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)

Fifth Anniversary (Wood)

[Pollinating bee log]

I started this blog on the 14th of June, 2006, so this is The Imaginary Museum's fifth anniversary. I'm afraid that the traditional material for a fifth anniversary present is wood (though modern gift-givers have replaced that with silverware, apparently). For myself, I'm sticking with the wood.

Why? On the one hand, because it's rather shocking to look at all those posts and see just how much time I must have spent typing away in these little blogger text boxes. What a woodenhead! On the other hand, though it's nice to think how much wood-pulp I must have saved by not printing it all out ...

This blog is only part of the story, though. From the very beginning I saw this as a project space: somewhere where I could try online text experiments. The very first thing I did with it, in fact, was to put up a bunch of topographical poems about Auckland, Roadworks, linked to a game-board with twin axes of time and space (okay, maybe that one wasn't all that successful, but I was looking for a three-dimensional way of arranging texts outside the conventions of the book-codex ...)

Quickly, though, I realised that the best way to use a single centralised site, like this one, was as a crossroads to other websites, each one of which could be adjusted to display different techniques and materials. The sidebar over there will testify to the sheer number of these experiments I've done over the past five years. Basically, though, they've boiled down to one big project per year - I'm not quite sure why. Every time I complete one of these things I tell myself Never again ...

So here they are, the "big five", in rough chronological order:

2007:



1. (November 6-December 3, 2007) Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive: Bibliographical Aids for the Use of Those Consulting the Waiata Archive (1974) and the AoNZPSA (2002-2004) - Audio Recordings available in Special Collections, University of Auckland Library and in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.



This website serves as an index to the contents of the:



Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive. Compiled and edited by Jan Kemp and Jack Ross, with assistance from Edmund King and Mark King. Materials collected by Jan Kemp, Elizabeth Alley, David Howard with Morrin Rout, and Richard Reeve with Nick Ascroft. (Special Collections Dept, Auckland University Library). [40 CDs Audio / 2 CDs Texts].


which is a project I worked on pretty intensively from 2002 to around 2008, when the last of the three linked audio / text anthologies I edited with Jan Kemp (Classic, Contemporary and New New Zealand Poets in Performance) was issued by Auckland University Press. We still get quite a lot of hits. There are 200-odd poets' pages included on the site, and I update it periodically with new information (on request).





2008:



2. The R.E.M. [Random Excess Memory] Trilogy (2000-2008):
   • (January 19-30, 2008) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 1]: Nights with Giordano Bruno: A Novel.
   • (January 20-February 13, 2008) [[The R.E.M. Trilogy, 2 - The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis]: Who am I? Automatic Writing.
   • (January 20-February 13, 2008) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 2 - The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis]: Where am I? Cuttings.
   • (August 15, 2006-September 3, 2007) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 3 - EMO]: EVA AVE– Inheritor of silence / shall I be? / Black mass below us / above us / only sky …
   • (August 16, 2006-September 3, 2007) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 3 - EMO]: Moons of Mars – Welcome / to the new reality / Nothing’s stranger / than the will / to survive …
   • (August 15, 2006-September 3, 2007) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 3 - EMO]: Ovid in Otherworld – Wild geese draw lines / across an amber sky / fish bask / in frozen rivers / generators die …



Between 2000 and 2008 I published a trilogy of novels, which are now available in their entirety on these six linked sites: one for Nights with Giordano Bruno (Wellington: Bumper Books, 2000), two for The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Auckland: Titus Books, 2006), and three for EMO (Auckland: Titus Books, 2008). Of course, they're still a lot easier to read in their original print copies, but one must continue to experiment with new formats (I suppose).





2009:



3. Academica (1984-1995):
   • (April 14-August 22, 2009) John Masefield: Early Novels 1908-1911. MA Thesis (University of Auckland, 1984-86).
   • (April 14-July 22, 2009) Versions of South America: An Elusive Identity: Versions of South America from Aphra Behn to the Present Day. PhD Thesis (University of Edinburgh, 1986-90).
   • (August 22, 2006-September 26, 2007) Scheherazade’s Web: The Thousand and One Nights and Comparative Literature.



This is an obeisance to the amount of time I've spent bumbling around in Academia: a complete online version of my MA & PhD theses and my post-Doctoral research (respectively: Auckland University, 1984-85 / Edinburgh University, 1986-90 / Massey & Auckland Universities, 1991-95). Since most of this stuff was composed in the transitional period before the digital age (the Masters thesis on a typewriter, in fact), it had to be scanned and re-edited before I was able to put it up online. Was it all worth it? Who knows? At any rate, there it all is, awaiting the curious ...





2010:



4. (June 1, 2009-July 4, 2010) A Gentle Madness: A Catalogue of My Book Collection: Geographical by Locations & Indexed by Categories.



It may not sound like much when you put it like that, but this was definitely the most laborious of these projects. It does seem worth all the time and trouble it took now, though - it's awful not to be able to locate a book you know you own when you really need it ...





2011:



5. (February 17-June 11, 2011) Leicester Kyle: An Index to the Collected Poems of Leicester Hugo Kyle (1937-2006).



And, last but not least, a work in progress: the online edition of my old friend Leicester Kyle's Collected Poems which I've been engaged on since the beginning of this year. It's just a tease at present, as the site is not yet complete. All you can access for the moment is the overall index, which lists all the works which will you eventually be able to consult in their entirety. This portion of the site does include a bibliography and reprints of all the secondary literature on Leicester I've been able to locate to date, however.

At times I despair at the magnitude of what still remains to be done on this project, but I suppose I can just continue to chip away at it gradually. Watch this space, though. I'm hoping to put out a limited edition of some late poems of Leicester's later this year, and the full text site should be online - albeit only in part - by July or so (I hope).

(By the way, any help in identifying the other person in this photo of Leicester Kyle in Auckland in the mid-90s - and the venue, and the photographer - would be greatly appreciated:)

Mark Young: Lunch Poems

[Mark Young: Lunch Poems (Auckland: Soapbox Press, 2009)]

Title sound familiar? It certainly should.



I guess a lot of others grew up on those beautiful City Lights Pocket Poets editions of Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and - of course - Frank O'Hara. The latter's sublime Lunch Poems came out in 1964, two years before his death in a freak traffic accident on the beach at Fire Island.

