Le poetry
Quelle joie! Our monthly cultural extravaganza is on Bastille Day. Let us hope some poems include French words.
Our monthly cultural extravaganza is on Bastille Day. Let us hope some poems include French words.
Les readings by:
* Steven Toussaint, poet
* Chris Holdaway, poet
* Anna Livesey, poet
Plus snacks and a glass of vin. Truly, our lives are blessed.
…
Sunday, July 14, 2019 at 3 PM
The Open Book
201 Ponsonby Rd, Auckland
Image credit: Mākaro Press. Dementia Wellington Chief Executive Anne Schumacher receives the $1030 cheque from poet Rob King in Wellington today.
Poet with Alzheimer’s donates $1030 in royalties to Dementia Wellington
Lyall Bay poet Rob King lives with Alzheimer’s but it hasn’t stopped him publishing his fifth poetry book, Waiting for Birds, which launched in March and has already netted him over a thousand dollars in royalties – money he donated today to Dementia Wellington.
King’s collection gathers together new and previously published poems written over 50 years in England, where he was born, Scotland, and New Zealand, where he moved 12 years ago. He decided to donate his poetry royalties to Dementia Wellington to show his appreciation of their support through workshops and community outreach. He also donates the proceeds he receives from his watercolours.
The Chief Executive of Dementia Wellington Anne Schumacher, who received the cheque from Rob King in Wellington this morning, is delighted. She says the poet, with the support of his partner, Ali Laing, is an inspiration to others living with dementia.
‘Waiting for Birds is a true testament of Rob’s determination to keep doing the things he loves,’ she says. ‘Rob is a brilliant example of someone truly living well with dementia, staying active and engaged in his community and continuing to pursue his passions. I am delighted that his book is proving to be so popular and we are very grateful for his generosity. The money will go towards helping more people live well with dementia.’
Presenters at this year’s Dementia Wellington symposium received a copy of King’s book as a thank-you gift, and King and Laing sold a number of copies to people attending the conference. It’s also been selling in bookshops, including the poet’s local – The Children’s Bookshop in Kilbirnie – where the book was launched.
Rob King worked with Mary McCallum and Paul Stewart of Wellington’s Mākaro Press to bring Waiting for Birds together. Many of the poems are about people Rob had met over his life – from neighbours in Yorkshire, where he grew up, to the homeless he worked with in Scotland, to locals waiting for the train in Ngaio.
‘Rob’s eye often falls, and his ear tunes, to eccentrics and people who are a little different and often on the fringes of society,’ McCallum says. ‘He has a humorous and compassionate take on the world and a poet’s eye for detail. His poems are never maudlin or self-pitying but instead celebrate life as a “dishful of stars”.’
‘As we worked with Rob on the book, his memory loss became more pronounced,’ says McCallum, ‘but working with the poems kept some of his memories in front of him. When Rob was sent the final proofs of the book to read and sign-off, he was unable to read for himself, so his partner, Ali, sat with him one afternoon and read the whole collection out loud. She said she was anxious about this, but as she went on she warmed to the task and enjoyed the way the poems brought back memories of times past for them both. Ali said there were many laughs and a few tears (all hers).’
Mary McCallum says Rob is a great ambassador for people living with Alzheimer’s, showing what’s possible, and how to live with humour, hope and optimism despite a dementia diagnosis.
Mākaro Press
Our books speak for themselves
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
from ‘Dover Beach’
‘Dover Beach’ by Matthew Arnold
I only discovered this poem in the early 2000s, not sure how I missed it as it so central in the canon. Mum is a poetry fanatic, and has loads of poems committed to memory. She had been the victim of a violent crime around that time, and as she reeled from the impact on her life, she found this was the poem that was going round in her head. You can see why – it’s strangely comforting even in its offering of a final bleak vision. We decided we would both learn it off by heart, and we did, over the course of a few weeks. We sat in the car and recited it to each other outside the pub, before going in to watch an All Blacks game.
Fast forward to about five years ago, we visited Dover Beach along with my husband. We were all supposed to have remembered the poem to recite together on the beach. Staggering a bit on the pebbles (which the waves draw back and fling at their return up the high strand…) we mostly achieved it, although I have to say I was the only one of us who had it word perfect.
As we walked back up the dark beach, Paul was in front, then me, then Mum. I turned around to see her, knowing I would want to remember this moment. Over her head, out in the tranquil bay, fell a shooting star.
