Our Changing World: Public Lecture Series
(Albany Campus, Massey University, 2018)

What the ...? Of course not, I hear you say. And, naturally, I have a good deal of sympathy with this view. I took the title from Paul Celan-biographer John Felstiner's intriguingly named book Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems. My unfortunate colleagues Jo Emeney and Bryan Walpert have been forced to live with it.

John Felstiner: Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems (2009)

This particular public lecture is by all three of us, you see, but unfortunately I was the one who sent in the rubric for it, some time in the balmy summer days of last year, when all such tiresome things seemed an awful long way off. Now, alas, it's hard upon us:

Not only that, but this:

Watch online

These public lectures are available to view online via webcasts.
If you can’t join us in person, why not join online?
Watch Webcast Live via these links
(will be stored so can also be watched after the event):
https://t.co/QDcbKgvkKw

Here's yet another announcement from the Massey website:

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Can poetry save the Earth? 

Thursday 31 May 2018  | Associate Professor Bryan Walpert, Dr Jack Ross, Dr Jo Emeney
Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems is the title of poet and critic John Felstiner's 2009 exploration of how the human and natural worlds connect. Can writing and reading poetry change both? It’s a question that resonates with one of the most pressing issues of our time – the impact of climate change. Poets and editors Associate Professor Bryan Walpert, Dr Jack Ross and Dr Jo Emeney, from Massey’s creative writing programme, discuss how imagination and thinking about nature can be opened up through poetry and will read from their own work.

And here's the text of an article our wonderful communications director Jennifer Little wrote about the whole extravaganza:

Can poetry save the Earth?

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Can reading, writing and studying poetry have any relevance to how we think about and respond to increasingly grim environmental issues? A trio of award-winning poets, editors and creative writing lecturers from the School of English and Media Studies will share their ideas on this intriguing notion in a public lecture.

In Can poetry save the Earth? (Thursday 31 May at 6:30pm), Associate Professor Bryan Walpert, Dr Jack Ross and Dr Jo Emeney will explore the idea that writing and reading poetry can connect us to the natural world in a way that resonates with one of the most pressing issues of our time – the impact of climate change.

They will discuss how imagination and thinking about nature can be opened up through poetry, and will read their own and others’ work – from home grown greats such as Hone Tuwhare and Brian Turner to American poet Robert Frost and Romantic English poet John Clare. It is the fourth of ten free public lectures in the 2018 Our Changing World series, featuring speakers from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

They’ve borrowed their lecture title from Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems - poet and critic John Felstiner's 2009 exploration of how the human and natural worlds connect.

While Felstiner may have intended just to give his book a catchy title, “Poetry and poets can use their sway to agitate for change. Why else would so many of us be put in prison?” says Dr Emeney.

“I can think of at least one example where the use of a chemical pesticide (DDT) was banned across the United States as a direct result of a book on the subject written by a poet.”

“I think Felstiner chose the title in a teasing way, since it's so obvious that poetry can't save the Earth. It gets more interesting when you start to question ‘why not’, though,” says Dr Ross. “Why couldn't it at least help? Doesn't poetry - by its nature - suggest certain attitudes which might be of value in keeping us alive?”

“I don’t think a particular poem is likely to save the Earth,” Dr Walpert says, “but I think that poetry as a whole can have an important effect on the way we think about the problems around us.”

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Eco-poetry voices 21st century concerns

While there are and always have been ‘nature poets’, there’s now a complete school of thought, with learned journals, anthologies, and growing bodies of work called ‘eco-poetry,’ says Dr Ross.

He and Bryan have co-supervised a PhD thesis in this relatively new, cross-disciplinary field. “I don't see how one can be a poet and not be aware of your environment, regardless of what that awareness actually means or constitutes,” he says.

“Poetry is about respect, about making sure that in future we listen more carefully to the voices who've been warning about this for so long: before Rachel Carson [ecological prose poet and author of the ground-breaking 1962 environmental science book Silent Spring], even, and all the way back to John Clare [19th century English poet) and [Romantic English poet and painter] William Blake (those 'dark satanic mills’).

“Perhaps in the current context,” says Dr Walpert, “at a time when we are so overwhelmed with digital waves of language and such a public experience of it, much of it without nuance – private experiences of language that take more than a few seconds to read, that bear re-reading, and that embrace complexity have a particular value.”

