Dual Booklaunch at Objectspace

Michele Leggott launching Bronwyn Lloyd's book

Well, the booklaunch duly took place, on Sunday 27th at Objectspace. There was quite a crowd gathered to hear Michele Leggott launch Bronwyn's book The Second Location, and Paul Janman launch Scott Hamilton's new book of poems Feeding the Gods (both available for order from the Titus Books website).

Michele Leggott & Bronwyn Lloyd
[Photograph: Farrell Cleary]

Michele reciting her poem

& here's the poem itself...
[copyright: Michele Leggott
(reproduced by permission)]

The catering, by Bronwyn and her sister Therese, was especially delicious -- there wasn't a cheesy scone or a madeleine left in the place by the time it all wrapped up, well after 5.30 pm. (As I carried off the last box of books to Brett Cross's car, I heard Richard Taylor calling after me, "Even Jack's doing some work for a change ...")

Bah! Sour grapes ... Here I am in full spout, sharing my views with the assembled company:

Jack Ross
[Photograph: Farrell Cleary]

& again

& again

& again (though it's hard to say why anyone would want to take so many pictures of me -- at least this one shows the crowd: Mike Lloyd and my mother June prominent in the front row)

Unfortunately we didn't get any shots of Paul and Scott playing their celebrated game of monopoly, but you can read about it on Reading the Maps here & -- Stop Press -- I see that he now has pictures of it up here.

Scott Hamilton & Cerian Wagstaff

Scott & Karl Chitham
[Photograph: Farrell Cleary]

Richard Taylor & Cerian
[Photograph: Farrell Cleary]

Isabel Michell, Margot Nicholson & Scott (in profile)

Isabel checks out the gallery show
[Photograph: Farrell Cleary]

Phew! It took a bit of putting together, but everything seems to have gone very well indeed -- I guess that's what happens if you just live right. Time for a well-earned rest ...

By now Olive had had quite enough ...

The Second Location

[Bronwyn Lloyd: The Second Location]

Dual Titus Books Launch

at Objectspace
8 Ponsonby Road, Auckland
Sunday 27 November, 3-5pm:

Bronwyn Lloyd's first book of stories
The Second Location

Scott Hamilton's second book of poems
Feeding the Gods


The MC for the event is Auckland poet and academic, Jack Ross
Special guests Michele Leggott and Paul Janman will introduce Lloyd and Hamilton respectively
Refreshments and home-baked food will be served
A range of Titus titles will be available to purchase for Christmas presents.

ALL WELCOME

[Scott Hamilton: Feeding the Gods]

So obviously this is pretty exciting news in our household. My brother and sister-in-law are flying up from Welilngton for the event, and it's great that we'll be able to have the launch at Objectspace, where Bronwyn's exhibition Lugosi's Children has just been held.

If you want to know more about the book, and the event, check out Bronwyn's blogpost at Mosehouse Studio.

And if you'd like to read Scott's thoughts on the likelihood of this being a happy post-election extravaganza, clebrating the political demise of John Key and his right-wing allies, go to Reading the Maps ...

But seriously folks, a very special thank you should go to Brett Cross at Titus Books, for being the bastion of alternative publishing that he is. And another one to Ellen Portch, for her cool cover design for Bronwyn's book. And to Graham Fletcher, for letting Bronwyn use that image. And to Margaret Edgcumbe, for allowing Scott to use those Kendrick Smithyman photographs in his book. And to Cerian Wagstaff, for her promotional expertise. And to Michele and Paul, for contributing their time to this mad venture ...

So come along. Buy a book. Support the mavericks. You may need us one of these fine days.

Finds: Titus & Ross

Art Titus & Jack Ross. Titus & Ross. 1970. Fallout, n.d.

In one of Ezra Pound’s first published poems, ‘Famam Librosque cano’ ['Fame and the Book I sing' - an adaptation of the first line of the Aeneid] (A Lume Spento, 1908), he already imagines his future ‘audience’ as a ‘Scrawny, be-spectacled, out at heels’ scholar with a ‘three days’ beard’, who:

picking a ragged Backless copy from the stall, Too cheap for cataloguing, Loquitur, ‘Ah-eh! the strange rare name ... Ah-eh! He must be rare if even I have not ...’ And lost mid-page ... He analyses form and thought to see How I ‘scaped immortality.

