Hearts on the Run (2010)

New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre


Hearts on the Run:
Poetry Panels in Sydney


HOME & AWAY 2010
at the University of Technology,
Sydney 31 August – 3 September

[Martin Edmond & Michele Leggott]

The last conversation was in many ways the most interesting. Martin Edmond had kindly offered to show me some Sydney bookshops earlier in the day, but after our ferry-ride to Cockatoo Island, there was really only time left for one: Abbey's in York Street.

By the time we reached it, after a long amble up from Circular Quay, that time was ebbing away (Michael Farrell had stopped us on the way to point out that we were now standing in Martin Place, where the man was found crying in Les Murray's "An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow" – “There’s a fellow weeping down there. No one can stop him”).

Martin Edmond and Mark Young kept on walking to some other mysterious destination, so I found myself, at last, standing in front of a what seemed to me a pretty well-stocked Australian Poetry section.

"What should I buy?" I demanded plaintively.

The only other poets left in our little party by then were Michael Farrell and Amanda Stewart, who both started frantically rummaging through the shelves as if unable to deny themselves the written word a moment longer.

John Forbes's Collected Poems was the first selection. Martin had recommended it to me earlier, and I'd even heard in invoked in verse the night before by Nigel Roberts. Michael and Amanda agreed I could usefully start off there.

At that point, though, volume after volume began to come down off the shelves, each one of them as crisp and desirable as only a new book can be: John Kinsella, John Tranter, Laurie Duggan, a bunch of others.

Eventually, after much anxious scrutiny (and the accidental discovery of a new translation of a contemporary Turkish verse epic which I felt I just had to have), I ended up with just the Forbes Collected and the latest Tranter Selected ... It cost me quite a pang to leave all the other books behind, but it was probably a bit Quixotic to squander even that much of my remaining Australian cash at the end of such an expedition (my luggage was already stocked with numerous trades and purchases from the other participants at the Symposium).

As I left, I could still see Michael scanning the shelves with his usual quizzical intensity. Amanda was sitting crosslegged on the floor leafing through a little stack of poetry books. Bliss.

Unfortunately, in my determination to get to at least one decent bookshop during my stay, I'd managed to miscalculate my departure time by an hour. When I got back to our hotel, the shuttle I'd carefully booked that morning was long gone, and my subsequent dash to the airport was rather more breathless than I would have liked.

I still ended up in exactly the same place I would have been if I'd been more clock-conscious, though: killing time in Sydney airport. In retrospect, that brief hour in Abbey's bookshop with Michael and Amanda was one of the most precious parts of the whole symposium. Why? Because the two of them were so obviously in their element – taking down books and talking about them; sharing their close knowledge and intense dedication to the craft and its local manifestations with a well-meaning stranger determined above all, to buy something, that right something that would bring it all into focus somehow.

It was all a far cry from that first evening at the C Bar, when most of us sat at our little tables in the pub chatting away furiously to our own kind – the faces we already knew from other festivals in our own countries. David Howard, to his credit, was one of the few I saw going up to people he didn't know, determined to break the ice. I unfortunately lacked his self-confidence, and instead spent a fascinating hour or two hearing Jeffrey Paparoa Holman talk about his recent booklaunch in the Ureweras ... an important piece of bridge-building in its own right, mind you, but not yet the kind we were actually there for.

But then what can you really hope to achieve in two days in another town? We were – not all, but mostly – so ignorant of one another's work and antecedents, however willing we might feel to learn about both …

The panels themselves, when they got into session the next day, I would define as dominated by a series of questions. I’d like to take them one by one:

Panel 1, Day 1
(Wednesday 1 September):
Pam Brown, Michelle Cahill, Brian Flaherty and Chris Price present new work

We were really still feeling our way into the event with this session. The four poets read, each of them made comments about the work they were presenting, there were a few questions, and then …

Mark Young to Chris Price: "How is what you just read different from prose?"

That put the cat among the pigeons. In itself I guess it was no more than a restatement of that old Poundian dictum “Poetry must be as well written as prose”, but it was great to see the discussion suddenly coming alive. What is the difference between poetry and prose? Lineation? Depth of focus in the language? The materials? Which (in fact) comes first: form or content? It might seem like rather a banal question, but it’s actually more barbed than that: a kind of Zen koan designed to catch you out.

I don’t really know in what spirit Mark intended his remark, and I’m not sure that Chris knew either, but it did have the effect of immediately jolting us out of that super-polite, super-careful Warren Commission manner (“How was your trip down here, Mrs. Oswald?”) Instead, it moved us on to the common ground of just how, exactly, one might go about defining the territory each of us there had chosen to work in. How can that not be a useful topic of discussion among peers?