There've been a lot of collected and selected editions since, but it's still arguably the best introduction to him and his hip, relaxed, laidback aesthetic - "Ave Maria," "The Day Lady Died" or "Lana Turner has collapsed!"

Mark Young's own slim volume is the seventh in Michael Steven's elegant series of chapbooks, issued through Soapbox Press. Here's the list to date:

2007

Michael Steven: Homage to Robert Creeley
Jack Ross: Papyri
Renee Liang: Chinglish

2008

Christian Jensen: Zin Uru
Martin Edmond: The Big O Revisited
Mark Young: Lunch Poems

planned for 2009

Jen Crawford: Napoleon Swings
Francis McWhannell (ed.) Poems of Lawrence Rees

Interestingly enough (to me, at any rate), the last time I was sent a book of Mark Young's to review was in 1999, when Alan Brunton's Bumper Books put out his first volume of verse after forty years of writing: The Right Foot of the Giant.



Here's what I had to say then (the review was commissioned by Mark Pirie for JAAM 13, but he ended up not including it in the magazine, I'm not quite sure why - I think he said at the time for reasons of space). I wish I could take some credit for prescience, but it was (at any rate) the best response I could come up with then to a wholly new name (for me) in the poetry firmament.

You see, I wasn't around in the NZ poetry scene in the sixties and seventies, so the Mark Young poete maudit legend was simply something I would eventually read about in the pages of Brunton, Leggott & Edmond's Big Smoke anthology of 2000.



Here's my review:

What would you call it? A conjuration of masks, perhaps? You know, the Venereal Game, those nouns of multitude: a pride of lions, an unkindness of ravens, etc. Mark Young certainly runs through a fair few masks in this, his first volume of poems – despite forty years in the writing game. Let’s take them one by one.

There’s late Baxter-ish Grafton poems:

On the edge
of a condemned gully, we too await
the graders that will be our guillotines.

Sexually frank Ginsbergian homosexual love poems:

Until that night when you fucked me more
ferociously than usual, & I felt carnivore breath
on the back of my neck …
& as you came in me I called you ‘Lion.’

Early Baxter-ish heterosexual love poems:

This sad flute was once the white bone
of your thigh, beloved …

Janet Frame-y incarceration poems:

I could not watch
the sports today – to see the spastics & mongols
running races is too bizarre …

Is such a multiplicity of personae a problem? Not if they are personae – but they seem to me, some of the time, rather too close to their originals.

Young’s publisher, Alan Brunton, regards him as a significant, but so far largely unrecognised player in the transition from the regional controversies of the forties and fifities to the more outward-looking poetics of the sixties. Certainly a poem like “Lizard” could easily be read in that way. I wasn’t born when it first came out in the NZ Listener in 1959, but I can see how intensely exciting it must have looked right then:

’Lijah Lizard, put your Woolworth glasses back on.

It’s intensely urban imagery (“I wanted to see the big city. / Still, there is an even bigger one / waiting for me now”), albeit filled with a sense of apocalyptic dread. The strange thing is that this was his “first poem attempted” – and has had perhaps the greatest success of any of his poems. It looks a little out of place here now, as if in inaugurating an era it left little space for the poet himself to manoeuvre, nowhere much for him to go.

I notice that Young makes no particular “important player” claims for himself, though. His engaging author’s note concentrates on the personal: an enthusiastic list of influences, authors, eras. “This book assuages my greatest regret, that I never had a collection of poetry published.” That, to be perfectly frank, would seem to me to be its principal function. I leave to better informed critics than myself the precise determination of Mark Young’s place in New Zealand literary history, but his importance to the average poetry reader is always going to depend on the merits of the individual poems.

Brunton also comments on the “sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll” ambience of so much of his work, but claims that they are “peripheral references, past of the landscape in which he existed … he was too busy surviving in it to write about it.” There’s something in that, I think. If you take away all the “period” details – invocations of all the people one might like to be (“Tristan Tzara, William Burroughs / Han-Shan The Rolling Stones”), jazz stuff, Beat stuff, French surrealism, and so on – there still has to be a distinctively personal voice left behind for us to continue to enjoy Young’s writing.

Is there? I think there is. Funnily enough, it’s a voice (fresh, fierce, frank) which would fit quite easily into the technically conservative, sixties-nostalgiac live poetry scene today. That’s not to say his work is unsubtle, but somehow unreflective, despite the breadth of reference - it's more Frank O'Hara than John Ashbery, if one wants to put it in those terms: more Beat than New York School. As he puts it in “I begin with Crazy Horse”:

Then it was easier. Your heroes
were alive, at least in mind.

“The shining images of youth” … those days of hope when internationalism, in the form of the Beats and the French New Wave, first came to rid the land of its demons. It’s nice to see that that the second part of this book, ‘A Bestiary for Borges’ (poems mainly 1969-79) is stronger (though, admittedly, less unified) than the first, which dates from 1962-68. I take that as a promising sign. With Mark Young, now that this history has finally seen the light of day, the best may yet be to come.

God, that sounds patronizing when I reread it now! I suppose that's the real reason Pirie wouldn't include it in his magazine.

There are a couple of good points hidden away in there, though, I think, if you strip away all the portentous bullshitting about Young's "place in NZ literature." First of all, the masks are certainly there, and clearly identifiable - I just didn't realise how much of a feature of his mature work they would become. There's a persistent tendency to duck and hide the moment a particular method or approach becomes identifiable in his poetry. Now I'd see that as a strength. I did then, too, I think, but was just a little doubtful about how many stances there'd actually been over that long haul between 1959 and 1999.

Second, my identification of the second part of the book, ‘A Bestiary for Borges’, as the stronger of the two, seems at any rate a little prescient. I'm not sure that anyone then could have foreseen the profusion of blogs, books, chapbooks, magazines and styles that Mark Young would go on to pioneer over the next decade, but at least I could see the best was yet to come.

If you want to see at least a preliminary bibliography, I recommend his author page at the nzepc as a good starting point.

Beyond that, what should I say about this particular book, the one Michael Steven has just put out? It's Mark Young. It's hip, streetwise, unaffected, urban & cool. It's a lovely tribute to its predecessor, Frank O'Hara's book, 45 years on from its first appearance.