- Ezra Pound, Selected Poems, ed. T. S. Eliot. 1928 (London: Faber, 1971): 42-43.

Hard to say if fiction is imitating life here. It was, of course, ‘In the year of grace 1906, 1908, or 1910’ that Pound made his own famous find on a Parisian bookstall:

I picked from the Paris quais a Latin version of the Odyssey by Andreas Divus Justinopolitanus (Parisiis, In officina Christiani Wecheli, MDXXXVIII) ... I lost a Latin Iliad for the economy of four francs, these coins being at the time scarcer with me than they ever should be with any man of my tastes and abilities.

- Ezra Pound, “Early Translators of Homer,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot. 1954 (London: Faber, 1974): 259.

As Pound goes on to mention, Divus’ Latin version of the ‘Nekuia’ (Odyssey, XI), served as the inspiration for Canto I (at the time his essay was written, c.1916, the ‘Third Canto’). Other examples of this trope – "beautiful, neglected book, sometimes mislabelled or badly damaged, picked up for next-to-nothing on an open-air bookstall, often at the sacrifice of other treasures" – can easily be compiled. Robert Browning’s ‘old yellow book’, bought in the Piazza San Lorenzo on a June day in 1860, was (according to Charles W. Hodell's introduction to The Old Yellow Book: Source Book of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book. Everyman’s Library 503. 1911. (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1927): ix) found ‘crammed between insignificant neighbours’.

... Five compeers in flank Stood left to right of it as tempting more – ... With this, one glance at the lettered back of which, And ‘Stall!’ cried I: a lira made it mine.

- Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, ed. Richard D. Altick. 1971. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981) 24-25 [1.75-76, 82-83].

FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, published ‘as a small quarto, without the author’s name ... gained no notice, and most of the two hundred copies found their way into a remainder box, and were sold at a penny each’ (according to Ernest Rhys' introduction to The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and Six Plays of Calderon, trans. Edward FitzGerald. Everyman’s Library 819. 1928. (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1948): xii). That is, until both Rossetti and Swinburne picked up odd copies independently, and the latter took it to show to George Meredith (Pound, too, refers to this incident. See The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 4th Collected ed. (London: Faber, 1987) 510 [80. 593]: ‘Rossetti found it remaindered ...’). Similarly, in his introduction to the Thousand and One Days, a group of Persian tales translated by him from the French, Justin McCarthy tells us that:

It was on a second-hand bookstall – the very bookstall, I believe, that has been made famous by Mr. Andrew Lang in his ‘Book Lover’s Purgatory’ – that I, rummaging, discovered some little French volumes, French volumes of the last century, lettered ‘Mille et un Jours.’ The title captivated me at once. I had loved ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ all my life, but I had never heard of ‘The Thousand and One Days.’ ... They were imperfect, unfortunately, only four out of a proper five, but I bought them, and read their stories, as far as they went.

- Justin Huntly McCarthy, ed., The Thousand and One Days: Persian Tales, 2 vols (London: Chatto & Windus, 1892) 1: vii.

McCarthy goes on to tell us that he soon discovered that the Persian stories ‘were easily obtainable in modern French editions’, but it is the original (though ‘imperfect’) find which remained in his imagination. Without even bothering to follow up Andrew Lang's remarks on the subject, I think it best to move on immediately to the principal subject of this post: Scott Hamilton's recent discovery of a very interesting old CD from the 1970s:

It was the age of the folk-rock duo. That Sundance Kid-looking dude on the left is (I think) Art Titus - a little reminiscent of Art Garfunkle, perhaps? - whereas his shorter, swarthier buddy is Jack Ross: clearly the brains of the outfit, if you look at their list of song credits:

I must confess to a certain indifference towards their style of music, despite Fallout Records' [home of the best rare music] exhortation on the CD cover: 'PREPARE TO BE BLOWN AWAY!' In fact, it's a little difficult at first sight to see why anyone would want to reissue this first and only album by the 'enigmatic duo from Marion, Indiana,' whose 'origins and subsequent history remains unknown.'