Bios

Dr Jo Emeney has written two poetry collections: Apple & Tree (Cape Catley 2011), and Family History (Mākaro Press 2017), as well as a recent nonfiction book, The Rise of Autobiographical Medical Poetry and the Medical Humanities(ibidem Press 2018).

Dr Jack Ross is managing editor of Poetry New Zealand, New Zealand’s oldest poetry journal (now published by Massey University Press), as well as author of several poetry collections, including A Clearer View of the Hinterland (2014).

Associate Professor Bryan Walpert has published several collections of poetry in the US, the UK and New Zealand, most recently Native Bird (Makaro Press); a collection of short fiction, Ephraim’s Eyes, which includes the short story, 16 Planets, that won the climate change themed Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire Award for fiction. He’s also written two scholarly books on poetry, Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry and the recently published Poetry and Mindfulness: Interruption to a Journey.

Lecture details:
Can poetry save the Earth? 31 May, 6.30pm: Sir Neil Waters Lecture Theatre (SNW300), Massey University Auckland campus, Albany.
Register at massey.ac.nz/ourchangingworld

If all that hasn't put you off, feel free to put in an appearance tonight at the lecture. Failing that, you can see the poems I'm going to be reading as well as the images from my powerpoint here, on my Papyri website. (Hint: it's likely to involve both Paul Celan and John Clare):

Gisèle Celan-Lestrange (1927-1991): "Etching"

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[all pictures of the event courtesy of Bronwyn Lloyd]:


Jo Emeney, Bryan Walpert & Jack Ross

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My New Massey Course on the 1001 Nights

Bronwyn Lloyd: Arabian Nights bookcase (3/2/17)

In three weeks from now, my new paper 139.329: Advanced Fiction Writing will be starting at Massey Albany (where I teach), as well as in an extramural version for distance students.

The most innovative aspect of this course is that it's centred firmly on the Arabian Nights - or, rather, on the almost infinite variety of fictional techniques on display in that work (if it is a work, that is, rather than just an eclectic anthology of stories collected over the centuries by different compilers in different languages and cultures).

How exactly am I proposing to do that? Well, if you're curious, you could do worse than check out the following link to the (publicly available) course website: http://albany139329.blogspot.co.nz/. That will give you a pretty good overview. If you're really interested, of course, we're always open to new enrolments. (After all, as an old Linguistics Professor told the idealistic young J. R. R. Tolkien when he first arrived at university, "What is a university, lad? It's a factory. And what does it produce? It produces fees").

For those of you who are bit less passionate about the subject, I thought it might be best here to reprint a kind of q-&-a interview I did on the subject with the Canadian-Sikh Indian writer Jaspreet Singh when he came to stay with us a few months ago. He was particularly intrigued by the large bookcase full of all the different translations and versions of the collection which we have in our living room.

Given his upbringing in North India, in Kashmir and New Delhi, Jaspreet preferred to use the Persian form of the title, Hazar Afsaneh [Thousand Tales], rather than the more familiar Arabic Alf Layla wa Layla [One Thousand Nights and a Night].

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Bronwyn Lloyd: Arabian Nights bookcase [close-up] (3/2/2017)

Hazaar Afsaneh [The Thousand Nights]:
An Interview by Jaspreet Singh

John W. MacDonald: Jaspreet Singh (2008)

[Jaspreet:] Who introduced you to Hazaar Afsaneh as a child? How old were you? Where were you based?

[Jack]: You know, it’s quite hard to say. I suppose it must have been my father. At any rate he was the one who bought the beautifully illustrated editions of Aladdin and Sinbad the Sailor which I remember poring over with such attention. I still have one of them now:

Maraja: The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor (1964)

The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor. Retold by Shirley Goulden. Illustrated by Maraja. London: W. H. Allen, 1964.

I suppose that puts it back well before the age of 10 or so. We were already in the house in Mairangi Bay. All my siblings were born and brought up there.

When did the Nights become an incurable obsession?

I think that they really took over – from being one of many other bookish interests – after I’d finished my PhD thesis and was utterly sick of the subject matter of said subject of study (books about South America in European literature). So that would put it around 1990: 25 years ago.

Tahiti?