Kate Camp
Kate Camp is a Wellington-born essayist and poet, with six collections of poetry published by Victoria University Press. She has also written essays and memoir. Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry Award (1999), and The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls won the New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry (2011). Snow White’s Coffin was shortlisted for the award in 2013, and The internet of things was longlisted in 2018. She has received the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer’s Residency (2011) and the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (2017). Her essay ‘I wet my pants’ was a finalist in the Landfall essay competition in 2018.
Dover Beach
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Matthew Arnold
Please note the change of date.
You are warmly invited to the launch of
Lay Studies
by Steven Toussaint
on Tuesday 9 July, 6pm–7.30pm
at Unity Books, 57 Willis St, Wellington.
Lay Studies will be launched by John Dennison.
Vaughan Rapatahana commutes between Hong Kong, Philippines and Aotearoa New Zealand. He is widely published across several genre in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English. He earned a Ph. D from the University of Auckland with a thesis about Colin Wilson and writes extensively about him. Rapatahana is a critic of the agencies of English language proliferation, inaugurating and co-editing English language as Hydra and Why English? Confronting the Hydra (2012 and 2016.)
He is a poet, with collections published in Hong Kong; Macau; Philippines; USA; England; France; India and New Zealand. Atonement was nominated for a National Book Award in Philippines (2016); he won the inaugural Proverse Poetry Prize the same year; and was included in Best New Zealand Poems (2017.)
He writes commentaries for Jacket2 (University of Pennsylvania): a 2015–2016 series and again during 2018-2019. In 2019 he edited an anthology of Waikato poets: Ngā Kupu Waikato.
His New Zealand Book Council Writers File
Landfall 237 edited by Emma Neale
Landfall 237 offers rich pickings for the poetry fans: familiar names (Peter Bland, David Eggleton, Elizabeth Smither, Ria Masae, Lynley Edmeades and Cilla McQueen) to emerging poets (Rebecca Hawkes, Claudia Jardine, essa may ranapiri) and those I am reading for the first time (Robynanne Milford, Jeremy Roberts, Catherine Trundle to name a few). The reading experience is kaleidoscopic, pulling you in different directions, towards both lightness and darkness, risk and comfort. And that is exactly what a literary journal can do. I was tempted to say should, but literary journals can do anything.
Landfall has a history of showcasing quirky artwork – and this issue is no exception. Sharon Singer’s sequence, “Everyday Calamities’ with its potent colour, surreal juxtapositions, strange and estranging narratives, and thematic bridges, is an addictive puzzle for heart and mind. I am circling humanity, the power of connection, the individual both tenacious and frail, the state of the planet. Paintings whirling and tipping you into moments that soothe, bewilder and provoke. I adore these.
I turned from these to Rachel O’Neill’s prose poem ‘The Supernatural Frame’ and get goosebumps:
You may look upon the painting through these special
foiled binoculars. We are at a safe distance. Afterwards you
may feel a chill or a fever linger for two days and a night,
accompanied by an infernal cough.
On the centennial of the birth of Ruth Dallas in Invercargill, I am also delighted to see John Geraets spotlight her poetry. Certain Dallas poems have always had a place in NZ literary anthologies (think ‘Milking Before Dawn’) but as readers we may less familiar with the wider expanse of her work. Like so many women poets of the twentieth century she is in the shadows. In his intro John suggests it is not clear how to include her ‘within more recent nexus based on gender, ethnicity, ecology, avant-gardism, faith or political affiliation’. He responds by assembling her words – culled from Landfall editor-contributor responses and her autobiography Curved Horizon – on the left-hand pages and his words on the right. He first sees in her poetry – compared with contemporary writing choices – predictability, regularity, un-excitement, regionalism; and then, by paying attention and refreshing his routes, he opens up poems to different movements. He moves in close to the poem. I love that. Much I could say on how we approach the women from the past! Expect 568 pages soon.
I absolutely love the poetry in this issue; it is both fresh and vital! I see neither formula nor dominating style but shifting stories, musicality, feeling, political bite, muted shades, bright tones.
Here are some highlights:
Joanna Preston’s poem ‘Allegrophobia’ carries you from birth to tardiness to spring in a layered on punctuality – a perfect little package.
Jasmine Gallagher’s ‘Be Still’ sent me to her bio because I want to read more by her. She is a doctoral student at the University of Otago and has previously been published in brief. Her poem is poetry as brocade – glinting for the eye and chiming for the ear.
