Gow Langsford Gallery booth at Auckland Art Fair 2024

Wings Over Water

Hold the shell to my ear and I hear the life of the hermit crab.
Hold the bird to my ear and I hear the waterways and the windmills.
Hold the drape to my ear and I hear the treachery of March.
Hold the steps to my ears and I hear the blessings of Providence.
Hold the vase to my ear and I hear the frugal life and the teeming rain.
Hold the water to my ear and I hear the mist and the mud.

Paula Green
from Making Lists for Frances Hodgkins, Auckland University Press, 2007

At the weekend, a Gow Langsford Gallery booth at the Auckland Art Fair featured a 1930s work by Frances Hodgkins, ‘Still Life in Front of Courtyard’. They invited three of their gallery artists – Sara Hughes, Grace Wright and Virginia Leonard – to produce a work in response. I have only seen the works on the gallery website but even on a distancing screen the effect is mesmerising. Three distinct and poignant homages to an extraordinary artist. I list three words in my notebook: vessel, colour, movement. But in the prolonged contemplation, I am moving beyond words to the way – perhaps a little like music – an artwork becomes elevator, suspension bridge, mental and body sway, absolute pleasure.

And then the words simmer and settle.

The still life of Frances Hodgkins, with its sensual curves and earthy colour, is like a charismatic poem that rhymes, pulses, holds the intangible within the physical, and resists any measure to be still. And here I am both transfixed and turning in the intimate moment of looking. Sara Hugh’s homages, equally charismatic, resemble the power of poetry to deliver the physical and the abstract. Overlapping bands of colour and motifs, where definitive meaning dissolves, as flower becomes swirl becomes vase becomes kiss, where the botanical becomes domestic and the domestic is a colour wash of recollection. Ah, the pleasure of looking.

Grace Wright also produces a sublime viewing experience. Again I look at these paintings as poems, with colour harmony and deft rhythms, and then find myself musing on artwork as music – such a vital ingredient of poetry. Is it an oxymoron to say that art triggers music, whether as melody, movement, chords, counterpoints, cadence? I don’t want to explain these sublime paintings, I just feel them, the enigma, the connections, the resonance. Grace’s paintings carry poetic titles: ‘Opening the Way’, ‘Cradle in the Moment’ and ‘Breath of Life’.

I had not seen the work of Virginia Wright before, and it is the perfect addition to this suite. The titles are apt: ‘Still Life with Plate’, ‘Still Life’ and ‘Crochet Legs’. The exquisite works summon the domestic, Frances’ ubiquitous vessels, with intricacy, with the pleasure of colour. They are like miniature poems on a ledge, with undulations of meaning and possibility, with harmonies and textures. Again feeling overrides thinking, feeling settling into drifting thought, the prismatic connections reminiscent of the white space on a poem’s page.

And then the looking shifts and startles.

This is a leap. I am fascinated by how each artwork prompts lists, simmering, shadowy lists, lists that step off from Frances’ still life, that might include lists of things on the table, what I see out my window, every vase in every poem (I begin with Ursula Bethell). Art that might hint or evoke or proclaim, that might reclaim or refresh the feminine, light-up the pioneering women, their painting and writing, their lexicons and grammars, whether literary or visual, without rules and regulations and limitations.

My life is full of lists. A daily list on the kitchen table, weekly lists for Poetry Shelf, shopping lists, dream lists, word lists. List poems. Ah, such a soft spot for reading and writing list poems. In 2006, I wrote a poetry collection called Making Lists for Frances Hodgkins, which I named an autobiography in the light of art. I wrote of the artists in my family tree, my youthful desire to paint, my ongoing pleasure in encountering art of all descriptions and my long and loving relationship with a painter.

Why list poems? I am drawn to the everyday and the ordinary, to the melody of repetition, the enchantment of pattern, the twang of surprise, the delight of humour, endings that swivel, a refrain of awe. Intricacy and economy. Whispers and shouts. The way the found might nestle alongside the imagined. The way myriad stepping stones might offer routes through a cracked maze of myriad things. The way a poem might signpost a shadow list, perhaps evoking memory, daydreams, objects, vistas, the ordinary.

I have selected five poems, gleaned from a solar system of list poems that I have particularly loved, with satisfyingly different approaches. Dinah Hawkens’ ‘Leaf’ is like an incantation, and is part of an awe-inspiring sequence of ‘page leaf stone’ poems. She draws me deep into prolonged contemplation, leaf reverie, poem drifts, to the way I might go full circle, to the way Frances’ vase might be the voice of my grandmother, the sunlight on the kitchen table, Sara’s vase motif, and back to the vase again.

‘Calabash Breakers’ by Selina Tusitala Marsh resonates in her voice as I read, both voice and poem charismatic, with the repeating pattern a form of insistence, a vital signal in these turbulent times, for yes, we need resistance to toeing the line, we need the storytellers, the singers, the artists, the poets. James Brown’s ‘The Time of Your Life’ is a list of adages, sayings so often repeated they can hollow out in meaning, but gathered here, linked by theme, assemble a witty portrait of time. And then, and then I am catapulted into thoughts of this life, this lifeline, this death, this silence . . . and whoosh, I am back at Frances’ vase, and it’s spiked with the uncanny, an emptiness, time passing.

