Showing posts with label John Denny. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Denny. Show all posts

Sunday, October 15, 2023

Slightly Foxed (b.o.f.)


John Fenton. Slightly Foxed b.o.f. [= but otherwise fine]. Auckland: John Denny, 1997.

I once belonged to a secret society.

It wasn’t especially secret – just a group of book enthusiasts who met once every month at the Kinder House in Auckland to jaw about their latest finds. It was called “Slightly Foxed.”

I first found out about it during a last-minute Christmas shopping spree. I’d just located a facsimile edition of Shackleton’s Terra Australis journal to give to my father, when I got to chatting to the salesman behind the desk.

He was quite a young guy, but very eager to talk – some relief from the surging crowds in Whitcoull’s basement, I suppose. When I admitted I was a bit sorry to give away such a prize rather than keeping it for myself, he urged to buy another copy. “Go on, you know you want to.”

Then we started skiting about how many books we respectively owned. Then onto this strange little club he apparently belonged to, and the respective tastes of its various members. One, I recall, was an enthusiast for the works of John Cowper Powys, but (as my new friend remarked) his own attitude to that author was “why use one word when ten will do?”

Having been a card-carrying Powysian since my teens, I vigorously demurred, and so it went on. It took me quite some time to extricate myself from there, but I have to say that the whole exchange remains quite vivid in my mind.

I never saw him again.

When I mentioned this “Slightly Foxed” group to a friend of mine, Murray Beasley, back at Auckland University, where we were both teaching at the time, he said that he had once attended a meeting of theirs, had a good time, but never been invited back. “It wasn’t really clear what the set-up was. Did one have to be shoulder-tapped? Were they judging the cut of my jib? Or should I simply have … turned up?”

A few years later, back in Auckland from a sojourn abroad, another friend, Kate Stone, asked me along to a meeting. She, it seemed, was a regular attendee, and knew all the regulars.

It was odd. From my long-ago conversation with the chap in the bookshop, I’d imagined something terribly high-powered: erudite discussions of colophons and signatures; all that bibliographical panoply I’d so eagerly tried to master in my years away at the University of Edinburgh.

Not so. The first time I attended the talk was (I think) entitled “Books on Waiheke,” and featured an old cloth bag containing various random finds obtained from the stalls and bookshops on the island, with desultory discussion of how much (or little) they’d cost. Hobbyist rather than serious collector talk.


The Kinder House (Parnell, Auckland)


But I was lonely, and it was a chance to get out and about, and the Kinder House was quite an atmospheric place to sit on a dark winter evening, with books on the table and mulled wine in one’s glass. So even when Kate stopped attending regularly, I kept on going along. I’d got on the mailing list somehow, so I suppose I had been shoulder-tapped, if such rituals ever actually took place. The whole thing was so informal, really, that it seemed impossible to imagine that there could have been that many obstacles to another person filling a chair.

The members were certainly both various and interesting. The oldest and most eminent was undoubtedly Ron Holloway, famous for printing so many New Zealand classics at his Griffin Press in the 1930s and 40s. He was pretty deaf, and seldom (if ever) took part in the discussions.

Then there was John Denny, a far younger, far more onto-it artisanal printer. He remains a friend. But the heart and soul of the group, so far as I was concerned, was John Fenton. A generous and clubbable man, interested in all aspects of the bookish game, especially Beat poetry and Jazz. It was he who wrote the society's history, pictured above - and, yes, that club logo on the cover was contributed by the great Ronald Searle!

Who else? Let's see - there was David Greeney, who'd had a career working in the publishing trade, and who knew it inside out as a result; there were Jan & Peter Riddick, a canny pair of local environmentalists; then there was the printer Ken Wood, who had a passion for collecting the same number from each numbered, limited edition he encountered. He must have had a magnificent collection even then!

  • 1997 - (24 September) “The Thousand and One Nights.”
  • 1998 - (18 March) “Kendrick Smithyman.”
  • 1998 - (10 June) “Maxim Gorky” [with Bruce Grenville]
  • 1999 - (1 September) “Mikhail Lermontov” [with Bruce Grenville]
  • 2000 - (19 July) “Henry James.”
  • 2001 - (21 March) “Antarctica.”
  • 2001 - (19 September) “Edgar Allan Poe.”
  • 2002 - (24 April) “Shakespeare.”

Probably the most successful of these - from the point of view of the other members, at any rate - were the ones where fellow-member Bruce Grenville, the (self-styled) Sultan of Occussi-Ambeno, showed a film from his massive collection of old celluloid – much of it inherited from the defunct stores of the Soviet embassy – while I talked about the life and works of the author concerned.

It was Bruce who contributed indirectly to my exit from the society, in fact. At one of the last of these talks – I think probably the one on Edgar Allan Poe – he got into an argument with the club’s president, and the two of them almost came to blows.

