Author Archives: Paula Green

Poetry Shelf audio spot: Lisa Samuels reads from a poetry ms in development

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Lisa Samuels reads two poetry increments from a developing poetry manuscript called Livestream: ‘The Other Instinct’ and ‘Like Big Noise’.

 

 

 

 

Lisa Samuels is a transnational (US/NZ) poet whose recent works include a film version of her book Tomorrowland (2017, director Wes Tank), the anthology A Transpacific Poetics (2017, principal editor; co-editor Sawako Nakayasu), the poetry books Symphony for Human Transport (a Guardian top ten poetry book of 2017) and Foreign Native (2018), and visual art at Studio One Toi Tū (2019). Lisa is Professor of English and Drama at the University of Auckland.

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Anna Livesey’s ‘Little words’

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Little words

 

Dear heart, a word —

which word? Shall we choose something

secret and unexpected?

 

Don’t say ‘moon’, everyone knows

that code of longing. Don’t say ‘talk’, the running sound

of every banal conversation.

 

Don’t say ‘bread’ or ‘wine’ or ‘salt’ —

those easy gestures towards

humanity and history.

 

Don’t say ‘love’ — that hollow ‘o’ so easy to look through.

One might say ‘bird’ or ‘house’ or ‘hand’ —

nearer sounds to the one we are looking for.

 

There is always ‘silence’

or ‘question’ — don’t say these words,

too large to qualify.

 

Let us sit quietly.

 

Let us shape a small word that holds us.

Let that little word

be ‘name’.

 

Anna Livesey

 

 

Anna Livesey is a poet, corporate strategist, stand-up comic, policy analyst, literary curator-at-large, podcaster, shouting yogi and early morning raver. Born and raised in Wellington, Anna studied at Victoria University where she completed a BA in English and an MA in Creative Writing. Anna also holds Masters degrees in Public Policy and Business Administration.

Anna has published three poetry collections to date: Good Luck (2003), The Moonmen (2010), and Ordinary Time (2017). She currently lives in Auckland with her husband and two children.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf Friday talk spot: Bill Manhire on Scholarship English

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In New Zealand there used to be a Year 13 exam called Scholarship English.  I more or less failed the exam (102 marks out of 200) back when I was at high school and spending a lot of my time in Dunedin’s snooker parlours. Hence it was odd many years later to find myself Chief Examiner for Scholarship English, and able to set essay questions like this:

“Each of the following texts has been published as a poem.  Write about all three in order to give your own definition of poetry.”

Not many students chose to answer this question – though a few did, brilliantly – which makes sense when you see the specified poems:

 

 

Epigram Engraved on the Collar of a Dog Which I Gave to His Royal Highness

I am his Highness’ dog at Kew;

Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are you?

 

*

 

Goodbye

If you are still alive when you read this,

close your eyes. I am

under their lids, growing black.

 

*

 

eyeye

 

I like all three of these poems, written (in order) by the 18th-century English poet Alexander Pope and the 20th-century Americans Bill Knott and Aram Saroyan. One thing I like is that they have a sense of humour. They aren’t troubled by a sense of self-importance. You can’t miss the mischief in Pope and Saroyan, but it might be harder to find it in Bill Knott’s dark, haiku-like piece. Still, consider this: if you happen to be alive and close your eyes at the point where the poem tells you to, you can’t read the remaining words. Reader and poem are obliged to become co-conspirators in overriding this logical problem. The poem goes on, past its own imperative, and of course we go with it.

One of the problems some people have in trying to fit Pope and Knott and Saroyan into their sense of “poetry”, is that we still tend to give the word a capital P.  It makes us a little hushed and breathless, as if we are in the presence of something sacred: Poetry.

We are often taught to regard poems as vehicles for a kind of superior wisdom, more important than anything mere prose can carry, full of feeling and spiritual insight, if perhaps a little bit misty in their phrasing. That is one reason poems seize the floor at weddings and funerals and naming-ceremonies.

“Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge—it is as immortal as the heart of man,” wrote Wordsworth, and many people who sigh over Poetry agree with him. But as often as not they are the very people who are frightened of real poems.

 

Bill Manhire

 

 

Bill Manhire lives in Wellington. Doubtful Sounds, a collection of his essays and interviews, is still available from Victoria University Press.

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Wild Honey cover

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Two book covers posted today! One on Poetry Box for my new children’s collection and the cover of Wild Honey: Reading NZ Women’s Poetry here on Poetry Shelf. Plus I have my new adult poems The Track out in July – so four years of writing activity is arriving in a flurry. So exciting and nerve-wracking all in the same gulp.

