Auckland Inside/Out features Paula Morris, Victor Rodger and others
Leave a reply
Author Archives: Paula Green
Celebrating Elizabeth Smither’s Best Book of Poetry Award
Elizabeth Smither, Night Horse – winner of the Best Poetry Book Award at the Ockham NZ Book Awards 2018
Paula: Your new collection is a delight to read and offers so many poetic treats. I was thinking as I read that your poems are like little jackets that can be worn inside out and outside in. In stillness there is movement and in movement there is stillness; in musicality there is plainness and in plainness there is musicality. In the strange there is the ordinary and in the ordinary there is the strange. What do you like your poems to do?
Elizabeth: I want them to do everything. Everything at once. I want them to feel and think (and feel the thinking in them as you read). I want them to be quick, in the old sense of the word: the opposite of dead. I want them to not know something and try to find it out – I would never write a poem with prior knowledge – I think ignorance can be bliss or at least start the motor. And as I write more I find out more and more about musicality. Isn’t one of the loveliest moments in music when harmony breaks through discord as though it is earned and you know that discord, instead of being a thicket or a dark wood, is part of it?
Paula: I especially love the ongoing friendship and granddaughter poems, but I particularly love the first poem, ‘My mother’s house.’ Kate Camp and I heard you read this at the National Library’s Circle of Laureates and were so moved and uplifted that we asked for copies! Unseen, you are observing your mother move through the house from the street (you gave us this introduction) and see her in shifting lights. The moment is extraordinary; are we are at our truest self when we are not observed? There is the characteristic Smither movement through the poem, slow and attentive, to the point of tilt or surprise. The final lines reverberate and alter the pitch of looking: ‘but she who made it/who would soon walk into the last room/of her life and go to sleep in it.’ Do you have a poem or two in the collection that particularly resonate with you?
Elizabeth: I’m fond of ‘The tablecloth’ after I observed my friend, Clay, scrubbing at a corner of a white damask tablecloth in the laundry after a dinner party. It reminded me of the old-fashioned way of washing linen in a river. It’s both a doll-sized tablecloth and something almost as large as the tablecloth for a royal banquet around which staff walk, measuring the placement of cutlery and the distance between each chair. ‘Ukulele for a dying child’ tumbles all over itself in an incoherent manner because the subject is so serious and no poet can do it justice. The grandmother poems will probably be ongoing because it is such an intense experience: something between a hovering angel and a lioness. Going back to your remark about ‘My mother’s house’ I agree with the truth that is available in our unobserved moments. Perhaps there is a balance between our social and our private moments which might comprise something Keats called ‘soul-making’.
from our interview
Tenderness
I
A tree in the centre of a corn field
the corn rising in its ranks like braided hair
to meet the lowest branches
a tree that has replaced at least twenty
corn stalks with their divided leaves
twenty golden cobs sweetly surrendered
for this lovely grace: leaf sweep touching
leaf sweep, the whole field given by
this rising trunk, a focus
the pattern drawn from the edge of the field
to the centre where the tree
delivers a blessing.
II
The forest planation blankets hills.
Neat-ankled, swift-running
the dark pines descend
except on one little hilltop a ride
of grass begins and runs
with the trees which seem to bend
tenderly towards it: a bed from which
a child has risen and begun walking
the solicitousness of pine branches over grass.
©Elizabeth Smither from Night Horse
Paula: Have you seen a festival poetry session (anywhere) that has blown you off your seat (or had some other significant impact)?
Elizabeth: Margaret Atwood and Hans Magnus Enzensberger at the Aldeburgh festival. I read first and sat down between them, shivering.
Paula: If you could curate a dream poetry session at The Auckland Writers Festival which poets would be there and who would mc or chair it?
Elizabeth: I think I’d do a Dead Poets session. Keats and Shelley, Robert Lowell, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Tomas Tranströmer, Szymborska, of course… the possibilities are endless. It might have something of the bitchy tone of ‘The Real Housewives of Melbourne’. To chair it one of the Paulas: Green or Morris.
from Poetry Shelf ’12 Questions for the Ockham New Zealand Book Award Poetry finalists’
Elizabeth will appear at the Auckland Writers Festival
Sunday May 20 1.30 – 2.20 Disappearances (4 readings) Limelight Room, Aotea Centre
Auckland University Press Night Horse page and author page
Booksellers review by Emma Shi
Radio NZ National review by Harry Ricketts with Kathryn Ryan
Award night
Celebrating Hannah Mettner’s Best First Book of Poetry Award
Hannah Mettner, Fully Clothed and So Forgetful – winner of the Best First Book Award at the Ockham NZ Book Awards 2018
We believe in the steps.
We tell our children and then our
grandchildren about the cool
pond at the top where sun-
carp clean our feet and where
we can sleep. The steps are one of
the beautiful mysteries of
life, like how did we get here,
fully clothed and so forgetful?
from ‘Higher ground’
Paula: ‘Fully Clothed and So Forgetful gave me goose bumps as I read and took me beyond words to that state where you stand somewhere wild and beautiful and just stall beyond language to absorb the world. My initial reaction is simply to tell the reader to read the book. But then I start accumulating a list of what I think the poetry is doing: the poems are inventive, unpredictable, melodic, on the move, strange, love-soaked.’
