2011 - Our Year in Review

[Jack & Bronwyn (27 August 2011)
[Photo: Katharine Jaeger]

Last year at about this time I put up a post about various of the projects Bronwyn and I had got involved with in 2010. This year I thought I might do the same -- a little anthology of the year's activities (& blogposts):

1. February 17:
   
   
   [Massey University Vice Chancellor Steve Maharey launches 11 Views of Auckland, an anthology of essays about the city edited by Grant Duncan and myself, with a cover image by Graham Fletcher].
   
   
   


2. May 20:
   
   
   [Scenes from The Puppet Oresteia, a collaboration between me and US-based UK artist Bill Ayton, goes live on online publishing site Lulu.com].
   
   
   


3. June 6:
   
   
   [Bronwyn announces the completion of the Pania Press edition of Jen Crawford's poetry book Pop Riveter on her Mosehouse Studio blog].
   
   
   


4. July 4:
   
   
   [Launch of my online edition of Leicester Kyle's collected poems, a dual index / text website which I fear I'll have to continue to work on for quite some time (though the texts of all the major books are now up in full)].
   
   
   


5. July 8:
   
   
   [I give a paper entitled “A brief Poetics” at the Poetry & the Contemporary Symposium (Melbourne: Deakin University, 7-10 July)].
   
   
   


6. July 12:
   
   
   [I give a paper called “The Twenty-Year Masterclass: Paul Celan’s correspondence with Gisèle Celan-Lestrange” at the Literature and Translation Conference (Melbourne: Monash University, Caulfield Campus, 11-12 July), a summary of my two-year project of translating all the dual-text poems included in Celan's letters to his wife].
   
   
   


7. July 29:
   
   
   [Lopdell House's late Poetry Day reading in Titirangi coincides with the launch of Ila Selwyn & Lesley Smith's beautifully produced poetry anthology The Winding Stair].
   
   
   


8. August 26:
   
   
   [Bronwyn's Lugosi's Children exhibition opens at Objectspace in Ponsonby Road].
   
   
   


9. November 9-13:
   
   
   [Ian St George unveils our joint edition of Leicester Kyle's posthumous epic Koroneho at the William Colenso Bicentenary celebrations in Napier].
   
   
   


10. November 27:
    
    
    [Michele Leggott launches Bronwyn's first book of short stories The Second Location, together with Scott Hamilton's new book of poems Feeding the Gods, at Objectspace].
    
    
    


11. November 29:
    
    
    [Launch of the online Jacket2 NZ Poetry feature, edited by me].
    
    
    


12. December 25:
    
    
    [Bronwyn's wonderful Christmas gift: a limited edition of my Britain's Missing Top Model poem as a Pania Press single].
    

Three September Launches:

[Paula Green & Harry Ricketts, 99 Ways into NZ Poetry]


TALKING POETRY:

Launch Event for
99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry

Auckland Central Public Library
Friday, 17th September
5.30-7.00 pm

Introduced by Paula Green & Harry Ricketts,
the book's authors,
ten poets will each have 3 to 5 minutes to chat informally
on the subject of poetry.

Here is the list:

Sarah Broom
Janet Charman
Murray Edmond
Anna Jackson
Michele Leggott
Selina Tusitala Marsh
Jack Ross
Robert Sullivan
Albert Wendt
Sonya Yelich

•

[Jack Ross, Kingdom of Alt]


Titus Books

DUAL BOOKLAUNCH

Thursday, September 23rd
at Alleluya Cafe, Karangahape Rd, Auckland.
6pm start

Alex Wild Jespersen
The Constant Losers

A novel of text-talk, musomania, mix tapes, student bars and library intrigues, The Constant Losers starts with a google search for 'boykrew fan club' and ends in a 'zine war'. The book's heroes are two students whose strange relationship begins in print and develops through a series of chaotic encounters.