Slattern: a
hoar frost:
a rime
Cold seed bed
Rot and slime
Another poet, Catherine Trundle, also sent me scavenging for more. She writes poetry, flash fiction and experimental ethnography. Her poem ‘The Caravan behind the Plum Tree’ is also an exquisite brocade.
This lush cusp of spring rides
pinkish, amoebic, wilding
the inside, every flesh ’n’ cranny
while the sunlight lunges in
through winter tidelines
of curtain rot
Tam Vosper’s ‘Ailurophilia’ was an equal hook for me. He is working on a PhD at Canterbury University that considers Allen Curnow and the poetics of place. Again this is brocade poetry: so rich in effect.
All Gallic pluck
and casual loft
you claim a suntrap,
slump sidewise down,
and unhinge your barbed yawn:
a shark to shoaling mice.
And I want to add Medb Charleton’s ‘I think I Saw You Dreaming’, Rebecca Hawkes’s ‘If I could breed your cultivar / I’d have you in my garden’ and Gail Ingram’s ‘The Kitchen’ to my list of brocade poetry. Glorious.
In contrast you have the spare deliciousness of Ariha Latham’s ‘Waitangi’. Another poet whose work I want to track down.
When I read Ria Masae’s “Jack Didn’t Build Here’ I can hear her performing its sharp mix of personal and politics – and it cuts into my skin. Six houses built. She carries us from the father’s house full of stories to David Lange’s Mangere home open to the locals: he ‘understood the pressures of fa’alavelave,/ cos he brown on the inside like that’. She bears us from the house her mum built with its’ celebration tables’ to the house Key built with its ‘security code gate’. She ends with a question (the house to be built?):
What house will Jacinda build?
Will it enable my daughters to build their own homes
of tangata whenua foundations and fa’a Samoa roofs
in this palagified City of Sales?
You can move from political bite to the glorious wit you often find in an Erik Kennedy poem. His ‘All Holidays Are Made-Up Holidays’ is no exception. Meet Cabinet Day – ‘we went along/ from house to house hanging little doors / around each other’s necks to hide our secrets’. Or the Feast of Holy Indifference. Genius!
Claire Orchard’s poem, ‘Breakages’, swivels on a set of shelves, on the objects that they hold, and in that satisfying movement speaks of so much more; the poem resembles a shelf of family history with peaks and troughs.
I enjoyed the way it had begun to display time
in the style of tottering, elderly people
I heard Joan Fleming talk about new poetry she was writing at the Poetry & Essay conference at Victoria University in 2017. The poems came out of her experience of camp life in Nyrripi and surrounding areas in Australia’s Central Desert. I was moved by her discussions of collaboration and consent, her attentiveness to the local. Two poems here – ‘Alterations’ and ‘Papunya is Gorgeous Dirty and I Second-guess my Purposes’ – come out of this experience. I can’t wait to see this in book form.
Finally a treat from Cilla McQueen. She has written ‘Poem for my Tokotoko’; it is personal, physical and abundant with the possibilities of poetry. Pure pleasure.
Sometimes I see you as an enchanter’s staff,
scattering poems like leaves to the west wind;
at others you’re practical, a trusty pole
by means of which, through quarrelling
undercurrents, I can ford turbulent water.
By means of which I put myself across.
This is such good issue – there are reviews and fiction I haven’t read yet, and the announcement of the Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition 2019 – but on the poems only, it warrants a subscription. Yep – Landfall has its finger on the pulse of NZ poetry.
Landfall 237 page
The New Zealand Book Council is thrilled to announce that award-winning author, publisher and journalist Lani Wendt Young will deliver its annual lecture on Wednesday 28 August at Wellington High School.
Stories from the Wild: Reading and Writing in the Digital Age is a brave and personal charting of the current realities and possible futures of publishing, reading and writing. Young explores these topics with her distinctive honesty, humour and passion.
Named Pacific Laureate 2018, Young is well known for her bestselling young adult series Telesa, as well as her critical and engaging essays and blogs on feminism, motherhood, Samoan culture, Pasifika literature, and digital and self-publishing. She has long been vocal about child sexual abuse and domestic violence in Pasifika communities and has raised the profile of these issues on a global scale.
Book Council CEO Jo Cribb is very excited about the event.
“We are honoured to have Lani as this year’s speaker as this will be the only chance for a Wellington audience to hear her speak this year. She is a forerunner in the field of self-publishing and an inspiration to the next generation of writers and readers.”
“Lani’s topic this year is really thought-provoking,” says Jo, who adds that while Young’s fans range from her teenage readers to parents who visit her Twitter feed for advice, it will be of particular interest to parents, aspiring writers and those from Pasifika communities.