“If this continues, I’m out of here.” I proclaimed. There was no pleasure to be found in sitting at a table with these two gentlemen sniping at each other, and I think I came back just once after that, to give one last talk on Shakespeare.

I still run into old “Slightly Foxed” alumni, though, some twenty years on. I met up with John Fenton again recently, and he tells me that the society has, in fact, folded - but then he would say that, wouldn't he? Perhaps it still continues in some clandestine form.

To be honest, more of my energies were directed into writing groups by then: first the (so-called) “Bookshop Poets,” who met at Lee Dowrick’s house in Devonport; and subsequently the “Eye Street Poets,” who gathered at Raewyn Alexander’s place in Western Springs. I rather miss those convivial gatherings, too.






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, January 19, 2014

Changes at Poetry NZ



Alistair Paterson, ed.: Poetry NZ 22 (March 2001)


I'm happy to announce that, at a meeting at Massey University's Albany Campus on 26th November 2013, an agreement was reached between the Head of the School of English and Media Studies, A/Prof Joe Grixti, Poetry NZ's managing editor Alistair Paterson, and production manager John Denny, for the future housing of the magazine by the university.

The new managing editor, in succession to Alistair, will be yours truly. I was featured in issue 22 in 2001, and I guest-edited issue 38 in 2009, which (I hope) qualifies me for such a task - though I don't pretend to claim that I could ever adequately fill Alistair's shoes: he's certainly a hard act to follow!



Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ 38 (March 2009)


But what precisely is Poetry NZ? New Zealand's most celebrated (as well as longest lived) poetry journal has been appearing twice a year since the end of the 80s, when it was started by Oz Kraus, initially with a series of guest editors, but then - from issue 8 onwards - under the editorship of distinguished poet, anthologist, fiction-writer and critic Alistair Paterson.



In another, truer sense, though, one could argue that the magazine actually started in 1951, when Louis Johnson began publishing his annual New Zealand Poetry Yearbook. That would make it the country's second-oldest surviving literary journal, after Landfall, founded by Charles Brasch in 1947. Johnson's series stopped in 1964, but a bi-annual version of the (re-christened) Poetry New Zealand was revived by Frank McKay in the 1970s and 80s and ran to six issues, each helmed by a different guest editor.



Louis Johnson (1924-1988)


Poetry NZ, in its present form, has now reached issue 47, with a 48th (to be guest-edited by Nicholas Reid) promised for next month. Longtime publisher John Denny of Puriri Press no longer feels able to undertake the myriad duties associated with the production and distribution of the magazine, however, so it seemed like a good moment to re-examine Poetry NZ's future as one of New Zealand's very few journals dedicated entirely to poetry and poetics.



Alphabet Book (Puriri Press)


I will, fortunately, be assisted in my task by an advisory board including academic and editor Dr Thom Conroy; poet and academic Dr Jen Crawford; publisher and printer John Denny; poet and academic Dr Ingrid Horrocks; poet and 2013 Burns Fellow David Howard; poet and editor Alistair Paterson ONZM; poet and academic Dr Tracey Slaughter; and poet and academic A/Prof Bryan Walpert.

From issue 49 onwards, our intention is to revert to Louis Johnson's original concept of an annual poetry yearbook, approximately twice the size of the present 112-page issues, but retaining the magazine's essential characteristics, such as the featured poet, the reviews section, at least one substantial essay per issue, and - of course - a substantial selection from the poetry submitted to us by local and international authors.



Alistair Paterson, ed.: Poetry NZ 25 (September 2002)


I think that all three of us, Alistair, John and myself, feel that it would be a tragedy for New Zealand poetry if this journal were to cease to appear. Where else can such a substantial cross-section of our poets rub shoulders with writers from all over the world? Where else can we debate the important question of what (if anything) defines a national poetry (or poetics)?

Hopefully having a new institutional home will enable Poetry NZ to continue its already sixty-year-old engagement with such questions in the confidence that it will never become an in-house university publication. Like Landfall, so ably supported by the University of Otago, Poetry NZ will retain its proud independence, but also benefit from the resources of one of New Zealand's largest tertiary institutions (this year celebrating its 21st birthday here on our Auckland campus) ...



Existing subscribers will be sent a copy of the enlarged issue no. 49 at no additional cost. Thereafter, though, new subscription arrangements will have to be made. Full details will be published in issue 48, and thereafter made public on the Poetry NZ website.

The most obvious change for the moment will be the fact that we'll now be open to electronic submissions (with "poetry nz" in the subject line) via email text and MSWord file attachments - in fact, that will become our preferred way to receive work. More details on that, too, later.



Alistair Paterson, ed.: Poetry NZ 47 (September 2013)