Given my own long and fruitful association with the almost equally enigmatic art-publisher Titus Books, which I'd hitherto assumed to be named after the eponymous hero of Mervyn Peake's Titus trilogy, new vistas of prophetic insight seem to be opened up by this otherwise innocuous coincidence. I ask you, why would Titus have published four books - Trouble in Mind (2005), The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (2006), EMO (2008) and Kingdom of Alt (2010) - by this Jack Ross (you'll find a list of various others in the sidebar opposite under the generic title "Jack Rosses of the World Unite!') over the past five years, if there weren't some ulterior motive? I leave you to ponder that, my friends.

Scott Hamilton: "The Ross Clique" (12/12/10) l to r: Hamish Dewe, Jack Ross, Ted Jenner & Brett Cross

2 Events in 1 Night

[Bronwyn Lloyd: Tui (after Anne McCahon) (2009)]

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to let you know that three of my School Journal birds (images attached) will be on display in a group textile exhibition curated by Judy Rae that opens at Waiheke Art Gallery next Friday, 25 Sept. at 6pm.

The birds will be accompanied by many beautiful textile pieces ranging from soft furnishings, jewellery, articles of attire and sculptural works, created by a range of contemporary textile artists including Rosemary McLeod, Rona Ngahuia Osborne, Merrilyn George, Miranda Brown, Paula Coulthard, and Margaret Chapman.

All of the works in the exhibition are available for sale.

I hope you can make it along to the show.

All the very best,

Bronwyn Lloyd

•

Hi Everyone,

As an attachment is your invitation to the launching of On the Eve of Never Departing, a collection of prose works by Richard von Sturmer.

The launch will be at Fordes Bar, 122 Anzac Avenue, Auckland City, at 6:30 pm on Friday, September 25th. Also launched will be Free Fall, by Rogelio Guedea, a Mexican writer. Both books are being published by Titus Books. Live music will be provided by Otis Mace.

Best wishes,

Richard von Sturmer

•

I hope you can sympathise with my dilemma. On the one hand, here's a book launch by the sublime Richard von Sturmer, whose work continues to be an inspiration to all us alternative types up here in Auckland.

On the other hand, here's the opening of Bronwyn's textile exhibition on Waiheke: 2 events in 1 night (to paraphrase the title of Janet Charman's first solo book of poems).

Go to both! you say. After all, they're bound to be boozing till pretty late on at Forde's Bar ... You can check out the exhibition, then hurry back to Parnell.

Well, you know, I would - but Waiheke? I just don't feel the logistics are on my side . So (of course) the choice is clear. I've just got to see those birds in situ, having watched them gradually come to squawking life around the house over the past couple of months.

I'm definitely going to be picking up a copy of Richard's book from Brett Cross at Titus Books asap after Friday night, though - and Rogelio's, too, for that matter.

So, for the record:

•


[Richard von Sturmer: On the Eve of Never Departing (2009)]

The booklaunch is on:

FRIDAY 25TH SEPTEMBER
from 6.30 pm

at Forde's Bar
122 Anzac Avenue
Auckland City

And here are the two culprits in question, decked out in their best plumage:

[Rogelio Guedea]

[Richard von Sturmer]

•


[Bronwyn Lloyd: Red Bird (after Jill McDonald) (2009)]

The exhibition:

FEEL OF FIBRE
(25 September - 19 October 2009}

opens on
FRIDAY 25TH SEPTEMBER
from 6.O0 pm

at Waiheke Art Gallery
2 Korora Road
Oneroa
Waiheke Island

For sales enquiries or further information,
please contact Linda Chalmers
Waiheke Art Gallery



•

I should just remark parenthetically that Bronwyn's recent honours include being selected for:

Best philosophical stand-off in a public space:
Wystan Curnow and Bronwyn Lloyd at the Rita Angus symposium

by Courtney Johnston on her blog best-of-3.

If you'd like to know more about that epoch-making stoush, check out the post here.

In the meantime, here's looking forward to fewer fisticuffs and more celebrations on Friday night!