I could go through the poems and talk about them individually, but what I like best about them is their sense of flow, their updated version of the O'Hara list poem ("I do this / I do that") in a new, electronic continuum.

Mark Young certainly is a poet for our times. I see now, as I couldn't really see ten years ago, that it's because of that long haul from 1959, not in spite of it, that his relentless trying-on of new hats has become a series of Borgesian avatars, not the set of exercises in the currently-prevailing fashionable styles I then thought it.

Happy fiftieth anniversary, 'Lijah lizard!

New NZ Poets by Theme

[Seraphine Pick, "He"]

I like typewriters because they are always turned on.
– Will Christie

Here's a thematic breakdown of the 97 tracks in our New NZ Poets in Performance anthology (Auckland: AUP, 2008). The categories are pretty subjective, and could undoubtedly be improved on. Maybe that’s not such a bad starting point for discussion, though: what's the poem really about?

ANIMALS

Tusiata Avia: My Dog
Anna Jackson: Takahe
Anne Kennedy: Cat Tales
Thérèse Lloyd: Forecast
Chris Price: Keeping Ravens

CHILDHOOD

James Brown: The Crewe Cres Kids
Andrew Johnston: How to Talk
Jenny Powell-Chalmers: Lunchbox
Sonja Yelich: whangaparaoa – on the sundeck

ELEGY

Glenn Colquhoun: On the death of my grandmother
Andrew Johnston: The Present
Jack Ross: Except Once

FAMILY

Anna Jackson: In a Minute
Andrew Johnston: Les Baillessats
Anne Kennedy: Whenua (2)
Emma Neale: You’re Telling Me

FANTASY & IDENTITY

Nick Ascroft: All of the Other Ascrofts are Dead
James Brown: Loneliness
Anna Jackson: The hen of tiredness
Andrew Johnston: How to Walk
Kapka Kassabova: A city of pierced amphorae
Kapka Kassabova: Preparation for the big emptiness
Thérèse Lloyd: Scorpion Daughter
Emma Neale: Confessional Poem
Jenny Powell-Chalmers: Linda
John Pule: Restless People – Ka hola
John Pule: Restless People – He
Sarah Quigley: Restless
Tracey Slaughter: biography day

FRIENDSHIP

Jenny Bornholdt: Rodnie and her Bicycles
Anna Jackson: On the Road with Rose
Robert Sullivan: V Honda Waka

HISTORY & POLITICS

James Brown: Soup from a Stone
Lynda Chanwai-Earle: Gasp
David Howard: Social Studies
Mark Pirie: Making a Point
Mark Pirie: The Third Form
Robert Sullivan: Waka 70 i Matakitaki
Robert Sullivan: Waka 62 A narrator’s note

LANDSCAPE & LOCALITY

Tusiata Avia: My First Time in Samoa
Serie Barford: God is near the equator
Jenny Bornholdt: Weather
Kate Camp: Backroads
Kapka Kassabova: My life in two parts
John Newton: Lunch
John Newton: Ferret Trap
John Newton: Inland
Gregory O’Brien: Epithalamium, Wellington
Jenny Powell-Chalmers: Carnival of Chocolate
Sarah Quigley: New York Four
Richard Reeve: Ranfurly
Sonja Yelich: narrow neck from the boat ramp

LANGUAGE & WRITING

Nick Ascroft: The Badder & the Better
James Brown: The Day I Stopped Writing Poetry
John Newton: Opening the Book
Mark Pirie: Progress
Chris Price: Ghastlily
Robert Sullivan: Waka 46
Sonja Yelich: writing desk

LIFE, THE UNIVERSE & EVERYTHING

Jenny Bornholdt: Please, Pay Attention
Glenn Colquhoun: from Whakapapa
Kapka Kassabova: One morning like a sleeper
Gregory O’Brien: Numbers 1 & 2
John Pule: Restless People – Liogi
Richard Reeve: Victory Beach

LOVE

Gregory O’Brien: It will be better then
Gregory O’Brien: Solomon Singing
Gregory O’Brien: There is only one
Jack Ross: Idyll

PAIN & SUFFERING

Serie Barford: Plea to the Spanish Lady
Lynda Chanwai-Earle: Details from a Personal Journal
Glenn Colquhoun: Lost Property
Thérèse Lloyd: One Hundred Hours
Richard Reeve: Dark Unloading
Jack Ross: Disorder and Early Sorrow

PEOPLE

Nick Ascroft: Cheap Present
Jenny Bornholdt: Then Murray Came
Kate Camp: Guests
Glenn Colquhoun: She asked me if she took one pill for her heart …
Emma Neale: Spoken For
Emma Neale: Jane Coleridge
Emma Neale: Caroline Helstone
Jack Ross: A Woman Named Intrepid

RELATIONSHIPS & SEXUAL POLITICS

Tusiata Avia: Wild Dogs under my Skirt
Kate Camp: Postcard
Kate Camp: Documentaries
Kate Camp: Water of the Sweet Life
David Howard: On the Eighth Day
David Howard: Talking Sideways
Anne Kennedy: I was a feminist in the 80s
Mark Pirie: Good Looks
Chris Price: The Origins of Science
Tracey Slaughter: Anatomy of dancing with your Future Wife

SUBURBIA

Jenny Bornholdt: Bus Stop
Olivia Macassey: Outhwaite Park
Olivia Macassey: Outer Suburb
Sonja Yelich: 1YA

New NZ Poets by Region

[Seraphine Pick, "Girl (with offered eyes)"]

I want New Zealand to secede from Americanized world culture,
in the same way that these islands seceded from the ancient
supercontinent of Gondwanaland.
– Scott Hamilton

Here's my preliminary attempt at a regional breakdown of the 28 poets in the last of our three AUP anthologies: New NZ Poets in Performance (2008):

Place -- Name -- Dates

AUCKLAND

• Serie Barford (b.1960)
German-Samoan by birth; lives in West Auckland
• Anna Jackson (b.1967)
Born in Auckland, she now lives in Wellington.
• Jack Ross (b.1962)
Born and still lives in Auckland's East Coast Bays.
• Robert Sullivan (b.1967)
Nga Puhi. Educated at Auckland University, he now lives in Hawai'i.
• Sonja Yelich (b.1965)
Lives in Bayswater, Auckland.

BULGARIA

• Kapka Kassabova (b.1973)
Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, she emigrated to New Zealand in 1992.

