Every day, my power company offers customers an hour of free power— at an off-peak time, of course, so before bed I make sure I turn on the dishwasher, get a load of washing in, charge my laptop and phone, vacuum, and maybe, if I remember, use the dryer for no real reason other than to heat my towel so the winter air doesn’t slice through me
after a shower, and by then I’ve done pretty well on the savings for the night, so I boil the jug for a cup of tea, marking the end of the day by blowing on the white knots of steam; and because I rushed home from work to get dinner on early and set my alarm—as usual—for 8:55 p.m., ready to vault through the house, there’s still time in the hour of power, so I boil the jug again to soak the pots and pans, put the electric blanket on and even
blow dry my hair, and I’m starting to get on a bit of roll by this point,
so I do my ironing in advance for a change, pop tomorrow’s roast in the slow cooker and stream an entire Netflix series so I have something to talk about at work tomorrow; and it’s about now I’m hoping I’m not bothering the upstairs neighbours too much, or worse, if they’re contracted with Electric Kiwi themselves and are saving more than I am, so I turn the shower on just to leave it running go down to the garage for last year’s Christmas decorations
and line the fence with fairy-lights, restart the chest freezer that hasn’t been used in years, play my stereo as loud as it goes; and even after all that there’s still time in the hour of power, and I’m not a handyperson by any means but I get the electric saw going—finally getting around to that bookcase I started over lockdown— and as I’m buzzing away, part of me wonders if I should really write a list next time of all the things to use and save money on
until I run out of cords and power sockets to plug into
and the whole house swells, swells; and the only thing stopping me now is if the fuse box blows (which my landlord wouldn’t be happy about) but at least I’d finally have some peace and quiet, and all the spaces would be flooded with darkness and I could creep upstairs into my bedroom, tracing my hands along the wall, until I’m under the duvet and everything is still.
Tim Grgec
Tim Grgec is a writer and public servant based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. His first poetry collection, All Tito’s Children (Te Heranga Waka Press, 2021), is a verse biography of the Yugoslavian dictator Josip Broz Tito. He was the 2018 recipient of the Biggs Family Prize for Poetry.
Ideas for my blog drop into my head like golden peaches. The next thing I know I am sending out invitations, poets are getting on board, and the Poetry Shelf community is engaged. I recently adored Tracey Slaughter’s editorial to Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2022. Rather than introduce the poets, she spoke to the idea of breakage in poetry. More than that, she offered a vital plea for us to bring everything when we enter the issue. I felt galvanised,on so many levels, by her piece. I compiled a list of words with links to writing and reading poetry, and invited a few poets to pick a word and write a paragraph in response. I am hoping to do one more Paragraph Room before early June. You can read the first Paragraph Room here.
With thanks to all the contributors, and to the ongoing supporters of Poetry Shelf. It means a lot.
Refuge
I’ve been thinking about writing as a refuge, as a place of safety and freedom, which means thinking about my poetry’s relationship to me and to the world. I’ve recently written what I used to disparagingly call poetry-as-therapy, a neighbour of poetry-as-refuge. There are lots of contradictions. I like to think of poetry as a place of freedom, somewhere you can write about anything in whatever way you like. But of course it isn’t. For example, I believe you should be careful how you use people who might recognise themselves in your poems. And although I like using personas because I like to imagine what it might be like to be somebody else, I’m not entitled to take on any voice I like. So can you write about what you don’t know or only about what you know? And where is the imagination in all this?
There are no easy answers, but there is a solution. You have the absolute freedom of your head. You can dream, try things, be someone else, make a mess, bore yourself, shock yourself, disgrace yourself at the keyboard. It’s what I like most about writing … the act of writing. When it comes to publishing, however, you leave your refuge and enter the world.
James Brown
music
it begins with a bird, one that claps its beak together, another that seems about to vomit, a shriek that is countermanded by a note so pure Mozart might have approved. It’s Radio NZ concert and it’s how I feel about writing. There is music and there are preambles: Handel’s first performance of ‘Messiah’ was dangerously short of seats so gentlemen were instructed to leave their swords at home and ladies to jettison their hoop petticoats. On which side does a sword go; what if a gentleman encountered a brigand on the way home; would love be less encumbered minus a hoop? The bird and then imagination and then the music. I used to admire those who scorned a room of one’s own and could write with children galloping around the dining room table, but now I realise I need music. Perhaps I am thinking of the music in poetry – not the obvious end rhymes – but the mysterious, not-quite rhymes that surprise you and lead you on like notes in pursuit of a theme. There is so much to think about, so much humour. Rachmaninoff’s big hands (another preamble) or the way some composers (Rachmaninoff is one) pummel and pulverise the end of a symphony as if they are beating it to death. Sometimes, thinking of music and poetry together, I say to myself my favourite rhyme from ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’.
“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.”
It’s that willing and shilling and will and the subtler pig and ring that never fail to enchant me.
Elizabeth Smither
Grief
I haven’t written much poetry in the last five years, but what I have written has been suffused with grief. Every creative practitioner goes through ebbs and flows, and I have been going through a poetic ebb. Poetry has been a place where I have been spending time alone, working through grief. The grief of losing family members, the grief of relationship breakups, the grief of dealing with trauma. Old griefs surface amongst the more recent ones and it feels like walking through a weird forest or a very biodiverse swamp. After pursuing a writing career for over 20 years I am only just getting to a point where I feel comfortable in this space. I have found poetic forms useful for providing emotional distance but also as a kind of packaging or container I can put things into and observe them. I don’t know when and how this work will find a home in the world – dark formalism is a very acquired taste – but for now it is enough that it functions as reflective practice.
Airini Beautrais
Time Travel
I love the idea of poetry as time travel. How amazing that we can sing our words onto a page and a minute or a day or a century later someone can read it and the song will flow into them. The song will sound subtly different to each listener, but it will still spark and ignite and fizz and I as the writer will speak directly to you, the reader. That’s the magic of poetry. In a time when seemingly it’s harder for us to listen to others, here is a room – a space – where two consenting people can touch, across space and time. That is something to hold on to.
