Is teething at the river mouth. Burrowing down. Between the dirt and wild things. Frozen breathing, rain, this place, is smoking from the mountainside. Is setting bush on fire. Is suspended by wire pins. Browning alpine sunshine slunk onto muck. Sky and the sailing moors, all bright descended pictures, falling on the roof. Is passing under cars. Is passerby. Non-belonging. Beating trails where the road hitches and pulls from snow, matted scrubland, country laid in bird formation. Is burnt-out with believing. Festering. Splintered. Usually self-inflicted.
Pippi Jean
Pippi Jean is seventeen and has yet to decide on a music taste. Her work has appeared in Signals, Starling, Poetry NZ Yearbook, Overcommunicate and Toitoi. Last year she was a finalist in the National Schools Poetry Award.
Vanessa Mei Crofskey reads ‘”Something in the Water” by Brooke Fraser’
This poem was published in the latest issue of Starling (Starling 10).
Vanessa Mei Crofskey is an artist and writer based in Tāmaki Makaurau. They are a staff writer at The Pantograph Punch, have a collection of poems out in AUP New Poets 6, and often write about the water.
This week many of us have celebrated te reo Māori – I have listened and read and, as I listen and read, I try to imagine an Aotearoa where every child becomes fluent, where we hear and see and read te reo Māori everywhere, where we honour the whakapapa of Māori place names and pronounce them correctly. I support te reo Māori as essential learning in all schools.
When I failed school and left without UE I had no idea who and how I wanted to be, but I went to night school to learn te reo Māori. It was Whangārei. It was the 1970s. It was ban the bomb badges and women’s liberation groups. It was vegetarian food and Joni Mitchell retuning her guitar. It was discovering Hone Tuwhare in the high school library. But as much as I thought learning te reo Māori was important, it felt even more important to step back and give space and time to Māori to grow their language again.
A week celebrating te reo Māori is a wonderful thing. A year boosting it even more so. A decade, a lifetime. Language is so important. We are what we speak. Just as our multiple stories are important. That 17 year old young woman is carried inside me, now that I am an older woman, and it feels like I am being invited into the language nest. With small steps, without wanting to speak over or take over, I feel this warm and encouraging embrace. I will make mistakes, I will hear the rōreka, the kõrero. I feel my way as the seeds of a language are planted. Tēnã koutou.
I carried the lamb in a sack on my horse the tongue hanging grey and limp. It’s buggered, said Dad, throw it in the creek. The creek leaped, dimpled. Small bubbles whirled, it rumpled where I was looking the water shadowed half-blue-black
deep just there with duckweed floating out the yards behind all noise, the cattle swirling up air swelled with dust and bellowing. Flies lighted on and off the rails. I took the lamb and kneeled in the pudgy mud both hands under it, under the water,
laid it carefully into the shocked cold. It hardly struggled, there was so little left. Put the bloody thing out of its misery I heard in my head as I pushed it under and the water shuddered. Get the hell out of that he yelled at my back
you macabre little bastard! It might have been ghoulish, he was good with words. The yards were sweating hot Dad wiped his hatband, the sack smelling of dry stiff flax, I wiped my nose my hand all mud and numb.
The birds hummed. In rain, in wind I go out all hours on my lambing beat he’s the shadow of me, always riding beside me. Let it go he said, quietly. I let it go floating it bobbed and the sun caught the eye, closing. Shush, shush, said the creek.
Marty Smith from Horse with hat, Victoria University Press, 2014
Agnus Dei
I used to think some of the connections and references I made for this poem were so obscure that the only people who would ever know (or care) about them were me and my Dad, and he was dead the whole time I was writing my book to him.
But when I read it at Wardini Books, Erice Fairbrother was there, and she told the audience that every year when she takes the Easter Service in the Napier Cathedral, she reads Agnus Dei to her congregation. And I had the kind of reaction that comes straight from the subconcious where it was – Whoa! The poem is against religion! – but I also remembered that the poem walks away from me as soon as it’s written, and it’s Erice’s poem when she reads it and wants to use it at Easter. Besides, Agnus Dei still has a dollar each way, like all of the poems in the book that question faith. Dad never went to church and we hardly ever did, but his mother was very religious. His maternal grandfather was a Lutheran minister who had to give up running the Lake Ferry Hotel because he couldn’t square it with being a tee-totaller and a minister. I lay off some bets, just in case.
