Category Archives: NZ poetry

Poetry Shelf Friday talk spot: Picking favourites on @radionz Bookmarks

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You can listen here

 

On Wednesday I flew back from Palmerston North and stopped off at the Radio NZ studios to talk favourites for Bookmarks. Jesse Mulligan was sick so I got to chat with Wallace Chapman. Like Jesse, Wallace is an empathetic host – a terrific listener! In the opening minutes we discovered we both grew up in manses with sermon writing fathers.  I had such a fun time talking books and music that we didn’t get onto films, television and other favourite things. So I want to share a few things we missed on my list.

Everywhere I go I am asked about Wild Honey’s biggest challenge: easy – making choices! How many sleepless nights I have had mourning the women poets who didn’t get to be in the poetry house I built. It is estimated we make thousands of choices everyday (a quick Google check said around 35,000!). I have been choosing poets to read at my Wild Honey events, I have been choosing how to answer interviews, I have been struggling with what to put on my morning toast. I need a choice holiday!

Choosing for Bookmarks was tough. We have book-lined walls in almost all our rooms, along with decades of album gathering and movie and TV viewing. So how to choose?

It came down to things that have got in me in the gut – and in the heart. Pretty much everything I chose, I chose because I have felt it deeply.

My music:

Maria Callas singing ‘Casta Diva’ from Bellini’s opera Norma. Wallace loved the aria too and he kept cranking it up. I felt like I was going to start crying. This is the track when the world stops and I can’t do anything but listen. The same thing happened when we played Nina Simone singing ‘Mississipi Goddam’. Wallace cranked it up and we just listened. As I said this is a goddam moment in the world – and poets are voicing that in a thousand ways.

We ran out of time to play Aldous Haring singing ‘Horizon’ from her album Party.

In 2017 the Silver scroll finalists were all women so I decided to write about a few of them in Wild Honey – and check out the way their songs were also poetry (Lorde, Nadia Reid, Chelsea Jade and Aldous). I am interested in the way words become musical notes, and make chords in their own right. Music is always the first thing that affects me when I read a poem. So it was fun exploring the lyrics as poems in Wild Honey.

Aldous’s ‘Horizon’ is mysterious, haunting, evocative. I love the sonic play, the slow-paced short lines and the way the song keeps pitching towards the horizon. Here are some word chords: (bowl babe bad)   (neck edge wet)   (‘here is your princess / here is the horizon’).

I also love Aldous’s repetitions: ‘Say again this place’ ‘say again this place’.  Reality is intensified, anxieties are tripled.

You can listen to Aldous here.

 

My books:

I got to talk about Luminescent by Nina Mingya Powles (Seraph Press), Bill Manhire’s Lifted (VUP) and Elizabeth Knox’s The Absolute Book (VUP). Three books I carry with me – Elizabeth’s extraordinary new arrival is the most affecting book I have read in a long time. But I love and am affected by all three.

I ran out of time to bring in children’s books – I am a big fan of reading them! I was going to talk about my love of Gecko Books. And (another impossible choice!!) singled out My Dog Mouse by Eva Lindström.

I review most of Gecko Books on Poetry Box and there is never a dud one. They publish picture books and novels that feature heavenly illustrations, exquisite writing and stories that tap into the core of being human with a healthy dose of imagination. Also – and most importantly – it feels like Gecko books don’t have to obey current rules on how a book for children ought to behave.

In My Dog Mouse a girl loves taking Mouse (the dog!) for a walk and everything they do is super slow. They need time to look at things (teeth, clouds, things flying in the wind). The girl is very good at looking after Mouse when she takes Mouse for walks.  I won’t ruin this delightful story by showing the ending but this is a story of kindness and of sharing. Just made me warm up inside. The writing is both plain and poetic.

He’s old and fat with ears as / thin as pancakes.

 

 

 

Films and television

This didn’t make it into our discussions at all! Too busy loving books and music. I had picked ‘Shetland’ as an example of the British and Scandi noir that is my go-to-pick-me-up-when-I-can’t-read-another-word-and-just-feel-like-pleasing-diversions. Really anything from Father Brown to Midsomer Murders to The Killing to Shakespeare and Hathaway to Killing Eve to Big Little Lies to Agatha Christie.