Ah, well, you make a good point. It was while I was in Tahiti, studying French, in 1978, at the age of 16, that I bought my first substantive copy of the Nights (or, rather, arranged to have it given to me as a birthday present: they’d bought me another book which I already owned, and offered to exchange it. I – somewhat cheekily, in retrospect – asked to be allowed to swap it for the two volume Classiques Garnier edition of Galland’s Mille et Une Nuits.) I read virtually every word of it in French, then, long before I owned it in English.

Do you have a name for the bookshelf? Hazaar Afsaneh (1000 Stories) bookshelf?

Bronwyn Lloyd: Glass-fronted bookcase (2/2/17)

Just the Arabian Nights bookshelf, I suppose. Before that they were scattered all over the place: the main ones in that glass-fronted bookshelf I inherited from my grandmother.

When exactly did you start seeing your growing collection as a separate bookshelf?

I suppose, probably, when I was living in Palmerston North in 1991. I already owned a number of editions in various languages, and the sheer bulk of them was beginning to make it difficult to house them.

Strange, the bookshelf is only a few meters away from the room where you first read 'Sindbad the Sailor' and 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves'!!! Talk a bit about this.

Yes that’s right. Of course, it’s true to say that if you stay in or around the same house for a very long time, it goes through a number of evolutions in your mind. That far-off house of my childhood is harder for me to remember than some of its more recent incarnations: the house my mother and father grew old in together, after all of us had left to the four corners of the globe.

Nevertheless, there is something strange about literally being in the same place – again. Comforting on the one hand, but also somewhat disconcerting. It doesn’t seem to fit with the peripatetic nature of the modern world.

Memory/Story of the 'last' book you acquired for the bookshelf? The first 3 books (now part of the bookshelf)?

The Mardrus-Mathers Translation (1899-1904; 1923)

I think that the latest book I inserted into the bookshelf (every one that goes in means that another one has to go out now) was a beautiful little copy of Dr J. C. Mardrus’s The Queen of Sheba: Translated into French from his own Arabic Text. Translated into English by E. Powys Mathers (London: The Casanova Society, n.d. [1924]). I bought it in the Browns Bay market (of all places!) Mardrus’s turn-of-the-century version of the Nights is – though wildly inaccurate – extremely entertaining, and the English translation of it is in some ways even more stylish than the original (Powys Mathers was a far better poet than Dr. Mardrus).

The first three books I got for this bookcase were, I would imagine:

Galland's Translation (1704-17)


• Les Mille et Une Nuits: Contes arabes traduits par Galland. Trans. Antoine Galland. 12 vols. 1704-17. Ed. Gaston Picard. 2 vols. 1960. Paris: Garnier, 1975. (bought in Tahiti in 1978)




Burton's Translation (1885-88)


• The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. Trans. Richard F. Burton. 1885. Decorated with 1001 Illustrations by Valenti Angelo. 3 vols. New York: The Heritage Press, 1934. (bought in Auckland sometime in the early 80s)




Lane's Translation (1839-41)


• The Thousand and One Nights; Commonly Called The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Trans. Edward William Lane. 3 vols. 1839-41. Ed. Edward Stanley Poole. 1859. London: Chatto, 1912. (the first two volumes I found in one shop; the other, a couple of years later, in another – the coincidence has always intrigued me …)

But is it really a 'book'? What kind of a book is the 1001 Nights?

Syrian Ms. of the 1001 Nights (14th century CE)

It’s more the assertion of a book than an actual book. Certainly there was (or must have been) a Persian collection called the Hazar Afsaneh, which almost certainly predated Islam. It doesn’t survive, however. What does survive is a tiny scrap of manuscript from the ninth century AD, which seems to be part of a translation of the frame-story of the Nights – though probably not quite as we know it. After that there are various not-entirely-consistent references in Arabic reference books around the turn of the millennium, and finally the Galland ms. – a fourteenth-century, 3 vol manuscript of the (so-called) “Syrian” version of the Nights. This is the oldest extant text and was – interestingly – also the first one to be translated more-or-less in full.

After that, after the Nights had become the rage of 18th century Europe, the pressure to find a “complete” version of the collection became overwhelming. It was possibly in response to this that the (so-called) “Egyptian” text was put together – it’s also known as “ZER” ("Zotenberg’s Egyptian Recension”) after the scholar who first identified it. It was a version of this text which was first printed in Cairo in 1835, and it was a variant of it which was translated by Lane, Payne, and Burton, the three most significant English translators.

