Last night Siobhan Harvey and I were the support acts for Emma Neale who is the current Literary Resident at The Pah Homestead in Auckland. There was an impressive audience made up of poetry fans, local poets, friends and family.

What a treat to hear our guest from Dunedin read. At question time, someone asked Emma to discuss the difference between writing poetry and fiction (she does both!). For her, poetry originates in a musical phrase, a musical fragment, the music of language (Interestingly she shows drafts of her novels to people for feedback but not drafts of her poems). When I sat back into the pleasure of her poems, it was my ears that pricked to attention — to a state of utter attentiveness. I have read the poems in The Truth Garden a number of times and admired their musicality, but to hear them in Emma’s voice adds extra musical zest. Words chime and words tremble. I particularly loved hearing ‘An Inward Sun,’ a poem written after Janet Frame. Emma gave us humour, intimacy, self revelation.

Two new poems particularly stuck me. The prose poem, ‘Stoic,’ that looped and curled on itself, drawing upon a mother-in-law along with the poet herself. It was witty, sharp, wry, pungent and densely packed with musical notes and observation. Then, in a completely different tone, but equally transporting, ‘PokPo’ used a  work of art as a starting point (a large white mouse). This poem was as much about mother and son, and maternal relations, as it was about art. There was poignancy and daring in its musical phrasing.

Interestingly Emma’s The Truth Garden was published as a result of The Kathleen Grattan Award — and Siobhan Harvey read from her manuscript that won the same award last year. Her reading of excerpts from the long narrative poem moved the audience profoundly (it will appear in book form later this year courtesy of Otago University Press!).

As for me I came away feeling I had put my foot in my mouth after responding to a question: Is there such a thing as women’s poems? Or some such wording. I spent seven years writing a doctorate where my central thesis/question was: Does it make a difference if the writer’s pen is held by a woman? This was explored in an Italian context (my Doctorate is in Italian). However, I read theory from all round the world as well as navigating Italy’s social, cultural, legal, political, historical and literary contexts. Such a question cannot be reduced to a black and white answer. There are smudges and blurs whichever way you look. But I strongly feel we haven’t yet told the story of women poets in New Zealand. And for all kinds of reasons I do think it makes a difference when the pen is held by a woman. Does this mean there is such a thing as men’s poetry and women’s poetry? I don’t know. Reviews of women’s poetry still denigrate it with a gender bias. You have to go back to Ursula Bethell and Eileen Duggan (and then further back still) and follow in the footsteps of our pioneering women writers to see how style, tropes and content (they can be in a symbiotic relationship) create writing that some people dismiss (particularly if it is domestic). Gosh the whole feminine-masculine  debate is a minefield. Ahh! Mmm. Ah well.

But tricky questions aside, it was terrific night. Just wonderful. So grateful thanks to The James Wallace Trust and The Pah Homestead crew.