Jack Ross
Kingdom of Alt

Is writing about staying on the sidelines, or getting involved - marginal observation, or "skyline operations" (Auden)? This book of short stories (plus one novella) offers a series of takes on the possibility of a truly engaged literature. Not all the conclusions it comes to are entirely pessimistic.

See you there

or

Order the books here

[Alex Wild Jespersen, The Constant Losers]

•

[Gabriel White & David Simmons, Stories of Tāmaki]


Wednesday 29 September
6:30pm

FREE Public Event

The premiere screening of
Gabriel White's new film
Stories of Tāmaki
with David Simmons

Academy Cinema
44 Lorne Street
city centre
(below Central City Library)
Auckland

This 50 minute film testifies to rich ancestral heritage of Tāmaki Makaurau, a landscape many take for granted.

NB: Stories of Tāmaki was funded by The Screen Innovation Fund and supported by The Auckland Heritage Festival 2010.

[Gabriel White]

Stokes Point

[Stokes Point, Northcote]

I'm co-editing a book on Auckland for our Massey University monograph series. The working title is A Super City: Views of Auckland, and it will consist of a series of essays by members of the School of Social and Cultural Studies, where I work, on various aspects of the city seen through the lenses of our diverse disciplines. You can find further details here.

Since our school happens to include Anthropologists, Historians, Linguists, Literary & Media specialists, Political Scientists and Sociologists, we're hoping the results will be pretty interesting. It's intended for a general audience as well as the students in our "Auckland: A Social and Cultural Study" summer-school course.

My co-editor Grant Duncan has already posted the abstract for his essay online, and you can request a draft of the whole piece from him here.

[Felton Mathews: Map of the Harbour of Waitemata (1841)]

My own essay is about Stokes Point, in Northcote (originally called Pt. Rough), which is the little reserve right under the Harbour Bridge, the spit of land from which it launches itself out towards the city. The particular angle I take on it might be seen as somewhat controversial, so I won't say any more about that here except to say that the working title is "The Stokes Point Pillars." If you want to know more, you'll have to read the book (due out in October).

What I thought I'd post here instead is a kind of suite of views of Stokes Point, from my visit there last Saturday with Bronwyn's digital camera.

•

[The View from the Shore]

[The Avenue of Pillars]

[Pohutukawas in Plastic]

[Car Park]

[Barriers]

[War of the Worlds]

[Plaque]

[Signage]

[Graffiti]

[Karnak]

[The Convergence of the Twain]

Martin Edmond at Massey Albany (27/8)

Atrium Building
level 3 common room
Massey Albany

Wednesday 27th August
3 to 4 pm

We’ve invited Martin Edmond to come and give a reading / q & a session on campus as part of our regular seminar series.

Entrance free. Please do come along if you're curious to hear him. It's mid-semester break, so there should be plenty of parking.

Martin Edmond’s latest books Waimarino County and Other Excursions (AUP, 2007) and Luca Antara: Passages in Search of Australia (Adelaide: East Street, 2006) were both nominated for Montana awards, a prize he won in 2004 with Chronicle of the Unsung.

His work in the genre of (so-called) “Creative Non-fiction” is taught in our Massey Life Writing and Travel Writing courses, but he’s also an award-winning poet and fiction-writer. He’ll be reading from his latest book, The Evolution of Mirrors (Otoliths Press, 2008). For further details on that book, please go here.



The other dates in his NZ tour are:

Thursday 21 August, 6pm, Wellington
Writers Read: Martin Edmond
Level D, Room 16, Block 5
Entrance A, (access through "The Pyramid")
Massey University Wellington Campus
Wallace Street
Chair: Ingrid Horrocks.
RSVP: to Jo Fink (j.w.fink@massey.ac.nz or 04 801 5799 x 6696) by Wednesday 20 August.