In other words, it has no identifiable author, dates from a variety of eras, originated in a language and tradition different from the one with which it’s now identified, and has an endlessly varied table of contents. All that really makes it a book is the central idea of Scheherazade telling stories for her life to the tyrannical King Shahryar. In other word, a fictional character constitutes its main authority for being (a little like the Bible, perhaps, which similarly rests its status as a book on the fiction of “divine inspiration”: i.e. having God as its author) …

Galland's Translation (1704-17)

Storytelling techniques?

These are very interesting, and repay much study. While it’s true to say that it’s more of a library than a single book, nevertheless the central core of stories already present in the Galland ms.: “The Fisherman and the Genie,” “The Porter and the three ladies of Baghdad,” and the “Tale of the Hunchback” establish a set of conventions which, while gradually adulterated in much of the rest of the collection, give us our notion of an “Arabian Nights tale.” The Chinese box effect of tale within tale within tale is part of it (what Todorov calls “l’homme récit”: the person who is the story they have to tell); also the supernatural atmosphere of magic and enchantment, particularly the ubiquitous presence of genies and magicians alongside scenes from everyday life; also the convention of Haroun Al-Rashid’s boredom, which leads him to undertake visits to the seedier quarters of his own city; also the highly eroticised encounters between beautiful youths and maidens; also the cliffhanger convention of ending each story at a dramatic point each morning in order to take the serial up the next night; also the highly ritualised and repetitive language employed to maintain our interest (there are hundreds of poems embedded in the stories, also: each one quoted by a character as a kind of reflection on the situation they find themselves in). Is that enough?

Djinn or Gin?

The French word génie, which Galland used to translate the Arabic word “Djinn” (plural “Djinni”) of course really means “spirit” – hence its use as a loanword in English for a “genius” (great spirit). “Gin” in the sense of a gin-trap, yes indeed: since once I fell into this particular pit I quickly realised there was no obvious way out. As for other kinds of gin, I’ve always been more of a wine and beer man myself …

Will your bookshelf continue to grow?

I’d like to say no, but I fear that the real answer is probably yes.

What is unique and unusual about this bookshelf? Books absolutely essential? Books you are proud of? Trophy books? Books you would like to add? Books you would like to discard? Books you have given away?
Books you have tossed aside? Thrown away?
Books you would like to steal?
Books others would like to steal from your collection?

I suppose I treasure most the books I’ve had longest: the 1934 3-volume “Heritage Press” edition of Burton; my first complete 16-volume set of Burton’s Nights, that French edition of Galland I bought in Tahiti almost 40 years ago.

Ideal Hazaar Afsaneh bookshelf?

Payne's Translation (1882-84)

Well, that would include a complete copy of John Payne’s 1882-89 translation as well as my complete Burton (1885-88). It would include Henry Torren’s 1938 attempt at a complete translation (which he abandoned after one volume). It would also include a copy of the 4-volume 1839 MacNaghten Arabic edition of the Nights, as well as the 1835 Bulaq edition. I’d also like a copy of Weber’s three-volume Tales of the East (1812).

What does your mother think about it? Your partner? What would your father say? Your ancestors?

I think they all think (or would think, in the case of those no longer with us) that I’m quite mad on the subject.

The mind, and impulses, of a collector?

Strange, certainly. One can contemplate the assemblage with perfect satisfaction without it having any appreciable contact with the rest of your life. If the whole thing suddenly disappeared, would one be any worse off?

Have you read your entire collection?

No, not really. There are many versions of the Nights I haven’t read, as well as a lot of the associated collections. I proceed by fits and starts.

The number of times you've read the Nights? When and where and how?

It took me a number of starts to get to the end of the Burton edition, and as I worked my way through some of the more arid regions of the 16 volumes, I think at times I was impelled only by the desire to prove Borges wrong (he said it was impossible to get to the end of that version).

For instance, is it possible to read Hazaar Afsaneh in the kitchen?

I question whether I could read any book in the kitchen.

Do you prefer reading during day or night?

I used to be able to read any time of the day or night. Now I only really read first thing in the morning, over coffee, and last thing at night, before going to sleep. Sometimes I have a bit of a read in the middle of the day, in the guise of a siesta.