And if you're curious to see the inspiration for Bronwyn's own nest of singing birds, check out the following images by (respectively) Jill McDonald and Anne McCahon:

[Gregory O'Brien: A Nest of Singing Birds (2007)]

[Anne McCahon: School Journal cover design (1954)]

bad appendix

[cover image: LynneMaree Patterson, "Twice as Good" (detail)]

Well, a good time seems to have been had by all at the big Titus booklaunch in K Rd last night. It was wonderful to see so many old friends, and to meet some new ones, too.

My novel EMO was introduced eloquently and insightfully (in my humble opinion, at any rate) by Jen Crawford. Then it was my turn to introduce her book bad appendix. This is what I had to say about Jen's poetry:

I guess there might once have been a time when one could say that so-and-so was predominantly a “love poet” or a “landscape poet” – or , for that matter, a “metaphysical poet.” There's a lot of evocation of places (both in Australia and New Zealand) in Jen Crawford's poems, yet the more distinctly they're delineated, the more obvious it is that she's referencing the landscape of the soul.

Take, for example, “primary school, port kembla” [45]

I walked along electrolytic street
and beyond the shadow of the stack
found broken cricks and patchy light,
mottled-leaf roses
and the stumps of old walls.
I lay down and gravel
pressed into my cheek.
beetles ran over my arms.

There’s a kind of directness about that which seems reminiscent of Blake’s “London”:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe

Or, perhaps more to the point, his “The Garden of Love”:

So I turn’d to the Garden of Love
That many so sweet flowers bore
And I saw it was filled with graves
And tomb-stones where flowers should be

That word “electrolytic” is particularly interesting – it sounds a bit like “epileptic” to me – as if it’s a very hot day and people are jittery, about to jump out of their skins. Here, though, it’s the street which is electrolytic, “capable of conducting an electric current” (as one dictionary definition has it), or, alternatively, conducive to electrolysis, that process of using electric currents to promote a chemical reaction. In this case (presumably), the electricity of human feeling and emotion transforming the solid landscape the poet sees: the stack, the cricks, the roses, the stumps of old walls, into the stuff of life.

I lay down and gravel
pressed into my cheek.

That’s a somewhat childish pose, perhaps – appropriate for the site of a primary school, that arena where emotions can run truly unrestrained. We can imagine the bitter tears, or (possibly) the ache of their absence, without their even having to be mentioned.

“Beetles ran over my arms” is, again, in this context, appropriate to the pettifogging, mind-numbing rituals of a primary school” “binding with briars my joys and desires.”

The poem continues with description of what is really no more than a walk through a landscape:

from here roads lead
out to the station, to the dunes,
the ankle-deep pool,
the mild veneer lake

But even that simple list of destinations sounds somehow ominous – as if each choice of direction were an existential decision. “The station:” getting the hell out of here, perhaps; “the mild veneer lake:” a more complete solution.

The journey actually culminates, though, in:

… the doorway of a pub
where in the beery cool a sparrow hunches,
watching not moving,
& when I step too close
doesn’t fly

It would sound cheesy, Wordsworthian, to talk about this as the “poet receiving comfort from natural phenomena” – the little bird which doesn’t fly away from her – but isn’t that what it is? Isn’t that what really happens sometimes? Maybe the pathetic fallacy isn’t such a fallacy after all? If, that is, one is honest about what it actually means – not that nature really does “sorrow for the son [or daughter] she bore,” (as A. E. Housman put it) but that our minds are naturally geared to interpret things that way.

There’s nothing cheesy about the expression of this poem, that’s the point. and one has to work pretty hard to get much detail from it. What is apparent at once (I’d say) to any reader is the mood of the poem – I doubt that anyone could follow Jen Crawford through this “electrolytic” landscape without getting a sense of anticipation, almost of dread.

The tone of Jen Crawford’s poetry is not polite and detached, not wryly observant and full of witty instances – nor is it loose and sloppy, unrestrained and “emotional” (in the worst sense). She’s not a beat, but neither is she a LANGUAGE poet. She has a lot to say about the substance and texture of experience, and she expresses herself with deftness and restraint.

