Car Epics

I guess it's been quite a while since I put up a post about the joys of listening to poetry on the car stereo while stuck in Auckland traffic. Since then I've been branching out a bit and checking out the recordings I like the most.

All of which is a preliminary to sharing my own - very subjective - list of best recordings of epics for such purposes (see also the supplementary list above):

1 - Homer: The Iliad (c. 850 BC)

a) translated by William Cowper (1791)
read by Anton Lesser
Naxos AudioBooks, 1995
3 CDs (abridged)

A bit too stilted and mannered for me - traditional verse translations don't work as well as prose when it comes to audiobooks, I think.

b) translated by Robert Fagles (1990)
read by Derek Jacobi
Penguin Audiobooks, 1993
6 cassettes (abridged)

A brilliantly vivid version in modern verse, read in a rather mannered way by (I, Claudius) Jacobi in every voice he can muster.

c) translated by Ian Johnston (2002)
read by Anton Lesser
Naxos AudioBooks, 2006
13 CDs (complete)

Pretty definitive, I should imagine.

2 - Homer: The Odyssey (c. 850 BC)

a) translated by William Cowper (1791)
read by Anton Lesser
Naxos AudioBooks, 1995
3 CDs (abridged)

As above about his Iliad. Cowper's Miltonic blank verse works fine on the page but not so well on the radio - Anton Lesser gives it a good go, though.

b) translated by E. V. Rieu (1945)
read by Alex Jennings
Penguin Audiobooks, 1995
6 cassettes (abridged)

Alex Jennings may be less adept as a reader than Derek Jacobi, but this is nevertheless an amazingly effective version. It quite transformed my last roadtrip around the South Island.

c) translated by Robert Fagles (1996)
read. by Ian McKellen
Penguin Audiobooks, 1996
12 cassettes (complete)

Translation great, Ian McKellen excellent, but it's surprising just how much of the poem concerns Odysseus wandering around Ithaca. Abridged versions tend to shorten all that return-of-the-native stuff considerably.

d) translated by Ian Johnston (2002)
read by Anton Lesser
Naxos AudioBooks, 2007
10 CDs (complete)

Again, pretty definitive.

3 - Virgil: The Aeneid (c. 30-19 BC)

a) translated by Robert Fitzgerald (1983)
read by Christopher Ravenscroft
Highbridge Company, 1995
8 CDs (abridged)

Ravenscroft, who used to be on Ruth Rendell's Wexford series, has a rather nasal voice, but it's fascinating to hear so much of Aeneas's adventures in Italy, normally glossed over in the selected versions. Fitzgerald's translation is fantastic - the only drawback about this version is that it is slightly abridged, otherwise I'd be to look no further.

b) translated by C. Day Lewis (1952)
read by Paul Scofield et al.
Naxos AudioBooks, 2002
4 CDs (abridged)

Partly dramatised and very selective - great for the bits it does do, though. Paul Scofield has the perfect hollow, echoing voice for the narrator of so spooky a poem.

c) translated by Robert Fagles (2006)
read by Simon Callow
Penguin Audiobooks, 2006
10 CDs (complete)

A spirited translation in a rather plummy rendition.

4 - Ovid: Metamorphoses (c. 8 AD)

[a) translated by Charles Boer (1989)
read by Noah Pikes
Spring Publications, 1994
1 cassette (abridged)]

I haven't actually heard this, but it gets a very bad review on the Amazon.com site. Boer's complete translation is great to read in book from, though.

[b)Tales from Ovid
translated & read by Ted Hughes (1995)
Penguin Audiobooks, 2000
1 CD (abridged)]

I haven't heard this, either (out of print), but Ted Hughes is usually a pretty good reader.

c) translated by Frank Justus Miller (1916)
read by Barry Kraft
Blackstone Audiobooks, 2008
12 CDs (complete)

Kraft has the most grating, mid-western voice imaginable, but at least he's audible and pretty consistent in his range of tones. That's a very important consideration when one's trying to listen to something over the roar of traffic. A very bald prose translation (from the Loeb Classics) is actually an excellent choice for reading aloud - and it is complete.

5 - Beowulf (c. 800 AD)

a) translated by Michael Alexander (1972)
read by David Rintoul (2000)
Penguin Audiobooks, 1997
2 cassettes (complete)

Excellent, informative translation in a spirited reading.

b) translated & read by Seamus Heaney (1998)
Penguin Audiobooks, 2000
3 CDs (abridged)

And yet, I have to admit, that - while he doesn't follow the strict rules of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse (unlike Michael Alexander above), there's a real difference between a poet's rendering of a great poem, and an academic's. Heaney makes a riveting story out of the ancient epic - the hype that surrounded his translation when it first came out certainly seems justified by this masterly reading.

