Slender Volumes, Richard von Sturmer, Spoor Books, 2024

To celebrate the four collections on the Ockham NZ Book Award Poetry Short list I invited the poets to answer a handful of questions, and to select a favourite poem from the book and by another NZ poet.

Reading this collection is to savour the gift of slowness, a slowing down to absorb the world, the things we hear see smell feel, back in the past, here in the present. And yes, it becomes a form of slow travel, reading these 300 poems, strengthening feet on the ground, hearts and minds set to uplift. Yes. Reading this exquisitely crafted collection is to travel with roadmap still in the pocket, to fall upon egg-whisk clouds in the sky hot water bottle Buddha Plutarch Dante a washing machine coffee with a drop of milk. It is to travel to Bologna Sydney New York Venice Poor Knights Islands Honolulu Auckland Mount Wutai Yumen Gate.

For me it is neither source nor destination but the travel itself. I am falling into the utter joy of writing and reading as travel. As discovery surprise wonder. A world in ruins and a world in repair. Richard is translating the koan within his own time and place, his own narrative, and I find myself doing this I read.

And that is what poetry can do. This book. These poetic vibrations, these wisdoms. Openings. Autobiography. Meditations. Poetry as an intimately and intricately woven cloth of both experience and imagining. Personal. Resonant. Anchored and anchoring.

Were there any highlights, epiphanies, discoveries, challenges as you wrote this collection?

Just to let everything drop (thoughts, expectations) and to see what appears.

Is there a particular poem in the collection you have soft spot for?

As there are 300 poems it changes. At the moment:

Linji Sees Huangbo Reading a Sūtra

Linji believed that a true Zen master should ignore the written word. But didn’t he know that The Lankavatara Sūtra states: “Things are not as they seem, nor are they otherwise”? The clouds read the wind, and their shadows read the fields. The large clock in the hall of the railway station reads the moving escalators. Waves scroll across the surface of the sea. And in their caves and crevices crabs turn over pages of seaweed, deciphering each grain of sand.

What matters when you are writing a poem? Or to rephrase, what do you want your poetry to do?

To open a door.

I would find this impossible to narrow to one example, but is there a poem by a poet in Aotearoa that has stuck with you?

The Darkness

My father had a plan to float down
part of the Waikato River
on a lilo
through the darkened canyons
seeing things
that you could never see
from up above

The plan was for my mother
(They were newly courting
not yet married
Junior Hospital
House Surgeons
in Hamilton)
to let him off at one reserve

then drive downriver
& pick him up
at the other end
She drove downstream
& waited
for hours
(it seemed)

She worried that he might have fallen off
The airbed gotten tangled at a bend
When he finally floated
out of the darkness
he was soaked to the skin
chilled to the bone
“I don’t remember anything about it”

“No, but I do,” she says to him

Jack Ross
A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems and Sequences 1981-2014 
(Wellington: HeadworX, 2014)

Are there particular poets that have sustained you, as you navigate poetry as both reader and writer?

Rainer Maria Rilke

We are living in hazardous and ruinous times. Can you name three things that give you joy and hope?

Getting out of bed each morning, sunlight, the company of a beloved.

Richard von Sturmer is a writer, performer and filmmaker who is well known for having written the lyrics to Blam Blam Blam’s “There is No Depression in New Zealand”. He is a teacher of Zen Buddhism and the co-founder of the Auckland Zen Centre. Slender Volumes is his tenth collection of writings.

Spoor Books page

Richard von Sturmer is a writer, performer and filmmaker who is well known for having written the lyrics to Blam Blam Blam’s “There is No Depression in New Zealand”. He is a teacher of Zen Buddhism and the co-founder of the Auckland Zen Centre. Slender Volumes is his tenth collection of writings.

Spoor Books page

Richard reads several poems here