New NZ Poets by Region

[Seraphine Pick, "Girl (with offered eyes)"]

I want New Zealand to secede from Americanized world culture,
in the same way that these islands seceded from the ancient
supercontinent of Gondwanaland.
– Scott Hamilton

Here's my preliminary attempt at a regional breakdown of the 28 poets in the last of our three AUP anthologies: New NZ Poets in Performance (2008):

Place -- Name -- Dates

AUCKLAND

• Serie Barford (b.1960)
German-Samoan by birth; lives in West Auckland
• Anna Jackson (b.1967)
Born in Auckland, she now lives in Wellington.
• Jack Ross (b.1962)
Born and still lives in Auckland's East Coast Bays.
• Robert Sullivan (b.1967)
Nga Puhi. Educated at Auckland University, he now lives in Hawai'i.
• Sonja Yelich (b.1965)
Lives in Bayswater, Auckland.

BULGARIA

• Kapka Kassabova (b.1973)
Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, she emigrated to New Zealand in 1992.

CHRISTCHURCH & CANTERBURY

• Tusiata Avia (b.1966)
A Samoan-New Zealander, born and educated in Christchurch.
• David Howard (b.1959)
Born and brought up in Christchurch, he now lives at Purakanui, near Dunedin.
• John Newton (b.1959)
Lives and teaches in Christchurch.
• Sarah Quigley (b.1967)
Born in Christchurch, she now lives in Berlin.

COROMANDEL

• Olivia Macassey (b.1975)
Born in Coromandel, she now lives in Parnell, Auckland.
• Tracey Slaughter (b.1972)
Lives in Thames, on the west side of the Coromandel Peninsula.

DUNEDIN & CENTRAL OTAGO

• Nick Ascroft (b.1973)
Born in Oamaru, he now lives in the UK.
• Emma Neale (b.1969)
Born in Dunedin, where she lives and works.
• Jenny Powell-Chalmers (b.1960)
Born in Dunedin, where she lives and works (after a brief sojourn in Wellington).
• Richard Reeve (b. 1976)
Born and educated in Dunedin, where he still lives.

NAPIER

• Thérèse Lloyd (b.1974)
Born in Napier, she presently lives in Iowa, where she was Schaeffer fellow for 2007-8.

NORTHLAND

• Glenn Colquhoun (b.1964)
Lives in a small village, Te Tii, just north of Kerikeri.
• Gregory O’Brien (b.1961)
Born in Matamata, he worked as a journalist in Northland before moving to Wellington, where he now lives.

NIUE

• John Pule (b.1962)
Born in Niue, he came to New Zealand in 1964. Presently lives in Auckland.

WELLINGTON

• Jenny Bornholdt (b.1960)
Born and lives in Wellington.
• James Brown (b.1966)
Born in Wellington, he now lives in Island Bay.
• Kate Camp (b.1972)
Born and educated in Wellington.
• Lynda Chanwai-Earle (b.1965)
Born in London, she was brought up in New Guinea and educated in Hawkes Bay before moving to Auckland and, subsequently, Wellington.
• Andrew Johnston (b.1963)
Born in Upper Hutt, he now lives in France.
• Anne Kennedy (b.1959)
born and educated in Wellington, she now lives in Hawai'i.
• Mark Pirie (b.1974)
Born in Wellington, where he still lives.
• Chris Price (b.1962)
Born in Reading, England, she emigrated to Auckland in 1966. She now lives in Wellington.

New NZ Poets Teaching Notes

[cover image: Sara Hughes / cover design: Christine Hansen]

New NZ Poets in Performance
Edited by Jack Ross.
Poems selected by Jack Ross & Jan Kemp
(Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008)

With the appearance of this third and final volume of our series, it seems appropriate to say a few things about the “NZ Poets in Performance” project as a whole. The trilogy of anthologies Jan Kemp and I have put out through Auckland University Press include (in all) 27 + 27 + 28 = 82 poets and 110 + 87 + 97 = 294 tracks on 6 CDs. The first poet included, A. R. D. Fairburn, was born in 1904; the latest, Richard Reeve, in 1975.