But these were my two picks that survived:

A Star is Born with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper  2018

I loved the Judy Garland version but really love this remake – it’s got a love story at its heart and the chemistry is breathtaking –  it is a complete package the divine cinematography is like honey (a bit like that of Moulin Rouge) – the camera moves with such a sweet fluidity – the music is breathtaking – and everything heightens the loss and ache and heartbreak. So I really felt the movie.

 

The Marvelous Mrs Maisel  comedy on Amazon Prime with Rachel Brosnahan

On the recommendation of my daughter I binge-watched the two seasons – and it was rollercoaster viewing – set in 1958 New York at a time when women tried to be perfect, perfect looking, perfect mothers and perfect housewives. Miriam was helping her husband out as a stand-up comedian but she gets to wing it at a mic one night and finds she has a gift. I loved the series because it made every character – men and women – so complicated and complex – you laugh and you mourn. Mrs Maisel used her life as material – so against the 1950s demure-woman status quo.

There’s a new wave of young NZ poets getting personal, putting their lives, wounds, fears, anxieties on show at the poem mic. Hera Lindsay Bird, Tayi Tibble, Rebecca Hawkes, Sugar Magnolia Wilson, Sam Ducker Jones, Chris Tse, Grgeory Kan, all the Starling poets. But women have been doing it for decades in poetry. Stepping out of expectation and limitation into self-exposure. Take Fiona Kidman and Rachel McAlpine in the 1970s. Two extraordinary poets (yes I adore Fiona’s fiction but she is also a poet and it is a love of hers) who chose to write against the grain of what men were doing and write from the home – inwards and outwards – in myriad ways. Go back to the 1950s and you will find Mary Stanley. Go to the 1980s and you will find Janet Charman.

 

I had also jotted down other things I loved in the Arts –

I got to mention the Uffizi Gallery and my bomb story.

But if I had had time NZ literary festivals were also on my list:

 

I adore going to NZ literary festivals: the Auckland Writers Festival, Going West Literary Festival, Raglan, Wellington Readers and Writers, Christchurch Writers Festival, the Ladies Literatea  – and listening to podcasts when I miss things. I would so love to go to some of the smaller ones at Mapua, Nelson, Featherston, Wanaka. Such community building occasions. My mother grew up in Mapua and I spent most summers there as a child holidaying with relatives. Feels like a DR Seuss moment: big and small, I love them all.

A few weekends ago I was at the much-loved Going West Literary Festival. Such a boost, tonic, good time. I posted about it here (got to hear Elizabeth talk about The Absolute Book!).

Witi Ihimaera launched his new memoir Native Son and performed an extract with musician Kingsley Spargo. Unforgettable. He had had a terrific conversation with Sue Orr earlier in the day where he talked about asking forgiveness of his younger self, because he had covered things up, bad experiences. The book was his way of opening up, of placing the bad things in the open and saying sorry to himself as a young man trying to cope.

I find festivals so nourishing as both a reader and a writer. At Going West we all mix up together! I love that!

 

Finally – I was going to introduce a new category: art jigsaw puzzles

as a way to get into a painting and as pain relief!! Van Gogh is great – The Mona Lisa was almost impossible.

I seemed to have had so many accidents over the course of writing Wild Honey – jigsaw puzzles were the perfect way of diverting a brain from pain and sinking into deep contemplation of a painting.

 

So there you go –

what fun it is to be offered a chance to enthuse about creative things you love. Elizabeth’s new work (I want to write abut it) shows the importance of books and libraries, of words and languages. The same can be said for music and films and art. We need to celebrate and preserve our creations for so many reasons – because they are vital and over time we will keep seeing/hearing/reading them in new and necessary lights.

In this goddam moment when our world is in a state of such disrepair we should grab every chance we get to share our fascinations and to celebrate every step towards repair.

Thanks Wallace Chapman – your enthusiasm was infectious and I just loved our conversation.