Hannah: The key thing that matters to me in a poem (whether one I’m writing or reading) is that it gets me in the gut. I get very frustrated by poetry that feels empty, or emotionally disengaged or distant, or is teasing the reader or holding them at arm’s length. I just find it boring, I mean, I know that different poems and poets have all sorts of intellectual fare to offer, but I want to be emotionally moved by a poem, and nothing less.
from our interview
My children are abducted by 17th-century French courtesans
In the rose garden near the big house
where somebody famous was either
born, or not, all the ladies spread their
pinks out in the sun. Pretty young ladies
with expensive, dewy faces who want
my children for their photogenic walls.
They look as though they’re picnicking
with their floral bubbles and their green
men but their stiletto fingers give them
away. And my children were just feeding
ducks, but where have they gone?! Quick
say the birds Find them Find them, gobbling
their trails of bread. The ladies strengthen
in the light and their prickles rise and my
nose is so full of their French scent that
I start to sneeze. The ladies wilt a little in
revulsion. Their corals and blushes and rouges
are falling brown, then grey; old ladies with
shallow bones and prickles blunted with
age. And where are your children they
want to know and I want to know too.
I’ve looked everywhere. There’s a low
graze of desperation in my throat, which
stings as I call their names. I uproot one
of the ladies and use her to beat back a
path through the others, until they look
almost young again in the freshness
of their bruises. When I get back to the
pond most of the spinsters have frosted
in the ground. The children are there
wearing new fur coats. One is putting logs
on a fire, while the other pulls dinner
from the snow.
©Hannah Mettner, from Fully clothed and so forgetful (Victoria University Press, 2017)
Author note: This is the poem that helped me realise that there was a way to integrate the emotional authenticity that I want my poems to convey (in this case the fear of ‘losing my children’) with something less literal. For me, this meant that rather than merely ‘stating facts’ in a pleasant or interesting way with line breaks, I was able to tease out multiple concepts and feelings simultaneously in an environment less concretely related to the real world. So, this poem deals with my fear of losing my children after the breakup of my relationship with their father, but holds with that the fear of a potential ‘stepmother’, and the fear of them doing fine without me, but because none of this takes place in a recognisable world (rosebushes don’t usually turn into young women), I felt freer to say all that.
Victoria University Press page
Radio NZ National: Harry Ricketts reviews the book with Kathryn Ryan
Award night:
Maria Ji on poetry and the mountains
Maria Ji: Things that make me feel both big and small at the same time include poetry and mountains.
Monday Poem: Albert Wendt’s ‘And so it is’
And so it is
we want so many things and much
What is real and not? What is the plan?
Our garden is an endless performance
of light and shadow quick bird and insect palaver
The decisive wisdom of cut basil informs everything
teaches even the black rocks of the back divide to breathe
Blessed are the flowers herbs and vegetables
Reina has planted in their healing loveliness
The hibiscus blooms want a language to describe their colour
I say the red of fresh blood or birth
A lone monarch butterfly flits from flower to flower
How temporary it all is how fleeting the attention
The boundary palm with the gigantic Afro is a fecund nest
for the squabble of birds that wake us in the mornings
In two weeks of luscious rain and heat our lawn
is a wild scramble of green that wants no limits
Into the breathless blue sky the pohutukawa
in the corner of our back yard stretches and stretches
Invisible in its foliage a warbler weaves a delicate song
I want to capture and remember like I try to hold
all the people I’ve loved or love
as they disappear into the space before memory
Yesterday I pulled up the compost lid
to a buffet of delicious decay and fat worms feasting
Soil earth is our return our last need and answer
beyond addictive reason fear and desire
Despite all else the day will fulfil its cycle of light and dark
and I’ll continue to want much and take my chances
©Albert Wendt
March-April 2017
Albert Wendt has published many novels, collections of poetry and short stories, and edited numerous anthologies. Last week, along with four others, he was recognised as a New Zealand Icon at a medallion ceremony for his significant contribution to the Arts.
Poetry Shelf audio spot: Rachel McAlpine reads ‘When?’
Rachel McAlpine’s new collection of poems will be published next year, and may be called Elsie’s Book of Strategies.
Bill Manhire and Albert Wendt recognised as Icons
Last night The Arts Foundation recognised Bill Manhire and Albert Wendt as Icons. Both Bill and Albert have produced writing that is a significant part of our literary landscape, yet both have done so much more. Their mentorship of and generosity towards other writers is noteworthy. Their writing stands as uniquely theirs, offering nimble and wide ranging voices, an ability to tap into the humane, the surprising, the musicality of the world. I find their poetry utterly nourishing.
Congratulations from Poetry Shelf on this well deserved honour.
See here for more details. The other Icons were: artist Billy Apple, composer Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead and sculptor Fred Graham.