Renee Liang
grief
I went past the word ‘grief’ near the top of the list and got stuck on it, I couldn’t concentrate on the other words and kept going back to it. I have been writing a lot of grief-ridden poems lately, trying to process ‘losing’ my father to dementia, as well as this communal grief we are all experiencing to some extent, for the way of living and connecting we used to have, and the way covid has put a stop to a lot of that life. At first that stop felt temporary, but now, two years on, it does not seem to be leaving. Poems are a sort of beacon in that darkness. I often think of a poem by James Brown called ‘Beyond Repair’, that I read as a young writer and loved. Although the poem was about a broken umbrella, there was a sadness sitting underneath it that I felt moved by. There are plenty of great celebratory poems, or f-you poems, or / or / or, but poems about grief seem to come from a deep and obviously painful place in the physical body. By writing poems about grief, I hope to reach people grieving. And as someone grieving, I want to read poems to see that I’m not alone. Poems are a place of kinship that you don’t have to be in the same room (or even the same time) as someone else to experience.
Louise Wallace
Fragment
In a way, all poems are made of fragments. Each line is created by a sort of breaking, making the poem a form fissured with cracks. Some poetry is literally fragmented; only sections survive. Lots of ancient poetry is like this; it is as if we possess a handful of sea glass rather than a complete bottle. I like the mystery of never quite knowing the whole. Because, I think, mystery is important to poetry, too. Good poetry is about what you know and can read, sure, but it is also about what is hidden, implied, unknown. What is lurking outside the text and exerting pressure on it. Poetry, to me, is always about what we know and what we cannot simultaneously. At once complementary and oppositional. So give me sea glass over a bottle any day; give me a fragment; give me a poem.
Hebe Kearney
Knot
I am fascinated by the presence of knots in both corporeal bodies and bodies of words. The innumerable ways knots are tied and undone in/through people and poetry constantly impresses me. I often catch myself chewing over everyday reversals/oppositions and getting quite furious at how quickly I diagnose their nature or belonging as ‘oppositional’. Every bit of me doesn’t want to arrive at these conclusions but I do, but I am always ready to interrogate my arrivals and departures. Humans seem to have some chronic compulsion—some biological compulsion—to disentangle, to cling to the asynchronous over the synchronous, but unless this compulsion is actually going to save our lives, I believe we ought to reassess it. There is a blend about almost everything: it is possible to be dreaming and not dreaming, truly overjoyed and truly miserable at once. Perhaps Maggie Nelson’s keen awareness of mutual inclusivity in The Argonauts best articulates how I feel about the responsibility of people, and the page, to examine a chronically loose knot: “I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed.” Poetry is special for the way it knits so intricately together the forces and feelings we aren’t sure how to make sense of (and often we still don’t know how to make sense of them after the poem, only feel we know them better) but for poetry to do such work it requires first a person to acknowledge this work as necessary, and more, to need this work to be necessary. I am thinking now of essa may ranapiri’s ransack. I am thinking of Anna Jackson’s Actions and Travels. I am thinking about the way I want my writing to always be honest about the knot: the deep-rooted (I accidentally typed deep-rotted, hmm) drive to disentangle, and the desire, the urgency, to keep the braid. My current MA project aspires to gallop through and around the knot. I wonder where I will arrive, where I will depart, and why, and why not?
Amy Marguerite
Time
I find it essential to be on time for everything (including the present assignment). If I’m invited anywhere, I count backwards to find the latest moment I can leave in order to be at my destination punctually. Occasionally I try to factor in a bit of fashionable lateness, but mostly in vain. Time in poetry, though, is a horse of a different colour. I wrote a poem while travelling in the Lake District with my family in 1981. The first two lines ran:
We built a man of slates, and after years, revisited, the rock had grown a face.
I liked them, but I wasn’t really sure what they meant. Perhaps for that reason, what came next was less satisfactory – to me, and to others. The poem stayed with me, though, and fifteen or so years later I made a concerted attempt to complete it with some entirely new lines. And in that form it appeared in my first book, City of Strange Brunettes (1998), under the title “First Love.” But I didn’t entirely like that version either, so later on I had a go at changing the second stanza. Just now, in 2022, I had a look at the poem again and decided to change it back to the way it’d been in the book. Even as I read it, though, I can still hear the original 1981 version of the last four lines going round and round in my head. My point is not so much that the poem is still alive for me, after forty-odd years (though it is); rather, the thing that fascinates me is the number of different moments over those four decades that are somehow miraculously preserved in this one six-line poem. Writing a poem is the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to that Proustian idea of recovering lost time – not just as it was, but with the added patina of what has come in between then and now. It’s a snapshot of a buried past, but with the advantage that the people in the picture are still able to live and breathe. Going back to old poems to rewrite and reshape them is not so much about improving them as asserting their ongoing vitality – and, I suppose, my own.
Jack Ross
Tongue
One of the things I value most about poetry is its ability to put me into contact with the feel of language, to allow me to hold language in my mouth, to taste language anew, to slow and savour. I have been immensely lucky to be lead in my writing and reading life by Tracey Slaughter, who encourages her students to encounter language in the limbic system, to practice out the sounds and shapes of words in our mouths like babies learning to talk, like kids crowing the same word over and over just to hear it echo. The rush of poetic lines are only liberated when the tongue is loosed, when those pursed lips of self-censor are softened. That’s the thing I’ve been holding onto most about writing and reading poetry lately: the invitation to slow and notice where words come from, where they live in the body, and what they do there. I’m really interested in the power of ink and tongues, of words and bodies—in language and the way it moves us, for better and worse. Poetry is maybe the lab where I go to tune my ear into the layers of inheritance and learning that lace our tongues, where I begin to untangle these shouting, baffling seasons that seem to just keep unfurling.