I think I can see why Erice would choose to read Agnus Dei at Easter, and if we hadn’t been in lockdown this year, I would have snuck into her service. It’s a brilliant thing to do, to read a poem in a cathedral —accoustics! – and I knew for a fact she’d get it perfect because she’s a really fine poet and a beautiful reader. I imagine it’s the line, ‘He’s the shadow of me, always riding beside me.’ I’ve always been very pleased with that image, but I was not meaning that kind of father, I was meaning my actual father. He was so huge in my life that when I was riding my pony, it was not my shadow I cast, but his. I wondered what Erice sees– is it casting the shadow of God beside people when they walk? (What kind of shadow would he cast?) (Does he have weapons?)
When I say I’m having a shot at religion, I’m only giving it the side eye in this poem. By using a religious reference as a title, though, it talks to other poems in the book which question faith. Some of the poems have what I think of as mirror lines – when you read the mirror line, you get the reflection of the other poem. (See why I say I’m probably the only person who ever will read Horse with hat like this? )
The mirror line is ‘Put the bloody thing out of its misery’, which is in Emphysema for Aunty Gwen. Dad’s sister Gwen contemplates him in his final coma and remembers the pact they made after he came back from the war: that if ever one of them was helpless in hospital, at the mercy of stangers, the other was to ‘put them out of their misery’.
When Dad says, ‘Put the bloody thing out of its misery’, there’s the shadow of the idea that sometimes soldiers had to shoot their own men if they couldn’t survive their injuries but would lie alive in agony for days. To use the Latin for The Lamb of God, Agnus Dei, is to suggest that servicemen were lambs to the slaughter. In another poem, Aunty Gwen is looking back, and she says, They were so innocent. They didn’t know anything. They’d led such sheltered lives on the farm.
On the farm level, we were never to let animals suffer. They were always to be put down if they couldn’t be saved, and if it sounds shocking now to throw the lamb in the creek, but in the fifties, as my aunty puts it, it was just what people did.
The poem didn’t start out as anything other than an exercise I was doing for the International Writers’ Programme at Iowa, where we were asked to write like US poet Lyn Hijinian – not so much write like her, but to have a go at using the tools she uses – really dense, really packed layering up of tiny details. The exercise required you to pick out a tiny detail and write every small detail you could about that detail, building outwards and outwards and for some reason the detail that threw up was the duckweed floating out on the creek – that was all it was, but when you start a memory like that the details roll out until they turn into what it really is—how deep and cold the water was. Then the lamb came floating up. The lamb was always there. Then it was about innocence.
The tiny details became heat and dust and the noise of the cattle bellowing, and it was always going to Dad in the cattleyards. It was surprising to me how those details came out as sound. It made me think of my Iowa tutor Shannon Welch, who said, The language is older than you. Let the language take you. (She also said, The water is deep, don’t snorkel.)
The other voice on the audio for Agnus Dei is Maude Morris, who was about 15 at the time. Maude is now the band LEXXA, with her twin sister Julia. It was Maude’s idea to loop the child’s voice, and make the heartbeat sound with the mic. Which stops. I asked her if she could make a sound that was recognisably birdsong, but with something wrong with it. An unnatural sound for an unnatural act, to go over the lamb going into the creek. Maude got a tui song and stretched it out, then played it backwards and chopped it off. You know it’s a tui, and you know there’s something wrong with it, but you don’t know what. Jeff Boyle from Jakob very kindly recorded it for us.
My father and uncles never talked about the war, because their gift to their families was for them not to have to know. Aunty Gwen said you never knew what they carried around with them. This poem has redemption at the end, because it’s all I can do, but they didn’t allow redemption for themselves.