‘If it doesn’t exist on the Internet, it doesn’t exist.’ One of our recent reviewers quoted this provocative apothegm from US poet and conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith. I don't know if I entirely agree - books and (more to the point) live performances have a huge importance still - but we've certainly taken the dictum to heart. There's now a complete index site devoted to the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive (2002-4) and its predecessor, the Waiata Archive (1974). This includes pages on each of our 200-odd poets, together with full bibliographical details of our three AUP publications and the original 3-LP set NZ Poets Read their Work (1974).

It's to be hoped that at some point in the future we may be able to link to a number of soundfiles from the archive itself, but for the moment (largely for copyright reasons) the only tracks available online are at our NZEPC 12 Taonga feature, and on the NZEPC's own author pages.

We've received some brickbats as well as many bouquets from our numerous reviewers. Some have taken exception to our choice of titles. Certainly, I concur that if we'd chosen to call any one of our volumes The Classic or The Contemporary or The New NZ Poets in Performance, I think it would be perfectly legitimate to interpret this as yet another exercise in building up a definitive canon of Kiwi poets. But then (of course) we didn't.

Classic, Contemporary and New NZ Poets in Performance, our actual titles, clearly imply the existence of many other "classic," "contemporary" and "new" poets whom we haven't been able to include for a variety of reasons (discussed in more detail in the books themselves). I'm not myself very interested in deciding who's in and who's out in a more loaded sense. The more the merrier is my instinct when it comes to our rich and fruitful poetry scene.

There also seems to be some dispute over the term “in performance." Personally I don’t see the presence (or absence) of a live audience as the sole criterion of performance. Do all the members of a movie's eventual audience have to be present when an actor records each take of a scene? And yet we continue to speak of Robert de Niro’s “performance” in Raging Bull or Taxi Driver. Or is it only stage actors who can be said to “perform”?

For the record, then, I'd like to state my opinion that a poet's studio recording of a poem can be every bit as much of a "performance" as the interpretation given at a live poetry reading. Our intention all along has been to include the best versions available to us of New Zealand poets reading their own work. I fail to see any ambiguity in our use of the term, but if anyone has been misled by it, I certainly apologise for the confusion.

I guess our desire all along was that the book could be used to promote awareness of NZ poetry in schools and tertiary institutions (though of course it’s been priced to appeal to individual consumers as well).

With that in mind, I’ve followed my own example with the two previous volumes by compiling a thematic breakdown of all the poems in the anthology (and it took quite a while, too, so don’t wax too sarcastic at my expense. I know that some of the categories are a bit suss):

• ANIMALS
• CHILDHOOD
• ELEGY
• FAMILY
• FANTASY & IDENTITY
• FRIENDSHIP
• HISTORY
• LANDSCAPE & LOCALITY
• LANGUAGE & WRITING
• LIFE, THE UNIVERSE & EVERYTHING
• LOVE
• PAIN & SUFFERING
• PEOPLE
• RELATIONSHIPS & SEXUAL POLITICS
• SUBURBIA

Another way of choosing a poet to talk about in your classroom (or your writing workshop, for that matter) might be through region and locality. Why not try to find a poet who comes from near where you live? Is there anything about their subject-matter, or their approach to writing, which seems to you to intersect fruitfully with the characteristics of your area?

Many of the poets in this book have associations with more than one place, but some (such as Tusiata Avia or Richard Reeve) are very strongly identified with a particular place, and constantly revisit it as subject-matter in their work.

Here are some of the places on offer:

• AUCKLAND
• BULGARIA
• CHRISTCHURCH & CANTERBURY
• COROMANDEL
• DUNEDIN & OTAGO
• NAPIER
• NORTHLAND
• NIUE
• WELLINGTON

Finally, further information may be accessed at the following websites:

• Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive: Bibliographical Aids for the Use of Those Consulting the Waiata Archive (1974) and the AoNZPSA (2002-2004) - Audio Recordings available in Special Collections, University of Auckland Library and in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.
(This is our own dedicated site, with full details of the AoNZPSA project).

• Authors. The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre.
(A select but valuable list of major NZ poets with pictures, recordings, and critical reactions).

• Homepage. Auckland University Press.
(Details of books and other publications by a number of the authors in the anthology).

• New Zealand Literature File. University of Auckland Library Website.
(This has thorough – though not always entirely reliable – bibliographies for many major New Zealand writers).

• Twelve Taonga. The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre.
(A brief account of the creation of the 1974 and 2004 recorded poetry archives, which were the principal source for this series of books).