Aimee Jane Anderson-O’Connor
Politics
‘All poetry is political’ is one of the most abused adages in the game. What people want it to mean is that their 16-line sonnets about urban ennui are quite radical, politically. What it really means is that most bodies of non-revolutionary poetry implicitly rubber-stamp the status quo. Being mindful of the difference between those two very different kinds of writing has been helpful to me as I consider what I really need to say and how I want to say it. (And don’t get me wrong: I love a good ennui poem!)
Erik Kennedy
Line-break
With each line-break I take a breath in, and in the out breath there is often a protest where I question what I’ve left unspoken. Line-break. I wince at the constriction of my tongue. Line-break. What does poetry mean for the environment we have created? Line break. There is uncertainty around what constitutes freedom of speech for humanity nowadays. Who listens to the wild voices, of all ages, who press us with an acuteurgency to look deeply at our foundations? Line-break. Is there space for another vernacular? Line-break. I imagine, if our collective can move forwards with aroha, that the external/internal/existential chaos might have less power. Line-break. And while I may wish in secret, for outdated oppressive systems to collapse, so that we might find stillness inside a new landscape, I know ultimately that the answers lie inside ourselves. Line-break. Am I a poet utilising line-breaks as moments to reflect? I sure hope so.
Iona Winter
Chaos
In Game of Thrones season 3 episode 6, Lord Petyr Baelish famously says to Master of Whispers Varys ‘chaos is a ladder’. I can only assume he was referring to employing chaos as a poetic device. Chaos in a poem can be a powerful tool, able to cut through a poem straight to the reader or audience. It can act as a sort of shortcut to an emotional evocation or provocation. But it can also be fool’s gold, an enticing siren seducing you on your poetry voyage, you hear its gorgeous call, then before you know it, you’ve crashed, and your poem has been obliterated into something unrecognisable. My personal philosophy is that more young poets should experiment with chaos. Sure, we’re following you through a golden field, eating pomegranate seeds, in a soothing state of cottagecore bliss, but where’s the chaos? Where’s the amplified effects of climate change setting the field immediately ablaze? Where’s the sudden ennui that leads to the speaker choking on the pomengranate? Where’s the local elderly occult devotees performing sacrifices in the neighbouring field? Maybe it’s all terrible and should never make it in the poem, but what’s the harm in trying? My favourite poets are those who have realised the secret to chaos is restraint, who can control it with ease and employ it when it is most effective, it raises the ceiling on the effect their poetry can have on their audience.
Jordan Hamel
Slippage
Perhaps more than prose, poetry always has the potential to slip into something else, which is part of what makes the writing process so challenging. You’re often drawing on influences both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the poem — there’s the content of the poem itself, but then there are all the poems you’ve read and loved before it; that live in your mind while you construct this one. A poem can be a séance: you’re never quite sure what you’re summoning; but what you let in can change it forever. A poem might slip into different places. It can slip wholly into memory or a vision of the future. The reality of the poem can slip. So can the language itself; it might shift into another language, or entirely into incoherence. The form of a poem can unwind and fray. It can slip into something no longer resembling a poem. The poet’s relationship with the reader can change. And you can change too.
Anuja Mitra
Landscape
When I’m writing, what I’m really doing is chasing a feeling. That’s why I love poetry so much because it does what no other genre of writing seems to do: it allows for the creation of emotional landscapes, to build these microcosms of feelings with as many or as few words as you like. You can put someone in the middle of the dining room, your childhood home, the eye of a mental breakdown, taking and giving, being honest, telling lies. Part of me really likes that challenge, likes trying to use a small number of words to put my reader inside a certain perspective. It’s one of the first things I notice about a poem I read and the thing I’m always reaching for in the dark of my draft work. That little world that pulls me in and sinks me to the core, where you look up from the page like you’ve just been somewhere far away, and now the light is seeping back in, and you can go about your day again.
Brecon Dobbie
Loathing
For poetry, loathing is recommended. I am only being half-facetious. It’s important I think, the loathing. The loathing of poetry. One’s own, sure. A bit. But the poetry of others. Particular poets. Some in far-off cities and some that you fraternise with and find charming. You may choose not to announce it out loud, and you’ll certainly deny it. Consider the opposite, that you loved all poems, that you applauded every line. You would surely be an idiot. Or at least undiscriminating. Liking everything would dilute your love of poetry. If you love it, you’ve got to loathe it. Right? What you love and what you loathe defines your aesthetic. I think it’s common to disagree with the list of poets and poems that others loathe. But I see the loathing itself as a good sign. It shows they care. And the lens of that loathing focuses a poet’s own writing. If you loathe every Nick Ascroft poem I applaud you. You have the good sense to loathe. Me, I like everything and everyone.
Nick Ascroft
Findability
When I write a poem, one thing has never changed: the thrill is in the process, which is bristlingly private. If I’m writing, I’m smiling. So what could possibly add to that? A live audience. These days, something else adds value to my poems: findability. My tired short-term memory abandons any lines scribbled on envelopes, no matter how fascinating. If they’re not in the file named “2022-half-baked-poems” they don’t exist. They have plopped out of my fingers like tadpoles. From the poems I read, I ask nothing. They may add or they may do mysterious things with a slide rule. If I could analyse this, would it be poetry?
Rachel McAlpine
Human
I don’t want much really. I just want to learn what another person knows about the human condition. I want to hear this experience in language that is mine and also not mine, with cadence that draws me up hills and through valleys. I want the poem to penetrate my body and leave me both weaker and stronger. That’s all.
Lynn Jenner
Line break
To me, line breaks are one of the most important tools in poetry. People joke that anyone can write a poem by spamming the enter key lots of times, but I think that knowing when to break up a sentence is very important. It can feel very intuitive or extremely calculated, depending on the poem. When I first started reading poetry, I found it confusing when a poem would break suddenly, seemingly against the natural rhythm of its structure, against what my brain wanted to do. But now I understand that this is often the art of poetry – to highlight something that normally might go unnoticed in the grinding rhythm of things. By changing the emphasis to fall on a certain word, you can create whole new worlds of meaning. It’s exciting, when you fall into a rhythm only to have it thwarted by where the words sit on the page. Like you can’t predict where the poem will fall next.