Poetry Shelf audio spot: Diana Bridge reads ‘A pounamu paperweight’

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Diana Bridge reads ‘A pounamu paperweight’ from Two or more islands (Otago University Press, 2019)

 

Diana Bridge has a PhD in Chinese classical poetry from the Australian National University, received the 2015 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize and has published numerous collections of poetry. She received the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award in 2010 for her outstanding contribution to New Zealand poetry. Elizabeth Smither writes: Diana’s ‘range is both local and international, delicate and down to earth, and at the same time, probing and intensely rewarding.’ Vona Groarke wrote in her judge’s report for the Sarah broom Poetry Award that Diana’s work ‘is possibly amongst the best being written anywhere right now– for the arresting composure of the poems, for their reach and depth, for their carefully wrought thought and language, for the beauty of their phrasing, for how they are both intellectually astute and also sensual and accessible, for the way they catch you up short and make you wonder.’

Cold Hub Press published In the Supplementary Garden: New and Selected Poems with an introduction by Janet Hughes in 2010. Two or more islands came out in June of this year from Otago University Press. About eighteen months before, she completed, with Peter Harris, a collaborative translation of a selection of Chinese classical poems. As well, last year she was interviewed, as one of eleven New Zealanders who have worked on aspects of China, for a project called ‘The China Knowledge Project’. The collected interviews are to be published.

Harry Rickett reviews Two or more islands on RNZ National

Poetry Shelf interviews Diana Bridge

 

 

Poetry Shelf classic poem: Tate Fountain picks Emma Barnes’s ‘White Tuxedo’

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White Tuxedo

 

I dream of you in a white tuxedo. It is a wedding. It is not our wedding.

But the face that you affix to yourself when you look into me is the face

of the man viewing the woman. Hello this is love. Your square jaw. Your

soft, capable, all knowing mouth. Hello even your bluest and greenest

eyes. Everyone is wearing white. I look down at myself and I am lace over

pearlescent white water wings and I am shaking with adrenaline. We walk

holding hands and you’re a helium balloon I tug to earth with my

unexpected weight. Your hands slip over me. You in a white fitted shirt

with your head thrown back. We lie in bed together wrapped tightly in disbelief.

Some of our best moments were sleeping. Some of our best

moments were only in our eyes. You tilt your head to turn to me and the

whole world follows behind you.

 

Emma Barnes

 

The poem was originally published in the journal, Sweet Mammalian 3

 

 

Note from Tate Fountain:

I rarely pass specific poems on to friends, despite the amount I read and my general penchant for sharing. ‘White Tuxedo’, however, was immediately dispatched to the other side of the globe: this is a very good poem, I told my best friend, the link attached in a Twitter DM. And it is, of course, precisely that. A very good poem. A bittersweet one, which accomplishes so much in something so seemingly simple.

‘White Tuxedo’ balances the delightful with the devastating, and both elements are augmented for the presence of the other. There is an ease to Barnes’ language, unadorned yet undoubtedly calculated, which lends both to fine poignancy—‘Your/ soft, capable, all knowing mouth’—and to forward propulsion—‘lace over/ pearlescent white water wings […]’. The fourth ‘sentence’, if you will—‘But the face that you affix to yourself when you look at me is the face/ of the man viewing the woman’—pierces. It verbalises a distinct discomfort, and the inescapable air of objectification, that I’ve so often found in ‘heterosexual’ experiences. (This is perhaps furthered by the wedding in the poem, and how pointedly it is not that of the narrator and the subject.) Of course, this line might just as well signal romance to someone else (‘Hello this is love’): perhaps an ode to the archetypes of affection by which they have seen themselves represented. This may be the loving look of literature, of cinema, of song—which is a valid interpretation, and a testament to the multitudes Barnes’ phrasing can contain (though it may also be the kind of feminine subjecthood that Barnes, in penning this particular poem, has explicitly reversed).

What I love most about ‘White Tuxedo’, though, is entrenched in each and every phrase: say it with me, gang—the intimacy of it all. This intimacy is a condition that I’m always looking for in poetry; in art, in life. The knowing of somebody, and an existence shared with them, that cannot be erased by the conclusion of it. The enormity of that understanding; making macro of the minute. Really, I have always had to share this poem just for its final statement, in which Barnes handles the depth of these ideas with sparing, rapturous clarity: ‘You tilt your head to turn to me and the/ whole world follows behind you.’ It’s delicious. It’s immediate, and it’s immense. It says everything it needs to. It’s very, very good.

