Poem for Hone

My friend Mary Paul went up north to attend Hone Tuwhare's tangi at his home marae in Kaikohe. Here's the poem she wrote about the occasion, and also about the long friendship he had with the Paul family, first with Blackwood and Janet, his first publishers, but then on into the next generation:

Poem for Hone

Your hikoi from te wai o pounamu
Was not planned

Your descent into Papatuanuku not counted on
But you must’ve known they would make their own decisions

You’ve written of it often enough and you know that
‘Cremation is not the Maori way’

Sometime about 1am on the night before the afternoon we got there
Moana your granddaughter gave you a piece of her mind

I don’t know exactly the words she said but it was tough

Coming back up here to this old place
Makes you available for comment

Coming back to this marae, not your own but your people are here
Brings your whanau back too

They are humble but resolute, shattered still by your personal land march away from them in 1965

The tangi is for the man not only the poet
Your son mihis to his mother
‘You may have been a poet but she is the poetry of love’

The next day when by chance I meet her and Rewi in the Kiwaka café
She asks why people think being addicted to alcohol is so amusing
We smile

Later the idea of self-medication surfaces
And I remember a rambling conversation with my friend Peter on this New Years Eve
The thing that is most us is the part we have no control over

Your psychiatrist said you had a fetish –
wanting always the earthiness of our succulent woman bodies

You knew you longed for your mother
Though you issued that Kaka Point challenge

See if I care – scatter me here
Singing cockles and mussels alive, alive, oh

We climb the hill as the sun breaks out from its grey veil
And you are lowered beside her – someone regrets it’s not beside your sister

From your new possie you look North over a valley and hillside of bright bush
Grown up from ti tree since Jean went there with your sister 30 years ago

Hinemoa shelters us from the heat under her green umbrella
and we speak of everyone leaving and of how your fame didn’t spread here

Some things have changed since 1945 1965 1975 but not so much

But no-one should feel ashamed

Likewise for my mother who used to joke of ends and ashes with you
And my sister
They both lie in the clinging earth

At Akaroa
At Makara

We, like your family, are not as fine as them
But they are you, we are them

This was bound to be whatever we did,
but in taking you, carrying you, holding you,
embracing each other, it comes to be seen to be

Kai ora e Hone

Mary Edmond-Paul
26th February 2008

Bernard Gadd (1935-2007)

Yes, I'm afraid it's another obituary. Bernard Gadd died on December 11th last year, but I only heard about it earlier this month (See the Poetry Society's memorial page here).

Siobhan Harvey and some others are organising a reading in his honour, which I unfortunately won't be able to attend, but here are the details if you'd like to go along:

Where: Manukau Research Library, 15 A Ronwood Avenue, Manukau City

When: Wednesday 20th February at 5.30 pm

For myself, I thought I'd just write a few memories down here.

I first met Bernie in 1998, at the Tauranga Poetry Festival, where he was launching a book of Haibun with Catherine Mair and Patricia Prime. I offered to commission a review of it in the pander, of which I was then one of the editors. The pander's basic schtick (at the time) was anonymous reviews -- like the oldtime Times Literary Supplement -- and the notice, when it came, was pretty scathing.

I got an indignant letter from Bernie, which I printed in its entirety in the next issue, and so peace was restored.

We didn't meet often, but that was the basic pattern of our literary relations. We were both editors of the literary magazine Spin at the same time, and agreed on little, but I think we always respected each other's integrity and right to a contrary opinion: "Opposition is true friendship," etc.

I printed poems by him in Spin, in brief (which actually led to a falling-out with previous editor Alan Loney), and was happy to find myself on the same poetry list as Bernie at HeadworX. Something about his maverick, bull-at-a-gate attitude obviously appealed to Mark Pirie (and to John Dolan too -- I found a most intriguing review of Debating Stones (2002) at the Glottis website).

His name seemed to crop up everywhere! On cross-cultural anthologies of stories and plays for schools, on old articles about Te Kooti in the Polynesian Journal, in poetry magazines ... When Michele Leggott, Murray Edmond and Alan Brunton released their anthology of sixties and seventies poetry, Big Smoke, in 2000, Bernie came back at them with a counter-anthology of all the poets he considered unjustly excluded: Real Fire (Hallard Press, 2002).

He was feisty and irrepressible. I'm glad that he achieved some of the things he really wanted towards the end of his life. Alistair Paterson featured him on the cover of Poetry NZ 34, and his work was increasingly being feted and recognised.

For my own part, when I look back over old reviews and notices, I feel he treated me with a great deal of forbearance and understanding. He must have thought me an awfully jumped-up young cub at times ... But here he is on When the Sea Goes Mad at Night(Pohutukawa Press, 1999/2000), a millennial anthology edited by Theresia Liemlienio Marshall:

Ross’s poems have the effect of the post-modern. Places evoke crisp images, memories, fragments of thought, literary recollections which, set side by side, successfully create imaginative poems crammed with surprises and interest.

and on Chantal's Book (2002):

This is a book of love poetry for Chantal, but very much of the 21st century, with a keen sense of the ambiguities and contraries of love, a questioning of its permanence and capacity to change the lovers, an almost edgy ambivalence. Here too is humour, satire, irony but not the jokey embarrassment at love and lust of, say, a Glover. A variety of poetic techniques are employed, often giving the page the appearance of a layered modernity. But the poetry is essentially accessible and direct.

You can't say much better than that, can you? I wish I had a similar sheaf of notices of his own books I could flourish, but I always shied away from reviewing him somehow. I wasn't sure that I really understood what he personally was getting at with his interest in haiku and haibun, and his revisionist views on New Zealand history seemed to demand a more informed commentator than myself.

I am glad I printed so many of his poems at various times, though. He was a tireless contributor to magazines and anthologies, and they give off an increasing lustre now that there won't be any more of them. There was one in the special "Smithymania" issue of brief [26 (2003) 86, and this one in a later issue [29 (2004) 45], which now sounds rather sad, in retrospect:

Sketch

your sketch
comes from three days
of typhoon

you stand in a clear white space
your shorts show no hip nub
nor squinted navel

above a shoulder
is hatched shadow
or a hint of stanza
or window slats

our lines lie drifting
on table glass

NZ Poet Laureate Blog

Michele Leggott
[photograph: Joanna Forsberg (nzepc)]

Just a quick post to point out the existence - unveiled yesterday, in fact! - of the NZ Poet Laureate blog on the National Library site. Michele tells me she's going to try to use this site as a way of providing quick links to interesting poetry events and information, as well as taking an occasional trawl through the Turnbull's digital archives, so it should be a good place to go for updates on such matters in future.

And, whatever one thinks of star systems - or of the whole institution of Poet Laureate, in fact (personally I feel NZ poetry needs all the help and publicity it can get right now) - I'd like to put on record here that I think Michele was a brilliant choice as first (or sixth, depending on how you count) incumbent.

The nzepc has done a huge amount for poetry in this country, and there's no way that site would ever have got off the ground without her enthusiasm and acumen. When you add to that the innovative off-the-page poetry teaching she's now doing at the university, the student cafe readings she helps organise, and her own status as an poetic innovator, I think she's going to be a very hard act to follow.

(Incidentally, just to make my own role in these matters a bit clearer, I think I can perhaps foreshadow here that Pania Press is planning to publish Michele's next book of poems, hello and goodbye, later in the year. That really will be one for the collectors and poetry lovers, so watch this space for further details ...)