Did someone ever read them aloud to you? Did you?

No, I’m not sure that I’ve ever really experienced that outside movies and audio books, which isn’t quite the same thing.

Illustrators of the nights?

There are so many! Edmund Dulac, Marc Chagall, Kay Nielsen, Maxfield Parrish, and – going back a bit – the beautiful illustrations of William Harvey from the original edition of Lane …

Edmund Dulac: Arabian Nights (1907)

Maxfield Parrish: Arabian Nights (1909)

Marc Chagall: Arabian Nights (1948)

William Narvey: Arabian Nights (1839-41)

Translations of the nights?
Translators of the nights?

Some swear by the German translator Littmann; others (Marina Warner, for example) by the 3-volume French Pléiade translation of Bencheikh and Gabrieli; some like Malcolm & Ursula Lyons recent complete Penguin translation; personally, my adherence is still to Burton, for all his eccentricities. Joseph Campbell was a great fan of John Payne’s translation. For sheer entertainment, I think I would read Powys Mathers’ English version of Dr. J. C. Mardrus’ belle infidèle turn-of-the-century French translation.

Littmann's Translation (1921-28)

Bencheikh & Miquel's Translation (2005-7)

The Lyons' Translation (2008)

Burton?

A landmark: indispensable, never to be superseded.

Talk a bit about your blog.

I put up the blog ["Scheherazade's Web"] because I couldn’t face the task of editing and reconciling all the various essays I’d written (and published, or read at conferences) about the Nights at various times into a single rational text. Instead, I just plonked them all online, together with a lot of the supplementary materials I’d collected. It seems to provoke a lot of correspondence from isolated Nights fanatics in far-off places.

Did the Nights inspire your own writing?

Jack Ross: EMO (2008)
Cover illustration: Emma Smith

It has had a certain influence, yes: one of my novels, EMO, has a character in it who has written a book about the Nights, said book being my own projected, half-written book about the Nights. It also comes up in quite a few short stories.

Do you recall ever dreaming about the 1001 Nights?

I’m not sure that I do, though I have had many dreams where I was in a second-hand bookshop making all sorts of amazing discoveries in the stacks …

Did you ever dream about your Hazaar Afsaneh bookshelf? About a paradisiacal library of sorts?

No, my dreams tend to be much more suffused by anxiety than that.

Borges and the Arabian Nights?

Well, I wrote an essay about that, as well as various other twentieth-century interpreters of the Nights (John Barth, Andras Hamori, Abdelfatto Kilito) – I even translated his poem on the subject (both are on the blog).

The whole world is within this bookshelf? Not W. G. Sebald's 'Rings of Saturn' but Jack Ross' 'Rings of Arabian Nights'?

In a sense, yes, though I’d hate to be condemned to read only the Arabian Nights for the rest of time. There are other stories, however all-encompassing this one collection has come to be.

Thoughts about Marina Warner? A. S. Byatt? Salman Rushdie?

All have been inspired by the Nights – none know quite so much about it as they think. Quite superficial thoughts about it keep on coming up again and again in their work. Rushdie, of course, has been more inspired by the Kathasaritsagara [Ocean of the Streams of Story] than by the Nights themselves. Warner failed to write the book she could have written on the subject. Byatt has done some nice, rather mannered, imitations of it.

Why are Non-Western books about the Nights not very popular in the West?

Interesting question. It’s true that Mahfouz and other Arabic novelists (especially female ones) who’ve been inspired by it are not widely read – but then, I’m not sure that any contemporary Arabic writing - most unjustly - is very much read in the West!

New Zealand Maori and Pakeha and the 1001 Nights?

I think that would be for Maori writers to say. If they see value in its structures and formulae, it would be very interesting to hear in just what way.

Do you recommend the Arabian Nights Encyclopedia?

Very much so. An indispensable work.

Freud, et al.?

I guess Freudian readings of the central Shahryar / Sharazad dilemma are pretty frequent and (some of them) pretty persuasive. But then I’ve always been rather a fan of Freud as a literary critic.

Edward Said, et al.?

He has little to say about it directly, but I imagine it would strike him as a particularly egregious piece of Orientalist clap-trap – in its larger cultural overtones, at least.

Future of Hazaar Afsaneh?

I think the Academic mill has only just begun to grind away at it. I hope they don’t succeed in crushing its appeal altogether.