Friday 22 August, 7pm, Palmerston North
Massey University's Writer Read series
Guest Writer: Martin Edmond
Free entry
Palmerston North City Library
4 The Square

Thursday 28 August, 2.30pm, Auckland
Mollie: On the Track of the Ohakune Elephant 1957-2008
Michele Leggott, Martine Edmond, Mandy Harper, Mary Sewall conduct an afternoon of talks and readings about Mollie, the circus elephant whose death in 1957 drew the attention of zoologist and curator Barney McGregor at Auckland University College. For more information contact Mary Sewall, m.sewall@auckland.ac.nz or 373 7599 x 83758.
Old Biology Building (McGregor 1 Seminar Rm)
University of Auckland

Thursday 28 August, 5.30pm, Auckland
Book Launch
Jack Ross launches Martin Edmond's The Big O Revisited (Soapbox Press). Register attendance with Laurel Walker, i.walker@auckland.ac.nz
Main Foyer
Old Biology Building
University of Auckland

Obviously the last of those dates is of most interest to me. I'll be launching Martin's first book of poems in almost twenty years (Streets of Music won the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry in 1980, and was followed by Houses, Days, Skies (1988). Michael Steven has done a wonderful job as publisher and designer of this deluxe book of travel poems.

It's a limited edition, though, so be sure to get in quick to buy a copy. I've been scouring the second-hand bookshops for years for those two early poetry collections of Martin's.

The 13 Book-launches of Dr J.

[Chris Cole Catley, Jack Ross & guest at Golden Weather launch, Takapuna Public Library]

"There's no such thing as a free launch"

-- Murray Edmond (attrib.)

I guess it's probably one of those old adages like "prise the gun from my cold, dead fingers" which endlessly migrates from speaker to speaker, but there's nevertheless a fair amount of truth in it.

As time goes by, you begin to learn the rules, however idealistic you were going in: always site the book-table near the exit (so that no-one can escape bookless without running the gauntlet of your reproachful gaze); never stint on food and drink (especially the latter-- you want to induce a false sense of euphoria in your guests); don't let the speeches go on too long; and (if possible) include a musician or a juggler or something novel to liven things up; only invite people who are likely to buy the book (that rules out the very rich and the very poor: too canny and too needy respectively).

It's with a certain amount of horror that I realise that the recent Classic Poets booklaunch was actually my thirteenth -- hence the melodramatic title of this post (I guess I was thinking of that old Dr Seuss film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T; or else maybe The Nine Gates of the Land of Shadow, that Satanic tract in the Roman Polanski film The Ninth Gate, which damns everyone who looks at it to eternal perdition ...)

So here they are, in reverse order of occurrence:

1. 2006 (20 July) -- Peter Simpson & Elizabeth Caffin launch Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance, edited by Jack Ross & Jan Kemp (Auckland: AUP), in the Hobson Room, Jubilee Hall, Parnell. MC: Jack Ross. Readers: Riemke Ensing, Anne Kennedy, Alistair Paterson, Jack Ross, C K Stead, Richard von Sturmer & Sonja Yelich.
2. 2006 (15 June) -- Gabriel White, Scott Hamilton & Brett Cross launch The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis, by Jack Ross, & Bill Direen’s Song of the Brakeman (Auckland: Titus Books), at the University of Auckland English Department Common Room.MC: Michele Leggott. Readers: Jack Ross & Olwyn Stewart.
3. 2005 (16 November) -- Mary Paul & Grant Duncan launch Where Will Massey Take You? Life Writing 2, edited by Jack Ross (Massey University: School of Social & Cultural Studies) in the Common Room, Atrium Building, Massey @ Albany.
4. 2005 (21 May) -- Mike Johnson & Brett Cross launch Trouble in Mind , by Jack Ross, Olwyn Stewart’s Curriculum Vitae , & Bill Direen’s Coma (Auckland: Titus Books), at Shanghai Lil’s, corner of Anzac Rd & Customs St.
5. 2004 (24 October) -- Roger Horrocks & Raewyn Alexander launch Monkey Miss Her Now, by Jack Ross (Auckland: Danger Publishing), at the George Fraser Gallery, University of Auckland.
6. 2004 (19 September) -- George Wood, the Mayor of the North Shore, & Chris Cole Catley launch Golden Weather: North Shore Writers Past & Present, edited by Graeme Lay & Jack Ross (Auckland: Cape Catley), at the Takapuna Public Library.
7. 2004 (12 September) -- Jan Kemp & Jack Ross launch the Aotearoa / New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive (Auckland University Library: Special Collections), at the Titirangi Pioneer Hall, Auckland. MC: Jack Ross. Readers: C K Stead, Janet Charman, Stu Bagby, Riemke Ensing, Mike Johnson, Paula Green, Bob Orr , & Sonja Yelich.
8. 2003 (4 June) -- Tina Shaw & A/Prof Mike O’Brien launch [your name here]: Life Writing, edited by Jack Ross (Massey University: School of Social & Cultural Studies) in the Common Room, Atrium Building, Massey @ Albany.
9. 2002 (10 November) -- Alistair Paterson launches Chantal's Book, by Jack Ross (Wellington: HeadworX) at the Birdcage Tavern, 133 Franklin Rd, Ponsonby.
10. 2000 (14 December) -- Alan Brunton launches Nights with Giordano Bruno, by Jack Ross, & Sally Rodwell’s Gonne Strange Charity (Wellington: Bumper Books), at The Space, 146 Riddiford Street, Newtown, Wellington.
11. 2000 (10 December) -- Professor D. I. B. Smith launches Nights with Giordano Bruno, by Jack Ross (Wellington: Bumper Books), at 6 Hastings Rd, Mairangi Bay.
12. 2000 (1 October) -- Jack Ross & Gabriel White launch A Town Like Parataxis, text by Jack Ross, photos by Gabriel White (Auckland: Perdrix Press) at 23 Maxwell Ave, Westmere.
13. 1998 (25 September) -- Theresia Marshall launches City of Strange Brunettes, by Jack Ross, & Lee Dowrick’s That was Then ((Auckland: Pohutukawa Press), at the Takapuna Public Library.

I guess my main impression, looking at this line-up, is to marvel at the number of people who've helped me and my collaborators out over the years. I mean, I have tried to do my bit to reciprocate, but it doesn't make nearly such an impressive list:

1. 2005 (5 December) -- Launched Richard von Sturmer’s Suchness: Zen Poetry and Prose (Wellington: HeadworX), with music by Don McGlashan, at the St Columba Centre, 40 Vermont Street, Ponsonby.
2. 2005 (20 October) -- MC, with Ahmed Esau, introducing Riemke Ensing, Deborah Manning, and Bill Manhire, at the launch of Ahmed Zaoui’s Migrant Birds: 24 Contemplations (Nelson: Craig Potton Books), in the Crypt of St. Benedict’s Church, Newton.
3. 2005 (17 October) -- Launched Bill Direen’s New Sea Land and Stephen Oliver’s Either Side The Horizon , with Alistair Paterson, launching Olivia Macassey’s Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Auckland: Titus Books) at Rakino’s, High Street, Auckland.
4. 2004 (17 July) -- Launch, with Jan Kemp, Olivia Macassey, and Richard von Sturmer, of nzepc feature: 12 Taonga from the Aotearoa / New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, at the Gus Fisher Gallery, Shortland St, Auckland.
5. 2000 (21 July) -- Organised the book-launch of Leicester Kyle’s A Safe House for a Man (Auckland: Polygraphia Press) at the Takapuna Public Library.

I suppose they can be quite fun sometimes -- meeting your pals, scarfing bread & cheese, making sure you're next to the drinks table when the speeches begin ... next time you go to one, though, do remember that you are expected at least to consider buying the book. Otherwise it's a bit like spending all afternoon tasting fine vintages at the vineyard and then rolling off without having purchased a single bottle -- it can be done, but it is a little gauche.

Really, though, I just want to put on record my thanks to all of you excellent people who have taken the trouble to come along on these many, many occasions. I guess your true reward will have to be postponed till you reach the next world, because it's unlikely to come in this one. I hope you take some satisfaction in knowing that you truly are the salt of the earth ...