[c) translated by Benedict Flynn (2006)
read by Crawford Logan
Naxos Audiobooks, 2006
3 CDs (complete)]

I hadn't realised that the Penguin Audiobook recording of Michael Alexander's translation is actually complete, or I don't know that I would have bothered with this one as well ...

6 - Dante: The Divine Comedy (c. 1300-1321)

a) translated by Benedict Flynn (1998)
read by Heathcote Williams
Naxos AudioBooks:

• Inferno (2004)
  4 CDs (complete)


• Purgatory (1998)
  3 CDs (complete)


• Paradise (2004)
  4 CDs (complete)

I have nothing but praise for this. I don't really like Heathcote Williams as a poet, but as a reader he's amazing. The choice of a literal prose version was also very wise - rather than mucking around with all the - essentially futile - attempts to naturalise terza rima into English. It's hard to imagine this being bettered, except (for Italian speakers) for this complete version read in the original.

7 - The Thousand and One Nights (c. 800-900 AD)

a) translated by Sir Richard F. Burton (1885)
read by Philip Madoc
Naxos AudioBooks, 1995
3 CDs (abridged)

A poor selection from Burton's immense masterwork. The reading is okay but it's hard to see the logic behind the audiobook as a whole.

b) translated by N. J. Dawood (1954-57)
read by Souad Faress & Raad Rawi
Penguin Audiobooks, 1995
4 cassettes (abridged)

A witty and musical reading -- the stories are well chosen and the whole makes good sense. More, please!

8 - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1400)

a) translated by J. R. R. Tolkien (1975)
read by Terry Jones
HarperCollins, 2007
4 CDs (complete)

A sinuous and complex set of poems, in a bluff, hearty reading by Monty Python's Jones. Again, you owe it to yourself to check this out, especially if you're unfamiliar with the originals - one of the great, thorny masterpieces of medieval poetry.

9 - Milton: Paradise Lost (1667)

a) read by Anton Lesser
Naxos AudioBooks, 2005
9 CDs (complete)

Great stuff. Lesser has a slightly whiney voice, which suits the Prince of Darkness very well. What better way to encounter the greatest epic poem in the English language? A complete Faerie Queene would be nice, too - but so far only selections are available.

20 Favourite 20th-Century Novels

[Craig Thompson, Blankets (2003)]

I guess this is a recipe for disaster, really. Once you get going it's very difficult to confine yourself to just twenty. The idea was prompted by looking at the line-up in the Auckland University English course "Novels since 1900," formerly convened and taught by the late David Wright. His list of eight - or nine, depending on whether you count John Barth as one or two books - was as follows:

• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
• Willa Cather, My Antonia (1918)
• E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
• John Barth, The Floating Opera / The End of the Road (1957/1958)
• Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966)
• Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)
• Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)
• Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)

It sure got me thinking, though. I've had to settle on a couple of lists (I'm sorry to say, since the point was supposed to be conciseness): one of English-language novels, one of foreign-language novels I've only read in translation. It's a desperately subjective list. See what additions (and subtractions) you'd like to make yourself:

1. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (1904)
2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
3. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
4. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
5. Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Trilogy (1946-59)
6. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
7. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
8. Janet Frame, Owls Do Cry (1957)
9. Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60)
10. William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959)
11. Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969)
12. Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffmann (1972)
13. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974)
14. Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves (1976)
15. Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (1978)
16. David Malouf, An Imaginary Life (1978)
17. Troy Kennedy Martin, Edge of Darkness (1985)
18. Dennis Potter, The Singing Detective (1986)
19. Alan Moore, Watchmen (1986-87)
20. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

I've cheated by putting in some trilogies and quartets of novels, but I guess I could settle on just one from each series if you want to get really purist about it. Obviously I had the advantage of being able to leave out all of David Wright's authors, also.

There are other features which some might find unusual: two TV-series, each of which seems to me every bit as complex and "written" as a great novel; two Sci-Fi novels; two Fantasy novels; one graphic novel; Australian and NZ authors jostling with the Americans and Brits ... Anyway, there it is.