Marty Smith’s Horse with hat won the 2014 Jesse Mackay award for Best First Book of Poetry, and was a finalist for the Poetry Award. One of the strands in the book is the cost to her father of carrying the war with him; another strand is the question of faith. Agnus Dei crosses religion over into war, although it looks like farming. Marty grew up riding beside her father, hence the horse strand in Horse with hat, hence the book she is writing about the obsession of people who risk their lives to ride racehorses. She would risk her life right now to ride a racehorse, if she were allowed.
‘Agnus Dei’ was short-listed for the 2013 Bridport Prize (UK) and was a place getter in the 2013 Joy Harjo Poetry Award (US)
Marty is currently working on poems to go alongside the lockdown essay she wrote for her friend, Paul Davis, whose plans for the end of his life were ruined by lockdown.
‘And I think it is this sense of connection, in all Kate’s poems, which sent me scrambling for a word like spiritual. Because what I feel when I read Kate’s work is that the great mysteries of the world, the omnipresent magnificence, the unexplainable and the truly awesome, rest in being human among humans. Take your ley lines and chakras and give me the oesophagus and the eyeball, the memory of a dusty school hall, that night, that party, remember the small blasts of happiness, our bloody painful hearts.’
Maria McMillan, launch speech for Kate Camp’s How to Be Happy Though Human
Poet, essayist and literary commentator, Kate Camp has published six previous poetry collections. Her debut collection, Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars, won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry at the 1999 Montana NZ Book Awards. Her fourth, The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls, won the 2011 NZ Post Book Awards Best Book of Poetry. Her poems have appeared in magazines and journals in New Zealand and internationally. For a number of years she has discussed classic literature – Kate’s Klassics – on with Kim Hill’s Saturday spot on Radio NZ.
To mark Victoria University Press’s publication of Kate’s How to Be Happy Though Human, Kate answered a few questions for Poetry Shelf.
So many things can go wrong
inside a human life, it’s almost comical.
You find yourself in a house,
in a night, with everyone you love
breathing in and out somewhere
and if you thought about it properly
you’d just throw up in terror.
from ‘Panic button’
Paula: Have you always been an avid reader and writer?
Kate: Family legend is that I came home from my first day of school and told my mother I could read. She said, oh ok read this. I replied, well I don’t know any words yet.
I didn’t learn to read particularly early, but once I did I quickly became obsessive about it, all the usual reading under the covers, walking down the street with a book on my way to school, re-reading books over and over again.
Paula: Can you name a few poets that have caught your attention across the decades?
Kate: Lauris Edmond is a key one for me among New Zealand poets. I’m reading Fleur Adcock’s selected poems at the moment and remembering what an important influence she was for me early on. And Jenny Bornholdt, her work and mine are so different, and yet I always feel such an affinity with her poems.
In more recent years / decades I’ve got into a lot of poetry in translation. Czesław Miłosz is one I come back to again and again, and Wisława Szymborska. Like Bornholdt, Mary Oliver is a poet I feel is very different from me, but I love her.
Paula: You acknowledge your writing group. How important is it to be part of this as a poet?
Kate: My whole career I’ve had a writing group. When I first started writing seriously I was on the creative writing course at Victoria in 1995, so I was in a weekly workshop. After that finished, around half the course members formed a group together and we met for years. Then in 2003 I joined my current group and it’s been going that whole time.
They are my first readers, my best readers, my greatest motivators. We follow the “Iowa workshop” style where we read our poem aloud, the others talk about it, and the poet just listens and says nothing. It’s such a brilliant, powerful way to understand how a poem is landing.
A liquorice cable
wires hand to mouth.
Proud magpies
raced the dawn home.
Asphalt remains lively
weeks after its laying.
from ‘Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars’
Paula: Your debut collection Unfamiliar Legend of the Stars came out in 1998. Were you writing poetry much before this?
Kate: I’d always written poems in a notebook but never really shown them to anyone or thought I’d do anything with them. I knew about the creative writing course at Victoria, I was a student there studying English and I knew that Emily Perkins, who was the older sister of a school friend, had done the course and become a published author.