Albert’s poem ‘New Coat’
Bill Manhire talks to Poetry Shelf
Verse Us in Ponsonby
Three of these poets are featured in Best NZ Poems 2017
A conversation and poem from the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize Finalists: Jane Arthur
To check up on the state of your heart you must lie back
with your tits out so a warm-handed stranger-
technician can run a small device across your ribs
like a barcode scanner. She seems not to see your skin,
is only concerned with looking beneath it. You want to ask her,
What is it that makes me different
from others who’ve lain here, does my heart hide deeper
in my chest, do my nipples watch you cock-eyed, disturbingly,
am I more beautiful than 50% of others or.
On a black-and-white screen there’s something grainy
and pulsing, trapped in a wedge frame
like an embryo, unheard. This is your heart, twitching.
Watching it you can’t tell what from what, all you know is
the image is moving and you are alive. What a miracle
of existence, you now understand, to have a life inside you
and you want to clutch the technician and rejoice.
Now you can hear it, too, your heart—thumping, muffled,
like listening with your ear pressed up against a wall,
the white-noise hiss of the ocean trapped behind.
But that’s not ocean, not white noise,
it’s blood noise. That’s blood pumping through your heart
to your veins. You hear it through a wall
of veins, bones, fat, flesh, skin keeping all this life inside you
like one big intricate loving dam.
©Jane Arthur
If you were to map your poetry reading history, what books would act as key co-ordinates?
Formatively, I was a music-obsessed teen, so the liner notes of the angsty ’90s: Kristin Hersh, Tori Amos, R.E.M.. Patti Smith. Before that: the poems of Leonard Cohen and Pam Ayres. More recent inspirations: Jenny Bornholdt’s Miss New Zealand; Geoff Cochrane; Kim Addonizio’s What Is This Thing Called Love; Louise Glück’s Vita Nova; random editions of Sport; A Hole is to Dig by Ruth Krauss and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Online poetry journals, including Sweet Mammalian, Starling, Turbine/Kapohau. The Poetry Foundation website. And most recently: essa ranapiri’s incredible Twitter thread of great NZ poems.
What do you want your poems to do?
I guess I want them to be intellectual exercises that end up appearing thoroughly non-intellectual. I want them to be approachable, definitely messy and imperfect, a bit funny but completely heartfelt without being gross? At least, that’s what I want them to “be”. What I want them to do is … reassure awkward readers that we’ve all been there and it’s cool, don’t worry about it.
Which poem in your selection particularly falls into place. Why?
“To check up on the state of your heart you must lie back” is one of those rare poems that burst out of me in one sitting (having been rolled around my brain for a day or so) and didn’t change significantly after that. An earlier version was published in Ika and two years later only a few words have changed. I wish I knew why some poems come out easily, it’s much more efficient. I am typically the world’s most painfully slow and fussy writer … more of a deleter.
There is no blueprint for writing poems. What might act as a poem trigger for you?
Standing in the shower. Brushing my teeth. Trying to write a different poem. Reading fiction. Going for a walk. Restless nights. Pretending to be someone else. Deadlines.
If you were reviewing your entry poems, what three words would characterise their allure?
Familiar, surprising, dorky
You are going to read together at the Auckland Writers Festival. If you could pick a dream team of poets to read – who would we see?
HRH Selina Tusitala Marsh as MC because I want her to be everywhere at all times. Some of the finest new, super-young poets like Tayi Tibble, Nina Powles and Freya Sadgrove – I’d ask the Starling eds to organize that bit. With interludes from Faith Wilson, Coco Solid, Hera Lindsay Bird, Chris Tse and Fleur Adcock. With a surprise VIP encore from Margaret Mahy during a round of whisky.
Jane Arthur was born in New Plymouth and lives in Wellington with her partner, baby and dogs. She has worked in the book industry for over 15 years as a bookseller and editor, and is a founder of the New Zealand children’s literature website The Sapling. She has a Master’s in Creative Writing from the IIML at Victoria University, where her supervisor was Cliff Fell, a 2017 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize finalist. She also has a Diploma in Publishing from Whitireia Polytech and a Master’s in English Literature from Auckland University. Her poems have appeared in journals including Sport, Turbine, Ika, and Sweet Mammalian.
The four finalists will read from their work at the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize event at the Auckland Writers Festival on Sunday 20 May, 3.15-4.15pm.
Sarah Broom Poetry Prize page.
From autostraddle: 100 poets in survival pack
OK I love the idea of a poetry survival pack.
‘When my sister and I were little, my grandma would pack us survival packs for the ride home from her house. Filled with food and toys and little notes, they made me feel like I could carry safety with me. As an adult, and as a not-rich mentally ill black traumatized queer person, leaving home feels close to impossible. But building and carrying my own survival pack helps me remember that even if you can’t leave, you don’t have to always be stuck.
In times of chaos, I often forget what helps me feel safe. For most of the past year, I’ve worked to remember how I’ve survived all of my worsts. In every memory, I’ve reached for a book. Being abused? Read a book. Worried about damnation from being gay? Read a book. People popped up and talked to me even though they weren’t supposed to be there? Read a book. Therapy and therapy and more therapy? Read a book, read a book, read a goddamn book. Poetry doesn’t save the world, but poetry could save you.
Poetry is my survival pack.’
NZ Poetry Shelf 