Minister of Social Development and Disability Issues, and Associate Minister of Pacific Peoples and Arts, Culture, and Heritage, Carmel Sepuloni, will give the opening address.
Young joins a star-studded line-up of previous speakers, including Joy Cowley, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Owen Marshall and Witi Ihimaera.
Last year’s event sold out within two days, and tickets for the 2019 event will go on sale on August 5. Updates will be sent out via the Book Council mailing list and social media.
WHAT: Stories from the Wild presented by Lani Wendt Young
WHEN: Wednesday, 28 August 2019, 6pm
WHERE: Wellington High School, 249 Taranaki St, Mt Cook, Wellington, 6011
The Book Council Lecture
The New Zealand Book Council Lecture has become a prominent part of the literary landscape in Aotearoa New Zealand. It provides an opportunity for one of our country’s leading writers to discuss an aspect of literature close to their heart.
For more information, please contact:
Dom Visini, Publicity, Whitireia Publishing nzbclecture@whitireia.ac.nz
Melissa Wastney, Communications and Engagement Manager, NZ Book Council communications@bookcouncil.org.nz 021512100
Girls on Key Press invite you warmly invites you to come launch the debut collection of poetry by Eliana Gray: Eager to Break.
Mary Kisler Finding Frances Hodgkins Massey University Press, 2019
At First Glance
At first glance you are a bird in flight
wings flapping and paper flailing
feet above the cobbled bridge
ready to land on a blank page
as happy as the lark,
Dorothy behind with strings let loose.
At first glance you carry a pigeon on your head
a thousand pictures and a thousand words
colours to cry for and lines to settle on
the tools of art tucked tight beneath your arm
in the blackest of winters and the blackest of springs,
Dorothy behind with her feet on the ground.
At first glance you are a moth to the flame
wings beating and cloth shivering
feet above the water
ready to land on windmills and cabbages
the cloud effects magnificent,
Dorothy behind with an eye on the light.
Paula Green
from Making Lists for Frances Hodgkins Auckland University Press, 2007
One summer I was invited to write something for a Frances Hodgkins exhibition – I lay on my bed surrounded by catalogues of her work and pitched deep into her paintings. It was a curious experience, because the more I looked, the more I became entangled in her artwork and the more her artwork became entangled in me: my back story, my obsessions, my predispositions, my failings. I ended up writing a poetry collection that I named Making Lists for Frances Hodgkins.
All these years later I am lounging back after finishing Wild Honey and find myself entangled in Frances’s paintings again; but this time it is a little more intricate – thicket like – because I am entering the artwork by way of Mary Kisler’s terrific new book Finding Frances Hodgkins. The book is beautifully produced by Massey University Press, with a generous serving of Frances’s paintings and drawings, and photographs from the archives and from Mary’s travels. Mary is the Senior Curator, Mackelvie Collection, International Art at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
In 2013 Mary was updating an unpublished catalogue raisonné of the works of Frances, and it proved a challenging task solving the unnamed titles and places. Keen to track the changes in style and subject matter in the work of such a nomadic artist, Mary decided to trace Frances’s travels through Italy, France, Spain, Morocco and Britain. Armed with the artist’s work on her iPad and her letters, Mary journeyed through Europe. The final result is a little treasure; a book that stitches you as reader to Mary as traveller/memoirist and to Frances as artist. It is a concertina booklet; Frances’s paintings folds onto Mary’s vivid descriptions, musings and anecdotes which fold onto Frances’s anecdotes which fold onto Mary’s photographs which fold onto your own experiences which fold back onto the paintings themselves. Unfold the whole sequence and your breathtaking absorption of a painting is rich and surprising.
Mary immerses you in the world of Frances – her daily routines, the physical scenes, the painter’s observations – the writing culled from letters, the lexicon of paint and from standing in places where Frances once stood/painted. A particular painting, Hill Landscape (1936), with its juxtaposed motifs and borrowed elements, is described as ‘a memoir, so pleasing and much richer than a postcard or a photograph that captures only a single place in a single moment’. Herein lies the joy of the book – the way Mary’s engaging travels have produced a book that offers postcards and photographs yet is so much more. It is travel guide, art guide and twinned memoir that draws you close to place, both past and present. As much as it illuminates the workings of an artist does it illuminate the workings and preoccupations of a scholar. Everything seems to bound off and rebound against each other. I love that.