I thought, I’ll apply for the course three times, if I don’t get in I’ll just give up on it. I got in the first time I applied and it was really only then that I started writing with any focus or seriousness.
Paula: That first book really caught my attention – it felt fresh and rendered the world alive with possibilities. Can you remember what motivated you as a poet then, what mattered when you shaped a poem?
Kate: I think what motivated me then was a sense that I saw the world in a certain way and I wanted to share that way of seeing with others. And I guess I felt the power of poetry, and I wanted to wield that power myself.
What mattered to me then was to write a poem that was clever, surprising, and made you feel something.
Having said that, when I’m actually writing a poem I try not to think at all. About anything. I find that gets in the way. The Canadian poet Christian Bok said “take care of the sound and the sense will take care of itself.” That’s how I’ve always written, just going with what comes up and trying not to switch my thinking brain on until I’ve finished the draft, and it’s time to edit.
Violin was out the back of my flat when I was nineteen.
I would put the speakers in the garden
and play ‘Be Mine Tonight’ again and again
running inside to rewind the tape.
He’s shocked to find I am middle aged.
I’m not shocked. Inside me are Russian dolls
of the women and girls I’ve been before
each more beautiful and unhappy than the current.
from ‘One train may hide another’
Paula: Your new collection How to Be Happy Though Human (you have a deft hand with titles!) is a gathering of new and selected poems. I like the way you have placed the new poems first and then we move through your books from the debut to the most recent. Often the new poems go at the end. I love this choice! Any comments?
Kate: I read a lot of selected poems and I tend to read them backwards, in chunks, so that I’m reading the poet’s most recent poems first. Otherwise with a poet like Milosz you’re starting in the 1940s and the poems can feel really dated. But if you start with the new ones, by the time you get back there you’re kind of in the zone.
That doesn’t really apply to my selected though as my career hasn’t been that long, at least not by Milosz standards! I just wanted to start with new poems because, you know, new poems are always the ones you love the most. The best poem is the next one.
And I go back to Saturday
we dance with other people
other people’s children,
create community with physics.
Memory is a kind of mourning.
We take each other’s hands
as if they were made for that
and we form a circle.
from ‘How to be happy though human’
Paula: Your new book offers perfect routes through the rewards of your poetry. The physical world is refreshed, relationships between things and people are made visible, there are surprising connections, and always a glorious poetic fluency. Did you encounter any poetry stumbling blocks or epiphanies across the decades?
Kate: There was a fairly big gap between Beauty Sleep and The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls. I was having a crap time in my personal life, and I felt really stuck creatively. I was scared to write about my failures, my despair, my loneliness, my fucked up life. And I was scared to write about “the human condition” like a Milosz or a Mary Oliver, I felt – who am I to write about the meaning of life? On both fronts my ego and my vulnerability was in the way.
But then I realised, the artists I most admired were writing poems and songs of utter devastation and heartbreak and disaster. And I didn’t think they were losers, I thought they were magnificent.
And I realised that I was never going to be anything other than a middle class New Zealand woman who grew up on Timbacryl adverts and 70s singer songwriters, and that I had just as much right as the next poet to plumb the depths of the human psyche.
I think that book marked a “fuck it” point for me where I decided just to write the poems that are in me, however depressing, distasteful or megalomaniacal they may be.
I take the last few turns in darkness
steep, short of breath
these legs have been mine all my life.
Hot hands. Small nights within my lungs.
We are fortunate to live in a world.
We are fortunate to live in a world
where some person, some man
is painting railings on the zig zag
and when he finished
he could have raised his eyes
and seen, beyond the black-tree hills
some ragged and fast-moving clouds.
from ‘Walking up the zig zag’
Paula: I just adore the new poems housed under the title ‘How to Be Happy Though Human’. Now and then I post a poem that has really haunted me in a new collection – and this whole section haunts me. The poems stick to me – I think the title is a key. These poems are intimate and revelatory, physical and movement-rich. Again the surprising juxtapositions: hanging out the washing, Watergate, your mother. Scenes become luminous. Family matters. There is a poetic heartbeat. Would you see any changes in the poetry process?