Future of your bookshelf?

I like to fantasise about presenting it to some appreciative institution, but I doubt that will ever happen. Sooner or later, I fear, it will be dispersed into a second-hand bookshop somewhere and hopefully continue to fertilise and inspire future bookworms like myself …

Early Copies of Lane's Translation (1839-41)

[13/7-22/8/15]


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Kay Nielsen: Scheherazade (1922)

Sacha Jones: One Woman's World

Sacha Jones: The Grass was Always Browner (2016)

A long time ago, in a galaxy not too far away from this one, I had a student in my Creative Writing paper at Albany called Sacha Jones. It takes most students in this course quite some time to get into the frame of mind where they can critique and analyse each other's work without fear of possible social repercussions. Developing that group rapport is an important part of teaching the paper.

Sacha, however, had strong opinions, and was not afraid to express them. Her ideas about form and structure seemed impressively astute and advanced, too, so I wasn't entirely surprised to find out from her midway through the course that she was in fact completing a PhD in Political Studies at Auckland Uni at the same time as attending this beginners' writing class. Let's just say that she stood out from the first.

Sacha Jones

She must have enjoyed it, though, because she went on to enrol for our stage two course in Life Writing (broadly speaking: Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, Genealogy and all variants on same). I usually only give a couple of guest lectures in this paper, but this year I was teaching the whole thing as one of my colleagues was away on leave.

It was, I have to say, a very stimulating experience. I recall some fascinating debates on the longterm legacy of the Women's Movement on writing and (indeed) society in general, where I tried to stress the immense value of that "the personal is political" mantra, and all the other ideas so hard fought-for then and so taken for granted (often, alas, in their absence) now.

This was very much Sacha's territory: part of the subject of her PhD (now completed) in fact - and she had a lot of light to shed on it.

After the end of the course, I didn't see so much of Sacha: a couple of meetings at the Society of Authors, and - of course - the stimulation of following the postings on her blog One Woman's World. This blog very much exemplifies the idea of exploring all the ramifications of - yes - one woman's life in the early twenty-first century, complete with "Poetry, prose, politics and parenting; photography, pirouetting, pruning and prattling on: a few of [her] pleasures, predilections and predicaments."

And now Sacha's memoir, The Grass was Always Browner, is being published by Finch Publishing (Sydney, Australia)! It's due out in New Zealand a little later this year: in May, if I'm not mistaken.

Now I always think it's extremely uncool - not to mention completely inaccurate - to claim any credit in the successes of one's former students. People's achievements are their own, and any help you may have given along the way is likely to loom larger in your imagination than theirs. That doesn't mean, however, that I'm not extremely proud of her and very chuffed to hear about this happy event.

Nevertheless, the fact that she was already well advanced in her Doctoral studies when we first met means that I'm unlikely to have exerted too much influence on her development as a writer. Never mind: I'm pleased to celebrate my colleague's book here and to recommend it to you strongly.

The book has many resonances for me, as my mother grew up in Sydney (though at a somewhat earlier date), so I grew up on tales of bull-ants and the blueness of the Blue Mountains. We made several trips over there during my grandparents' lifetime, so I retain quite a vivid memory of the family house in Chatswood (immense it seems to me in memory: with great wooden verandahs where I lost my favourite Matchbox toy, a little police car, and had to be comforted with the gift of a little koala bear).

If you'd like to sample some more of Sacha's writing, you could look at her fascinating piece Hunger, included in our online anthology of students' writing from the Life Writing course. It gives you some idea of the territory she covers: ballet, bulimia, body issues, but - of course - many of life's brighter aspects as well.

The best of luck with the book, Sacha!

Massey Albany Open Day (16/8)

School of English and Media Studies Notice Board [LA]

I just thought I'd post a few of the pictures that Bronwyn Lloyd and Leola Abraham (our College communications advisor), took of us all on Saturday 22nd August:

The SEMS desk [BL]

Bronwyn & I proffer advice [LA]

Jack Ross & Pansy Duncan [BL]

The Round Room, Atrium Building [BL]

Our part of the Round Room [LA]

You can find more of these online:

l-to-r: Pansy Duncan, Bronwyn Lloyd, JR, Raquel Harper, Joe Grixti [LA]

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.

Jan Kemp: 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) ...

Massey's Albany 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)