Cadence Chung
Pronouns
Whether or not you consider non-binary people trans depends on so many things both internal and external to the individual thinking about it. I, personally, live outside the binary and across it. Sometimes seen. Sometimes not. In general extremely hidden. I find these days eventually things boil down to pronouns. Things are revealed by pronouns. For better, for worse. Sometimes they are something good. Regularly, they are an uncomfortable choice between uncomfortable choices layered with further uncomfortable choices. I’m not drawn to any of the pronouns in regular circulation, poetically, they just exist. The pronoun I am most obsessed with when it comes to my writing is you. It’s me, it’s you, it’s a different you, it’s all of us in general. It’s a flexible cover for a multitude of people. It’s a flexible cover for a multitude of selves. I sometimes feel it’s the central working theme in my work to obscure and reveal who is speaking and spoken of. Who is the object and who is the subject. I love what I can do with you. I love what you, the reader, can do with you. I love who I can be with you. I love you.
The reading process is such a curious thing. I often liken it to bridges. Some days I cross the bridge easily into a poem or a novel while on other days it is impassable. When it happens with poetry books, I often return to the bridge and find an open and rewarding route.
Bryan Walpert’s novel is shortlisted for theOckham New Zealand Book Awards 2022. It has received a number of glowing reviews, and has really affected readers. Madison Hamill: ‘Trust me, this story will unfold like a set of dominoes arranged in the shape of your heart.’ David Hill in Kete Books: ‘In Entanglement, you feel that Walpert is frequently intrigued and surprised by his own material. The result is a story that jumps with energy, both emotional and intellectual.’
When I first started reading Bryan Walpert’s novel I loved it, and then I stalled and put it to one side. I stalled because my reading life is so fickle this year. Sometimes there are no bridges, sometimes there are myriad bridges that lead to balm, gold nuggets, simplicity, complexity, electrifying connections.
I have picked up Entanglement again, the love I first felt is stronger than ever, and yes, I am entangled in the premise, the characters, and the writing itself. What first beguiled me was the writing. The exquisite accumulation of phrases into long sentences, a slow accretion that adds to character and tension. Think of the tension on a loom or a set of knitting needles. This is a book to read and savour slowly, without skimming, to amass the threads and the stitches, andante. To appreciate the knots.
And yes, this is a book of knots – think the knottiness of time, the gnarliness of situation. The book you are holding is a book of time travel, a book of love and misstep, of ideas and apprehension. The structure enables you to step into time-travelling shoes as you move among three strands. Past present future entanglements. A novelist is undertaking research at Sydney’s Centre for Time. He falls in love with a New Zealand philosopher. A writer is doing writing exercises at a writing retreat at a New Zealand lake. They accrue like autobiography. Someone is travelling back in time, pulled by tragedies in the past that haunt but are not clearly understood. There is marriage, there is a beloved daughter, there is a severely injured brother. There is a compulsion to write and a curiosity about time.
Pretty much any book we write depends upon pleats and folds as our lives overlap, crease into living or a poem or a novel. In Entanglement strands overlap, pleat together, and that becomes a fascination as you read. The writing exercises raid a life and an imagination. The past present future rub against each other as time becomes unstable, uncertain. How do we define the present, how do we experience the now that is already past, the moment you blink it? Everything is suspect. Is it one person? Is it one conventional time thread?
I find the slowness of my reading shifts in the final third. The lure to know what happens to the time traveller takes precedence, and it jars to be pulled back into a reflection on free will and time arguments. I am hungry to keep reading. It feels like I am mimicking the traveller’s dislocation, grappling at the entangled lives and times and ideas, pulled breathlessly to a particular location – for me the last page – to make sense of whatever can be made sense of.
This is a writer taking a risk (you choose: Bryan Walpert, the narrator novelist, the narrator at the retreat, all three, all one). Am I reading the narrator as entanglement, shaped by tragedy, driven by curiosity at the level of physics and philosophy, smashing against the familiar and the unbeknown?
Reading becomes an exhilarating excursion, with risky climbs and turning bays for meditation. Yet at the heart, at the warm core of the novel, I find all things human. This is what makes Entanglement a haunting, moving read. It is the choices we make, domestic detail, daily routines, self doubt, self compulsion, the way we nourish those we love, the way we nourish and make sense of ourselves. It is the way we are human; intellectually and emotionally engaged. Entangled. The way we become entangled as we read. I toast this glorious book.
Bryan Walpert is the author of Late Sonata, winner of the 2020 Seizure Viva La Novella Prize, as well as a short story collection, four books of poetry and two of literary criticism. He is a professor in creative writing at Massey University, Auckland.
Welcome to the autumnedition of a fine line,flagship magazine for New Zealand Poetry Society / Te Hunga Tito Ruri o Aotearoa, edited by Gail Ingram with Assistant Editor Lily Holloway.
Featured Poet: Johanna Aitchison
Our featured poet, Johanna Aitchison, lives, writes, and teaches in the Manawatū. She completed a PhD in Creative Writing at Massey University 2021, and will publish her next collection of poetry, 57 New Words, in 2023.
Featured Article: Juanita Hepi
Juanita Hepi (Kāi Tahu) is a storyteller exploring the intersections of race, class and gender through Indigenous storytelling. She holds a Masters of Māori and Indigenous leadership and is māmā to three.
Poets include: Susan Howard, Brent Cantwell, Anita Mortlock, Gillian Roach, Laurice Gilbert, Susan Howard, Sophia Wilson, Aine Whelan-Kopa, Mercedes Webb-Pullman, Alexandra Fraser, Denise O’Hagan, Susan Wills, Michael Giacon, Peter Free, Barbara Strang, Hester Ullyart, Julie Adamson, Debbie Strange, Craig McLanachan, Sue Courtney and Karen Peterson Butterworth
Interview with Tim Wilson, editor of New Zealand Poetry Society Annual Anthology Kissing A Ghost 2021 & this year’s editor for 2022. Tim tells us what it’s like to go through over 1000 submissions and put together an anthology, along with sharing his own work.