 

Tate Fountain is an Auckland-based writer, actor, and academic, whose recent work can be found in Starling, Perception, Gold Hand and MIM. In 2018, she self-published the chapbook Letters, which found readers around the world, and she has just begun a literary newsletter, which she hopes might be read by five people.

 

Emma Barnes lives and writes Te Whanganui-ā-Tara. She’s working on an anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writing with co-conspirator Chris Tse. It’s to be published by AUP in 2021. In her spare time she lifts heavy things up and puts them back down again.

 

 

 

 

Maraea Rakuraku’s ‘Allies: A Checklist’

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Allies: A Checklist

  1. Associated always with some godawful Act of Aggression
  2. Hero swoops in
  3. Woman swooning
  4. War won

 

Allies:  A Checklist Revisited

  1. Try listening. Actually, scrap that just listen.
  2. i.s.t.e.n. P.a.k.e.h.a men.
  3. Especially you. Specially, special,specifically you.
  4. Alone this checklist applies.
  5. It doesn’t.
  6. It does.
  7. Feel that?
  8. Pissed off? Beset upon? Mis-judged? Angry? Emotional? Overly emotional? Guilty?
  9. You sure bloody are
  10. Look at you, looking at me, looking at you
  11. Assessing
  12. Is she educated enough?
  13. Articulate?
  14. Published?
  15. Literary?
  16. Poetical?
  17. Pretty?
  18. Hot, enough?
  19. Enough already.
  20. Whatever is what, I’m not – white man, white woman,
  21. E noho.
  22. You do you.
  23. I’ll – do me.
  24. Wāhine Māori ma, E tū

Ally: Definition

A country that has agreed officially to give help and support to another one, especially during a war:

If Patriarchy is the Country, Women are at war.

If Women is the Country, Patriarchy is the war.

Ally: Definition

Someone who helps and supports someone else.

Doesn’t takeover. Doesn’t redefine. Doesn’t reinterpret. Doesn’t tell you about you. Doesn’t tell you how you can do you better. Doesn’t make it about them. Just doesn’t.

Ally: Definition

Someone who helps and supports someone else by – helping and supporting, someone else.

  1. Ally from the Latin word alligare,
  2. Alligare – to bind to
  3. We, are bound
  4. To make it happen: Amirite wāhine ma?
  5. As for binding – be it feet, a relationship or “spiritually”. No.
  6. Means no.
  7. No – maybe. No – later. No – after dinner. No – because it makes you sleep easier. No.
  8. Nothing ever stops the Patriarchy from being itself.
  9. Through narcissistic old white.
  10. Men who yet again, tell me they know me better than I know my…
  11. Self actualisation, theirs, reflective in a world created solely by them
  12. for them. Not us.
  13. Selina Tusitala Marsh stretching across the Pacific through whakapapa and words following,
  14. Teresia Teaiwa, who did it first,
  15. Grace Molisa, before her. And the legions –
  16. Legends before her, not myths
  17. Truths
  18. Friend
  19. I ally you and your story
  20. and your telling of it
  21. not mine
  22. yours
  23. In solidarity.
  24. Shoulder to shoulder.
  25. An ally jimmies. There is room enough for two, for multitudes.
  26. Sister, the light is enough for us all. Come. Here. Join me. Join us.

 

Maraea Rakuraku

 

 

Musician and actor Moana Ete read this heart-stunning poem at the Wild Honey National Poetry event at Wellington’s Unity Books and you could hear a pin drop the silence was so deep.

Tonight I am celebrating Wild Honey in Palmerston North, and tomorrow I am heading from the airport to RNZ to talk favourite books, music, poetry and movies with Jessie Mulligan on the Bookmarks spot. It feels like this intensely wonderful time I have had drawing my new book into the world is moving into a different phase. I can retreat into my quiet life and do secret things for a while. Time to recharge the empty fuel tank.

It is utterly fitting to post Maraea’s poem that muses on the word ‘ally’. The past weeks have been a time of poetry friendship, of warmth, empathy and connections. I am so grateful to everyone who has attended and participated in the Wild Honey events.

And I am so moved by Maraea’s poem – it makes my heart sing.

 

‘Sister, the light is enough for us all. Come. Here. Join me. Join us.’