Wild Honey is out in August with Massey University Press and we are planning various events to celebrate its arrival. Sarah Laing painted the amazing cover which stretches over onto the back  – along with drawings for inside.

The cover features Fleur Adcock Alison Wong Elizabeth Smither Ursula Bethell Jessie Mackay Blanche Baughan Robin Hyde Selina Tusitala Marsh and Airini Beautrais with more poets on the back.

My birthday treat! Two book covers with a third in the wings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf audio spot: Jane Arthur reads ‘Snowglobe’

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The poem, ‘Snowglobe’, was published in Mimicry 5 and will appear in Jane’s first collection CRAVEN to be published by Victoria University Press in September 2019.

 

 

 

Jane Arthur was the recipient of the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize in 2018, judged by Eileen Myles. She has worked in the book industry for over fifteen years as a bookseller and editor, and has a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the IIML at Victoria University of Wellington. Born in New Plymouth, she lives in Wellington with her family. Her first poetry collection will be published in September 2019 by Victoria University Press.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf Classic Poem: Elizabeth Morton picks Janet Frame’s ‘I Visited’

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I Visited

 

I visited
the angels and stars and stones;
also, adjectival poets, preferably original.
There was an air of restlessness
an inability to subside, a state of being at attention,
at worst, at war with the immediately beating heart and breathing lung.
I looked then in the word-chambers, the packed warehouses by the sea,
the decently kept but always decaying places where nouns and their
representative images lay together on high shelves
among abbreviations and longlost quotations. I listened.
Water lapped at the crumbling walls; it was a place
for murder, piracy; salt hunger seeped between the shelves;
it was time to write. Now or never. The now unbearable,
the never a complete denial of memory:
I was not, I never have been.

 

Janet Frame from The Goose Bath: Poems, Vintage, 2006

 

published with kind permission from The Janet Frame Estate (note in The Goose Bath states that this appeared as a section in a long untitled sequence)

 

 

Notes from Elizabeth Morton:

Veni Vedi Veci is a T-shirt-perfect slogan, gloating in its victory of ancient history, and its facility with Latin grammar. As an undergraduate I likely sported such an item of casual alliteration. I may have stood at the fence of Albert Park, smoking a Wee Willem cigarillo, mispronouncing the words to passing first-years and telling a bastardised yarn about Julius Caesar. Janet Frame’s poem, ‘I Visited’ relates a quieter, more tentative conquest – that ends in brute self-nihilation – ‘I was not, I never have been’. This is no Caesar. Here is a concession that our words are things to be borrowed, not usurped. There is a sense of things in flux, things that spill through the gaps in your fingers – ‘decaying places’ and ‘crumbling walls’. There is no pillaging of intangibles. The world of words is a lending library with ‘word chambers’ and ‘high shelves’.

Frame’s poem is gently playful. Through it, I recognise this impossibility of ownership. Words are slippery; words alter to their context; words are shared but never spent. I have supermarket bags full of words – words for ‘angels and stars and stones’, earthly and metaphysical – words like ‘turophile’ and ‘oleaginous’ and ‘eosophobia’ and ‘absquatulate’. They can never be conquests. I visit them. Visito. And I try to shake the dust off the words that have been left for dead. Words are people too, you know – ‘with beating heart and breathing lung’. Frame’s poem captures an excitement, a vitality, and also an humility. Also, ‘salt hunger’ makes me shiver.

 

 

 

Auckland writer, Auckland writer, Elizabeth Morton, is published in New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, the UK, Canada and the USA. She was feature poet in the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017, and is included in Best Small Fictions 2016. Her first poetry collection, Wolf, was published with Mākaro Press in 2017. She is completing a MLitt at the University of Glasgow, usually in her pyjamas.

Janet Frame (1924-2004) published eleven novels, five story collections, a previous volume of poetry (The Pocket Mirror, 1967), a children’s book and a three-volume autobiography. She won numerous awards and honours, including New Zealand’s highest civil honour when she was made a Member of the Order of New Zealand in 1990. In 2003 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement and was named an Arts Foundation Icon Artist. Pamela Gordon, Denis Harold and Bill Manhire edited The Goose Bath, Janet’s posthumous collection of poems in 2006.