We might have been feeling a bit guarded, still – the gloves hadn’t yet really come off, despite Mark’s obvious glee at being so provocative, but I must say it made me feel a lot more relaxed when I realized that this was indeed going to be a symposium about poetry, not some kind of official ambassadorial jaunt.

Panel 2, Day 1
(Wednesday 1 September):
Jen Crawford, Martin Harrison, Jack Ross and Amanda Stewart present new work

And then it was our turn. It’s easy enough to sit there carping on the sidelines, but when you’re actually up at the front of the room, you generally find it’s not so simple to make the points you really want to make. All of us, Martin, Amanda (both of whom I’d just met), Jen and I, had clearly read each other’s work on the website, but we still weren’t clear exactly how we should present it.

Martin was in charge of our group, and had – he told us – been emailing us with his ideas over the past couple of days, but unfortunately none of these messages had reached us (his server was down). But then, as the moments ticked down to our personal D-Day, where was Martin? He was, after all, on home turf, and had no doubt been swept off by one of the other currents of university life …

He finally made it with seconds to spare, and so – telling us that he’d like each of us to make some comments on how we saw our work intersecting with the theme of Trans-Tasman relations – he ushered us into our chairs.

I had nothing! And when I get flustered (as people who know me well will tell you), I tend to play things for laughs. I hadn’t anticipated having to address directly the theme of New Zealand / Australian connections. The poems I had with me were mostly reflections on / reactions to the work of Paul Celan … I am, though, half-Australian, as I proceeded to outline.

As each of us went through our paces, I began to see that Martin’s strategy in pushing us onto stage off-balance and unprepared was not as casual and coincidental as it may have first appeared. The poems he read – some of them written and published in New Zealand at the very start of his career – were gradually starting to evolve into areas of casual roughness and intentional blemish and inconclusiveness. Since this was the territory he was exploring in his work, this may also have been the effect he wanted to achieve with this panel of fellow-poets.

The crucial question this time came from Michael Farrell:

MF to Martin Harrison (paraphrased): "How can you seriously expect to end a poem with the word 'heart' in this day and age?”

Roughness, lack of polish, unfinished structures, even – but were there tropes which could not be recuperated however hard you tried? Was sentimentality, the “heart-felt” verse of the past just such an exclusion zone?

As it happens, this is a question which preoccupies me as much as it does Martin (and Michael too, I guess), so I found the discussion which erupted as this point very interesting indeed. Jen, too, has been accused of excessive displays of feeling in her work by those who see pervasive irony as the crucial plank in the Modernist platform, a point which cannot be conceded without sacrificing everything that has been gained since the Imagist revolution in the early twentieth century.

At last I felt at home – these were people alive to the kinds of issues that nag at me all the time. To hell with national divisions – it was linguistic and poetic divisions which now had us all going! Amanda, Jen, Martin and I stood revealed as fellow barbarian roughnecks, formalists detesting formalism, experimentalists determined to assert our right to a place in Yeats’s “foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart ” …

Panel 3, Day 2
(Thursday 2 September):
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Jill Jones, Peter Minter and Lisa Samuels present new work

Panel 3 was every bit as interesting as Panel 2 had been – to me, at any rate. (I hope the audience found the long quizzing of the possibilities of recuperating feeling for poetry as fascinating as those of us on the panel did).

Lisa Samuels is a intensely cerebral poet (though her main preoccupation in the pieces she read us from her projected work Tender Girl lay, she said, in trying to find new ways of expressing emotion and physicality which might somehow sidestep the social and linguistic codes which bedevil our attempts to paint them more conventionally).

This prompted Mark Young to ask yet another loaded question:

MY to Lisa Samuels: “Which comes first, the poem or the plan?”

You can’t really put Lisa on the spot with questions like that, though. She proceeded to outline certain aspects of her method and intentions, but clearly it was a chicken-or-egg dilemma to her. How can you have either without the other?

As the other poets spoke, I felt things which had been previously unclear to me in their work – Peter Minter’s use of almost absurdly baroque “poetic” language, for instance, or Jill Jones’ insistence on using song lyrics in her titles – beginning to come into focus. I could see there was nothing unthought-through or adventitious in their choices. And I saw, too, that just as sometimes it’s necessary to hear someone read before you can really understand the underlying patterns in their work, in this case the pieces I’d read online by each of these poets had not sufficed to give me a clear sense of their respective projects.

It wasn’t that I felt I’d finally “got them”, in some reductionist way. It was more that I felt I had, now, a firmer understanding to base my reading on – that, and a determination to pursue my new acquaintance with their work.