 

Maraea Rakuraku is an award-winning playwright, poet, short story writer, critic, reviewer and broadcaster who lives in Wellington and the Bay of Plenty. She creates work that investigates, examines, calls out and celebrates Te Ao Māori and our navigation of 21st century Aotearoa New Zealand.

Her thoughtful, fierce intellectualism, and grounding in her Tūhoe and Ngāti Kahungunu identity, is matched only by her heart and commitment to giving voice.

With Vana Manasiadis, Maraea is the co-editor of and contributor to Tātai Whetū: Seven Māori Poets in Translation (Seraph Press, 2018). In 2018 she started a PhD in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Wellington.

 

 

 

 

 

A tribute to Dunedin poet: Elizabeth Brooke-Carr (1940 – 2019)

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On Friday 6th September I was in Dunedin to celebrate Wild Honey with local poets. The occasion was moving in its connections and warmth, but made even more so by the sadness many felt at the death of much loved Dunedin poet, Elizabeth Brooke-Carr that afternoon.

 

Elizabeth Brooke-Carr was a poet and writer. She taught English in secondary schools for twenty years and has tutored creative writing evening classes. Her work includes The Soldier and the Poet, a collaborative piece with Clair Beynon. Her poems, and her short story ‘Jimmy the Needle’, have been published in the Otago Daily Times. Her articles on social justice and environmental issues have appeared on the web, in Touchstone, the National Methodist Newspaper, as an exemplar in NZ Secondary Schools Scholarship Examination, and in Connections a collection by Philip Garside Publishing. Her 2005 essay won the open section in the Dunedin City Council’s competition about the built environment. She was awarded an NZSA mentorship in 2007, and in 2009 was winner of the NZSA 75th anniversary National Competition. Elizabeth was the inaugural writer-in-residence, Down the Bay, at the Caselberg Trust cottage in 2010.

I have invited some Dunedin poets to pay tribute to Elizabeth. Jenny Powell shares the poem of Elizabeth’s that she read at the Wild Honey event. I have also included the introduction to the new 8 Poems plus one which became a wee letter-press-printed anthology of 9 poems in order to publish Elizabeth’s this year rather than next. The anthology was released in time for her to see it and depended upon an act of kindness from Riemke Ensing. Thanks to The Pear Tree Press I have also included Elizabeth’s poem.

Elizabeth’s page at Otago Writers network

 

Jenny Powell:

I chose Elizabeth’s poem to read partly because it’s about a Clydesdale horse and partly because there are a series of coincidences attached to the poem.

Kay McKenzie Cooke and I, otherwise known as touring poets J & K Rolling, posed with Clydesdales for the photo we use on our posters. Elizabeth loved the photo. It reminded her of childhood days, and so she went on to write her poem.

J & K Rolling have a shared trait of getting lost. It’s not a great quality when you’re on tour. Last year, inland from Owaka, we were driving down a country road looking for the farmhouse where we were staying the night. After a while we came to an old dairy factory and Kay decided we weren’t on the right road, so we turned around and drove back. Coincidentally, directly across the road from the dairy factory was the setting for Elizabeth’s poem. It was the site of the farm where she lived as a child.

But I wasn’t prepared for the final coincidence.

Elizabeth died this afternoon.

 

Nobby and Joseph

He hauled the bulky leather collar from a peg
at the back of the high walled barn,
heaved it up in a crane-swing arc

to fasten around Nobby’s burnished shoulders,
a soft word or two blurted into his neck
with awkward country affection,

a rub of his jaw, a nudge, and down to the garden
they trudged, Joseph close behind
the old Clydesdale, silky leg feathers

flaring wide in a lumbering dance, through the gate
harnessed to a single-furrow plough
nosed firm into the earth.

Joseph held the reins lightly, the hand grips hard
turned the sod slice by slice,
like strips of blubber flensed from

the sides of a dark-fleshed whale, rolling them
over onto the back of the last neat row
until the whole field was an ocean

of green fringed waves. His turf is kept by another
now, who sits astride a ride-on mower,
smoke wafting, incense-blue,

from the exhaust-pipe thurible, rumbling deepthroated
down swathes of sombre lawn
flanked by granite headstones,

one, with Joseph’s name and a few shy words
of love, tethered in gold letters,
blinks in the sinking sun.