CHRISTCHURCH & CANTERBURY

• Tusiata Avia (b.1966)
A Samoan-New Zealander, born and educated in Christchurch.
• David Howard (b.1959)
Born and brought up in Christchurch, he now lives at Purakanui, near Dunedin.
• John Newton (b.1959)
Lives and teaches in Christchurch.
• Sarah Quigley (b.1967)
Born in Christchurch, she now lives in Berlin.

COROMANDEL

• Olivia Macassey (b.1975)
Born in Coromandel, she now lives in Parnell, Auckland.
• Tracey Slaughter (b.1972)
Lives in Thames, on the west side of the Coromandel Peninsula.

DUNEDIN & CENTRAL OTAGO

• Nick Ascroft (b.1973)
Born in Oamaru, he now lives in the UK.
• Emma Neale (b.1969)
Born in Dunedin, where she lives and works.
• Jenny Powell-Chalmers (b.1960)
Born in Dunedin, where she lives and works (after a brief sojourn in Wellington).
• Richard Reeve (b. 1976)
Born and educated in Dunedin, where he still lives.

NAPIER

• Thérèse Lloyd (b.1974)
Born in Napier, she presently lives in Iowa, where she was Schaeffer fellow for 2007-8.

NORTHLAND

• Glenn Colquhoun (b.1964)
Lives in a small village, Te Tii, just north of Kerikeri.
• Gregory O’Brien (b.1961)
Born in Matamata, he worked as a journalist in Northland before moving to Wellington, where he now lives.

NIUE

• John Pule (b.1962)
Born in Niue, he came to New Zealand in 1964. Presently lives in Auckland.

WELLINGTON

• Jenny Bornholdt (b.1960)
Born and lives in Wellington.
• James Brown (b.1966)
Born in Wellington, he now lives in Island Bay.
• Kate Camp (b.1972)
Born and educated in Wellington.
• Lynda Chanwai-Earle (b.1965)
Born in London, she was brought up in New Guinea and educated in Hawkes Bay before moving to Auckland and, subsequently, Wellington.
• Andrew Johnston (b.1963)
Born in Upper Hutt, he now lives in France.
• Anne Kennedy (b.1959)
born and educated in Wellington, she now lives in Hawai'i.
• Mark Pirie (b.1974)
Born in Wellington, where he still lives.
• Chris Price (b.1962)
Born in Reading, England, she emigrated to Auckland in 1966. She now lives in Wellington.

New NZ Poets Teaching Notes

[cover image: Sara Hughes / cover design: Christine Hansen]

New NZ Poets in Performance
Edited by Jack Ross.
Poems selected by Jack Ross & Jan Kemp
(Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008)

With the appearance of this third and final volume of our series, it seems appropriate to say a few things about the “NZ Poets in Performance” project as a whole. The trilogy of anthologies Jan Kemp and I have put out through Auckland University Press include (in all) 27 + 27 + 28 = 82 poets and 110 + 87 + 97 = 294 tracks on 6 CDs. The first poet included, A. R. D. Fairburn, was born in 1904; the latest, Richard Reeve, in 1975.

‘If it doesn’t exist on the Internet, it doesn’t exist.’ One of our recent reviewers quoted this provocative apothegm from US poet and conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith. I don't know if I entirely agree - books and (more to the point) live performances have a huge importance still - but we've certainly taken the dictum to heart. There's now a complete index site devoted to the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive (2002-4) and its predecessor, the Waiata Archive (1974). This includes pages on each of our 200-odd poets, together with full bibliographical details of our three AUP publications and the original 3-LP set NZ Poets Read their Work (1974).

It's to be hoped that at some point in the future we may be able to link to a number of soundfiles from the archive itself, but for the moment (largely for copyright reasons) the only tracks available online are at our NZEPC 12 Taonga feature, and on the NZEPC's own author pages.

We've received some brickbats as well as many bouquets from our numerous reviewers. Some have taken exception to our choice of titles. Certainly, I concur that if we'd chosen to call any one of our volumes The Classic or The Contemporary or The New NZ Poets in Performance, I think it would be perfectly legitimate to interpret this as yet another exercise in building up a definitive canon of Kiwi poets. But then (of course) we didn't.

Classic, Contemporary and New NZ Poets in Performance, our actual titles, clearly imply the existence of many other "classic," "contemporary" and "new" poets whom we haven't been able to include for a variety of reasons (discussed in more detail in the books themselves). I'm not myself very interested in deciding who's in and who's out in a more loaded sense. The more the merrier is my instinct when it comes to our rich and fruitful poetry scene.

There also seems to be some dispute over the term “in performance." Personally I don’t see the presence (or absence) of a live audience as the sole criterion of performance. Do all the members of a movie's eventual audience have to be present when an actor records each take of a scene? And yet we continue to speak of Robert de Niro’s “performance” in Raging Bull or Taxi Driver. Or is it only stage actors who can be said to “perform”?

For the record, then, I'd like to state my opinion that a poet's studio recording of a poem can be every bit as much of a "performance" as the interpretation given at a live poetry reading. Our intention all along has been to include the best versions available to us of New Zealand poets reading their own work. I fail to see any ambiguity in our use of the term, but if anyone has been misled by it, I certainly apologise for the confusion.

I guess our desire all along was that the book could be used to promote awareness of NZ poetry in schools and tertiary institutions (though of course it’s been priced to appeal to individual consumers as well).

With that in mind, I’ve followed my own example with the two previous volumes by compiling a thematic breakdown of all the poems in the anthology (and it took quite a while, too, so don’t wax too sarcastic at my expense. I know that some of the categories are a bit suss):

• ANIMALS
• CHILDHOOD
• ELEGY
• FAMILY
• FANTASY & IDENTITY
• FRIENDSHIP
• HISTORY
• LANDSCAPE & LOCALITY
• LANGUAGE & WRITING
• LIFE, THE UNIVERSE & EVERYTHING
• LOVE
• PAIN & SUFFERING
• PEOPLE
• RELATIONSHIPS & SEXUAL POLITICS
• SUBURBIA

Another way of choosing a poet to talk about in your classroom (or your writing workshop, for that matter) might be through region and locality. Why not try to find a poet who comes from near where you live? Is there anything about their subject-matter, or their approach to writing, which seems to you to intersect fruitfully with the characteristics of your area?