Panel 4, Day 2
(Thursday 2 September):
Janet Charman, David Howard, Selina Tusitala Marsh and Vivienne Plumb present new work

By now I felt a pattern was more-or-less established. This was a symposium preoccupied more with questions of craft and intention than with attempts to find useful generalizations about the respective flavours of New Zealand and Australian verse.

How wrong I was, though! Panel 4 (for me) moved in entirely unexpected directions. I’d thought I knew the work of all four of the participants fairly well, but when some of them began to expound a kind of unproblematic public role for poetry, a way in which it could be seen as just another way of shaping (and selling) words, I felt for a moment as if we were re-entering the world of the ancient Bards and Skalds.

The interesting question for me in this panel was when someone in the audience (whose name I unfortunately didn’t catch) asked David Howard, à propos of his dual-language Dutch and English poem about Abel Tasman. "How much research do you do for your historical poems?"

It wasn’t that I doubted the validity of this approach to poetry and poetics – just that I hadn’t expected to find it so boldly on display. I felt, I guess, a little like Michael Farrell must have when he heard an attempt to end a love poem with the word “heart” … it was as if a door had suddenly swung open which one had assumed had been rusted shut for generations.

Plenary Session, Day 2
(Thursday 2 September):
Pam Brown (MC), Michael Farrell, Michele Leggott, Jack Ross and Ann Vickery

As I understood it, the plenary session was intended to present a series of assessments of the whole “Home and Away” venture: the Auckland and Sydney symposia, as well as the idea of providing advance materials for discussion on the digital bridge.

That’s how I approached my part in it, anyway. I gave a rather briefer version of the reactions recorded above to the various panels and readings we’d been enjoying over the past couple of days.

It was therefore a bit of a surprise to me to find that both Michael Farrell and Ann Vickery had come with written papers, which they proceeded to read.

Their papers, though, were so fascinating that I found myself wishing that I’d done the same. Michael Farrell’s positive assessment of various aspects of contemporary New Zealand poetry came as quite a revelation to me. Of course I was pleased to find how much he liked (envied might be a more accurate description) the set of three AUP audio/text anthologies edited by Jan Kemp and me. I was glad I’d gone to so much trouble to include a long performance piece by Keri Hulme in the middle volume, Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance (2007), when he singled it out as particularly interesting and representative of a type of poetry – in his view – not often heard in Australia.

When he went on to praise the last couple of issues of brief magazine, especially one piece of delirious raving by the inimitable Richard Taylor extolling the virtues of (among other things) “Delicious peanut butter” (brief 40: 85), I started to wonder if I’d gone through some kind of wormhole to Bizarro World. I’d had no previous intimation at all that Michael admired any of the crazy stuff we’d been getting up to across the ditch. Good on him.

Ann’s paper, too, was closely reasoned and constructive, and set – I thought – a good agenda for future contacts and discussions between New Zealand and Australian poets.

The discussion that came after it was perhaps more dominated by logistics than theory, but I guess that’s inevitable when this whole event had just demonstrated so clearly how important it is, from time to time at least, to all sit in the same room and talk to one another.

I believe that this Sydney Symposium was a very promising beginning to a series of dialogues I hope will continue. I did have some very good conversations with my flatmates Lisa and Jen, but then I already knew from past experience that we were on fairly compatible wavelengths. The warm and interesting chats I had with my fellow-panellists Amanda Stewart and Martin Harrison were, however, new departures for me.

What else? There were so many good readers among the ones I listened to: Ken Bolton, king of the MCs; the dry cool wit of Pam Brown … the one I'm still trying to get my head around is, however, Michael Farrell. I bought a copy of his book of cartoons, Break Me Ouch (2006), and I have to say that it pleases me immensely. He just can't draw at all. And he doesn't care. Most of the cartoons seem quite pointless, but of course that’s precisely why they’re not. I very much admired A Raider's Guide (2008), which he gave me on a previous visit to Auckland, but I have to say that those cartoons really blew me away. I've had a not dissimilar project on the stocks for quite some time, and this has emboldened me to persevere with it.

Maybe that's the conclusion I'd like to come to, then: emboldening each other to go one better, one step further than we'd otherwise dare. I found this Sydney experience very worthwhile for that reason alone.