The more I read her poems, the more I see in them. I don’t think it’s any accident that she quotes from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ (so-called) “Terrible Sonnets” in her own poem called “terrible sonnet” [59]:

oh put me out of my fucken misery.

It’s a note which hasn’t been heard in our poetry for far too long.

I'd like to repeat a few thank yous here, at the end of this post:

• to Brett Cross, for licking the three books into shape, and putting this whole launch party together. Titus Books has now issued 16 titles, I hear - a pretty amazing achievement off the back of a few enthusiasts with no grants funding whatsoever;
• to Bronwyn Lloyd, my lovely wife, for agreeing to collaborate with me on possible the oddest reading heard at a booklaunch so far this year;
• to Jen Crawford, for her kind and perceptive words about my book;
• to Emma Smith, for the most kick-ass cover image I think I've ever seen in my life (she's now admitted that the picture does indeed have a title: "have I been / pardoned / yet?");
• to Scott Hamilton, for his expert MC'ing of the event;
• to Cerian Wagstaff, for looking after the booktable and the wine, and also for taking so many excellent photos (a selection can be seen over at Reading the Maps) of the event;
• to Bill Direen, for his beautiful music and reading, and for so generously agreeing to share this launch with Jen and myself;
• to Peter at Alleluya cafe, for lending us his wonderful venue, high above Auckland city;
• and finally to all the people who came along to support us and to buy a book: for a while there it almost seemed to me as if everyone I'd ever met was moving in and out of the flickering lamplight.

[cover image: Emma Smith, "have I been pardoned yet?" (detail)]

[Additional: 3/7/08]:

Check out Scott Hamilton's write-up of the occasion at Scoop Review of Books.

Upcoming Titus Booklaunch (19/6)

[cover image: Emma Smith / cover design: Brett Cross]

Yes, it's that time again - booklaunch season!

The latest Titus Books extravaganza will be at the Alleluya Cafe, St Kevin's Arcade, Karangahape Rd, on Thursday 19th June from 6.30 pm onwards.

The three books are:

Jen Crawford, Bad Appendix (poetry)

Bill Direen, Enclosures (novel)

Jack Ross, EMO (novel)

I'm very happy to be in such distinguished company. Bill and I had a launch together in 2006 for our previous two Titus titles: my The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis and his Song of the Brakeman. Jen Crawford is a friend I've met more recently, and whose poetry I was proud to include in Landfall 214 (2007): 41-44. MC Scott Hamilton has already put up an interesting post about the event at Reading the Maps.

We'll all be doing our thing on the night: I'll be performing some dialogue from my novel with the lovely Bronwyn Lloyd, Jen will read some poems, and (probably the most potent lure) as well as giving a reading from his novel, Bill will also be playing songs from his latest album Songs for Mickey Joe in the course of the evening.

*

What can I say about EMO?

The original idea was to compile a blog-novel in the form of three sets of diary entries available online. The concept has grown a bit since then, though. Each page of text has ghost pages underneath it (still legible to the determined), as well as a main narrative by one of my three protagonists: Eva, Marlow and Ovid.

Does that sound complicated? I don't think it will present any real obstacles to readers of the two previous volumes in my R.E.M. [Random Excess memory] trilogy: Nights with Giordano Bruno (Bumper Books, 2000) or The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Titus Books, 2006).

I should emphasise, though, that EMO is an entirely stand-alone story, and does not require any knowledge of the other books in the series. I have to admit that parts of it have shocked some readers, but I don't think any of them have found it difficult to get into. On the contrary, it's only too compulsively - and disreputably - readable, as one of them remarked to me ...

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. ...

Titus Strikes Again

[Will Joy Christie at the Titus Launch]

Titus Books appears to have a thing for trilogies (following in the footsteps of their illustrious namesake, Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan, perhaps?). This is the second launch [in the Alleluya Cafe, Karangahape Rd, this time -- Thursday 12th April] at which they've presented three books of poetry simultaneously: Will Christie's Luce Cannon, Scott Hamilton's To the Moon, in Seven Easy Steps, and Richard Taylor's Conversation with a Stone.