Many of the poets in this book have associations with more than one place, but some (such as Tusiata Avia or Richard Reeve) are very strongly identified with a particular place, and constantly revisit it as subject-matter in their work.

Here are some of the places on offer:

• AUCKLAND
• BULGARIA
• CHRISTCHURCH & CANTERBURY
• COROMANDEL
• DUNEDIN & OTAGO
• NAPIER
• NORTHLAND
• NIUE
• WELLINGTON

Finally, further information may be accessed at the following websites:

• Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive: Bibliographical Aids for the Use of Those Consulting the Waiata Archive (1974) and the AoNZPSA (2002-2004) - Audio Recordings available in Special Collections, University of Auckland Library and in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.
(This is our own dedicated site, with full details of the AoNZPSA project).

• Authors. The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre.
(A select but valuable list of major NZ poets with pictures, recordings, and critical reactions).

• Homepage. Auckland University Press.
(Details of books and other publications by a number of the authors in the anthology).

• New Zealand Literature File. University of Auckland Library Website.
(This has thorough – though not always entirely reliable – bibliographies for many major New Zealand writers).

• Twelve Taonga. The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre.
(A brief account of the creation of the 1974 and 2004 recorded poetry archives, which were the principal source for this series of books).

• New Zealand Writers. The New Zealand Book Council Website.
(This has pictures and short biographical and critical summaries adapted from Roger Robinson & Nelson Wattie's Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998), but with updated information and supplementary entries on more recent writers).

Sound-bytes in Cyberspace

[Leonardo da Vinci, Analysis of a bird's wing
- looks a little like a digital soundfile, doesn't it?]

There's a new set of soundfiles up on the Titus Books website.

They include:

• David Lyndon Brown reading from his novel Marked Men (Titus, 2007)
• Bill Direen reading from his poetry collection New Sea Land (Titus, 2005)
• Scott Hamilton reading from his poetry collection To the Moon in Seven Easy Steps (Titus, 2007)
• Mike Johnson reading from The Vertical Harp, poems of Li He (Titus, 2007)
• Alistair Paterson launching Olivia Macassey's Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Titus, 2005)
• Olivia Macassey reading from her book during the Rakino launch (2005)
• Olwyn Stewart reading from her novella Curriculum Vitae (Titus, 2005)
• & me reading from my novel EMO (upcoming: Titus, 2008), with backing music by Padmanabha Fischlinger.

I don't know about you, but I really like the idea of checking out upcoming purchases online through sound as well as text extracts.

It makes me realise, yet again, how desirable it would be to complete my online listing of the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive (2002-4) with just such a set of soundfiles -- at least one extract from every author willing to participate in the project.

Alas, I lack the technical expertise (and, at least at present, the time) to attempt such a task, but how about it? Are there any people or institutions out there anxious to help out? Watch this space for further developments. ...

With a single bound Jack was free ...

New Zealand Poets Read Their Work (1974). [Image: Pat Hanly]

You all know the story. The hack who usually wrote each instalment of the weekly magazine's adventure serial was off on holiday, but at the end of the previous episode he'd provided a true cliffhanger: his hero was bound to the stake, surrounded by hostile tribesmen, with a fire being kindled under his feet, dozens of rifles trained on him, and an erupting volcano in the background.

Nobody in the office could think of any conceivable way of getting him out of this tight fix, so they had to summon the writer back from his vacation with the lure of extra cash in order to extricate them from this embarrassment.

He walked in, sat down at the desk, took a look at the last page he'd written - and then scrawled: "With a single bound Jack was free."

You may have noticed I haven't been doing a whole lot of blogging on this site lately. It's not been through idleness, I assure you - nosiree. "With a single bound Jack was free." Or at any rate that was the plan.

Jan Kemp & Jack Ross (2004)

The thing I was trying to get shot of was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive. For those of you who don't know, this is a collection of recordings of 171 New Zealand poets, on 40 audio CDs (with two CDs of texts and bio/bibliographical information) which was compiled between 2002 and 2004.

As you can imagine, there's a certain amount of staff work involved in setting up recordings in the four major centres (Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin), and then at least as much again in tidying up all the tapes, and texts, and photos and other impedimenta.

Jan Kemp & Alan Smythe (1974)

It started off as the brainchild of Jan Kemp and Alan Smythe, who'd collaborated on a similar venture in 1974 (resulting in a set of 3 LP records: New Zealand Poets Read Their Work). Smythe was then (2002) the head of SCAPA, the Performing Arts centre at the University of Auckland, so he seemed well-placed to facilitate the collection of materials. When he left that position in 2003, the archive shifted to Special Collections in the University Library, with the help of funds from Creative New Zealand and from the University of Auckland English Department (then headed by Ken Larsen).

Jan Kemp & Alan Smythe (2004)

There were many, many other people involved, though, and I was one of them. My particular responsibility was getting all the texts in order. When I say that this involved sorting out more than 2,000 tracks on over 3,000 pages of A4, I think you may get some idea of the scope of the project.

For various copyright reasons, the eventual electronic archive can - at present - only be accessed in two places: University of Auckland's Special Collections (which also has all the raw data from which the 42 Cds were distilled); and the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington.

So what's actually in the archive? Well, a list of the 171 poets, together with sample tracks from 12 of them, has been available as a feature at the nzepc since 2004. But up until now it wasn't actually possible to know which tracks had actually been recorded by each one of them unless you visited one of the two institutions mentioned above, and sat down in front of a monitor with the CDs.

I thought that was a shame. It seems foolish to go to all that trouble, and then end up with an artefact no-one can really use. And some of the poets involved let me know as much in no uncertain terms.

(And while we're on the subject, d'you feel like modifying your tone a bit when you send me emails out of the blue, guys? I mean, I don't actually spend my life plotting ways to derail your literary career ... There is in fact a certain amount of idealism involved in putting together these huge compilations - and that applies not just to me and Jan (and Mark King, who made order out of the chaos of all the different recordings), but also to the people who organised the recordings in the four centres. Elizabeth Alley in Wellington, David Howard & Morrin Rout in Christchurch, and Nick Ascroft & Richard Reeve in Dunedin did a great deal of work for a not conspicuous amount of reward).