References:

• Farrell, Michael. Break Me Ouch. St Kilda, Victoria: 3 Deep Publishing Pty Ltd., 2006.
• Farrell, Michael. A Raiders Guide: New Poems. Giramondo Poets. Sydney: Giramondo Publishing Company, 2008.
• Forbes, John. Collected Poems. 2001. Blackheath, NSW: Brandl & Schlesinger Pty Ltd., 2010.
• Harrison, Martin. Wild Bees: New and Selected Poems. New Writing Series. Crawley, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 2008.
• Jones, Jill. Dark Bright Doors. Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press, 2010.
• Murray, Les. Collected Poems 1961-2002. CD included. Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002.
• Ross, Jack, & Jan Kemp, ed. Classic, Contemporary, & New NZ Poets in Performance. CDs included. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006-2008.
• Stewart, Amanda. I/T: Selected Poems 1980-1996. CD included. Surry Hills, NSW: Here and There Books, 1998.
• Taylor, Richard. “Reading Things.” brief 40 (2010): 80-86.
• Tranter, John. Urban Myths: 210 Poems [New and Selected]. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2006.

Michael Farrell & Janet Charman on Cockatoo Island

(5/9-29/10/10)

Home & Away 2010. New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (19/11/10).
[Available at: nzepc]

[3078 wds]


Home & Away (2010)


•

Going West Five Years On (2004)

Vanessa York & Andrew Forsberg, ed.: pander OS 2.0

Going West Five Years On

Going West Books & Writers 2004: Between the Lines: A Tribute to Michael King. Titirangi War Memorial Hall (September 3-19th)

Going West Books and Writers Festival

Having just presented a session at this year’s Going West Festival (or at least MC’d a launch hosted by the Festival – a slight distinction there), it seems an opportune moment to revisit the old Pander review of the 1999 Festival. The thing’s rather been haunting me, I must confess – sitting like an unexploded time bomb on Andrew Forsberg’s site.

There seem to be two major issues to discuss: the first is cowardice, the second truth.

Cowardice

The Pander anonymous review convention attracted a lot of criticism during its brief life. I modelled it on the old Times Literary Supplement tradition of unsigned reviews, though one could certainly object that the magisterial, ex cathedra character of the TLS had nothing in common with the insolent cheek of the Pander.

Was it cowardly? Just a device for getting out of putting your name where your mouth was? Not in intention, no. I just felt that too much of our criticism was based on such-and-such-a-name reviewing such-and-such-another-name, which tended to focus attention solely on the personal relations of the two (in New Zealand, everyone knows each other – depressingly true, still). “You give me a nice review or I’ll get my revenge later” is always the unspoken threat.

One thing that seemed to confirm me in my stand was that people would occasionally go to great lengths to ascertain who had written a particular review in the magazine, and then, when they did find out, discover that the name meant nothing to them at all. I wanted to focus attention of the content of our criticism, not on who it was by.

I still think that we live in an almost claustrophobically small Arts community, and an unusually thin-skinned one, also. Depressingly few people here appear to acknowledge that negative commentary could ever be worthwhile or useful to them – let alone to the public. There’s money involved! There’s a reputation! There’s a livelihood!

It’s always unpleasant to receive bad reviews, of course. I realise that. Having had a few myself, I’m a lot more sympathetic now to people who objected to the tone rather than the content of Pander reviewing. I do think (now) that we allowed ourselves too much latitude there. I’d still defend each of the reviews we printed individually, but I can see that printing them anonymously made us look like a group of smash-&-grab thugs. That’s one reason why we phased out the convention in the second full year of the magazine’s run, in fact. I should stress that no single contributor ever requested that their contributions appear anonymously – that was an editorial decision, made by me, and endorsed (at least initially) by the other editors.

Negativity is not really the issue, though – neither is tone. You have to be at least prepared to be negative to be an effective reviewer. Sarcasm is also appropriate in some contexts – deflating grandiloquent self-importance, for instance. What is not acceptable, under any circumstances, is ad hominem criticism, focussing on the creator rather than the work under discussion.

Obviously the two overlap: works (and events) come out with a nametag attached. It’s only sensible to cross-reference them with other works issued under the same nametag. The moment, however, you start slagging someone off rather than talking about their work, you’re in trouble. It’s a fine line, and I hope we were always on the right side of it. I think we were, but some of our critics clearly think we were not.
I’d be much more careful now than I was then, much more considerate of the need to persuade rather than hector readers, but it’s not as if this issue of criticising the work rather than the person didn’t continually arise in preparing copy for the magazine (and, latterly, the website). Up to you to judge, really. I’d like to think we were always on the side of the angels, but we certainly sailed pretty close to the wind at times.

One of those times was with the Going West review, which appeared on the website rather than in the magazine for reasons of space (otherwise it’d have graduated from wrapping fish’n’chips to the landfill by now, and thus be out of my hair).

Truth

Was it true? Would I say the same things now? Do I (in short) repent?