Elizabeth Brooke-Carr
Dunedin, New Zealand

 

Sue Wootton

I selected several of Elizabeth’s poems for the ODT when I was editing the poetry column, and also had the privilege of publishing a couple of pieces by her, recently, for Corpus. “All hitched up” is about receiving her first dose of chemotherapy and contains her poem “The Vein Whisperer”.

 

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With kind permission from The Pear Tree Press, here is the  ‘Introduction’ and Elizabeth’s poem; from 8 Poems plus 1 by New Zealand Poets 2019,designed by Tara McLeod (Auckland: The Pear Tree Press, 2019):

 

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‘All that remains is pressed flat’ Elizabeth Brooke-Carr, 8 Poems plus 1:

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Claire Beynon shares one of Elizabeth’s poems that recently came to light after quite a search. ‘I took it to our writing meeting yesterday and read it out to the group – it’s a poem that Paddy Richardson especially loved. She said it had stayed with her long after first being published in the ODT’s Monday Poem series (several years ago, when Diane Brown was editor).’

 

When bright red was eclipsed by silver shoon

 

You see your teacher perched on a spare desk

at the front of the classroom. A dusty blackboard

behind, frames her there, skirt tucked tight around

her calves. She stares across the top of your head,

draws a long, deep breath, Silver, she says, pausing

to open the book on her lap. She begins to read.

 

You are captivated by her bright red lipstick,

it goes right to the corners of her mouth.

You hear your mother say scarlet is for show-offs

and only clowns take lipstick out to the corners.

 

Your teacher knows none of this.

She is enchanted by Silver. Her lips, full and lucent,

send tiny stars wheeling off into the round,

as she aspirates each soft, silvered sound.

You forget bright red and what your mother said.

Everything is silver.

 

Your teacher is swaying a little, peering this way

and that as she reads. You know she’s walking

with the moon, and soon you catch up.

You’ve never heard of shoon, or casements,

but now you see them, glistening. You reach out,

touch silver fruit on silver trees, step around

the sleeping dog, look up to doves. Startle

when a mouse darts by. You’re moveless near the

edge of a silver stream when you become aware

 

your teacher has stopped reading. She has

closed the book, a far-away look in her eyes.

Ah, girls, she sighs, Walter de la Mare!

She speaks his name in a spangle of stars,

clasps him close to her chest as she swoons

and steps down to the floor. You’re still thinking

of the moon, leaving the sky to come and walk

with you at bright red noon, slowly, silently

to the end of your days, in her silver shoon.

 

Elizabeth Brooke-Carr

 

 

From Jane Woodham:

 

 

Listen to Elizabeth read an extract from her novel Greywacke

 

 

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All that remains is pressed flat,

 

a strip of bare earth up on the hillside

and, between the leaves of a book

she was reading that morning, four stiff stalks

bearing sunrise petals. A softly coiled feather

brats the air when she turns the page.

 

from ‘All that remains is pressed flat’,  8 Poems plus 1

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Better Off Read in conversation with Carolyn DeCarlo (AUP New Poets)

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(Image of Carolyn DeCarlo by Tabitha Arthur)

 

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Launched in 1999, AUP New Poets first introduced readers to Anna Jackson, Sonja Yelich, Janis Freegard, Chris Tse and many other significant New Zealand voices. Relaunching this year under the editorship of Anna Jackson and with a bold new look, AUP New Poets 5 includes substantial selections from the poetry of Carolyn DeCarlo, Sophie van Waardenberg and Rebecca Hawkes.

Go here to listen

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf audio spot: Vana Manasiadis reads ”Hieroglyph 3 (or Colin McCahon’s Gate III in 1993)’

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Vana Mansiadis reads ‘Hieroglyph 3 (or Colin McCahon’s Gate III in 1993)’

Published in The Grief Almanac: A Sequel  Seraph Press, 2019

 

 

Vana Manasiadis is a Greek-New Zealand poet, translator and creative writing teacher who has been moving between Aotearoa and Greece, and is now living in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland. Her first collection, Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima, was published by Seraph Press in 2009. She is the co-editor of the Seraph Press Translation Series, and was the editor and translator of Ναυάγια/Καταφύγια: Shipwrecks/Shelters: Six Contemporary Greek Poets (2016) and co-editor, with Maraea Rakuraku, of Tātai Whetū: Seven Māori Women Poets in Translation.