 

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Poetry Shelf review: Murray Edmond’s Back Before You Know

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Murray Edmond, Back Before You Know, Compound Press, 2019

Jonas Bones, Jonas Bones esquire,

whale-stabber, seal-clubber,

great hands held like tongs in the fire,

road-digger, gold-grubber—

JONAS: Never did have no blasted luck,

every plan came unstuck—

Always up to his ears in muck

couldn’t make two ends meet.

So one last chance to call a stop

one last throw on a crumbling life,

on the King Country line he set up shop,

with one lone child and one sharp wife.

from ‘The Ballad of Jonas Bones’

 

 

Murray Edmond is a playwright, poet and fiction writer; he has worked as an editor, critic and dramaturge. Several of his poetry collections have been finalists in the New Zealand Book Awards:   Letters and Paragraphs, Fool Moon and Shaggy Magpie Songs. He has worked extensively in theatre including twenty years with Indian Ink on the creation of all the company’s scripts.

Murray’s new collection comprises two long poems that play with other sources; with fable, allegory, history, theatre, poetics, the ballad form. The first poem, ‘The Ballad of Jonas Bones’ steps off from Robert Penn Warren’s ‘The Ballad of Billie Potts’ (1943), from Kentucky to the Waikato / King Country. Murray claims his version as a palimpsest or adaptation, leaving traces of the original version, ghost-like and haunting. We may find vestiges of place, the story that gets passed down the line from ear to mouth, the innkeepers who rob their well-off guests, a character’s return to origins, the cutting shards of history, the kaleidoscopic turns of humanity. I haven’t read Warren’s poem but I sense its eerie presence.

Murray’s fluctuating rhythm and rhymes are like shifting river currents, his poem a river poem carrying the debris of story, hand-me-down anecdote. There’s gold and there’s mud, there’s error and there’s incident, there’s greed and there’s survival. Dialogue gives it life as a theatre piece, staged to the point I invent the presence of audience and a live version runs through my head. I am watching as the past is made present and the future present is gestured at in the revised story along with the original skelton. A wider context is superimposed and hides in the seams: ‘frontier’ stories that mutate in the telling, the more significant misrepresentations that shaped our histories, the way individual stories are muffled within the dominant narratives.

Ah but alongside these fertile underground veins is the fact this is a cracking good story with its blinding twists and wounding heart. For some reason I kept thinking of Blanche Baughan’s affecting long ballad, ‘Shingle Short’.

The second poem, ‘The Fancier Pigeon’, is equally arresting with Murray characteristically playful. I am reading with a wry smile, every sense provoked, my reading momentum both fluid and addictive.  We meet the fancier pigeon and the pigeon fancier (she with her hair aglint) when they meet perched on stools at a bar:

 

She had hair the colour of apricot

she smelt like a cake just taken

from the oven and her father played

drums in a band in the only night club

in town

 

I am always reluctant to spoil the unfolding of a poem, long or short, in ways that ruin the reading experience, that spotlight the darkened nooks and crannies, the poem’s pauses or digressions. That dampens the joy of reading. But I will say when the two characters kiss a pigeon drops a ring at their feet – they decide they will each keep the ring for a week and then only met when they exchange the ring. Such an emblematic hook.

The poem feels cinematic (visually sharp, moody hued), theatrical (with both dialogue and action body gripping) and fable-like (overlaying universal themes of love, betrayal, mishap and destiny). The poem also feels cinematic with its smudged lighting as though we can’t quite be sure what happens between this scene and the next, with the cue to fable never far off, the characters, a quartet, shifting and sliding in and out of view.

 

and it was there

the girl had stopped her

as she walked

“Has he come asking for me”

of course he had so she said “No”

and as if she were granting wishes

she asked

“You wanna come out on the lake

with me in the canoe?”

and she had lead her down

among the bulrushes

 

What I love about the poem – beyond the supple language play and the sensual images, the addictive and offbeat characters, and the narrative tug – is the way the world adheres. As reader you can’t just stick to the poet’s diverting fable – because the real world intrudes, the hurt and broken world if you hold the bigger picture, and the miniature daily stories if you hold the way humanity is formed by individuals. Both things matter at the level of the humane.

The book’s punning title, like a cypher, a tease, is also a ‘dropped ring’. It is re-sited as the last line: ‘BACK AGAIN BEFORE YOU KNOW’.  And I am looping back on the unknown and the achingly familiar, the beginning that is ending that is beginning and so on, the switch back roads and the clifftop vantage points, the downright miraculous and the daily mundane. Ah setting sail on this poetic loop, with its blurs and its epiphanies, is sheer bliss. Poetry bliss.

 

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