It still seems strange to me that people apparently didn’t notice how much I was guying myself in writing the review that way (perhaps there anonymity didn’t serve our cause). I thought the prologue made it quite obvious that this was an envious would-be littérateur venting steam, rather than a balanced, magisterial analysis. I said as much, in fact.

You may, of course, believe that that invalidates the piece altogether, but personally I’ve always believed in stating a bias in advance, rather than trying to imply that it doesn’t exist at all. I was puzzled to find that I wasn’t enjoying the Festival, and wanted to put my finger on why. I certainly didn’t mean that everyone would have the same reactions, or see it the same way. I tried to quiz as many people as possible to find out how they felt about it all along the way, in fact.

I guess my substantive criticisms came down to two things (both illustrated by numerous examples):

1. I felt that the festival was organised to pay excessive deference to names, and to minimise effective participation from the floor. That’s one reason I quoted so many asides from the paying audience, and mentioned the prompt suppression of the (quite interesting) Michael King question, among others. Interesting issues were coming up, and they weren’t being explored (I felt) because of a lack of flexibility in the structure.
   
   I think now that I was wrong to attribute this so unequivocally to the setup of the Festival, and (particularly) to the nametag arrangement. Festivals on this scale are vastly complicated to run, and I suspect that indifferent chairing of some of the various sessions, a timid, non-interventionist audience, and a venue with a raised stage and school-assembly seating all conspired to rob the discussion of liveliness.


2. I thought that the choice of topics to discuss, and people to present the sessions, was too safe and predictable, and lacked a really cutting-edge sense of what was going on in New Zealand writing (a re-rediscovery of Ronald Hugh Morriesson, for example).
   
   I still think that’s true, but it’s a criticism that applies so widely that it seems pointless to attribute it solely to the organisers and participants in Going West. Within a limited budget, and a limited number of eminent presenters to call upon, I’d now feel more disposed to accentuate the positive, the good things which were undoubtedly there.

So, yes, I do repent a little of some of my churlish remarks (perhaps I’ve just sold out to The Man in the meantime). I think I was too rude about the organisers and not sufficiently critical of the participants (and the audience – including myself).

The main point I’d make, five years on, is that it’s pointless to criticise a smorgasbord as if it were intended to be a banquet. One doesn’t have to go to everything, and a case of indigestion is bound to result from the attempt.

I still feel that the atmosphere of the Festival is a little too hierarchical, but I’m not quite so sure how that could be addressed. More q & a, perhaps? What was most encouraging about the sessions I attended this year was that pertinent questions were far more welcome, and indeed some speakers seemed to be practically gagging for a good question from the floor.

Power to the people is still my watchword, as it was in 1999, but I think now that until we get better audiences we won’t get better Literary Festivals. It cuts both ways, of course. You’ve got to interest people to drag them in.

Literature’s still largely equated with solitary vice in New Zealand, though. When questioned whether or not they write, people tend to put on a hangdog expression before they guiltily confess to the dog-eared novel, or memoir, or portfolio of poems in the bottom drawer. I’d like us to be bolder both as writers and readers. Festivals like Going West can certainly be seen as barometers in charting this process, but for now I’d just like to stress how lucky we are to have them – and their organisers – at all.

(15/9/04)

Pander Online.
[Available at: http://www.thepander.co.nz/literature/articles/jross200409.php]

[1437 wds]




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Royal NZ Ballet: Peter Pan (1999)

Pander 8 (July 1999)

The Royal New Zealand Ballet, The Shell Season of Peter Pan, Choreographer Russell Kerr, Designer Kristian Fredrikson, Composer Philip Norman. National Tour, 27 February-18 April.

Royal NZ Ballet: Peter Pan

It’s been done before, of course: a ballet of Peter Pan. One might have thought the play was spectacular enough, with its doggy nurse, trapeze wires, variegated sets and pantomimic audience participation (“Clap if you believe in fairies!”), but no, another dance verison was, it seems, required. You’ll have gathered that it was with a certain trepidation that I repaired to the Aotea Centre to see the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s new version of the immortal tale (that ghastly Disney film did little but leach away at its strangeness).

To say I was pleasantly surprised is to put it mildly. I loved it. True, it’s less perverse, less self-exploratory than J. M. Barrie’s original, but perhaps there are abysses there that it’s best not to peer into for too long (those of you who’ve read, or watched, Andrew Kerr’s The Lost Boys will know what I’m talking about: the bizarre psychodrama of Barrie’s involvement with the Llewelyn-Davies children).

One strong point in favour of the ballet is the strongly masculine presence of Peter himself. The convention of having girls in the leading role had perhaps gone far enough. It’s time to see this parable of arrested emotional development in another, franker light. The other “archetypes of the collective unconscious” (surely one of the great titles) embodied in Barrie’s play – mermaids, Indians, pirates – were equally fresh and clear.

