Showing posts with label Jan Kemp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jan Kemp. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Jan Kemp's Tripstones



Jan Kemp: Tripstones (2020)


Expatriate Kiwi poet Jan Kemp's latest collection, Tripstones, is a beautiful piece of bookmaking as well as making an important statement about her poetic identity.



Titlepage. Tripstones (Puriri Press, 2020)
[photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd]


The central image here is the Stolperstein, the stumbling block, the stone that trips you up when you least expect it.



Here's Jan's own picture of the Stolperstein she discovered in her own (new) hometown, Kronberg im Taunus. As she herself explains in the note at the back of the book:
A Stolperstein is a small square burnished brass plaque about 12cm x 12 cm set flush with the walkway paving in many German towns, villages and cities - gold against grey - so that you might notice one shining underfoot. You 'stumble' upon it, and then perhaps look down and read the inscription engraved on it, the name of a murdered victim of the Holocaust who lived in a nearby building.
The poems, too, drawn from the last thirty years of her writing life, from The Other Hemisphere (1991) to Black Ice & the Love Planet (2020), seem to be those she wishes us to be stopped by, to stumble over, not to be able to move on from too rapidly.

They range widely in theme and content, mind you. From the evocative local imagery of "Swimming" (which you can hear the author reading here), dated from Waiake Beach, Torbay, 2004 - just a few miles down the road from where I live:



Jan Kemp: "Swimming." Tripstones (2020)
[photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd]

Nothing reduces you to your skin like the sea:
cold plunge into reality,
a tongue already salty
& all that power
self-propelling you through our other element,
body loving
every pummelling second,
as your mind slips on the (no wonder)
Madonna-blue beach wrap of the sky.


Jan Kemp: "Golden Week, Kyoto." Tripstones (2020)
[photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd]


To the Alice in Wonderland-like restrictions of 'Golden Week' in Kyoto:

Giants in yukatas,
a 4-tatami-mat room,
we bend far to unroll beds

open, half-open, close, re-open
the double sequence of glass
bamboo, paper square-framed doors,

duck, enter a garden.



To her new Heimat in Germany ('The Kiwi in me' - joint English / German reading available here):

I've swapped Tane Mahuta
for two mighty Eiben,
the woods for the sea -

tui, tuatara for
Rotkehlchen, Eidechse,
but the Kiwi stays me.


Jan Kemp: "The Kiwi in Me." Tripstones (2020)
[photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd]


Increasingly the new poems need glossaries, peppered as they are with German terms. Did you know a Rotkehlchen was a robin redbreast and an Eidechse a lizard? I knew that Eiben were yew trees, but the linguistic realm inhabited by her more recent work does seem to presuppose a reader equally familiar with the particularities of New Zealand and German discourse.

Clearly this isn't an accidental choice. When you go international, you can go bland and unitone: an idiom suited for the airport bookshop; or, alternatively, you can cherish the peculiarities of your own idiolect.

Characteristically, this is the choice that Jan has made, something which fits with her life-long fascination with the spoken word, the sound of a particular poet reading a particular poem at one precise time - the reason she worked so hard for so many years on the Waiata (1974) and Aotearoa New Zealand (2002-2004) Poetry Sound Archives, as well as on our three published anthologies of work from those collections (2006-2008).

After all, as the first of the poems I quote from above concludes:
The straightest line imaginable
just over the breakers
visibly separating the two
doesn't exist.
You do.

Yet, can you hold
a handful of salt water
to prove it
for just one moment
before you go?
The straight line, the centrist discourse, doesn't exist - except in the abstractions we're invited so vociferously to inhabit and believe in - but, unprovably yet demonstrably, 'you do'.

This is a lovely and thought-provoking collection from a poet who's been making a contribution to our literature for almost half a century. Judging from the poems here, she's still going strong!



Poetry NZ 48 (2014)




The book has been published by John Denny of Puriri Press in a limited edition of 50 copies. Most of these have already been sold or distributed to friends, but there are still a very few copies for sale. John Denny adds that:
People wanting a copy should contact me first to make sure there are some still available (puriripress@gmail.com), in which case I'll confirm and send them an invoice. The price is $NZ50 plus $5.90 pack & post.
As you can see from the sample pages included in this post, it's a lovely piece of printing: on sumptuous paper, with a handprinted cover, and all the things we collectors cherish so much in a small-press book.
[NB: As of Sunday, 25th October, this edition is officially
SOLD OUT
so from now on you'll have to consult it in a public collection near you!]


