewhat reluctantly, we had to rule out Young.

Recent Poetry in New Zealand was the title chosen by Charles Doyle for his 1965 Collins anthology, memorialising an earlier generation of revolutionary young poets. But very few of the poets in any of our three anthologies haven’t published “recently.” Hone Tuwhare and Alistair Te Ariki Campbell are still putting out books; as are C. K. Stead and Kevin Ireland – not to mention virtually all of the writers in Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance. So Recent, too, seemed more than a little misleading.

The New Poets: Initiatives in New Zealand Poetry (Allen & Unwin, 1987) was Murray Edmond and Mary Paul’s attempt to map the turbulent seas of NZ poetry in the 1980s. Their title and subtitle were arranged quite ingeniously to avoid that awkward juxtaposition: New New Zealand Poetry. And yet, there’s something in that very awkwardness which seems appealing. So many colonial and postcolonial states and cities have that “new” lurking in their names: New Hampshire, New South Wales, New York, New Haven … Only two of the world’s 193 sovereign nations are forced to contend with such a dated (and dating) prefix, though: New Caledonia and New Zealand.

Is novelty the overwhelming characteristic of this third of our anthologies, then (anymore than it is of our country as a whole)? The blurb for Mark Pirie’s New Zealand Writing: The NeXt Wave (HeadworX, 1998) suggested that “hard-edged realism and fantasy, pulp and Science Fiction, postmodernism and multiculturalism mix with unruly urban rhythms and the shrill drive of popular youth culture and modern performance poetry” to represent the “emerging and innovative voices of the 1990s.” Anything and everything, in other words. Ten years on from Pirie’s bold claims, what are the distinguishing characteristics of Generation X, Generation Y, and all those other media-labelled trends?

First of all I’d single out the role of women writers and women’s poetry. It’s no accident that we’ve chosen to open the book with Anne Kennedy’s teasing nursery rhyme “I was a Feminist in the 1980s.” Kennedy addresses the concerns of a generation of women whose political certainties have been complicated by the sheer multifarious business of life, children, and relationships. Many of the other poets included here, Jenny Bornholdt, Anna Jackson, and Sonja Yelich among them, have been forced to contend with families and family-values in a way their “Man Alone” poetic predecessors were able – at least occasionally – to sidestep. The proportion of women poets to men here, too, begins finally to reverse the polarities of the male-dominated culture of the first half of the twentieth century. Is it at last time, in fact, for the guys to shut up and listen?

Beyond that huge shift in our literary body politic, I’m tempted to identify a new ease with the world of travel and ideas in poets such as Andrew Johnston and Kapka Kassabova, with sexuality and history in Emma Neale and Chris Price, with wide-ranging themes and intellectual austerity in Gregory O’Brien and Tracey Slaughter. These are poets determined to go their own way, wherever that may lead them. And yet, are their concerns so dissimilar from those of their predecessors of the twenties and thirties? Then, as now, Utopia and Dystopia were the two warring faces of the New Zealand psyche. The pastoral nostalgia of M. K. Joseph’s “Mercury Bay Eclogues” and A. R. D. Fairburn’s “The Cave” alternated with the sweeping perspectives of Curnow’s “Unhistoric Story” and Kendrick Smithyman’s “Near Ellon.”

Then there’s the strong multicultural and indigenous tradition pioneered by poets such as Hone Tuwhare and Albert Wendt, which has born fruit in the powerful, troubling work of Pasifika poets such as Tusiata Avia and John Pule. The effortless virtuosity and inclusiveness of Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka (2000), by contrast, might be seen to hold out hope of a new harmony within our complex, fractured society.

It’s still hard to say if Richard Reeve meant to be ironic or affirmative when he chose an epigraph from Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra for his anti-landscape poem “Victory Beach”:

And life itself confided this secret to me: ‘Behold,’
it said, ‘I am that which must always overcome itself ...’

If we are, indeed, a nation perpetually at odds with itself: athleticism at war with aestheticism, suburban vacuity with heartland values, an ever more vexed and fought-over past with a compensatory insistence on amnesiac novelty, then New New Zealand Poets in Performance is perhaps the best title we could have chosen to celebrate this diversity, the rich jangle of clashing ideas, voices, genders which combine to make a living culture.

I hope, like me, you’ll find the trip a stimulating one. I’ve learnt a lot about our country and its characteristic voices and concerns over the past five years, while working on these three anthologies. Whether you read them at home, listen to them in the car, pore over them in the library, or simply sample the odd page between appointments, I’m sure you’ll find some kindred spirits here – not to mention opponents of the type who clarify your own thinking. So three cheers for:

… the people we used to be, for
rice and dope and chilli olives, three shadows
for your silhouette, with its cigarette, for the sound
of a swing at midnight
the sound of a swing when the swinger is crying

(Olivia Macassey, “Outhwaite Park”)

Not a comforting vision, necessarily, but one which has the virtue of being disconcertingly, even (at times) agonisingly real.

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The hardest thing in these cases is always deciding who to leave out. It’s better, in fact, to turn the question on its head and ask which writers you can’t imagine not including. And yet, it’s important to note that there are a lot of complicating circumstances in a sound anthology which don’t obtain in a more conventional print-only collection: the availability of suitable recordings, for one. Not to mention the undoubted fact that not all poets are accomplished performers of their own work.

Our principal criteria for selecting poets and poems remain, therefore, the same as in the previous two volumes:

• literary merit (inevitably a subjective category – but also the most important one)
• a strong body of published work (including at least one solo collection of poems)
• a commitment to performance and the living voice as an integral part of the work

Once again, we’ve tried to be true to the words of the poem as it was read, rather than as its author published it (at the time or subsequently). All such variations between printed text and recording have been included in an appendix of variant readings. In accordance with our practice in the Classics and Contemporaries, this collation is confined to published books, and has not been extended to separate periodical publications.