Kate: Almost all of these poems have been written since I came back from the Menton fellowship, where I was writing prose – a collection of memoir essays. I can definitely see the influence of that. These poems are looser, more prosy in style, and in many cases are straightforwardly autobiographical. They’re also long. Pulling together this book made me realise that my poems have got very long lately!
Paula: Do you have doubt tagging along? Is there a particular poem that was hard to write?
Kate: Most poems I try to write either don’t happen at all, or turn out to be not that good and get abandoned. But every poem I write that turns out good, I write in one go, in an hour or so. I will revise it later but usually not a huge amount. That’s just my process, it’s kind of scattershot but when it’s working, it’s easy, so I don’t really find any poem hard to write. I just throw away a lot of attempted poems.
My main doubt is whether I will ever write a good poem again. The first sensation when I write something I like is relief.
Tom Waits records the sound of frying chicken
that’s how he achieves his pops and crackles
Our old unit had a crooked arm,
it was a trunk of wood with woven speakers.
As I child I worried about forgetting:
the hexagonal handle, a creamy honey cell,
that flaw in the lino resembling Donald Duck
while the others of its kind looked like grey bells.
sometimes life would seem too big, even then
an empty Sunday when you drifted as a ghost.
I saw Bonnie and Clyde on such a day,
as I recall, in black and white
from ‘Snow White’s coffin’
Paula: What poem really works or matters to you?
Kate: The poem “Snow White’s Coffin” is an important poem for me. It covers a lot of abiding interests for me – found facts, childhood memories, what makes life meaningful when you’re an atheist. It draws on something I thought on a lot when I was living in Berlin, the tension between intellect as the most human thing of all and the intellect as dehumanising. There’s also a tone of anger and despair in it which is quite primal – the word “howling” is in it, which is not a word anyone puts in a poem lightly.
In my last few books, the title poem is a poem that is really important to me – one that functions as a kind of tuning fork for the whole collection.
Paula: Do you have any tips for emerging poets?
Kate: Read poetry by other people. If you don’t like reading poetry, you’re not a poet, you’re just a bit of a dick.
Paula: What else do you love to do apart from writing?
Kate: Conversations and laughing are my favourite things. I love to sing with my choir. I love to watch Netflix. I love to dance. I love to drink to excess, rarely but with gusto. I love doing escape rooms with my nephew. I love looking out the window while drinking tea and listing to podcasts about American politics.
By the end of the decade the song is said to have lost most of its charm. This did not diminish the vogue for delicate compositions, likened to albums of fragrant leaves or to finger bowls in which reveries drifted among the reflections.
A preference for ornament over direction led to a confusion of jewellery boxes. The greatest treasures mingled with trinkets of lesser value, or were lost against the velvet lining.
The expressed aim of the cantilena was to drown the world in night.
The enigmatic nature of beauty is said to have inspired his phrasing of the portamento. At its most lucid moments a slight staccato, almost a stammer, conveyed the vague sensation of a serenade.
The belief that the action of the wrist was a form of respiration gave rise to experiments with breathlessness. Audiences likened the experience to diving into a deep lake, or being smothered in song.
Each charmed moment coaxed a new loop of melody from the shadows. Also her hair, which he compared to a curtain made of silk and embroidered with tiny stars.
Although the modulations were described as ‘tormenting’, this did not diminish the rapture that greeted the appearance of the sub-clause.
She compared the delicate figurations in the left hand to an attempt to conceive of a vaporous machine. Also a pattering of raindrops, or the sound of a bird tapping its beak against a shell.
By wandering into less dominant keys, he hoped to reveal a gender that slipped through minor modulations like water, and had no name.
Likened to a failure of the symbolic code due to an exhaustion of available resources. For example, the disappearance of the object, or the composer burying himself in a large white handkerchief.
Alison Glenny
Alison Glenny’s Antarctic-themed collection of prose poems and fragments, The Farewell Tourist, was published by Otago University Press in 2018. She lives on the Kāpiti Coast.