Take Frances on truth and how she is perceived:
I wish the papers wouldn’t make me out a sort of freak artist. I am really a very sober minded thoughtful sort of person with nothing slapdash or offhand about my work. Every stroke I put down comes from real conviction & is a sincere aspect of truth – if not the whole truth. If I can only live long enough the world will have to acknowledge me – I am horribly stubborn & I haven’t lived these long years of privation & hard work for nothing.’
By 1929 Frances is pleased to be in the news and exhibiting alongside Len Lyre and emerging modernists Henry Moore, Ben and Winifred Nicholson and Paul Nash. In a letter to her brother Bert she writes:
It is about time they realise I exist and am doing something a little more significant than the usual ruck of artists who come to Europe – even it is unpopular now people will in time grow used to the strangeness of my technique, a “handwriting” unfamiliar to them and therefore ‘eave a brick at its ‘ead!
To view the paint stroke as a form of handwriting is genius – with its subjective gestures and colour palette. Her autobiographical script was affected by the art of others, as Mary often points out, but Frances was always forging her own visual voice. It affects me as spectator at the level of both feelings and ideas. I am reminded of Robin Hyde’s pull to flee New Zealand and her ache to write. Frances was also pulled to Europe (and Africa) but in her ‘ache to paint’ she navigated what she felt and witnessed in front of her. She would stick to her own painting impetus but she would also wipe her canvases clean when her galleries saw ‘flaws’ and demanded new work. ( Interestingly I have lived with an artist for over 30 years and have never witnessed such gallery demands). She was both alone and not alone – alone in the moment of putting brush on canvas but often touring with friends or teaching students to earn money.
Behind any painting (or poem or movie etc) is the narrative and context of its making. Sometimes traces are glimpsed in what is disclosed or hinted at but often it is impenetrable. Frances’s life-long struggle to survive for example. This was a matter of finances, of crippling contracts with galleries and of maintaining her own ‘painting voice’ regardless of the ‘isms’ she rubbed against and the scant recognition back home. Mary highlights this independence: ‘Other English modernists were constantly battling over the right “ism” to follow, but Hodgkins kept her head down and followed her own path, sometimes weaving certain surrealist elements into a partially abstracted tapestry of motifs.’
I am drawn to the way Frances produced a strong bond between place and objects. Sometimes place took the form of an armchair, at other times a Mediterranean vista. The objects were often dreamlike and mnemonic, often a potent symbol. In this sense her paintings become poems – rich in visual chords that activate multiple engagements. This is what attracted me when I was lying on my bed with her catalogues. Mary comments on ‘Self Portrait: Still Life’:
(..) we know what she physically looked like, but encompassed in her self-portrait are aspects of everything that was important to her: objects she loved and which held particular symbolism for her, her favourite scarves reflecting her love of pattern and design, and her ability to construct a work rather than simply paint what was in front of her. It states clearly: judge me by what I do and what I believe, not by how I look.
Finding Frances Hodgkins is a book to linger over, savouring sumptuous detail, along with joyful discoveries and sidetracks. It is kaleidoscopic in its reach, it enhances viewings of Frances’s paintings and the real/imagined woman painting. I love this book because it resists straitjacketing the artist within specific theories in order to explicate her work. The way we write about art, the way we ‘find’ art cannot fit into a single reductive box. We can critique within the critical climate of our time but we can also choose independent paths (whilst brushing up and absorbing traces of contemporary thinking, styles, tastes). Mary has followed in the path of Frances but she has made that path her own.
Of course no one really ‘finds’ Frances Hodgkins, because she will never fit comfortably into a single box. But what I hope to have done on this journey is cast some light on how important place became in her search for modernity, and her individuality as an artist, respecting the work of others but always taking her own path. (Mary Kisler)
This is a book I will treasure for a long time.
Massey University Press author page
Mary Kisler in conversation with Kim Hill on RNZ Saturday morning
Evening
Between the skeletal tree and the blue grape, my ears ring.
Between the black roof and the soft drape, my skin yellows.
Between the support of the loggia and the altar table, my voice holds back.
From the pink hill to the fallen leaf, and upon black sand, my limbs burn.
From the little windows to the muddy goblet, I make out the women dying.
From the white wall to the sensual fruit, my hands seek slim comforts.
Between the streamy clouds and the blue jar, I rest upon crisp sheets.
Between the blood shadows and the chalky highlights, my stomach empties.
Between the eye of the house and your eye, I am in limbo.
Paula Green from Making Lists for Frances Hodgkins
NZ Poetry Shelf 