[Cover illustration by Ellen Portch]

Both Richard and Will have published chapbooks at various times before, but this is the first full-length book of poems for all three of them. And long overdue, I think we'd all agree.

I'd like to say more about all of the books, and I will, but for the moment I just want to direct you to the accounts here and here of the launch on Scott's blog. (Unfortunately I was otherwise detained, enjoying a blissful mid-semester break down in Wellington, but that sure won't stop me trying to publicise these fascinating collections).

All three of the authors are, again, old brief contributors, so it's extra gratifying to see them busting out into the staid New Zealand poetry mainstream.

[Richard Taylor at the Titus Launch]

Oh, and for the curious:
In early 2005 Titus launched a triad of novellas: Bill Direen's Coma, Jack Ross's Trouble in Mind & Olwyn Stewart's Curriculum Vitae.
In late 2005 they launched their first hat-trick of poetry books: Bill Direen's New Sea Land, Olivia Macassey's exquisite Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction & Stephen Oliver's Either Side the Horizon.
In early 2006 they launched a duo of novels (soon to be expanded to three with the addition of David Lyndon Brown's Marked Men): Bill Direen's Song of the Brakeman & Jack Ross's The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis.

I like Mike

This is the text of the speech I'm intending to give at Mike Johnson's sixtieth birthday party / launch for his new book on Waiheke island tomorrow (fingers crossed):

Everybody knows that Mike Johnson’s one of New Zealand’s foremost writers of fiction. If you didn’t know you really haven’t been keeping up. His strange, futuristic debut Lear (1986) matured into the dark Faulknerian vision of Dumb Show (1996), but there are a host of other fascinating novels and stories to be enjoyed along the way – and I hope there’ll be plenty more to come.

The success of his fiction may have had the effect of obscuring to some extent the fact that Mike actually began publishing as a poet, and has kept up this side of his oeuvre with almost equal intensity. His 1996 AUP volume Treasure Hunt, for instance, is woven around the tragic 1993 death of the Chinese poet Gu Cheng, who committed suicide after killing his wife here on Waiheke island.

The book that we’re here to celebrate today, then, The Vertical Harp: Selected Poems of Li He, represents the coming together of a number of strands both in Mike Johnson’s own work and in recent New Zealand culture.

It’s a obvious truism that, like it or not (personally I like it a lot), New Zealand is moving ever faster towards becoming a multicultural society. The trend is clearest in Auckland, because it’s the biggest population centre, and thus plays a kind of Ellis Island role in our cultural melting-pot.

It’s evident on our streets, our shops, and (above all) in our schools. As a tertiary teacher, Mike Johnson has experienced this evolution firsthand (as have I in my own teaching jobs at local Language Schools and at Massey Albany).

For writers, of course, this is truly priceless material – an “international theme” to parallel the New World / Old World divide of Henry James. And what better way to signal this than by publishing this book of poems from the works of that classic Chinese poète maudit Li He (who some of you might know better under the earlier Anglicisation Li Ho)?

Each of the major T’ang poets has his English adherents. The great rivals Tu Fu and Li Po are probably the most frequently translated (by Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound intially, but then by a host of other more-or-less inspired amateurs or experts), but then there’s the beautifully contemplative landscape poet Wang Wei as well, and then – probably somewhere quite far down the list because of his perceived personal and poetic intransigeance – we eventually encounter Li He, the so-called “Chinese Baudelaire” (perhaps Lautréamont might be a better analogue, considering the fact that he died at the age of 26).

In my case it was in a Penguin book called Poems of the Late T’ang (still one of the great titles, I think), translated by a guy called A. C. Graham. I found the whole thing completely entrancing, and spent far too much time reading it the summer I was supposed to be studying for my end-of-school exams (which is one of the many reasons I bombed out so badly, I suspect. I don’t think the English examiners appreciated being bombarded with platoons of quotes from obscure Chinese poets).

I first came across Mike’s own translations when working on collecting texts for the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, an immense collection of 171 New Zealand poets reading their own work, on 40 audio CDs, collected between 2002 and 2004 in all four of the major centres (and now housed in Auckland University Library and the Turnbull in Wellington, if you’re curious to check it out). I was very intrigued by the way Mike seemed able almost to ventriloquise through this 9th-century Chinese poet.