Perhaps that’s the keynote of this piece, in fact: clarity. The original Peter Pan is muddled, mad, multi-faceted – this one is clipped and elegant. The sets are sumptuous but never de trop – the dances precise and unprotracted. It’s hard to see a foot put wrong.

The strongest accolade is that both the adults and the children in the audience enjoyed it. The frisson one feels when looking round at large numbers of children in expensive theatre seats is seldom an agreeable one, but even the ones who were too young to be studying ballet seemed satisfied. Jon Trimmer’s genial nabob Captain Hook, the roly-poly Lost Boys, the sinuous star maidens provided sufficient spectacle for all.

The music was quite adequate to its purpose, though perhaps a little uninspired. It’s hard to imagine it in a concert hall on its own. I’d rather have that, though, than another tired production to first-rate music: one more Nutcracker, say. The freshness of the choreography (particularly scenes such as Peter in search of his shadow) and ingenuity of the design were a joy. Full marks and felicitations.

(14/7/99)

Pander 8 (1999): 38-39.

[435 wds]


Pander 8 (1999)


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Going West Literary Festival (1999)

Vanessa York & Andrew Forsberg, ed.: pander OS 2.0

Going West Literary Festival: The Nation’s Narratives. Titirangi War Memorial Hall (September 12-13th, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.)

Going West Books and Writers Festival

– What was so bad about it?
– Where do I begin? Well, I mean, I was supposed to be covering the event for the magazine, but they all made a point of ignoring me, and walking away every time I went up and tried to talk to anyone!
– Poor baby …
– Yeah, but I’ll get my revenge. Wait till they see what I say!
– Yeah?
– I thought of opening with something like: “I was determined to write a balanced, statesmanlike piece about the Going West Literary Festival; but then, halfway through, I thought: Fuck it. Why not tell it like it is?”
– Can you say that?
– Say what?
– Fuck.
– I don’t see why not. I’ve done it before. A savage journey into the heart of the Westie dream … Whatcha reckon?

•

• Saturday, 12th September. 9.10 a.m.: Talk about mainstream. Murray Gray and his lieutenants bustle around officiously: “Don’t talk to me; I’ve got a nametag. I’m important.” About as much fun as church so far. Still, some interesting people will, it appears, be speaking. [More on the nametag issue later].


• 9.30: Ian Wedde’s keynote address is quite thought-provoking, though (to my mind) not so much marred as curiously informed by the fact that he sees TV ads – Crumpy and Scotty, the Speights musterers – as the cutting edge of our culture.
  Peter Simpson on Ian Wedde: “You have such a capacity to irrigate our minds.” Chap behind me: “You mean piss on our brains?”


• 10.15: Better than more of these fatuous “workshop discussions,” though. “Warts & All! Literary Biography,” “Pop Lyrics: Telling it the Way it is!” (that’s subtle). How about “Porno: Wet Dreams for Wankers” (Oh God, that’s there already as “Tales of Sex and Art”) or “Is the Author Dead? A discussion of the ‘new novel’”? Seriously, this sort of stuff is the intellectual equivalent of poems about foxgloves in English lanes, or my pawky Scots ma. Most of the participants look vaguely ashamed of themselves. At least they’re getting paid.
  [A nice aside by Dave Dobbyn about this “right-wing stinking Nazi government we have nowadays” in the pop music session. I ask him if he’s aware that the festival was opened by the National Party Minister of Culture, which seems to amuse him].


• 1.30: In the panel on “Are all Romances Love Stories?” Rachel McAlpine confides to us, in motherly tones, that she’d been saying to Kim Hill, on the radio, just the other day, that they really should admit that “people like you and me” [as opposed to what? People with brains? good hair-dos?] like Mills & Boons romances too! ‘Nuff said, as smilin’ Stan Lee used to say in the Marvel comics.


• 2.30: Up to now, I haven’t quite put my finger on what’s wrong here. In the Michael King session there’s the customary 30 seconds left for “interaction” with the audience, and someone is stroppy enough to ask a leading question about his relations with Maoridom. Much tutting and frowning from John Cranna in the chair, but King condescends to answer with a few generalisations about times changing and the necessity to move on. The question was a bit aggressive, but I’m distressed to see this closing of the ranks at the first sign of a challenge to the party line.
  There’s a confusion of signs and intentions here: “City of beans and cod / Where the writers speak only to nametags / and the nametags speak only to God.” People who’ve paid to hear their favourite writer speak should be allowed the opportunity to speak to them later, and the registration fee should include some kind of standard nametag. That’s democracy, I think. That’s the right way to do it, and the way I’ve seen it done at other venues. As it is, these silly nametags have become an implicit barometer of prestige.
  Why do my notes include the phrase: Next time I’ll bring a syringe … ?