Biographical and bibliographical information on each poet can be found listed after their poems.

In some cases the poets have dated their own work. These dates have been printed in italics. Otherwise, the dates in square brackets after each poem record its first book publication. In cases where the poem has not yet been collected in a book, the date of its first appearance in a periodical or online has been given instead.

To facilitate the use of the collection, CD and track numbers have been listed beside the text of each poem. Further details can be found in the Bibliography and Track list at the end of the book.

(7/07)

New New Zealand Poets in Performance. Edited by Jack Ross. Poems Selected by Jack Ross & Jan Kemp. ISBN 978 1 86940 4093 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008): ix-xiv.

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New New Zealand Poets in Performance (2008)


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Classic NZ Poets in Performance: Preface (2006)

Jack Ross, ed.: Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance (2006)

Preface

Alan Smythe & Jan Kemp working on the Waiata Archive (1974)

In 1974, the poet Jan Kemp, together with Alan Smythe and Dr Jonathan Lamb of Auckland University’s English Department, set out to collect sound recordings of as many as possible of New Zealand’s major poets. Of the 53 who eventually read for the project, 41 had poems selected for the set of three LPs published later that year: New Zealand Poets Read their Work (1 & 2) and New Zealand Poets Read their Work for Children. The reel-to-reel tapes of the original sessions were eventually donated to the Alexander Turnbull Library, where they have remained ever since.

In 2002, nearly thirty years on, Jan Kemp and Alan Smythe, then Acting-Director of the School of Creative and Performing Arts at Auckland University, decided to create a new, updated archive of spoken poetry. The plan was to set up regional collection centres in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin in order to maximise coverage of the country’s poets. Jan Kemp took responsibility for Auckland, Elizabeth Alley for Wellington, David Howard and Morrin Rout for Christchurch, Richard Reeve and Nick Ascroft for Dunedin.

When it was eventually deposited in Auckland University’s Special Collections late in 2004, the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive had grown to include 171 poets, each reading for approximately twenty minutes, collected onto 40 audio CDs, together with photos, texts, and bio-bibliographical materials in separate, complementary discs.

These two unrivalled collections of the country’s poets form the basis of the following collection. There are, of course, gaps. It’s regrettable (to mention just a few) that we have no recordings of Ursula Bethell or Robin Hyde. Ruth Dallas, too, unavailable to read in 1974, felt that she could no longer do justice to her own work when she was asked again in 2002. The most striking thing about both archives, though, is their immense inclusiveness.

The Waiata archive includes readings by many of New Zealand’s canonical poets, including James K. Baxter, Charles Brasch, A. R. D. Fairburn, Denis Glover, M. K. Joseph, and R. A. K. Mason. Most exciting of all, perhaps, is the opportunity to hear a voice in 1974 and then again thirty years later. The poets represented twice, in both archives, include many of our finest: Fleur Adcock, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Allen Curnow, Lauris Edmond, Riemke Ensing, Janet Frame, Kevin Ireland, Michael Jackson, Vincent O’Sullivan, Alistair Paterson, Kendrick Smithyman, C. K. Stead, Brian Turner, and Albert Wendt.

The task of selecting materials for this collection of Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance has therefore been more a matter of pruning back this embarras de richesse than of questing around for more.

We have tried to choose the poems according to a number of criteria:

• Historical significance is one. It would be unthinkable to leave out, say, Glover’s “Magpies,” Curnow’s “Unhistoric Story” or Tuwhare’s “No ordinary sun,” even if one actually preferred other poems by those authors.
• Representativeness is another. We’ve tried to display as much as possible of each author’s range of styles and voices (literally, in the case of those recorded both in 1974 and 2002).
• Poetic merit is another, obviously far more subjective and difficult to assess. In general, we’ve gone for poems which seem to me concrete and clear, rather than those which exhibit an outdated sense of poetic rhetoric.

Limiting the time available to each poet might be seen as a constraint – alternatively, as an opportunity. My experience of many a long poetry reading has convinced me that the short, sharp shock can be more effective than the lingering half-hour performance. Our poets have roughly five minutes apiece to make an impression. Each of them, it seems to me, rises to the occasion supremely.

To facilitate the use of the collection, I’ve listed CD track numbers beside the text of each poem. Fuller bibliographical and recording details can be found in the track list at the end.

A decision was made at an early stage to be true to the poem as it was read, rather than as its author published it. All such variations between texts published elsewhere and the recorded version printed here have, however, been included in an appendix of Variant Readings.

Biographical and bibliographical information on each poet, together with a picture, can be found after their poems.

I moved monotonously with each altering swell
my rigid body drifting in small space
about the cold ridged ocean-moulded shell
till I lost hope of light: yet on my face
after drear days I felt again the sun.

It’s intensely moving to hear R. A. K. Mason read these words of his, more than thirty years after his death. His voice sounds rough, vernacular, unstrained – almost as if he intends to undercut the lofty sentiments of the verse – but then it rises again to passionate conviction with that “after drear days I felt again the sun.” These, he seems to be saying, are true words, words to live by. I don’t know any other way to experience that.

This, then, is not so much a museum piece as a set of living voices recorded in their prime. The more I listen to them the more I learn. I hope you’ll feel the same way.

Jack Ross & Jan Riemenschneider Kemp
[AoNZPSA Launch, Gus Fisher Gallery (17 July, 2004)]

(16-19/7/05)

Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006): ix-xi.

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Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance (2006)


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