So what I've been doing over the past month is compiling an index to the whole kit and kaboodle. It takes the form of an immense interconnected and hyperlinked blog, because that was the only way I could think of to do it which didn't involve further requests for funding from the various agencies who've already sunk so much into this project. You'll find a link to it at the side of this page.

It includes:

* an alphabetical index of all 171 poets included in the 2002-2004 AoNZPSA (Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive), with a list of the poems they recorded, a picture (where one was avaialble), biographical and bibliographical information.

* an alphabetical index of all 52 poets included in the Waiata Archive of recordings compiled for the 3 1974 LPs. I've included photos and bio / bibliographical information with these where it was readily available, but should note that collecting such details was not part of the original brief 30 years ago. I don't even have dates of birth for some of the poets included.

* Contents lists for all four publications which have come from these two archives: the 3-LP set New Zealand Poets Read Their Work and New Zealand Poets Read Their Work for Children (Waiata Records, 1974); and the set of three chronological audio / text anthologies Classic, Contemporary and New New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland University Press, 2006-8) edited by myself and Jan.

Useful? I certainly hope so. I should note that it contains no actual copyright materials: no recordings, and no texts of poems. Those are all reserved for the archive itself. I have, however, tried to link to homepages or websites which do include such features.

The selection of poems was, in each case, the poet's responsibility. So, generally, was the format of their bio / bibliography (in the few cases where this was missing, these were compiled by me or by Edmund King). I'm perfectly happy to update them, but to start with I've just posted what we collected in 2002-2004. I'd also like to receive more pictures (jpegs under 50 kb in size are ideal) for those 73 (of 196) poets we don't have photographs of.

To my mind, this puts at least a provisional full stop to the whole project. To my involvement with it, at any rate. If you're interested in a particular poet or poets, you can now easily see which poems of theirs are included in the archive, and then go and listen to them either in Wellington or Auckland (and, yes, I wish the materials were available elsewhere - all I can say is that we tried very hard to arrange it, and will continue to do so).

Beyond that, I can only refer you to the three chronological volumes of recordings (one of which, New NZ Poets in Performance is still in production at present: due out on Poetry Day next year) now available through AUP. I'd rather, myself, that the whole collection could be up on the internet, but that's a project far beyond my resources and technological expertise.

This could be seen as the beginning of such an online digital archive, perhaps, but we aren't quite there yet. Certainly, in the future, the internet will be the place for such extensive collections.

Contemporary NZ Poets by Theme

Come along with us, they say
There are one or two questions
We should like to ask you
– Bill Manhire, “The Old Man’s Example”

Here's a thematic breakdown of the 87 tracks in our Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance anthology (Auckland: AUP, 2007). The categories are pretty subjective, and could undoubtedly be improved on. Maybe that’s not such a bad starting point for discussion, though: what's the poem really about?

ADOLESCENCE & EDUCATION

Janet Charman: injection
David Eggleton: Teen Angel
Graham Lindsay: Playground

ANIMALS

Anne French: Trout
Sam Hunt: Hey, Minstrel
James Norcliffe: planchette
Peter Olds: Elephant
Bob Orr: Ballad of the Great South Rd

ELEGY

Murray Edmond: Voyager
Anne French: Uncle Ron’s last surprise
Roma Potiki: For Paiki
Ian Wedde: Earthly – Sonnets for Carlos 35

FLATTING

Geoff Cochrane: 1988
Peter Olds: Waking up in Phillip Street
Bob Orr: The X

FOOD

Paula Green: greek salad
Paula Green: oven baked salmon

FRIENDSHIP

Bernadette Hall: Amica
Sam Hunt: Rainbows and a Promise of Snow

HISTORY

Alan Brunton: from Waves
Geoff Cochrane: Atlantis
Bernadette Hall: Famine
Bill Sewell: Breaking the quiet
Bill Sewell: Jahrhundertwende
Apirana Taylor: Parihaka
Apirana Taylor: six million

LANGUAGE & WRITING

Graham Lindsay: Life in the Queen’s English
Bill Manhire: On Originality
Bill Manhire: Valedictory
Iain Sharp: Two Minute Poem
Ian Wedde: Barbary Coast

LANDSCAPE & LOCALITY

David Eggleton: Poem for the Unknown Tourist
Paula Green: Two Minutes Westward
Jan Kemp: Sailing boats
Graham Lindsay: Cloud silence
Bill Manhire: The Old Man’s Example
Bill Manhire: Visiting Mr Shackleton
Cilla McQueen: Living Here
Stephanie de Montalk: Northern Spring
James Norcliffe: at Franz Josef
Peter Olds: Doctors Rock
Bob Orr: A Country Shaped like a Butterfly’s Wing
Vivienne Plumb: The Vegan Bar and Gaming Lounge
Roma Potiki: Exploding Light
Bill Sewell: Riversdale

LIFE, THE UNIVERSE & EVERYTHING

Keri Hulme: from Fisher in an Autumn Tide
Bill Manhire: A Song about the Moon
Vivienne Plumb: The Tank
Ian Wedde: Earthly – Sonnets for Carlos 31

LOVE

Michele Leggott: cairo vessel
Jan Kemp: The sky’s enormous jug
Jan Kemp: ‘Love is a babe . . . ’

PAIN

Geoff Cochrane: Zigzags
Anne French: Acute
Roma Potiki: Riven

PARENTS & CHILDREN

Alan Brunton: The Man on Crazies Hill, 1 & 3
Janet Charman: cuckoo in the nest
Bernadette Hall: Party Tricks
Sam Hunt: My Father Scything
Sam Hunt: Plateau songs
Graham Lindsay: Chink
Bill Manhire: Miscarriage
Bob Orr: Eternity
Vivienne Plumb: A Letter from my Daughter

PEOPLE

Bernadette Hall: The Lay Sister
Stephanie de Montalk: Tree Marriage

POLITICS & POLEMICS

Fiona Farrell: Instructions for the consumption of your Humanitarian Food Package
Anne French: The new museology
Cilla McQueen: Fuse
Bill Sewell: Censorship
Apirana Taylor: Sad Joke on a Marae
Ian Wedde: Earthly – Sonnets for Carlos 32