Book reviews
The Gnawing Flood by John Gallas is reviewed by Vaughan Rapatahana I Am in Bed with You by Emma Barnes is reviewed by Molly Crighton
Art: Anita Mortlock, Tiana Malina, Jan Fitzgerald, Aine Whelan-Kopa, Edna Heled
The next edition of a fine line will feature a student poet who will win publication as our featured poet, a year’s membership to New Zealand Poetry Society and a year’s membership to New Zealand Society of Authors. This is open to students from secondary schools as well as tertiary level students.
We also welcome poetry submissions from members on any theme. Send up to four poems (no more than 40 lines each) and/or up to four haiku to editor@poetrysociety.org by June 10 2022. Submission guidelines here.
Heapmeal. Piecemeal. Leafmeal. We all fall into our chairs like collapsed parachutes. Each of us is known to have been ground down. Each of us has wished for a meal like this. Wholemeal. With some warmth in the talk or in herself. In Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the last supper, the person beside you sprouts nasturtium-green, seems attached to a branch – Rameal. On this very fertile ground, another person has found the sea is internal – watermeal – and seems draped in an only slightly tousled world. But you are inside the flesh of a pomegranate. Bloodmeal. Ravishmeal. Each of us lean into the foreground of the other – Limbmeal by Limbmeal – to see the source of sun is a person. So much ground, from which everything can rise.
Sarah Scott
Paula: I am captivated by your poetry. The three poems included here, with their attachments to particular paintings, mesmerise on so many levels. Are they part of a wider project? What prompted it?
Sarah: My background is in art history and curating and I’ve always drawn and painted. I thought it might be interesting to have those things cross-pollinate with my creative work in poetry, and now I would love to see this to grow into a larger project. Writing poetry about art feels like a rich vein to me; there’s an endless supply of material, and there is something that happens between the artist/artwork and writer/poem, like a double shot of creativity.
I woke up from a dream one night and wrote down the name Fiona Hall. She’s an Australian artist whose work I must have come across and it had lodged in my subconscious. I sought out her work and I love her experimental, beautiful depictions of the natural world. My poem Amazonical was prompted by looking at a still of the video Amazonical from her exhibition Force Field.
In Leaven I looked at Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco The Last Supper – it was Easter or almost, when I wrote it, so ideas around ascension just floated up into the poem. My poem House by the Railroad, which I talk more about below, responds to Edward Hopper’s haunting painting of the same name.
Amazonical
maybe we go for our usual walk & the way you talk draws out one kid-soft living example:
maybe the sky looks like a giant waterlily except heavier, its Victorian under-structure Built for Dusk
maybe mountains of babies were placed on its leaves in a crystal pavilion in the 1830’s a shoot to show what else there could be
in the universe more powerful than when you touch gingerly &
my mouth is another opening flower bruised as the natural world
Sarah Scott
Paula: I think we need a new word to describe the bridge between poem and artwork. Not exactly translation, transcendence, conversation, road trip.
Sarah: Yes, that’s so true! There’s the potential to speak in a slightly different language and transcend your usual ways of thinking. Anne Carson writes somewhere about the desire to find ways to stand back from yourself, in order to get closer in, and I think the words ekphrasis (poetry about art) and ekstasis (to stand outside of oneself, as in awe) seem curiously close, like they are knit together somewhere deep in the language. Ekphrasis poetry also feels collaborative, like a conversation – sparks from the art overbrim into your own creative process, taking you in unexpected directions.
Paula: What draws you to a painting?
Sarah: If an image draws me down into something deeper, I run with it. Fiona Hall’s video Amazonical immediately threw a confetti of ideas over me. It’s surreal, slant and beautiful. In the video-still I base my poem on, the image of a giant waterlily is overlaid on a landscape, in dusky, bruised colours, making me think about the vulnerability and exhaustion of the natural world, which seems critical right now. I also love the title, and sometimes it’s the title (like with poetry) that draws me in.
Paula: I love how your poems are a sweet trinity of sound, image and surprise. What is important when you write a poem?
Sarah: Sound is so important to me. The more mysterious grooves of prayer and song rather than ordinary speech resonate for me, and I like to let language lead. I’ve also realised that I think through images – they open up vistas through which to talk about other things. The process of writing is like travelling through those doors, toward someplace you didn’t know you were going, but hopefully, you’re happy you did.
House by the Railroad for Phyllis
If a house could be you, in your pale blue swimsuit. If you’d mouthed this house like gum. If the letterbox still flapped open, making the sound of one afternoon on the ocean. If the railroad tracks carried blood back to the plains of your heart. If this house could make light of its own dark. If I scalloped some sky from a Botticelli. If we washed all the small talk off. If your weatherboards were touched soft by grass. If I could return here on a recommissioned train. If we were on the rust -filled platform again, me helping you down and down, into the open sea.
Sarah Scott
Paula: Does autobiography enter the mesh?
Sarah: I feel like this process allows me to go down the tracks of my own life and thought without realising. Hopper’s painting House by the Railroad for instance, felt strangely comforting to me, even though it is a painting that speaks of absence, and my poem became a love letter to my late grandmother who I was very close to.
Paula: Tell me about the Poetry Lightbox Series you curate in Te Whanganui-a-Tara.
Sarah: The lightbox project has given me the opportunity to showcase the work of other poets in a space usually reserved for visual art. People encounter the lightbox on their commute to work or walking up Cuba Street, and I like that these might be people that may not seek poetry out, but there it is, in such an unexpected place. It’s a joyful project to me – creating room for quiet and beauty in the busy urban environment, and I’m hugely grateful to the poets who have contributed their amazing work for it.
Paula: Do you read much poetry? Can you share a couple of books that have left a mark on you recently?