If I could have, I'd have liked to fit in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954); Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962); Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers (1966); William Golding's Pincher Martin (1956); Philip Larkin's A Girl in Winter (1947); C. S. Lewis's Perelandra (1943); Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947); Gerald Murnane's The Plains (1982); John Cowper Powys's A Glastonbury Romance (1932); Mary Renault's The King Must Die (1958); Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (1994) -- something by Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms (1929) is probably my favourite), Kerouac (of course On the Road (1957)); D. H. Lawrence (perhaps Women in Love (1920)?); Wyndham Lewis (The Childermass (1928)); Norman Mailer (Ancient Evenings (1983)?); Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer (1934)?); Steinbeck (I guess it would have to be The Grapes of Wrath (1939)); Gertrude Stein (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)?); Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited (1945)?); and lots more graphic novels (including Blankets (2003), pictured above) but everything you put in means that something else has to come out. That's how I understand the rules of the game, at any rate.

Here's my companion list of foreign language novels (equally contentious, I hope):

1. Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk (1912-23)
2. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27)
3. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924)
4. Franz Kafka, The Castle (1926)
5. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (1928-40)
6. Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (1943)
7. Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters (1943-48)
8. Italo Calvino, Our Ancestors (1952-59)
9. Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy (1956-57)
10. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (1957)
11. Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961)
12. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Green House (1965)
13. Milan Kundera, The Joke (1967)
14. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
15. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle (1968)
16. Augusto Roa Bastos, I, the Supreme (1974)
17. Gunter Grass, The Flounder (1978)
18. Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual (1978)
19. Marguerite Duras, La Douleur (1985)
20. Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1992-95)

No Brazilian writers there, I'm afraid: Jorge Amado or Clarice Lispector. No Chinese novelists either: I simply don't know their work well enough.

New NZ Poets by Theme

[Seraphine Pick, "He"]

I like typewriters because they are always turned on.
– Will Christie

Here's a thematic breakdown of the 97 tracks in our New NZ Poets in Performance anthology (Auckland: AUP, 2008). The categories are pretty subjective, and could undoubtedly be improved on. Maybe that’s not such a bad starting point for discussion, though: what's the poem really about?

ANIMALS

Tusiata Avia: My Dog
Anna Jackson: Takahe
Anne Kennedy: Cat Tales
Thérèse Lloyd: Forecast
Chris Price: Keeping Ravens

CHILDHOOD

James Brown: The Crewe Cres Kids
Andrew Johnston: How to Talk
Jenny Powell-Chalmers: Lunchbox
Sonja Yelich: whangaparaoa – on the sundeck

ELEGY

Glenn Colquhoun: On the death of my grandmother
Andrew Johnston: The Present
Jack Ross: Except Once

FAMILY

Anna Jackson: In a Minute
Andrew Johnston: Les Baillessats
Anne Kennedy: Whenua (2)
Emma Neale: You’re Telling Me

FANTASY & IDENTITY

Nick Ascroft: All of the Other Ascrofts are Dead
James Brown: Loneliness
Anna Jackson: The hen of tiredness
Andrew Johnston: How to Walk
Kapka Kassabova: A city of pierced amphorae
Kapka Kassabova: Preparation for the big emptiness
Thérèse Lloyd: Scorpion Daughter
Emma Neale: Confessional Poem
Jenny Powell-Chalmers: Linda
John Pule: Restless People – Ka hola
John Pule: Restless People – He
Sarah Quigley: Restless
Tracey Slaughter: biography day

FRIENDSHIP

Jenny Bornholdt: Rodnie and her Bicycles
Anna Jackson: On the Road with Rose
Robert Sullivan: V Honda Waka

HISTORY & POLITICS

James Brown: Soup from a Stone
Lynda Chanwai-Earle: Gasp
David Howard: Social Studies
Mark Pirie: Making a Point
Mark Pirie: The Third Form
Robert Sullivan: Waka 70 i Matakitaki
Robert Sullivan: Waka 62 A narrator’s note

LANDSCAPE & LOCALITY

Tusiata Avia: My First Time in Samoa
Serie Barford: God is near the equator
Jenny Bornholdt: Weather
Kate Camp: Backroads
Kapka Kassabova: My life in two parts
John Newton: Lunch
John Newton: Ferret Trap
John Newton: Inland
Gregory O’Brien: Epithalamium, Wellington
Jenny Powell-Chalmers: Carnival of Chocolate
Sarah Quigley: New York Four
Richard Reeve: Ranfurly
Sonja Yelich: narrow neck from the boat ramp