RELATIONSHIPS & SEXUAL POLITICS

Alan Brunton: The Man on Crazies Hill, 2
Janet Charman: but she wanted one
Janet Charman: ‘they say that in paradise’
Fiona Farrell: Anne Brown’s Song
Sam Hunt: Bottle to Battle to Death
Jan Kemp: Against the softness of woman
Jan Kemp: Jousting
Bill Manhire: Domestic
Apirana Taylor: Hinemoa’s daughter

SPIRITUALITY

Paula Green: afternoon tea with Virginia Woolf
James Norcliffe: the visit of the dalai lama
Richard von Sturmer: Dreams

SUBURBIA

Janet Charman: ready steady
Geoff Cochrane: Spindrift Sunday

WORK

Janet Charman: from wake up to yourself
Iain Sharp: Amnesty Day

Contemporary NZ Poets by Region

Parts of the island are disappearing.
– Geoff Cochrane, “Atlantis”

Is it where you were born, where you were brought up, or where you live that defines you best as a person (or as a writer)? Bill Manhire was born in Invercargill, but is generally thought of as a Wellington poet; Janet Charman was born in Wellington but now lives and works in Auckland … I’ve been influenced more by where people were born than where they live now in compiling this list, but I have made some exceptions where the results seemed just too paradoxical.

So, anyway, here's my preliminary attempt at a regional breakdown of the 27 poets in our anthology, Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance (AUP, 2007):

Place -- Name -- Dates -- Pages in Contemporary NZ Poets

AUCKLAND & NORTHLAND

• Paula Green (b.1955) 115-18
educated at Auckland University, now lives on the West Coast.
• Sam Hunt (b.1946) 26-33
born in Castor Bay, but now lives north of Auckland.
• Richard von Sturmer (b.1957) 141-45
born in Devonport, lived abroad for more than a decade in the USA, and now lives in Remuera.

BLEINHELM & MARLBOROUGH

• Ian Wedde (b.1946) 46-52
born in Bleinhelm, travelled extensively as a child, but is now based in Wellington.

CHRISTCHURCH & CANTERBURY

• Alan Brunton (1946-2002) 17-25
born in Christchurch, educated in Auckland, but is most strongly associated with Island Bay in Wellington.
• Peter Olds (b.1944) 1-6
born in Christchurch, but is generally thought of as a Dunedin poet.

DUNEDIN & OTAGO

• David Eggleton (b.1952) 94-97
educated in Auckland, he is now based in Dunedin.
• Fiona Farrell (b.1947) 53-57
born in Oamaru, she is now based on Banks Peninsula.
• Bernadette Hall (b.1945) 7-11
born in Alexandra, Central Otago, she now lives in Christchurch.

GREECE

• Bill Sewell (1951-2003) 88-93
born in Athens, and brought up in parts of Southern Europe, he studied at Auckland, taught German in Dunedin, but then moved to Wellington.

GREYMOUTH & THE WEST COAST

• Keri Hulme (b.1947) 58-62
born in Christchurch, but is now based on the West Coast, at Okarito.
• James Norcliffe (b.1946) 42-45
born in Greymouth, but lives in Christchurch.

HAMILTON & WAIKATO

• Murray Edmond (b.1949) 63-68
born in Hamilton, now lives and works in Auckland.
• Jan Kemp (b.1949) 69-73
born in Hamilton, now lives between Torbay, on Auckland’s North Shore, and Frankfurt, Germany.
• Bob Orr (b.1949) 79-83
born on a farm in the Waikato, lives now in Auckland’s Point Chevalier.

INVERCARGILL & SOUTHLAND

• Bill Manhire (b.1946) 34-41
born in Invercargill, now lives and works in Wellington.

TARANAKI

• Michele Leggott (b.1956) 134-40
born in Stratford, she now lives in Devonport on Auckland’s North Shore.

UK

• Cilla McQueen (b.1949) 74-78
born in Birmingham, she now lives in Bluff, after many years living and working in Dunedin.
• Iain Sharp (b.1953) 104-07
born in Scotland, he now lives and works in Auckland.

WELLINGTON & THE HUTT VALLEY

• Janet Charman (b.1954) 108-14
born in the Hutt Valley, she now lives in Avondale, West Auckland.
• Geoff Cochrane (b.1951) 84-87
lives in Wellington’s Island Bay.
• Anne French (b.1956) 128-33
worked for many years in Auckland, but is now based in Wellington, where she grew up.
• Graham Lindsay (b.1952) 98-103
born in Wellington, he lived for many years in Dunedin, then Christchurch, and is now living in the UK.
• Stephanie de Montalk (b.1945) 12-16
based in Wellington.
• Vivienne Plumb (b.1955) 119-22
based in Wellington.
• Roma Potiki (b.1958)146-50
lives on the Kapiti Coast, outside Wellington.
• Apirana Taylor (b.1955) 123-27
lives on the Kapiti Coast outside Wellington.

Contemporary NZ Poets Teaching Notes

[cover image: Richard Killeen / Cover design: Christine Hansen]

Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance
Edited by Jack Ross & Jan Kemp
(Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2007)

So it appears that I'm down to give a public lecture (in the "Chancellor's Series," no less, alongside the likes of Nicky Hager and Cindy Kiro), on the subject of this series of anthologies: NZ Poets in Performance.

It's at 12 noon on Wednesday, August 1st, in the Study Centre Staff Lounge of Massey University, Albany. If you happen to be passing. Free entry -- free tea and coffee, too ...

That got me to thinking about the bunch of teaching notes I put up on this blog when AUP published Classic NZ Poets in Performance last year. I hope they’ve been handy to someone, at least. I haven't heard much about them either way. In any case, I thought I might continue the tradition and do the same thing for this sequel, Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance.

I guess the philosophy behind our selection of poems all along was to choose those which didn't require a great deal of background knowledge to like. We’ve tried to choose poems about very concrete, accessible topics, by poets who are used to reaching out to a general audience. That’s not to say that there aren’t subtleties and complexities in all three books (these two and the projected New NZ Poets, scheduled for publication next year), but the idea was never to compile an anthology purely for poetry-lovers -- though of course we hope they’re being catered for as well.

The plan, at least, was to try to put in something for everyone in the books, as I’ve attempted to demonstrate in the breakdown of poems by theme which follows this entry.