I had, however, encountered something similar with Kendrick Smithyman’s translations from the Italian. In Kendrick’s case, it was as if the necessity to incorporate an ideal of the Mediterranean – amore, pane e fantasia – somehow liberated him from late twentieth-century irony, the corner his exquisite art had ended by painting him into.

In Mike’s case, however, Li He appears to have liberated a kind of inner barbarian, a wilder, crazier poet than traditional Kiwi mores really allow us to be (perhaps he’ll prove me wrong later in the evening).

I don’t want to quote too many examples, as I know he’ll soon be introducing and reading from the poems himself, but I’d like to make just this one citation from “occult strings” – a poem about a female shaman exorcising demons:

on her passion-wood lute, the gold-leafed phoenix writhes
as she mutters and mumbles, face twisting to the harsh sounds
picking note for word, word for note

descend stars and spirits! come
taste meat!

That doesn’t sound like Arthur Waley. It doesn’t even sound like Ezra Pound (whom T. S. Eliot referred to as “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time”). It’s time for some new inventors now, I think: both of Chinese poetry in English, and of New Zealand poetry itself. Mike Johnson is among those brave, outward-looking pioneers.

[This is what came up when I first googled Li He, trying to find a representative image. It’s hard to feel that either poet would really disapprove]:

The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis

[poster design by James Fryer]

It's two days now since that strange booklaunch in the English Department common-room at Auckland University. I've always thought it a pretty odd space, even before the carpets were all dyed slaughterhouse purple. Once we'd turned off all the lights and arranged little lamps around the window-ledges, though, it turned into a kind of Orphic cavern: the temple of the mysteries.

I think there had been a film preview in there before we arrived, so there was still a huge white screen in the middle of the floor. We didn't dare to try and take it down without instructions, so it stayed there behind the podium with the speakers projected onto it, like the chained-up captives in Plato's parable of the cave.

Michele Leggott had kindly agreed to introduce the speakers, and did so valiantly despite having hardly enough light to make out her notes.

Scott Hamilton went first. He's already given a spirited account on is own blog of the talk he gave introducing Bill Direen's J. G. Ballardesque novel / Apocalyptic text Song of the Brakeman. Brett Cross of Titus Books (the publisher of both novels), comments about the reading Olwyn Stewart then went on to give from it, that "it got quite surreal and trancelike there for a while, with hazy music in the background, the low lights, and words tumbling over the top ... I don't think I'll ever get those nodules of Tyrian purple nosing out of thinning fur out of my mind ..."

Then came Gabriel White, introducing my book The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis. "Jack has a cold front," he said. "Jack puts his worst foot forward." He went on to compare me to Plato -- or Plato's more subversive side, at any rate. He sure got a laugh at that! I despair of doing justice to all the extravagant stuff Gabriel had to say -- it was a pretty goddamned impressive performance, though, I reckon (though I say it that shouldn't). For a video-clip of part of Gabriel's speech, click here.

The wine flowed freely and bread & cheese went down by bucketloads. Strange shapes loomed up in the semi-darkness, insisting on sharing their own views on Atlantis. "Perhaps some of their descendants are here in this room," speculated one poet. "Perhaps we're all Atlanteans," I riposted.

Andrew McCully's mood music was the other unique feature of the evening. He played on heroically as evening turned into night and the stars and citylights came on. He was still playing when I left. I hope he and all those others got safely home.

If you didn't manage to get there, I'm afraid that you missed an experience. Both books are now on sale, though, and can be ordered from the Titus website. I'll finish with some of the plaudits my own book has earned already:

· The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis. ISBN 0-9582586-8-6. Auckland: Titus Books, 2006. RRP $NZ 27.95

"… after having read some of the contents, maybe it just wasn’t meant to be printed …"
– Marian Reeves, Massey Printery

"… rather rude …"
– Bronwyn Lloyd

"… women don’t always respond well to girl-girl erotica written by a bloke."
– Martin Edmond

I think that says it all, really. You owe it to yourself to check this novel out.