LANGUAGE & WRITING

Nick Ascroft: The Badder & the Better
James Brown: The Day I Stopped Writing Poetry
John Newton: Opening the Book
Mark Pirie: Progress
Chris Price: Ghastlily
Robert Sullivan: Waka 46
Sonja Yelich: writing desk

LIFE, THE UNIVERSE & EVERYTHING

Jenny Bornholdt: Please, Pay Attention
Glenn Colquhoun: from Whakapapa
Kapka Kassabova: One morning like a sleeper
Gregory O’Brien: Numbers 1 & 2
John Pule: Restless People – Liogi
Richard Reeve: Victory Beach

LOVE

Gregory O’Brien: It will be better then
Gregory O’Brien: Solomon Singing
Gregory O’Brien: There is only one
Jack Ross: Idyll

PAIN & SUFFERING

Serie Barford: Plea to the Spanish Lady
Lynda Chanwai-Earle: Details from a Personal Journal
Glenn Colquhoun: Lost Property
Thérèse Lloyd: One Hundred Hours
Richard Reeve: Dark Unloading
Jack Ross: Disorder and Early Sorrow

PEOPLE

Nick Ascroft: Cheap Present
Jenny Bornholdt: Then Murray Came
Kate Camp: Guests
Glenn Colquhoun: She asked me if she took one pill for her heart …
Emma Neale: Spoken For
Emma Neale: Jane Coleridge
Emma Neale: Caroline Helstone
Jack Ross: A Woman Named Intrepid

RELATIONSHIPS & SEXUAL POLITICS

Tusiata Avia: Wild Dogs under my Skirt
Kate Camp: Postcard
Kate Camp: Documentaries
Kate Camp: Water of the Sweet Life
David Howard: On the Eighth Day
David Howard: Talking Sideways
Anne Kennedy: I was a feminist in the 80s
Mark Pirie: Good Looks
Chris Price: The Origins of Science
Tracey Slaughter: Anatomy of dancing with your Future Wife

SUBURBIA

Jenny Bornholdt: Bus Stop
Olivia Macassey: Outhwaite Park
Olivia Macassey: Outer Suburb
Sonja Yelich: 1YA

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 ...

The "Queen's English Society" on Poetry

[Irish Monk in the Scriptorium]

I dropped round to see my parents on Sunday. My father wanted to show me an article from the Weekend Herald on the necessity of rhyme and metre in poetry. He assumed it would interest me, but I'm afraid that I was very dismissive of it and him. And now I'm feeling guilty about it, because I read the article online this morning, and it interests me very much. So sorry Dades. I'll be way less offhand next time.

Basically the article (actually reprinted from the British Observer) discusses a group of people called the "Queen's English Society" who have "turned their attention to contemporary poetry and poets, arguing that too often strings of words are being labelled as poems despite the fact they have no rhyme or metre."

The campaigners say that there should be a new definition of poetry, outlining the characteristics needed before a piece of work can be called a poem.

"A lot of people high up in poetry circles look down on rhyme and metre and think it is old-fashioned," said Bernard Lamb, president of the QES and an academic at Imperial College London.

"But what is the definition of poetry? I would say, if it doesn't have rhyme or metre, then it is not poetry, it is just prose. You can have prose that is full of imagery, but it is still prose."

Michael George Gibson, who is heading the campaign, goes on to say:

"For centuries word-things, called poems, have been made according to primary and defining craft principles of, first, measure and, second, alliteration and rhyme," said Gibson. "Word-things not made according to those principles are not poems."

True poems, he said, gave the reader or listener a "special pleasure".

Gibson praised the work of Chaucer, Shakespeare, John Donne, Robert Graves and even Queen Elizabeth I, all of whom he thought followed the rules of poetry. But he was critical of current writers ...

I guess that Gibson must have become aware of the difficulties of his position when he realised that, by his own society's rules, Homer and Virgil didn't write poetry -- nor did any of the Classical poets or dramatists, in fact. Rhyme only became a technical resource for European poetry in the Middle Ages.

In fact, it's conjectured by many that the Troubadours, who first pioneered its use in their songs and ballads, borrowed rhyme from the Arabic poets of Spain. Some medieval Latin poets had already begun to use rhyme rather than the syllable-length-based metres employed by Greek and Latin poets before that, though, so the question is a controversial one.

I don't want to seem as if I'm splitting hairs or trying to bury the argument in pure historical detail. If the "Queen's English" society are solely interested in the rules of poetry in English, I think there may be certain problems with their argument even there.