GIVEN WORDS thanks everyone who sent their poem with the five words chosen from Las Moscas (‘Flies’) by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado. They received 144 poems and have made a selection from these to publish here on Given Words. The winning poems have been selected by the poets Mikaela Nyman, Jordan Jace and Charles Olsen. (You can read about them here.)
GIVEN WORDS is delighted to announce the winning poets. The winner of Best Poem is Stuart Airey for his poem I am a Blue Whale Heart, and the winner of the Under-16 category is Sarah-Kate Simons for her poem Attic. They will receive books courtesy of Landing Press and The Cuba Press respectively as well as being translated into Spanish and published on Palabras Prestadas. More details of the book prizes can be found here. Congratulations from Given Words, Landing Press and The Cuba Press.
Below are the winning poems. You can read the judges’ selection of the rest of the poems from adults here and from under-16s here. All the entries had to contain the words: letter, childhood, fly (the animal), greedy and dream.
I Am a Blue Whale Heart
In this current re-make of me I am becoming the heart of a blue whale I dreamt myself an angel but this wasn’t enough He was wondrous but stuck like a fly in amber
You can hear a whale heartbeat from 2 miles away which is the distance I want to be from unleavened nurse smiles and the choice of ensure or tube
No tampering with the drip lines Friends I am un-distending I wonder as my zipper finds free air whether Eve had to eat the whole apple
I liked my angel counting calories and grams together his feather vane minutiae
A whale heart aorta is as big as a dinner plate Why does food have such gravity?
My angel’s face was an open letter to each whispered treatment our greedy midnight exercises
A whale heart – blue – is as heavy as a Lion (adult, male) which is exactly what you need for beautiful dying
I wish I could take my angel’s place sleeve my childhood into the wall
When a whale dives deep its heartbeat slows slows in the black to 2 beats per minute just 2 beats left to still to marble
Stuart Airey, Hamilton
Attic
all the days of childhood collected in sepia photographs in the crevices of the boards watching the greedy dust descend to settle on their faces
age has curled up their edges into love hearts like the shape she used to replace the dots on her i’s; tiny lopsided hearts that flood the pages of the stack of letters resting in the bottom of the rickety suitcase, its faded travel stickers
peeling off and flaking away like the nails on fingers pressed to an anxious mouth and these funny little dreams of things swirl up like moths from the piles of outgrown clothing and fill the air with their wing powder turning the musty scent of forgotten things into a phantom
of lily of the valley; the lid of the harpsichord crammed against the broken dollhouse is propped open on a sewing box and in the murk of memories there’s a song tiptoeing up the keys — or is it just the bluebottle fly scratching its wings against the windowpane and whining to be set free
Sarah-Kate Simons, age 15, Canterbury
Stuart Airey lives in Hamilton with his wonderful wife and has three children who have mostly left home. He writes poetry as therapy or possibly for more perplexing reasons. He has been a Sarah Broom finalist and was shortlisted for the Julia Darling Memorial Prize. Stuart has been published in the Molotov Cocktail Journal with a short story and third place in the Shadow Poetry Award. These successes have managed to pay for several cups of coffee. He has dabbled in multi-media performance poetry and dreams of being a jazz pianist. His poem entry for given words is an honest attempt to enter the thoughts of those suffering from anorexia as well as being more widely read.
Sarah-Kate Simons is a 15 year old home-schooled girl from rural Canterbury. Her day job consists of schoolwork and volunteering at her local wildlife park, where she gets to walk the llamas. She loves to go on biking and tramping holidays with her family, and tries her hand at all sorts of arts and crafts. She is also the proud owner of a very naughty puppy named Missy. Sarah-Kate eats, breathes and sleeps writing in all its forms—poetry, flash fiction, short stories and novels. She can often be caught talking to thin air as she tries to figure out time travel for her latest novel or peeking into nooks and crannies in search of her next poem.
We (Carolyn DeCarlo & Jackson Nieuwland) are opening a bookshop in Wellington that will feature exclusively books by independent publishers and small presses. This is an expansion of our project Food Court, a reading/zine series that we’ve been running for the past six years. Poetry will obviously be a big focus for us at the bookshop!
NZ Poetry Shelf 