• New Zealand Writers. The New Zealand Book Council Website.
(This has pictures and short biographical and critical summaries adapted from Roger Robinson & Nelson Wattie's Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998), but with updated information and supplementary entries on more recent writers).

Montale's Eel

[Begging eel (Motueka)]

I'm reliably informed (by Marco Sonzogni of Victoria University) that there are now more than fifty English-language versions of Eugenio Montale's famous lyric "L'anguilla" [The Eel], from his late collection La bufera ed altro [The Storm and Other Things] (1956).

So what's wrong with one more? (Mine's a little on the free side, as you'll observe from the version I've included underneath):

Eel


frigid ice-queen
of the Baltic
who quits her haunts

to plumb our river
mouths
branch to branch

capillary to capillary
deeper deeper
into the rock

writhing through ditches
till one day
a flash of light

glancing off chestnuts
ignites her
in the stagnant pond

eel
lightstick birchwand
Love’s arrow on earth

led downhill through
Apennine gullies
to green fields

still waters
through dust & drought
the spark that says

Just do it
when everything’s
burnt toast

your spitting
image
iris recognition

would suggest
mired in this life
can you not call her

sister?

Here's a more literal translation for anyone else who'd care to try their hand:

Eugenio Montale (1896-1981):
L’anguilla / The Eel



L’anguilla, la sirena
The eel, siren
dei mari freddi che lascia il Baltico
of the cold seas that quits the Baltic
per giungere ai nostri mari,
to come to our seas,
ai nostri estuari, ai fiumi
to our estuaries, to the rivers
che risale in profondo, sotto la piena avversa,
rising from the deep, under the downstream surge,
di ramo in ramo e poi
from branch to branch and then
di capello in capello, assottigliati,
from capillary to capillary, slimming itself down,
sempre più addentro, sempre più nel cuore
increasingly more inside, increasingly into the heart
del macigno, filtrando
of rock, infiltrating
tra gorielli di melma finché un giorno
between rills of mud until one day
una luce scoccata dai castagni
a light glancing off the chestnuts
ne accende il guizzo in pozze d’acquamorta,
lights her fuse in stagnant puddles,
nei fossi che declinano
in ravines cascading down
dai balzi d’Appennino alla Romagna;
from the flanks of the Apennines to Romagna;
l’anguilla, torcia, frusta,
eel, flashlight, birch,
freccia d’Amore in terra
arrow of Love on earth
che solo i nostri botri o i disseccati
that only our gullies or dried
ruscelli pirenaici riconducono
Pyrenean streams lead back
a paradisi di fecondazione;
to a paradise of insemination;
l’anima verde che cerca
the soul that seeks green
vita là dove solo
life there where only
morde l’arsura e la desolazione,
drought and desolation bite,
la scintilla che dice
the spark that says
tutto comincia quando tutto pare
everything begins when everything seems
incarbonirsi, bronco seppellito;
burnt to charcoal, a buried stump;
l’iride breve, gemella
brief iris, twin
di quella che incastonano i tuoi cigli
to the one your lashes frame
e fai brillare intatta in mezzo ai figli
which makes you shine intact in the midst of the sons
dell’uomo, immersi nel tuo fango, puoi tu
of man, immersed in your mud, can you
non crederla sorella?
not believe her sister?

So what's all that about? To find out, let's turn to the notes in Jonathan Galassi's magisterial translation of Montale's Collected Poems 1920-1954 (2000), p.594 et seq:

Arrowsmith [in his dual-text version of La Bufera ed altra, 1985] emphasizes that the eel should not be read as essentially phallic, but that it incorporates both sexes, incarnating an "undifferentiated 'life force' akin to Bergson's elan vital" ... 'The Eel,' then, should be viewed as a cosmic love-poem, an account of the phylogeny of the human spirit as well as a dithyramb to the woman who inspired it, or as [Gilberto] Lonardi ... puts it, "the anabasis of the Anima, in the Jungian sense, of its author".

Just so. Couldn't have put it better myself.

I'd also recommend the fascinating discussion of Robert Lowell's strange translation / adaptation of the poem (included in Imitations, 1961) in Paul Muldoon's recent collection of his Oxford lectures on poetry, The End of the Poem (2006). Lowell ended up running this poem into the one which happened to be printed next to it in the Penguin Book of Italian Verse, as he didn't realise that the page divide was also the end of the poem ...