• 5.00: Lynda Chanwai Earle concludes her reading by saying: “I really enjoyed today.” That’s nice, Lynda. I didn’t. I bet I would have if I’d had a fucking nametag, though. When they open me up they’ll find the word embossed on my heart.



• Sunday, 13th September: 8.45 a.m.: It says something for my sense of duty that I actually came back – just bloody-mindedness, perhaps. What fresh horrors of invention will this day show?
  [Vignette: early morning. Enter conference organiser, chasing a duck out of the hall foyer. It’s hard to say which of them looks more indignant.]


• 9.10: The second day is dawning better. The hi-tech seems to be working for a change. A kind of impromptu morning tea is breaking out around us, but Murray Gray does not approve. Sit down, naughty people.
  The daring “revisionism” of rediscovering Ronald Hugh Morriesson reveals the implicit tendency of this affair. How many times can you rediscover someone? I mean, damn it, let’s rediscover some other little-known neglected artists like McCahon and Hotere at the same time.
  In his bit of this weirdly over-organised session, C. K. Stead tells an anecdote which is more revealing than he probably intends. He was at a literary congress sometime in the seventies, and was continually interrupted by a man in the audience who seemed to want to speak in praise of universities and how they discover and popularise neglected works of art. Stead did not then (or now) agree and, in any case, it seemed a bit irrelevant, so he shut him up.
  Later on he realised the man was Morriesson himself, trying in this rather devious way to express thanks for Stead’s own part in “rediscovering” his early novels. And the moral is? Well, you know my moral by now: if you ain’t got no nametag, you ain’t nobody.


• 10.15: This is the real nub of the matter: Tainui Stevens and Professor “Jamie” Belich on The New Zealand Wars. The former is a very engaging speaker, and chatters on agreeably for quite a while. The latter sits with crossed arms and a frown, looking like some nineteenth-century man of destiny.
  When it comes to his turn to speak, Professor Belich announces that he will now answer his critics. “Ah ha,” think I, and mentally rub my hands together – “Now we’ll hear something interesting. He’ll explain a few points, and set the record straight at last.” Nope. They’re all cranks, it appears (his word). The only thing required is to “anthropologise” their reactionary views. One crank was actually rung up by a national newspaper for an opinion, which is shocking. Because if cranks are allowed equal space with professors of history, then society will fall apart. My mouth rather fell open at this, but the audience had been well trained by the rough justice meted out to impertinent questioners yesterday, so no-one demurred. Now, I ain’t no military historian, but some of the people who wrote in to question certain details of the TV series apparently were. Never mind. They’re all cranks.

There was, of course, more, much more – readings by this, that, and the other poet and novelist [did Kapka Kassabova really say: “to be the nipple of pleasure lipped by the panting dogs of summer,” or was that just a fever-dream?]. Michele Leggott announced that today was an A2 day (referring to the size of the piece of paper she was proposing to read from). C. K. Stead tried to get a fight going, but in a half-hearted sort of way (“Cynical, isn’t he?” said the woman in the seat behind me). There was a beleaguered tone about it all, somehow – nothing against [most of] the speakers involved, but I felt we were being asked to buy a package. Enterprise culture c.1987.
You’ll be glad to hear, though, that there was one thing I really liked in that soulless, uninspiring weekend. Someone asked Shonagh Koea how she managed to keep on writing, and whether she ever got discouraged. She replied, “Well, I sit down at my desk, and then I start crying.” Not racking sobs, she explained, but just drizzling, hopeless tears. Why? “Oh, from fear.” Fear, she went on to explain, that she wouldn’t be able to go on. That did appeal to me. Weeping from terror is so much closer to my experience of life than all the other sold-out business-as-usual bullshit the establishment’s trying to peddle these days. She had some good tips on how to get round your blocks, but it was mainly that image that got me. At the end of the day (literally, in this case) there’s something comforting about fear and sorrow.

(10/98)

Pander online edition 6/7
[Available at: http://www.thepander.co.nz/archive.html (4/99)]

[1450 wds]




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Poetry Live (1998)

Sunday Star-Times (18/10/98)

It’s Standing Room Only for the Rekindling of Live Lines:
Poetry Live at the Alleluya Café

Alleluya Bar & Café

Some scream; others mumble. Some recite from memory; others cling to their little bundles of scribbled or typewritten pages. There’s only one microphone – one reader, or singer, or musician at a time – but anyone is free to use it. At most of the tables there are heads bent over, testing words, chewing pens, writing down those elusive few lines which will somehow come across.