Jan Kemp: "Stolpersteine / Tripstones." Tripstones (2020)
[photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd]


Sunday, October 01, 2017

Allen Curnow Symposium



Allen Curnow: Collected Poems (2017)


A Symposium on the Life and Works of
Allen Curnow


30 September 2017
University of Auckland, Arts 1: Room 220


9.30 – 10.45
Panel One: Remembering Allen Curnow (I).

Chair, Alex Calder


C. K. Stead
[photograph: Jan Kemp]


  • C. K. Stead: ‘AC: informal recollections’
  • Elizabeth Smither: ‘Allen & Jeny: a tribute’
  • Wystan Curnow: ‘Venice’

10.45 - 11.00: Morning tea

11.00 - 12.35
Panel two: New Zealand Perspectives
Chair, Tom Bishop
  • Hugh Roberts: Unsettler Poetry: Curnow’s Literary Nationalism Revisited
  • John Newton, ‘All the History that Did Not Happen’
  • Paul Millar: Curnow and Pearson
  • Philip Steer: Curnow and Environmentalism

12.35 - 1.15 Lunch

1.15 – 2.50
Panel three: Poetry and Poetics
Chair, Erin Carlson


Roger Horrocks
[photograph: Jan Kemp]


  • Roger Horrocks: ‘Trying to save poetry from poetry’
  • Dougal McNeill: ‘Abominable Tempers, Magic Makers: Allen Curnow, Earle Birney and Mid-Century Modernism’
  • Harry Ricketts: ‘Allen Curnow: A post-Christian Poet’
  • John Geraets: ‘Show and Tell: Curnow’s Stealth’



Dougal McNeill
[photograph: Jan Kemp]


Afternoon tea: 2.50 – 3.10

3.10 - 4.25
Panel four: Early days, Latter days.
Chair, Alex Calder
  • Mark Houlahan: Curnow at Sonnets
  • Peter Simpson: 'Contraries in two late Curnow poems: “A Busy Port” and “Looking West, Late Afternoon, Low Water”’.
  • Jack Ross: ‘Teaching Late Curnow’.

Short break

4.30 – 5.45
Panel five: Remembering Allen Curnow (II)
Chair, Alex Calder
  • Michael Hulse: ‘That can’t be it!’
  • Jan Kemp: Poems for Allen Curnow






Terry Sturm: Simply by Sailing in a New Direction (2017)


So guess where I was yesterday ... One always approaches these events with a certain trepidation, I fear. I think you'll agree that the above list represents a pretty packed programme, but - as the prime mover of the whole affair, Alex Calder, remarked at the end - all the presenters "brought their A-game," and there was really never a dull moment in the whole day (not to mention an excellent lunch, which is more important than one might think for morale on such occasions).

There were numerous biographical revelations: Curnow's defiant contempt for homophobia, marching down Princes Street arm in arm with his theatre producer, who'd just been convicted of 'lewd acts,' in full sight of Auckland University's powers-that-were, was a particular high point (thanks for that detail, Paul Millar); and many of C. K. Stead's points about the 'authorised' nature of the biography were also shrewd and to-the-point. Michael Hulse, Jan Kemp and Elizabeth Smither contributed fascinating accounts of their very different friendships with both Allen and Jeny Curnow.



Roger Horrocks, Jan Kemp, Mac Jackson, Michael Morrissey
[photograph courtesy of Jan Kemp]


The Academic papers were uniformly excellent. I particularly enjoyed the focus on his earlier work provided by Hugh Roberts, John Newton, Dougal McNeill and Mark Houlahan. At times they overlapped, at other times disagreed, but the combined picture they presented certainly helped me to understand a lot of aspects of his poetry which had hitherto been quite opaque to me.



My paper
[photograph: Jan Kemp]


It's the later poetry, from the 1970s onwards, for which I myself feel a real enthusiasm (as I hope I revealed in my own paper on my strategies for teaching some of these poems to local students). Even here, though, there was much to learn. Roger Horrocks' ringing defence of the first book Curnow published after his long silence throughout the 1960s, Tree, Effigies, Moving Objects (1972), from the various accusations of 'roughness' and 'excessive obscurity' which bedevilled it at the time, was very persuasive, and Peter Simpson's analysis of two of these later poems both informative and charming. It tied in very well with Wystan Curnow's account of his father's long love affair with Italy, and - in particular - la città del sogno [dream city] itself, Venice, which Wystan interestingly contrasted with the Lyttelton of his childhood.



