Welcome to a new and ongoing series on Poetry Shelf. I have been thinking a lot about the place of poetry in global catastrophe and the incomprehensible leadership in Aotearoa. How do we write? What to read? Do we need comfort or challenge or both? I am inviting various poets to respond to five questions, and to include a poem or two of their own. This week poet, novelist, essayist and editor, Ian Wedde.

Maxi checking walk weather

1 Has the local and global situation affected what or how or when you write poetry?

Always – sometimes the bad news shuts me up, as now somewhat, with a sense of weariness at the very bad regressive policies of New Zealand’s current government. At other times – ‘You have to start somewhere/ in these morose times’ (The Lifeguard) – or when I wrote poems about call it the human condition (Barbary Coast) it was from a compassion with and for those of us not feeling good about the state of call it the human condition:

and I can’t remember
where the silence ended and speech began,
where vision ender and tears began.
All our promises vanish into thin air.

… bit morose, really.

Other responses have been less introverted, for example the work I did with Fawwaz Tuqan producing the book of poems by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish back in 1973, my contribution of a sort to the situation I lived with while working with Palestinian refugees in Amman, Jordan.

2 Does place matter to you at the moment? An object, an attachment, a loss, an experience? A sense of home?

Yes it does. I love living where I do at present, in Three Lamps, Ponsonby, Auckland, encircled by sea and in a walking-distance neighbourhood with pretty much everything I need within dog-walk reach, including a swimming beach (when not polluted by rain run-off). I lived nearby in Wood Street back in the 60s when I was at university and Ponsonby was very down market, so I have a kind of stretched-out sense of home. There’s a new small book on the way called Ode to Auckland, which begins like this:

1

McCahon’s Defile
For John Reynolds

And so Colin I cast off in my frail craft of words
my craft of frail words of crafty words
into the defile of Three Lamps where
struck by sunshine on the florist’s striped awning
and the autumn leaves outside All Saints 
as you did before fully waking in Waitākere
to look at the elegant pole kauri in dewy light
I defile my sight with closed eyes
and so see better when I open them the Sky Tower
pricking a pale blue heaven like Raphael’s
in Madonna of the Meadows or the scumbled sky of
Buttercup fields forever where there is a constant flow of light
and we are born into a pure land through Ahipara’s blunt gate
a swift swipe of pale blue paint
on Shadbolt’s battered booze bar where bards
bullshitted among the kauri.

Gaunt cranes along the city skyline
avert their gazes towards the Gulf
away from babblers at Bam Bina
breakfast baskers outside Dizengoff
some pretty shaky dudes outside White Cross
beautiful blooms in buckets at Bhana Brothers
(open for eighty years) Karen Walker’s window
looking fresh and skitey across Ponsonby Road
my charming deft dentist at Luminos
most of South Asia jammed into one floor at the Foodcourt

… and so on for a few pages, from 2020.

3 Are there books or poems that have struck a chord in the past year? That you turn to for comfort or uplift, challenge or distraction.

I’ve been loving very regular email posts from my good mate Barry (Bazza) Hill in Queenscliff, Victoria, Australia. He’s been sending regular chunks of a new book for me to have a read and comment as appropriate, so it’s like a drawn-out conversation when I suspect both of us have a glass of wine to hand. His poems are coming in an amazing rush of energy largely driven by rage at the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, a momentum I can’t even imagine matching, especially as the poems I’m writing at present are very slow to come and often minimal when they finish. Sample from back in 2007:

Film Treatment

The klieg lights, the dark,
dripping forest, the rank flanks

of horses, a sneery hound pissing
on wet tents. The collapse

of public transport, the unhygienic
orphanage, the barracks, the unpredictable

success of tour discounts. A lake
in which a lake

is reflected. A mountain
superimposed on another where

thoughts race along the boardwalk
losing touch with their bodies

4 What particularly matters to you in your poetry and in the poetry of others, whether using ear, eye, heart, mind – and/or anything ranging from the abstract and the absent to the physical and the present?

Pretty capacious question! I’d say entertainment in the very broad sense of texts that engage me fully by whatever means, ideally very diverse and as unexpected as possible – poems that entertain everything from the most minimal and conceptual to the most deliberately programmatic. I admit to wearying of let’s call it the introverted domestic-personal, I prefer the unexpected and to not have my sympathy courted too simply.

5 Is there a word or idea, like a talisman, that you hold close at the moment? For me, it is the word connection.

Conversation.

Born 1946 in Blenheim, New Zealand, Ian Wedde has lived in various places in New Zealand and elsewhere and currently in Auckland with his wife the screen-writer Donna Malane and their dog Maxi. They have five sons between them and six grandchildren.