The audience is as mixed as the performers. Some, a few, are there every week; others just drifted in off the street for a coffee, or because they were attracted by the din. The Alleluya is, after all, usually just another Karangahape Road café. “Poetry Live is three hours on Wednesday nights,” says Peter Hawkesby, the owner. “I’m here seven days a week.”

His café boasts one of the best views in Auckland. During the day, the gentle green of Myers Park predominates; as night falls, the Chinese-blue sceptre of the Sky tower looms up behind the high glass windows. And St. Kevin’s arcade, though a little dilapidated, is an Art Deco gem. It was built in the 1920s, and still has its original ornamented shop-fronts and plaster ceilings. In the 1950s it played host to the Beats; now, in the 1990s, it’s home to the moveable feast called Poetry Live.

Founded in 1979 by the performance poet David Mitchell, Poetry Live has been migrating ever since from venue to venue – a kind of Cook’s tour of the older Auckland pubs: the Globe, the Gluepot, the Albion, the Shakespeare, the Empire. Most New Zealand poets have read there at one time or another, in one or other of these incarnations. Is this the end of its wanderings? Almost certainly not.

Probably only one person, Tim Bush, has been coming all that time, though even he admits to missing “a year or two. This’ll be my eighteenth or nineteenth. It’s not absolutely every week, though. We do finish a bit before Christmas, and then break till the end of January.”

It’s slightly staggering to think of that many poetry evenings, over that length of time: not a thousand and one, but more like 9,000 nights of guest poets, musicians, and MCs (different each week), as well as all those readers (and hecklers!) from the floor.

“David Mitchell was clear on the rules: ‘Read your own. Anyone can read, so long as they read their own.’”

Tim goes on to say, “I’m not always the oldest – I’m 63. It’s all ages, though it’s true they’re mostly young. Over the years it’s got more political, loud, and relevant. We get students, balladeers with pamphlets to sell, ‘poet laureates’ from the suburbs … all sorts, really.”

Judy McNeil, who has been administering Poetry Live since 1995 – as well as producing its magazine (started by Briony Jagger in 1992 as Auckland Live, and now called Tongue in Your Ear) – insists that “the whole idea is to provide an accepting kind of audience who don’t sit in judgement, who aren’t there to be critical.”

It hasn’t always been like that, though. Robert Sullivan, guest poet on one of the nights I was there, says he found the old Albion “gloomy and intricate,” with an audience to match. “People got pushed away from the mike, and the crowd would throw things if they didn’t like you.”

Briony Jagger, another guest poet, back after a long absence, agrees: “It was so smoky in the Albion that I had to go out every few minutes to breathe. The Shakespeare, on the other hand, had lounge chairs and sofas, and on a cold night there’d be a roaring fire to warm you up.” The audience at the Alleluya can get a bit thin in winter, but there’s generally someone at every table. “Some nights it’s standing room only,” puts in Judy.

“The other day we had a seventeen-year-old who came in for the first time, got inspired, and started to write on the spot. The next week he got up and read it,” this week’s MC, Annora Gollop, tells me. “It was good. Some of what we get is more therapy than poetry, admittedly, but people here are as tolerant of that as they are of a more literary style.”

Annora used to attend live poetry readings in Wellington. “There are the Poetry NZ readings for the really well-established poets, and then places like the Angus Inn in Upper Hutt which offer a mixture: pub poetry as well as the rest.” Other visitors from Christchurch, Dunedin, Nelson are anxious to tell me about the open mike venues in their own cities.

Even in Auckland, Poetry Live is not without competition. Over the years there have been numerous other places for live poetry, as well as workshop and performance groups. Just in the last month a rival has started up across the road: Friday nights at the Ron Riddell’s Live Poets’ Café. Most of the people I spoke to saw this as a healthy thing. They were happy to go to both.

“It can be a little forbidding at first, but there’s good will under the surface,” one young poet, Damian McGregor, confides to me. “I started coming at first because it didn’t cost me any money, but then I found I had a lot to learn from it.”

One thing is certain. As long as every table is full on Wednesday nights, as long as there’s a real need for a place that’s simply “creative: where people can just stand up and sing” – or recite – or shout – this long-running show is unlikely to close.

Poetry Live: 7.30-10.30, every Wednesday night, Alleluya Café, St. Kevin’s Arcade, Karangahape Road, Central Auckland.

(22/8-9/98)

Sunday Star-Times (October 18, 1998): F4.

[949 wds]


Sunday Star-Times (18/10/98)


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