The perils of explaining all the references as you go along ...
[photograph: Jan Kemp]


What else? My Massey Palmerston North colleague Philip Steer had many interesting things to say about the environmental concerns of the 1930s, and the ways in which they manifest in Curnow's early poetry; Harry Ricketts analysed the 'coldness' many have claimed to detect in Curnow's 'post-Christian' poetry - which (I guess) places it alongside the work of such precursors as Eliot and Montale, as well as the more overtly present Wallace Stevens. John Geraets contributed a condensed overview of his thinking about Curnow over the years, grouped around certain predominant themes.



Harry Ricketts
[photograph: Jan Kemp]


There were some other voices I would have liked to hear. I would have liked Elizabeth Caffin and Linda Cassells to talk some more about their work on (respectively) the new collected poems and the biography. But since I was unfortunately unable to attend the booklaunch on Friday night, I suspect that they may have already discussed the subject there. It would have been interesting to hear some more details about it, though.



Harry Ricketts
[photograph: Jan Kemp]


All in all, it was a great day out, and a very fitting tribute to one of our most important and (I suspect) enduring poets.

Another important presence there (albeit in absentia) was that of the late Professor Terry Sturm, whom I knew pretty well when I used to work in the English Department. He was a very kind as well as a very brilliant man, and I have nothing but good memories of him (including a rather surprising speech in the Senior Common Room one day, after probably all of us had had a bit too much to drink, on the improbability of some of the more surprising claims made routinely in Penthouse forum ...). He was a good boss and a straight-shooting talker. I greatly enjoyed reading his biography of pioneering novelist Edith Lyttleton, and anticipate the same enjoyment from his work on Allen Curnow.



Dieter Riemenschneider & Jan Riemenschneider-Kemp
[photograph courtesy of Jan Kemp]






Mangroves, Little Shoal Bay
[Photograph: Ray Tomes (2009)]


from A Small Room with Large Windows (1957)

Comfortable
To creak in tune, comfortable to damn
Slime-suckled mangrove for its muddy truckling
With time and tide, knotted to the vein it leeches.

- Allen Curnow

New Zealand is a very small country, still. It's strange how many connections you can find with people you hardly know at all (except by reputation). Does it matter? I guess not really. It's fun to table a few of them, though:

My father told me that as kids they stayed in a boarding house in Akaroa where the Curnow family were also guests. They didn't much take to Allen, he said, but they had a great time playing with his brother Tony (this must have been sometime in the late 20s, I imagine, when my grandfather was working as a teacher in Templeton, on the outskirts of Christchurch).

Then my English teacher at Rangitoto College, Mr. Lamb, had many reminiscences of Allen Curnow as a lecturer. He retired from Auckland University a few years before I got there, though. In fact the only time I ever spoke to him was one day in (I think) 1986, when I was in the English Department mailroom and he asked me for help with the fax machine. I had to admit that it was a mystery to me, too, so there went my chance of making a good impression.

The next time I remember seeing him was at a poetry booklaunch in the late 1990s, where my friend Leicester Kyle finally gave into our persuasions that he go over and speak to the great man. Leicester's father, Cecil, who also had poetic ambitions, had been a fellow reporter of Curnow's on the Press in Christchurch in the 1930s, and they had some nice chat about it. There was a suggestion that Allen might write a preface to a collection of Leicester's own poems, but nothing ever came of that.

Connections: I know that Shoal Bay seascape of "A Small Room with Large Windows" very well. My grandmother lived in Ngataringa Bay, just around the headland, and we grew up sailing around on boats and wading over the mudflats. I don't know the West Coast beaches nearly as intimately as Curnow did, mind you. Of course I've been to Karekare many times, but have only stayed overnight there once. Muriwai is my favourite of those wonderfully evocative beaches, perhaps because it's really just round the corner from Mairangi Bay.


Karekare
[Photograph: Brad's pictures]


from A Dead Lamb (1972)

Never turn your back on the sea.
The mumble of the fall of time is continuous.

A billion billion broken waves deliver
a coloured glass globe at your feet, intact.

You say it is a Japanese fisherman's float.
It is a Japanese fisherman's float.