Once again, I know that some of the poems could be listed under more than one heading, but all I’m doing here is indicating what I think is the predominant subject-matter or thematic direction in each. If you don’t agree, that might be a good starting-point for discussion:

• ADOLESCENCE & EDUCATION
• ANIMALS
• ELEGY
• FLATTING
• FOOD
• FRIENDSHIP
• HISTORY
• LANDSCAPE & LOCALITY
• LANGUAGE & WRITING
• LIFE, THE UNIVERSE & EVERYTHING
• LOVE
• PAIN
• PARENTS & CHILDREN
• PEOPLE
• POLITICS & POLEMICS
• RELATIONSHIPS & SEXUAL POLITICS
• SPIRITUALITY
• SUBURBIA
• WORK

As with the Classic NZ Poets, our new book is arranged in chronological order of birthdates, beginning with Peter Olds in 1944 and ending with Roma Potiki in 1958. The preface to the book explains that:

This second volume, Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance, is our overview of the poetic generation which came to maturity in the 1960s and 1970s, that turbulent era of social, sexual, musical and artistic experimentation.

(Some might call them the baby-boomers, though I doubt it’s a term which appeals much to the people in question. )

Many of the poets in the book have associations with many different parts of New Zealand; others (such as Bob Orr or Keri Hulme) are very strongly identified with a particular region, and constantly revisit it as subject-matter in their work.

Here are some of the places on offer:

• AUCKLAND & NORTHLAND
• BLEINHELM & MARLBOROUGH
• CHRISTCHURCH & CANTERBURY
• DUNEDIN & OTAGO
• GREECE
• GREYMOUTH & THE WEST COAST
• HAMILTON & WAIKATO
• INVERCARGILL & SOUTHLAND
• TARANAKI
• UK
• WELLINGTON & THE HUTT VALLEY

Further information may be accessed at the following websites:

• Authors. The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre.
(A select but valuable list of major NZ poets with pictures, recordings, and critical reactions).

• Homepage. Auckland University Press.
(Details of books and other publications by a number of the authors in the anthology).

• New Zealand Literature File. University of Auckland Library Website.
(This has thorough – though not always entirely reliable – bibliographies for many major New Zealand writers).

• Twelve Taonga. The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre.
(A brief account of the creation of the 1974 and 2004 recorded poetry archives, which were the main source for this sereis of books).

• New Zealand Writers. The New Zealand Book Council Website.
(This has pictures and short biographical and critical summaries adapted from Roger Robinson & Nelson Wattie's Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998), but with updated information and supplementary entries on more recent writers).

Traffic

We all know Auckland traffic is appalling -- and it's getting worse. One of the main reasons for living and working on the Shore (at Massey Albany), in fact, is avoiding this sort of thing: the grind across the bridge. Or at any rate having the opportunity to choose one's moment to take the plunge.

So what do you when you do get stuck in traffic, creeping along behind some bozo whose idea of fun is stopping twenty or so yards behind the car in front and then gradually drifting up on them, leaving you unable even to stop and cogitate in peace?

I guess I tend to wish I was somewhere else -- either snouting around some musty time-soaked secondhand bookshop, or lying supine on a sun-baked beach (Mairangi Bay, for instance ...)



So the question is, how do you get from one to the other: traffic-jam to state of inner peace? Well, the obvious solution is to listen to the radio, but there's only a limited number of times you can hear John Tesh dispensing "wisdom for your life" without wanting to strangle the smug bastard, or to those announcers on the Concert Programme who go on and on about every detail of the composer's life before they actually allow you to listen to any music.

Bringing along your own tapes or CDs, and listening to those, is probably the best idea -- if you're organised to remember to keep the supplies stocked up. But here's my own original extra suggestion for mellow, tension-free motoring ...

[I should probably add at this point that everyone to whom I've so far mentioned this solution has reacted to it a bit like Jim Jones's congregation when they got their first big satisfying slug of Kool-aid ... but you never know, you guys might be an exception. It works okay for me, at any rate ...]

What I do is listen to poetry in the car.

"Gaaah!" I hear you cry. "No, no, have mercy -- anything but that."

But wait a second. Jan Kemp and I have spent an awful amount of time over the past few years collecting soundfiles of NZ poets reading their own work (most of which now reside in the vaults of Auckland University Library and the Turnbull in Wellington). We even put out a text/ sound anthology of Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance through Auckland University Press last year (and very successful it's been, thank you very much).



But when can you actually find time to put a bunch of poets on the CD-player during an average day? I mean really, not just that one dutiful listen you give it before packing it away on a shelf forever .... In my case the answer is: in the car.

Not just our anthology, of course (though I've listened to that an immense number of times -- not to mention its sequel, Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance, covering the baby-boomer poets, roughly from Sam Hunt to Michele Leggott, and due out later this year).



I guess my particular favourites for traffic jams or long drives in the country are very long epic poems: The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Aeneid. I have a number of versions of each, and it's agreat way of comparing the different translations.

Too intellectual? Too pretentious. Well, as the immortal Blackadder once put it, there's nothing intellectual about wandering around Italy in a nightshirt trying to get laid. That's pretty much the essence of most of these epics -- sex, sadism, family feuds, and lots of drinking. Life, as Homer sees it, is a grim struggle punctuated with moments of brightness, and it doesn't seem to make much difference whether you're a mortal or a god.

I like listening to other poets too, the Moderns: Ginsberg is great to crank up loud when you're cruising round campus trying to disillusion people with the life of the mind: "Moloch! Moloch!" Auden has a kind of dry charm. I like the mellifluous blarney of Irishmen such as Paul Muldoon or Seamus Heaney. And it's not long before you find yourself getting to know their poems far better than you ever did when they just sat in front of you on a page.

It's depressing to think that I can still sing the jingles of most of the TV ads which were on when I was a kid ("We are the boys from down on the farm / We really know our cheese ..." "They're going to think you're fine / 'Coz you got Lifebuoy ..." "Kiss me Cutex / Kiss me quick ..."). Wouldn't you rather din into your head the immortal cadences of Homer or Beowulf, or find yourself intoning "April is the cruellest month / Mixing memory with desire ..." instead? Okay, maybe not -- but it's got to be better than bitching about the traffic or (worse) listening to talkback.

[Editor's note (May, 2008): And here's the cover of the latest in our series, New New Zealand Poets in Performance, due out from AUP on Poetry Day (July 18) this year]: