Showing posts with label Going West. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Going West. Show all posts

Saturday, September 22, 2012

A Day out with David Howard



Poster at Massey Albany
[photograph: Jack Ross]


Funnily enough, last weekend I was teaching a poetry course in the very room this poster adorned - or should I say "infested." It was, admittedly, a session on two contemporary poets: a New Zealander and a West Indian, but the cap still seems to fit, somehow.

After all, who else around here can be held responsible for a Doctoral thesis entitled "An Elusive Identity: Versions of South America in English Literature from Aphra Behn to the Present Day" (University of Edinburgh, 1990)? Written, incidentally, on a large institutional mainframe computer - which did take a bit of mastering, but which has certainly prepared me pretty well for all the idle tapping around I've been doing on them ever since.

I guess the only Mexican poets I looked at in any depth in that epoch-making masterwork were the sublime Renaissance genius Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and (closer to the present day) Nobel Prize-winner Octavio Paz, together with certain of his contemporaries - I don't actually recall any nineteenth-century Mexican poets worthy of being discussed alongside the Argentine José Hernández (author of the epic Gaucho Martín Fierro). I could well be wrong, though.

Anyway, to hell with those dweebs! They're just jealous. Let them go back to their haggling and huckstering in the precincts of the temple. It gave me great pleasure to shake the dust of the place off my feet, and instead head north for a day-long road trip with my good friend and fellow poetry-obsessive David Howard, up here for the Going West Festival.



[Howard in Helensville]


I've known David for many years. We first met in Auckland in the late nineties, when he was making a living as an entrepreneurial pyrotechnician and events-organiser. He could never completely submerge the writer in him, though. The books have continued to appear in steady succession since the mid 80s:

  1. Head First. Auckland: Hard Echo Press, 1985.
  2. In the First Place: Poems 1980-1990. Photographs by Paul Swadel. Hazard Poets Series. Ed. Rob Jackaman. Christchurch: Hazard Press, 1991.
  3. Holding Company. Christchurch: Nag’s Head Press, 1995.
  4. Shebang: Collected Poems 1980-2000. Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2001.
  5. How to Occupy Our Selves. Photographs by Fiona Pardington. Wellington: HeadworX, 2003.
  6. The Word Went Round: Poems. Paintings by Garry Currin. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2006.
  7. S(t)et. Port Chalmers, Otago: The Gumtree Press, 2009.
  8. Beyond What is Said to What Is. Graphics by Roger Hickin. Governor's Bay, Lyttelton: Cold Hub Press, 2010.
  9. The Incomplete Poems. Governor's Bay, Lyttelton: Cold Hub Press, 2011.
  10. You're So Pretty When You're Unfaithful To Me. Auckland: Holloway Press, 2012.

After he left Auckland around the turn of the millennium we stayed in touch, even after he moved to the frigid paddocks of Purakanui, north of Dunedin. Financial necessity forced him to visit Auckland from time to time to organise fireworks shows (his principal source of income), and most times we'd end up heading out into the wilds on various crazed excursions to the heart of the New Zealand dream ...

A surprising number of those drives ended up in Warkworth, mostly involving a trip to the Unicorn Bookshop, then run by the late lamented Richard Wasley. I wrote an obituary for Richard here, but since then his beautiful Unicorn Bookshop has reopened under new ownership. They'd been enlightened enough to offer me a $20 book token in their monthly prize draw, thus offering another reason for turning our footsteps in that direction.



[Welcome to the Kaipara!]




[Still a bit of colonial pizazz left in the old town]




[along with other things ...]

Scary, isn't it? If I'd been more assiduous, I would have got some shots of the bizarre old cinema complex at the bottom of the hill as you drive out of town, which is now home to a huge collection of art and antiques, only occasionally open to the public - mostly on weekends. This time we had to content ourselves with staring through the windows and speculating about the effects of damp on pre-loved paperbacks ...

The whole point of these road trips is to barrel along in the car in no particular direction, with no clear destination in mind, shooting the breeze about life, books, poetry, and the doings of mutual friends and acquaintances. We originally met through poet-priest the Rev. Leicester Kyle, long before his departure for the Coast and a date with ecological destiny. We're also the joint executors of his literary estate, so there are generally a few things to sort out about that.

These are not particularly high-pressure conversations. I can't recall us ever having a serious falling out in the fifteen or so years of our friendship. I find a lot of his work incomprehensible, and much of mine seems to him (I suspect) perversely raw and underwritten. Who cares? We get on with the job, always with a certain respect for each other's judgement and dedication to the task in hand.




[The new-look Unicorn Bookshop (Warkworth)]




[The children's section]

And yes, I asked permission before taking these shots. We did spend a fair amount of money on various obscure books of poetry in there, so I guess Tania thought it would be churlish to refuse. She insisted on staying out of the photo, though. Which is a shame, because it's a beautiful little shop she's building there. Much of Richard's old stock still remains, but her own taste for children's books is beginning to make real inroads.

And so the day meandered on. We'd started from Glen Eden, driven north along the coast, via Helensville, then crossed over to Warkworth. By now it was time to hurry David off to the airport - which took a tiny bit longer than anticipated, but still got us there with time for him to check in.

As he left, he gave me a copy of this beautiful little book of poems by Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova (David does love those obscure Eastern-European writers) ... so I'll close with some lines from one of his sparse, spare, fascinatingly deadpan poems, "In the Lake Region" (trans. Ellen Hinsey):

The past does not enlighten us — but still, it attempts
to say something. Perhaps the crow knows more about us
and about history's dirt than we do ourselves.
Of what does she want to remind us? Of the black photos,
the black headphones,
of radio operators, black signatures under documents,
of the unarmed with their frozen pupils — of the prisoner's
boot or the trunk
of the refugee? Probably not. We will remember this anyway,
though it won't make us any wiser. The bird signifies
only stoicism
and patience. If you ask for them, your request
will be granted.

Pretty cool, huh?

If you want to check out some of David's own poetry, why not go to his author page on the nzepc?



['Astonished' Howard named Robert Burns Fellow
(Otago Daily Times September 12, 2012)]


Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Poetry Business


[The Tuesday Poem]

Tuesday Poems



That peripatetic poet and erudite Beckettian Harvey Molloy has just posted a poem of mine, "The Darkness", on his blog, as one of his weekly "Tuesday Poems." (I found out just what an authority he was on Joyce and Beckett - kind of inevitable, given the surname - a couple of weeks ago, when he put up my poem "U.p.: up")


[Harvey Molloy: Moonshot]

The idea didn't actually originate with him. Apparently it was Mary McCallum who first started the actual Tuesday Poem blog, which is now managed by a rotating editorship. The idea does seem to have spread like wildfire, though. There are now quite a number of sites which post a weekly poem on Tuesdays. You can check out a bunch of them through the links available here. Go on - what else are you going to be doing of a Tuesday morning?




[Fishpond.co.nz]

99 Ways into NZ Poetry



I've been allowed a sneak preview of the proofs of this mighty tome, written by Paula Green and Harry Ricketts, and due out from Random House in the middle of next month.

I was sent the advance sheets because Paula and I will be discussing the book (and talking generally about "ways into poetry") at the Going West Books & Writers weekend on Saturday 11th September (from 3-3.45 pm). I'll also be at the official booklaunch in the Auckland Central Public Library on 17th September from 5.30 -7.00 pm. Come along and pick up a copy then.

So what's it like? Well, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that it's the book we've all been waiting for: comprehensive, inclusive, varied, visually attractive and positively bursting with useful detail. Those of us who teach poetry will now have something to recommend both to students who are struggling with the whole notion of expressing yourself in heightened snippets of language, and more experienced readers who need a crash course in what's been written, when, and by whom.

It's not just a textbook, though. I defy anyone who takes a look inside to say that it's all familiar territory. To be honest, I think it's worth having just for the reprints of single poems with discussions by their authors. It's extremely interesting (and revealing) to see just how each of them approaches the task of dancing around a poem which was - of course - originally intended to be self-sufficient and self-explanatory.

It's going on all my reading lists right now. I think we're going to be talking about this book for a long time to come.


Check out Nelson Wattie's launch speech for the new Poetry Archive of New Zealand / Aotearoa. They already have an extensive catalogue of books available for consultation in their Wellington premises, but Mark tells me that donations from authors and publishers are always welcome. Be sure to check the online catalogue to make sure they don't already have all of your works, though!





[Notes]

Home & Away



The second leg of this Trans Tasman Poetry Symposium is scheduled for Wednesday September 1st-Thursday September 2nd in Sydney. You can find a full programme of events on the nzepc here, together with a digital archive of the poems and texts generated to date by the first part of the gathering.

There'll be a lot more to come, I'm told, so do keep on checking the site.

I understand that not many of you are going to be able to jet across to Sydney just for the occasion (I wouldn't be going myself if it weren't for a helping hand from my employers, Massey's School of Social and Cultural Studies). You'll notice that a lot of the papers from the Auckland part of the conference are already up on the nzepc, though, so hopefully the same will be true of the readings and discussions this time.