Is blank verse, the standard English iambic pentameter, "poetic"? Shakespeare, singled out for special praise above, very seldom wrote in rhyme. In his songs and sonnets, yes, but not in his plays. Is the concluding couplet the only piece of "poetry" in his scenes? Do his plays become less poetic as the metre gets looser and harder to scan? By that argument, "Two Gentlemen of Verona" (an early, very regularly written play, in careful accentual pentameters) is closer to poetry than late masterpieces such as "King Lear" or "Hamlet."

Milton specifically decried "the modern barbarism of rhyming" in his preface to Paradise Lost. Is that a poem? It certainly doesn't rhyme. Was Milton only a poet in his early work, when he did use rhymes - in "L'Allegro and "Il Penseroso," for instance? Milton thought he was being more poetic by not rhyming -- he hated the jogtrot rhyming heroic couplets which would dominate English verse for the next century, preferring instead to refer to Classical models for his own epic diction. Is Pope's Dunciad (rhyming) a better poem than Paradise Lost (unrhymed)?

"Measure" and "alliteration," the two words Gibson uses to accompany "rhyme" as identifying features of "true poetry", were presumably chosen to get over this difficulty. After all, Anglo-Saxon poetry didn't rhyme - Beowulf was composed in alliterative verse. Rhyme came into England with the Norman conquest, in fact, and took a good two or three centuries to take hold here.

Strangest of all is the contrast the article ends on.

John Donne's bizarre, eccentric (electrifying) masterpiece "The Sun Rising" is contrasted with a recent poem by "Michael Schmidt, a contemporary poet and academic who had been awarded an OBE. Schmidt's piece "Pangur Ban" was not poetry, said Gibson."

Jerome has his enormous dozy lion.
Myself, I have a cat, my Pangur Ban.
What did Jerome feed up his lion with?
Always he's fat and fleecy, always sleeping
As if after a meal.
Perhaps a Christian?
Perhaps a lamb, or a fish, or a loaf of bread.
His lion's always smiling, chin on paw,
What looks like purring rippling his face
And there on Jerome's escritoire by the quill and ink pot
The long black thorn he drew from the lion's paw.

I have to say that these lines sounded pretty familiar to me. And, sure enough, a quick search revealed the (admittedly rhyming) Irish original of Schmidt's poem:

Pangur Ban

Messe ocus Pangur Bán,
cechtar nathar fria saindan:
bíth a menmasam fri seilgg,
mu memna céin im saincheirdd.

Caraimse fos (ferr cach clu)
oc mu lebran, leir ingnu;
ni foirmtech frimm Pangur Bán:
caraid cesin a maccdán.

O ru biam (scél cen scís)
innar tegdais, ar n-oendís,
taithiunn, dichrichide clius,
ni fris tarddam ar n-áthius.

Gnáth, huaraib, ar gressaib gal
glenaid luch inna línsam;
os mé, du-fuit im lín chéin
dliged ndoraid cu ndronchéill.

Fuachaidsem fri frega fál
a rosc, a nglése comlán;
fuachimm chein fri fegi fis
mu rosc reil, cesu imdis.

Faelidsem cu ndene dul
hi nglen luch inna gerchrub;
hi tucu cheist ndoraid ndil
os me chene am faelid.

Cia beimmi a-min nach ré
ni derban cách a chele:
maith la cechtar nár a dán;
subaigthius a óenurán.

He fesin as choimsid dáu
in muid du-ngni cach oenláu;
du thabairt doraid du glé
for mu mud cein am messe.

In other words, the Queen's English Society's argument has now extended to translations (and adaptations) of existing poems.

The Irish monk who originally wrote that lovely poem about his cat, did indeed use rhyme. Does that mean that all subsequent translators should do the same, even if their versions sound far limper than Schmidt's?

I and Pangur Ban my cat,
'Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night ... etc. etc. (trans. Robin Flower)

So was Pope on the right track in translating Homer into rhyming couplets, thus turning his (unrhyming) Greek hexameters into poetry? Or is it better to translate Homer into English hexameters, even though English is a stress-based language which can't really reproduce the metrical forms of unstressed languages such as Latin and Greek? Or would it be better to use (unrhymed) blank verse, even though it doesn't really resemble the Greek forms at all?

The responses Gibson has received are quite instructive, also:

One Poetry Society trustee told Gibson: "There is poetry in everything we say or do, and if something is presented to me as a poem by its creator, or by an observer, I accept that something as a poem."