Sarah: I’m smitten by the work of American poet Mary Szybist, whose collection Incarnadine refracts and reflects on depictions of the Virgin Mary from different perspectives. Her imagery is startling, and I can’t recommend her work highly enough. A friend in the States put me onto the ‘pastoral surrealism’ of James Wright. Reading Wright’s collected poems, I’ve had to pause quite often just to take it in – it’s quietly ecstatic – an amazing and rare reading experience.
Sarah Scott’s poetry has appeared in Landfall, Turbine |Kapohau and Fresh Ink. She currently curates the Poetry Lightbox Series in Te Whanganui-a-Tara where she lives with her partner and two sons.
Amazonite is a soothing stone. It calms the brain and nervous system, aids in maintaining optimum health, balances the masculine and feminine energies, helps in seeing both sides of a problem or different points of view, soothes emotional trauma, alleviating worry and fear. I wear a pillar of amazonite on a gold chain around my neck, the yellow and gold interplay keeping me at my centre point – neither woman nor man, at my most natural state. My work pushes me to that place, an existence without binary, a study in how to be both, or neither, or outsider. Outsider artists require no formal training – but what does that mean when you’re working with ghosts? I channel my work through them, and my technique – all realism – goes out of my brain, I am free for true expression – the abstract reality at the base of everything. Realism is the mask reality wears when the truth becomes too much to bear. Strip back the veil that separates life and death, and the figure is infinitely more beautiful than the shroud used to cover her. It is infinitely more exciting to consider that life after death could also occur here, on Earth – not 100 million light years away on some distant planet, not up in the clouds, in Heaven, but in the natural world around us, existing symbiotically. What if I told you that plants had souls? What if I told you I could see their auras – I am not a Romani fortune-teller reading energy, rather, a naturalist surveying the land, sketching plants and flowers as I see them – the stems and the leaves, and also the imprints they make on the air. If plants have souls, the significance of things expands infinitely – burying your father beneath the tree in his yard that he sat under as a boy sets his soul at rest, but also in communion with his tree. For the rest of the time that the Earth exists, their two afterlives will be in union. That is the power of this land – its fertility extends to all living things, provides them with the code to run out their course as she intended, whether or not we believe.
Carolyn DeCarlo
Carolyn DeCarlo lives in Aro Valley. Caro’s chapbook, Winter Swimmers, was published in AUP New Poets 5. Caro is part of We Are Babies Press.
Like thumbprints, the moulding of the mountains made by light and shade, the long spine like folded paper, the crane of peace perhaps but we are a long long way from that.
from ‘Tears and Wounds’ in The Lustre Jug (VUP, 2007)
Some poets you carry with you. Every new book is a significant arrival. The poetry of Bernadette Hall has been like that for me. Her writing touches so many levels, from heart to ear to eye to cheek. Her writing relishes warmth, connection, observation, experience. Living. Reading. Questioning. Ideas. As I travelled through Bernadette’s books again, looking for poem extracts to add to our conversation, I realised what a tough job I had set myself. I wanted to quote everything.
Needing a word for the little jumps on the surface of things
(that certain blurring of the edges like the sea’s turning back or the gulls hitched up on elastic)
I’m still hanging around
My sleeves ripple like flags
from ‘the persistent levitator’ in The Persistent Levitator (VUP, 1994)
Paula: Thank you so much for agreeing to an email conversation with me. I have been fan of your poetry for a long time, so this feels like a much needed outing. I have no idea how it will unfold but I am picturing the two of us sitting down on the beach watching the waves roll in as we talk about books and poetry, about reading and writing. With a flask of tea. The sky is blue and the sun is shining but there’s a nip in the air because, after all, it is autumn.
It is so long since we have seen each other, such corrugated and challenging times for everyone. Books and writing have been an essential part of my day. Have you read anything, any genre, in the past year that has lifted you? Anchored you? Taken you apart and reassembled you?
Bernadette: A gorgeous afternoon here today, dear Paula. A slight tremor in the leaves of the trees that crowd around my little writing room. I like being backed into a small, dimmed space like this. As if I’m underground. I’ve spent much of the last few weeks way up on a high ladder, pruning dead wood out of olive and plum trees and a peach. And a hedge which I think is called taupata. I’m much in love with all this, being way up there in the air. My body knowing what it has to do. Shifting, balancing, rebalancing. No thinking. No talking. No words.
And then of course I do come back. To this place. To the big white desk. To the walls that are covered with books and paintings. The door open to the gravel path that goes one way to the front of the cottage and the other way to the street. And the world is full of suffering and outrage and there are words, words, words, and there are screams and there’s weeping and there’s the ripping shrieks of missiles. And all the while the glaciers are melting. I’m not writing much at the moment. I haven’t got words for it. But I am reading. Voraciously, hungrily, reading and rereading. Mostly non-fiction. Some fiction. Not so much poetry. For poetry hurts. And I can’t say why.
Paula: To picture you pruning and then in your writing space is a welcome image in my head. I agonised over whether to reboot my blogs in 2022, but it came down to a love of words, books and writing connections. I have been thinking about the poets who have mattered so much to me since my debut collection in 1997. The way the lines of certain poets sung to me: This is what poetry can do. Were there poets important to you in your poetry beginnings?
Bernadette: I am so grateful to you, dear Paula, as a poetry connector. Every time you set me a little task, I feel the jolt of a writing impulse and am grateful. In the late 1970’s, not long after the birth of my third child, I joined a writing group run by John Dickson in Dunedin. That’s where I met the Americans, most memorably, John Berryman:
My daughter’s heavier. Light leaves are flying. Everywhere in enormous numbers turkeys will be dying and other birds, all their wings.
from ‘Dream Song 385’
So, the scene is Thanksgiving. And the little child recurs. What resonates with me in Berryman’s work is not the whole but fleeting lines like these. The final stanza in this particular poem is one I go back to again and again. It reassures me that poetry is my place.
My house is made of wood and it’s made well, unlike us. My house is older than Henry; that’s fairly old. If there were a middle ground between things and the soul or if the sky resembled more the sea, I wouldn’t have to scold my heavy daughter.