Ashleigh Young, like the other four poets, has crafted lists into several of her poems. I have picked ‘Going rafting with my uncles’, because the list is the spine of her poem, a shadow list poem that is family. First the uncles, physically present, as though I’m holding a family snapshot. And then the poem viewfinder switches to include the mother, pulling her from outside the photo frame, an imagining. And at the acute heart of the poem, the lines that muse on love, the lines that pierce me, every time.

I find myself stalling on the artworks in the booth on numerous occasions, just as I find myself reading and rereading these five poems, refusing to limit them to tidy explanations, to close readings, to conforming to my expectations of what a list poem might do. Arielle Walker’s ‘a poem is a fluid thing all wrapped up in fish skin’ opens out what a poetry can be, how it might need liquid and mountain currents and salt water and fluidity. How it might be tangle and skeleton and swell. And here I go drifting again, musing on how an artwork might be tangle and skeleton and swell. How a poem gains momentum and wonder in the form of a list.

To finish, this sweet week of meander, I have included a second poem from Making Lists for Frances Hodgkins, a poem with a trace of list, a poem that is for me, both love poem and a miniature manifesto on absorbing art and poetry.

Poems

Leaf

Leaf as one of many.
Leaf as incredible colour.

Leaf as silence, and silence
as a cave and the wall of a cave.

Leaf as an invitation: as a screen
to come leafing through.

Leaf as leafy machine. From water and light
you have breathable air!

Leaf as a life partner, a moveable feast.
Leaf, a soft whisper. Leaf as leaf.

Dinah Hawken
from Ocean and Stone, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2015

Calabash Breakers

we all know
the calabash breakers
the hinemoas
the mauis
the younger brother
the only sister
the orphan
the bastard child
with rebellious blood

we all know
the hierarchies
the tapu
the boundaries
always crossed
by someone
petulant

we all know
the unsettled
the trouble makers
the calabash breakers
they sail the notes of our songs
stroke the lines of our stories
and reign in the dark hour

we should know them
we now need them
to catch bigger suns

Selina Tusitala Marsh
from fast talkin PI, Auckland University Press, 2009

The Time of Your Life

The turn of the century.
The dawn of the decade.
The year of the cockerel.
The winter of our discontent.
The summer of love.
The age of Aquarius.
The ides of March.
The moment of truth.
The nick of time.
The knell of parting day.
The twilight of the gods.
The end of an era.
The twinkling of an eye.
The chance of a lifetime.

A night of it.
A term of endearment.
A momentary lapse of reason.
A fraction of a second.
A stitch in time.
A minute of silence.
An hour of darkness.
A day of shame.
A period of mourning.
A month of Sundays.
Oh season of mists . . .
Two shakes of a lamb’s tail.
Fifteen minutes of fame.
One hundred years of solitude.

James Brown
from Selected Poems, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2020, originally published in The Year of the Bicycle, 2006

Going rafting with my uncles

No help comes, and night is closing in
on me and my uncles. Some of us
dangle our legs in the water –

all of our heels are shaped like mallets, see,
or like they’ve been beaten with mallets.
Uncle David sits apart, drafting a group email. 

Uncle Neil has lost both our oars, and I find myself
looking at his hands, his carpenter’s hands
from the 70s. How good he was at everything, how tall,

how hungry we were for little cabinets and salad bowls.
Uncle John bundles his swanndri around me,
the one he goes eeling in. I once saw him kill an eel with a spade

while wearing it. We knew he was going to do it.
It’s in how an uncle moves, it’s in how cosy he is, it’s in
how you haven’t seen him for eighteen years and may not again,

and I wonder if I love these men – the sort of love
that is said to be deep down,
like sand that turns into a fish all of a sudden.

Oh someone save us, but do it without speaking.
Oh, something happen, something happen –
a house with lights on at the corner,

or moonlight, too beautiful to speak of, or rain,
or, on a bank, the sound of my mother’s voice
saying how glad she is to see us, 

how she had to walk for hours through the swamp.
Let us see her, holding a little dog
in one arm and a video camera in the other.

Ashleigh Young
originally published in Turbine | Kapohau 2022

a poem is a fluid thing all wrapped up in fish skin

How can I write a poem that isn’t first a body of water?

How can I write a poem unless its surface is formed
from the borrowed skins of seals and salt and seaweed
and its blood runs in the swell and roll of waves and
moon-pull of tides and its bones are pieced together
from the calcified skeletons of a million
                                                                tiny
                                                              fish?

I cannot write a poem in a drought

How can I write a poem unless it rolls (a ready-made
river) out of the side of a mountain and runs gleefully
forward in a rush of eddying currents towards the sea
          so that all I have to do is hold out a hand to unravel
                            the slightest fraying edge of its fluidity, and
                                                   spin a new yarn from its depths?

Arielle Walker
from her ‘river poems‘ section in AUP New Poets 9, Auckland University Press, 2023

But What Do You See in It?

I see the sun humming or
the yellowness of gold
and if I could hold your hand
we would lie in the gold meadow
gilding with words
to describe the mountains inside
outside in the time you took
to collect the hives.

Paula Green

from Making Lists for Frances Hodgkins