Mōrena🐈⬛.
I’m excited to share details of my upcoming exhibition, Dead Man’s Block. This show is on for two hours only on April the 18th, 11-1pm. It’s at the New Lynn Community Centre in the Active Recreation Hall.
I’m very grateful to the indomitable Bronwyn Lloyd and Jack Ross for their accompanying texts and as ever the wonderful William Bardebes for fabrication, design and everything besides.
I hope if you live in Tāmaki you can make this show. 45 Totara Ave. There is loads of handy parking out the back and it’s right next to the train station and bus depot. Love to see you there!
- Emma Smith (22/3/26)
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This is the poem I wrote for Emma's show:
Reading Cold Mountain
in interesting times
for Emma Smith
Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail – Gary Snyder I The little dog’s better he’s with the monks now Bronwyn assumed I’d remember she told me that the Buddhists walking across the States to raise awareness had sent off their dog to get his leg fixed he’s glad to be back he wagged his tail II This morning John sent me a link to a doco about Cold Mountain Han Shan a poet who lived 1000 years ago he may have been Taoist or Buddhist but was really just a crazy old man who scribbled poems on rocks as the old lady said he faded into the walls of his cave III In Hoffmann’s Mines of Falun a sailor gives up the sea after coming back from a voyage to find his mother dead the old man who lures him to work underground is a ghost or a demon or something like that they both end up stoned in veins of ore IV Cold Mountain this hermit who gave up on life to clamber up here had nothing to teach if you’ve nothing to learn there are statues of him and his buddies they’re ugly and red Red Pine laughed when he saw them the filmmaker asked him why because he would have laughed however he looked
[24-26/1/2026]
1 comment:
I might be able to get there some time. I was thinking of Emma as I (having learnt some German) had another look at Breathturn by Joris and Emma and your book Celanie. I think I appreciated what I saw of Celan more knowing a few German words and so on. No, or little French, though. An interesting mix in Celanie of the two mediums and your book has been overlooked I think as I suspect people dislike the kind of darkness in Celan. Hadn't heard of the book Cold Mountain or the movie but that is what people look at or "read". Then they know about these things, or seem to. Hoffman and Buddhism and even Gary Snyder! All I know about him is the movie I saw in Roger Horrocks, Curnow and Michelle Leggott (et al), their American Poetry course, with Snyder diving into a swimming pool. I like the style of your poems with these references that people may or may not know about and the atmosphere of the poem...Fascinating! And Emma presumably still doing her enigmatic abstracts! Great stuff...
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