When it comes to New Zealand poetry, my hand reaches time and time again to DIA by Michele Leggott (AUP, 1994), where the unsayable is said and gorgeously:
the heart in its cage stands up desiring fine instruments what shall we play? laughter startles the sublime lyric c’est le pays du desire and I its best gesture wake in tears
from ‘CIRCLE’ in DIA (AUP, 1994)
I’m currently reading, and re-reading as I go because it’s difficult, a substantial piece of non-fiction, On Equilibrium by John Ralston Saul, published in 2001. When it comes to imagination, he describes it as ‘a rhythm of the body.’ So it’s something that’s there, ‘in our intellect, our perception, our body as a whole, our relationship to others, to what we create, to rooms, to atmospheres.’ What do you reckon? Thrilling, eh?
Paula: I love that! Imagination as a body rhythm. This week, I posted a review of Janet Charman’s fabulous new collection, The Pistils, and found myself navigating its ideas, heart and physicality through rhythm. I find both head and heart reactions, body reactions to the world, to a poem. Body music. You got me thinking how a poem is a set of rooms and corridors, atmospheres and relationships. How essential rhythm is as you write (and read).
I can remember analysing one of your poems (‘Rathcoola rain’) at Hagley Institute with a group of students. In your company! I opened the music of the poem as a way of walking through its ‘rooms and corridors, its atmospheres and relationships’. Its ideas, its physical reach. Your poems have always struck me in this way. What was important to you when you were writing poems at that time?
The rain is like mice scrabbling in the ceiling. It’s like the crackling of plastic, the first licking of flames in a handful of wood shavings, the complicit turning of pages in hundreds of Mass books
It is slight and light and insistent.
from ‘Rathcoola rain’ from The Lustre Jug (VUP, 2009)
Bernadette: Survival! I needed an ‘island’ where I could just be. A secret place where words which I didn’t know were inside me might find their way out. A place, I guess, of instinct and intuition. A private, solitary space. For truth-telling. As far as I could feel it.
Paula: I think it’s how I work. A secret island where I’ve no idea what paths I will track and what will fall upon the notebook page. Especially now when writing is a survival aide. Are you able to write at the moment?
Bernadette: More prose than poetry at the moment. Bits and pieces. Though there is one new one, a love poem in precarious times.
On adding up the loves of our lives
When I walked into the room my garden walked in with me.
When he walked into the room his cat walked in with him.
I heard them whispering in the night.
‘Don’t worry, little man,’ I heard him say. ‘I’m sure the sea-wall will hold.’
Paula: Ah so lovely! I am writing both poetry and prose but not sure how I feel about publication. Do I want or need this? I am on my third draft of a children’s novel and love having this place of retreat. I also write a tiny poem each day to go with my Wordle result. It is automatic writing that taps into an autobiography of the everyday, found poetry, surreal tracks, the imagined, the felt. What draws you to prose? A patchwork quilt of prose?
Bernadette: Or a rag-bag! Prose is often something I’ve been invited to do. It’s like a job that makes sense before I begin. I think the poems come from a deeper, more unpredictable place. Or rather, the ordinary, lived experiences that are at the base of a poem shift of their own accord into a darker, less rationally controlled space. It doesn’t always happen, of course. So you learn to be patient, don’t you. You sort of despair yet over the years you begin to understand that that emptiness is actually part of the process. ‘You go back and back to the same leaping off place.’ When a poem fills itself up, you feel amazed and jubilant. I don’t write all the time. I come and go. I’m a Sagittarian, I have enthusiasms.
Tell me about your love of children. The way you have celebrated their poetry in beautiful books. Year after year you have exerted yourself encouraging, teaching, travelling round the country, all for the sake of young writers. In the same way, your Poetry Shelf has been essential and much loved as a connector and an instigator nation-wide for years. How did you find the time? Could you share with us one of your tiny poems and a children’s poem?
A man with two shopping bags and a dog on the lead makes it down the street
A kererū sleeps on the telephone wire at the top of our long drive
A tiger reads War and Peace to a family of little giraffes under our carpet
Paula Green, April 24 (WORDLE poem)
The Glass Door
Open the glass door and the whole world changes
after the splatter splatter rain and the tiger tiger wind and the pepper pepper hail and the nose biting cold
the grounds steams like little dumplings the birds sing like my warbling aunt the cat rolls over on her tummy and I hide in the shiny grass.
from Groovy Fish and other poems (Scholastic, 2019)
Paula: I have always loved writing for children. Walk into a classroom and poetry can liberate the most reluctant writer through word play. You don’t need rules or models. Imagination sets sail. The real world counts. It’s fun but you also navigate important ideas such as friendship, difference, what we want and need in the world. The joy of engaging with children, as they make poems matter, is beyond words.
And yes, poetry comes out of a deep unpredictable place. So private, so intimate, so vulnerable. It’s an energy source. It fits into little and larger pockets of time.
I have connected with your writing, but also in the way you have mentored younger writers. How they hold you in such deserved esteem. Did your teaching/mentoring and writing feed each other? How did you find the time? I am thinking poetry time finds us!
Under Erebus
A woman is standing under Erebus She has wrapped all her gifts around her, including caritas.
A bulky mammal able to feed her young.
See the red flag with its purple shadow, the flagged road curving towards tomorrow.
There is shelter here, off to the right, a bunch of metal rods and a cloth.
You wonder if it’s going to be enough.
Bernadette Hall, from The Ponies (VUP, 2007)
Bernadette: You’ve hit the nail on the head when it comes to the dual highway of exhilaration when that liberation of words happens between like minds. So often it’s been blissful, talking up a storm, one on one, with someone who’s on the track, as it were. In love with language, compelled to make something out of that desire. Gifted yet unsure. Open, honest, trusting. It’s a huge honour to be trusted in that way. By someone giving some part of themselves away. So the creative intimacy, the vulnerability you refer to is somehow shared. Hopefully along with laughter. And cake and good coffee!