 

Seraph Press author page

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf classic poem: Wen-Juenn Lee picks Joan Fleming’s ‘Husband and Wife Talk Without Talking At A Difficult Dinner Party’

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Note from Wen-Juenn Lee:

I first read Joan Fleming’s ‘Husband and Wife Talk Without Talking At A Difficult Dinner Party’ at university, when something about the simple domesticity yet the ‘intolerable solitude’ of love (‘Translations VI’, Failed Love Poems) struck me – at a time when I was just beginning to read tragic, suburban love stories by Raymond Carver. (I liked the line, ‘He drinks more and she stops drinking. It is for the same reason’ and I did not know why, until later I realised that it reminded me of the wife in ‘The Student’s Wife’, who wakes up in the middle of the night and calls her husband’s name, but he does not answer.)

Love is different in ‘Husband and Wife Talk Without Talking At A Difficult Dinner Party’, different because it is not marked by suffocating drabness, but sleepy attentiveness, knowing the patterns of someone else with the instinctiveness you know it’s going to rain when storm clouds appear. (Simone Weil: ‘Attentiveness is the rarest form of generosity.’) It is with this attentiveness that the poem breathes: there is the hard brittleness of a wine glass, the clattering of forks, underpinned by the softness of silent communion. A couple sits, one drinks and one doesn’t, and they suffer quietly, and maybe they’ll leave and go to bed, alone with their griefs and little traumas. Maybe they will talk without saying anything important at all.

Here, we have the external actions of people, yang, and the inarticulate feelings they have, yin. This heartbeat of yin and yang underpins the very heartbeat of the poem. Yang, the boundaries in self between you and me, yang, the face I present to the wider world: of husband shredding his napkin, of wife touching her earlobes. In this, I am reminded of my parents who interact with the formality of Chinese tradition. My parents do not say, ‘I love you’, but ask ‘have you eaten?’ Yet. They know I talk loudly when I’m tired and they know when I’m irritated and trying to disguise it with forced cheer; they would just never tell me they know. To the outsider, someone walking past the window, a plus one at the party, anyone that isn’t the husband or wife, maybe they would notice the shredded napkin, the unnecessary earlobe-touching, but they can only guess; they can observe but never decode. This is a poem of extended people-watching, in the sense that we too, are outsiders with the privilege of understanding a couple’s private state, if only fleetingly.

When we are lucky enough to know people that know us intimately, that know us well, they will know the difference between your laugh and your forced laugh, and this is where the duality of yin and yang can occur. Husband and wife are having a conversation without using their words at all. She says, I have a headache. He says, I’m worried about my father. The dinner party is Difficult because maintaining your yang is Difficult in the face of your worries, because expressing your yin is near impossible. I found the last line in the poem so devastating, not because it ends with silence, but something of the frail and incomplete yin, ‘a soft space where speech can grow’. This tender, fragile possibility of communion (in whatever form that takes) is part of the larger love letter I see in Joan Fleming’s The Same As Yes. It struck me then, as it strikes me now, how ordinary intimacy and its limits can feel to me more concrete, more sorts of tragic, than anything else.

 

Wen-Juenn Lee works in Melbourne, and writes when she can. She writes about Wellington, her family, and her feelings. Her work has appeared in Landfall, Southerly, and other publications.

Joan Fleming is the author of two collections of poetry, The Same as Yes and Failed Love Poems, both from Victoria University Press, and the chapbook Two Dreams in Which Things Are Taken (Duets). Her new collection Dirt is forthcoming with Cordite Books. She holds a PhD in ethnopoetics from Monash University, Melbourne, and is the New Zealand/Aotearoa Commissioning Editor for Cordite Poetry Review. She currently lives in Madrid, and in 2020 she will travel to Honduras for the Our Little Roses Poetry Teaching Fellowship.

Victoria University Press author page

 

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Poetry Shelf noticeboard: celebrating Helen Heath

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Helen Heath won the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards with her poetry collection, Are Friends Electric? National Poetry Day sat down and talked to her about ‘that moment,’ the themes that recur in her work and why poetry is so hot in Aotearoa.

 

 

Helen reads two poems for Poetry Shelf

Poetry Shelf in conversation with Helen

Victoria University Press author  page