- Allen Curnow






[Photograph: Marti Friedlander]

Allen Curnow (1911-2001)


Poetry:

  • Valley of Decision: Poems. Auckland: Auckland University College Students' Association, 1933.
  • Enemies: Poems 1934-36. Christchurch: Caxton Press,1937.
  • Not in Narrow Seas: Poems with Prose. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1939.
  • Island and Time. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1941
  • Sailing or Drowning: Poems. Wellington: Progressive Publishing Society, [1946?]
  • Jack Without Magic: Poems. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1946.
  • At Dead Low Water, and Sonnets. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1949.
  • Poems 1949-57. Wellington: Mermaid Press, 1957.
  • A Small Room With Large Windows. London: Oxford University Press, 1962.
  • Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects: A Sequence. Wellington: Catspaw Press, 1972.
  • An Abominable Temper, and Other Poems. Wellington: Catspaw Press, 1973.
  • Collected Poems 1933-1973. Wellington: A.W. and A.H. Reed, 1974.
  • An Incorrigible Music. Dunedin: Auckland University Press, 1979.
  • Selected Poems. Auckland: Penguin, 1982.
  • You Will Know When You Get There: Poems 1979. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1982.
  • The Loop in Lone Kauri Road. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986.
  • Continuum: New and Later Poems 1972-1988. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1988.
  • Selected Poems 1940-1989. London: Viking, 1990.
  • Early Days Yet: New and Collected Poems 1941-1997. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1997.
  • The Bells of Saint Babel’s. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001.
  • Sturm, Terry, ed. Whim Wham’s New Zealand: The Best of Whim Wham, 1937-1988. A Vintage Book. Auckland: Random House New Zealand, 2005.
  • Collected Poems. Ed. Elizabeth Caffin & Terry Sturm. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017.
  • [Appendix to Allen Curnow: Collected Poems. Ed. Elizabeth Caffin & Terry Sturm. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017. Available at: http://www.press.auckland.ac.nz/en/curnow-collected-appendix.html].

Plays:

  • The Axe: a Verse Tragedy. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1949.
  • Four Plays: The Axe, The Overseas Expert, The Duke’s Miracle, Resident of Nowhere. Wellington: A.W. and A.H. Reed, 1972.

Prose:

  • Look Back Harder: Critical Writings 1935-1984. Edited by Peter Simpson. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1987.

Edited:

  • Book of New Zealand Verse: 1923-45. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1945.
  • A Book of New Zealand Verse: 1923-50. Christchurch: The Caxton Press, 1951.
  • Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960.

Secondary:

  • Simpson, Peter. Allen Curnow: The Loop in Lone Kauri Road. Titirangi: Lopdell House Gallery, 1995.
  • Sturm, Terry. Simply by Sailing in a New Direction. Allen Curnow: A Biography. Ed. Linda Cassells. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017.

Webpages:




Saturday, July 09, 2016

Real Illusions: i.m. Russell Haley (d. 4/7/16)



Russell Haley (1934-2016)


I've just received some rather bad news. Ian Wedde has sent out an open letter to friends of Russell & Jean Haley:
Russell died on Monday 4 July of a brain tumour, at home in Whangarei. He wanted to be cremated without any ceremony, as simply as possible, and this was done on Tuesday. There will be a celebration at his and Jean’s place in Whangarei, on Saturday 9 July.

I can't be at that celebration, unfortunately, but I would like to put a few things on record here even so. I've known Russell Haley for a long time. He was (briefly) a fellow-tutor with me in the Auckland University English Department in the early 90s. I also met up with him quite often while Jan Kemp and I were working on the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive in the early 2000s (in which he is, of course, included).

He taught life writing for us for one semester at Albany, and I'll always remember the masterly guest lecture he delivered on the relationship between voice and personality: using a recording of Kathleen Ferrier as a starting point, then moving on to his own biography of Pat Hanly, he took the students and me carefully through every stage of a complex argument about identity.

He was always cheerful, always interesting to talk to, always full of new ideas and original aperçus. We didn't meet often, but it never seemed to matter: there was always something to add to what we'd been discussing on the previous occasion.

Of course it's mainly as a writer that Russell will survive: will continue to be with us for the long haul, I'd venture to predict.

Here's a list of his major publications. Most of them I have, though there are one or two pesky gaps still waiting to be filled:

  1. The Walled Garden (1972) [poetry]

  2. On the Fault Line (1977) [poetry]

  3. The Sauna Bath Mysteries (1978) [stories]

  4. Real Illusions: A selection of family lies and biographical fictions in which the ancestral dead also play their part (1984) [autobiography]

  5. The Settlement (1986) [novel]

  6. Hanly: A New Zealand Artist (1989) [biography]

  7. The Transfer Station (1989) [stories]

  8. The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories (1989) [edited, with Susan Davis]

  9. Beside Myself (1990) [novel]

  10. All Done with Mirrors (1999) [novel]

  11. A Spider-Web Season & The Transfer Station (2000) [stories]

  12. Tomorrow Tastes Better (2001) [novel]




Russell Haley: All Done with Mirrors (1999)


Russell's work figures prominently in Matt Harris's Doctoral thesis on "Metafiction in New Zealand from the 1960s to the present day" (Massey, 2012), which was co-supervised by Mary Paul and myself. There is also a fascinating interview with him included as one of the appendices.