Do you remember the little poem I sent you for your birthday book a few years ago? It’s so slight and mysterious. Yet somehow it seems to pull together all I want to say about writing poetry. Maybe the very word emporium is along the lines of Janet Frame’s Mirror City. And our job is to entrust ourselves to it. Daniella Bagozzi, a fabulous Christchurch teacher, translated the little poem into Italian for you. That’s another string to your bow, isn’t it. That lovely operatic language.
On entering the emporium
I understand now why the children fuss and stir looking for some light relief.
Even a little bird will do, hopping oddly along a bench.
Paula: Well that was a special arrival – turning my laptop on when I turned 60 and falling upon a suite of poems as a birthday gift. Helen Rickerby made it into a beautiful book. These gestures seem even more important now.
And the idea of an emporium hooks. Michele Leggott used it on the flap of Mirabile Dictu (Auckland University Press, 2009): ‘If the effect is a kind of poetic emporium I would be very pleased, having learned that the word reached us through the Greek emporos, traveller or merchant, from poros, a journey, a prosperity, passing from one thing to another.’
Italian! We both spent time in another language. I enrolled at the University of Auckland for one year, but I loved Italian so much, I kept going back until there were no more degrees left. It was the beauty of the language, it was stepping into a wondrous literature from the Renaissance through to contemporary times. Above all, it was admiration for what the women were doing with pens and paintbrushes across the centuries. It has shaped me as a poet, an anthologist and a blogger!
Bernadette: Many moons ago, dear Paula, you asked me what I’d found enthralling in my recent reading. We’ve covered quite a lot of ground between then and now. And somehow you took me back in time. I’m thinking how lucky I was to spend four years within the Classics haven at Otago University, starting in 1964. The poet Iain Lonie was my tutor. Hearing him and Judith read their poems in a performance was breath-taking. Having Prof. Kenneth Quinn share with a couple of us the manuscript of his emerging translation of the lyrics of Catullus was challenging, as people say today. He asked for our opinions, this English phrase or word or another, and he repeated over and over that we had to be ‘sensitive’ to language. He clearly thought we weren’t. It certainly got me thinking. Vincent’s ‘The Dark is Light Enough’, his brilliant portrait of Ralph Hotere, published in 2020, fills up so many gaps for me. I gobbled it up eagerly, twice through. So this is what was going on under my nose in Dunedin at that time. I played cello in the uni. orchestra conducted by Bill Southgate. I went to plays at the Globe Theatre. But I was shy, my sphere sequestered. I didn’t get to know the movers and shakers.
A month ago I was enthralled by Jane Campion’s film, The Power of the Dog. Enthralled even more when I went on to read Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel republished in 2001 with an afterword by Annie Proux. My edition dated 2021. Thank goodness I entered the story this way, film then text with room for so much richness and complexity fully realised on the page.
Bernadette: I have two other current enthralments. Conversātiō – in the company of bees by Anne Noble with Zara Stanhope and Anna Brown (Massey University Press, 2021). It’s exquisite, a life-changer, rich in language and in image. It’s majorly desirable, it reignites in me a passion for making, poetry along with my beloved bee-garden.
You have linked my writing with music, Paula. I’m not conscious of that myself, but here’s a quotation from Zara’s essay: ‘ Music is a language of its own that touches nerves and ignites our sensory imaginary. Sound is felt.’ And I’m thinking ah yes, the sound of words. But what about ideas, what are the words saying?
Paula: Absolutely! Music leads to ideas, feeling, the physical world, sensations. Maybe music enhances the other effects and arrivals in a poem. I too loved Anne’s book. So beautifully crafted at the level of image, word and book production.
Bernadette: And finally there’s The Lobster’s Tale, text by Chris Price and photos by Bruce Foster (Massey University Press, 2021). I’ve just got my hands on it. I’ve not read it yet, just dipped in a little, stroked the paper, turned the beautiful pages. ‘Look to the life that goes on in your blind spot, the light that will eat you alive. Ahead remains a narrowing gap no creature can thread solo, by exercise of will or control, but only in collaboration: you might choose to carry each other as the kōura in berry carries eggs below her tail…..’ Already I know that this is something I need, it’s come at the perfect time, it will fill me up. And I am really grateful.
ii
Slowly the place takes shape. We are homeless and dissolving in the silky water-laden air. The dream was of my mouth full of crushed glass, quite different from that other one of stealing envelopes and being pursued by a monkey, by a donkey, by a monkeydonkey and to be honest, who cares. I met Joanna at 6.00pm and we went to see SMOKE. Now that’s a film and a half. My stars say you must abandon complexity as if to have more than one word in your mouth at a time is a vice. ‘You have to make a choice,’ says the gum tree, pushing itself up out of the lumpy asphalted playground. ‘Otherwise there’s nothing but bird noise in the aviary.’
Bernadette Hall, from ‘Fancy Dancing’, in Fancy Dancing (VUP, 2020)
Bernadette Hall is Otago born and bred. She gained an MA in Latin at Otago University She taught at high schools in Dunedin and Christchurch, and for the last eighteen years has lived in a renovated bach at Amberley Beach in the Hurunui, North Canterbury, where she has built up a beautiful garden. In 2008 Bernadette co-founded the Hagley Writers’ Institute in Christchurch. She was involved with the Institute as a tutor, a supervisor, and eventually the Patron, retiring from that role a couple of years ago. She has written eleven collections of poetry, including Fancy Dancing: New and Selected Poems 2004 – 2020 (VUP). She edited Like Love Poems (VUP), a gorgeous edition of poems by Joanna Margaret Paul and brought the poetry of Lorna Staveley Anker our attention in The Judas Tree (CUP). In 2015 she collaborated with Robyn Webster on Matakaea, Shag Point, an art /text installation exhibited at the Ashburton Art Gallery. She received the Prime Minister’s Award for literary achievement in poetry (2015) and was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature in Aotearoa New Zealand (2017).
Te Herenga Waka University Press page Poetry Shelf review: Fancy Dancing
NZ Poetry Shelf 