I guess he had a good innings. Somehow that doesn't seem to matter much when one hears news like this, though: Russell was just one of those people whom it's impossible to imagine gone for good: I'm sure I'll keep on expecting to run into him somewhere for quite some time to come - always with that cheeky smile and that fund of good stories and quiet, unobtrusive intelligence.

I was rereading the first few stories in The Sauna Bath Mysteries just last week. I know that sounds improbable, but it's true. It just suddenly stood out from the shelves and demanded to be read. That will probably keep on happening, too, I'm sure.

Love and good wishes go with you, Russell: and my best to all those gathered in Whangarei today, also.



Russell Haley: Hanly (1989)


Thursday, April 01, 2010

Wildes Licht / Wild Light


[Dieter Riemenschneider: Wildes Licht (2010)]

It's weird seeing yourself in a foreign language. Last night I was at the booklaunch of Wildes Licht: Poems / Gedichte aus Aotearoa Neuseeland, a bilingual English / German anthology of New Zealand poetry, translated and edited by Dieter Riemenschneider, and available from Tranzlit publishers (or from a bookseller near you).

The title comes from Michele Leggott's poem "Wild Light", and you'll find a really fascinating assortment of poems old and new in there. Why I'm in there is a little harder to say (you'll have to ask Dieter), but I have to say that I certainly value the opportunity to see my words through the transverse lense of his careful translation:

Situations ii: CBD

Auckland nach dem Regen


NO VACANCIES
at the “City of Sails” motel.
It’s hard to convey how strange that is:
dark, skid-marked streets; day after day
of grey …
Who the fuck’s there?

Two loonies
standing by the road
(blue parka, beige kagoul)
not waiting for anything
– just waiting.
By a roundabout.

It’s ten at night.


Rain-slick streets are cool.

has become:

Ortsverhalte ii: CBD

Auckland nach dem Regen


BELEGT
das “City of Sails” Motel.
's ist schwer zu sagen wie
merkwürdig das ist:
dunkle Schleuderspurenstraßen; tagelanges
Grau …
Wer verdammt ist da?

Zwei Verrückte
stehen am Straßenrand
(blauer Parka, beiger Anorak)
warten auf nichts
– warten nur.
An einem Verkehrskreisel.

’s ist zehn am Abend.


Die regenglatten Straßen sind kühl
.

The title (in the unlikely event you hadn't noticed) makes reference to Max Ernst's apocalyptic "Europe after the Rain" paintings from the 1940s - which seemed very appropriate to me in 1998, when this poem was written, as the whole city was blacked-out and diesel generators were chugging away in every shop door in the CBD.

[Max Ernst: Europa nach dem Regen II (1940-42)]

Beyond that, I particularly like the way that my loonies have become Zwei Verrückte [two crazies], and my "Who the fuck’s there?" has been transformed into the equally-heartfelt: Wer verdammt ist da?

Oh, there are joys innumerable to be found in this anthology. You owe it to yourself to read Allen Curnow's "Das Skelett des Großen Moa in Canterburymuseum, Christchurch":
Nicht ich, ein Kind kommt wunderbar zur Welt
und lernt den Trick, wie man sich aufrecht stellt
.

(Pretty clever, getting it to rhyme as well), or Hone Tuwhare's "Keine gewöhnliche Sonne" [No Ordinary Sun], or Apirana Taylor's "Trauriger Witz auf einem Marae" [Sad Joke on a Marae] ...

Why is it so appealing to see these familiar poems in such a new guise? I have to say that I hope this is the first of many such anthologies. There was a bilingual French selection of New Zealand poets included in the journal Europe a few years ago: No 931 (Novembre 2006) – Écrivains de Nouvelle-Zélande, but that doesn't really compare with the epic breadth of Dieter's fascinatingly various sampling of historic and contemporary New Zealand poetry to date.

Anyway, check it out if you get the chance. The initial booklaunch in Auckland will be followed by a road-trip during which Dieter and Jan will launch the book at various venues in Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. I'll put up more exact dates and details as soon as they come to hand.

In the meantime, though, I'll leave you with some lines from one of my favourite Curnow poems, "Man wird es wissen wenn man dort ist" [You Will Know When You Get There]:

Hinab geht mann allein, so spät, in den wogenschwarzen Bodenriss.

Down you go alone, so late, into the surge-black fissure.

Isn't that word wogenschwarzen wonderful? "Fissure" still wins out over Bodenriss, though, I think: such a weight of implication in just the sound of those last few words ...