Ruth Padel, a prize-winning poet who used to be chair of trustees at the Poetry Society, added: "In The Use of Poetry TS Eliot said, `We learn what poetry is - if we ever learn - by reading it'."

Schmidt, professor of poetry at the University of Glasgow, argued that for centuries poets had added variations to patterns and rules.

"It seems a primitive and even infantile notion that there are rules poetry must obey," said Schmidt, who accused the QES of placing poetry in a "straitjacket".

"Poetry that follows the rules too closely is bad poetry. I think every form of verse, free or metrical, establishes a pattern and plays on variations of it."

The "rhyme and metre" argument is certainly too simplistic to match the complexity of what has traditionally been regarded as "poetry" even in the English-speaking world. I mean, the QES's argument, if taken to extremes would argue that only the metrical versions of the Biblical Psalms turn them into true poems:

The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want.
He makes me down to lie
In pastures green, he leadeth me
The quiet waters by.

Is that a "poem" in a way that the Authorised version's translation, which tries to reproduce something of the parallelism characteristic of Hebrew poetry, isn't?

The Lord is my shepherd:
I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:
he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

I'm reminded of the character who denounced the idea of a new translation of the Bible by saying that since the Authorised version was good enough for St. James, it was good enough for him ...

"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain," as the German poet Schiller once remarked.

Mind you, I certainly think it's interesting to continue to debate what precisely is the difference between the heightened, patterned language we call "poetry" and that less-obtrusive medium we call "prose." Once might even argue that its the tension between the two which provides a good deal of the electricity surge we call "literature."

But to think that these terms can even be neatly parcelled up in the manner Gibson and his buddies suggest is, I'm afraid, a little akin to the nineteenth-century American state legislature which voted to make the mathematical ratio "pi" a round number. Yeah, it'd be nice if you could, but since the subject's really a lot more complicated than that, let's debate it seriously if we're going to talk about it at all.

In the meantime, I'll keep on reading Homer and Milton, and Gibson can stick to the collected lyrics of Elizabeth the First ...

Battlestar Galactica = Iraq War

Well, yes, I guess you don't have to be a genius to figure it out. The feature-length miniseries which spawned the remake first screened in 2003, less than two years after a certain sneak attack on the World Trade Centre got the Americans so crazy for vengeance.

It's true that the Cylons pretty much succeeded in wiping out human life on the 12 colonies with their own weapons of mass destruction, but the analogy is not -- as I understand it -- meant to be an exact one: simply a good way of setting up a dramatic situation where one can examine at leisure the psychology of a particularly paranoid and inward-looking society at war.

The "remake" idea is an excellent one when it comes to protective camouflage. What harm could possibly come from revisiting kindly old Lorne Greene as Adama, and those two good old boys Apollo and Starbuck hotdogging around the sky in their Star Wars-knock-off fighters? That version was made back in the late seventies, when Vietnam had sickened the USA on real wars, and escapist fantasy westerns and space operas were the order of the day.

Is mine a reductionist reading? Possibly. I'm a big fan of the new series -- not (even at the time) the old one -- but what struck me about it from the first was the profoundly insightful line it took on military expediency and power-hunger.

It isn't just the black uniforms with silver highlights that make Lee Adama and the others look like a squad of young Fascists. Edward James Olmos's croaky, world-weary Adama is certainly no Hitler, but he might be a Rommel or an Admiral Raeder. Is there anything he and his friends won't do in the interests of survival? Adama's led a military coup against civilian government, ordered the assassination of a superior officer, connived at torture, the black market, the murder of civilians -- the list goes on and on. Some hero.

But it's all okay, because the Cylons are even worse.



Or are they? The biggest revelation of the new-look series is the Cylons themselves. they look human. They look better than human, actually. The women -- Tricia Helfer (above), Grace Park (below) and our own ex-Xena Lucy Lawless -- are all babes and supermodels. The men, on the other hand, tend to take a bit of a back seat when it comes to decision-making.



Gorgeous female robots are no new thing in Sci Fi, of course -- think of Metropolis or (for that matter) Blade Runner or Solaris. The interesting thing about these "skin-jobs" (or "toasters"- or any of the other loving terms applied to them by the freedom-loving colonials) is their obsession with theology.

Yes, you heard me right. The quickest way to spot a Cylon infiltrator is to lure them into a discussion about the existence of God and His/Her intentions for the universe. That's the true genius of this TV series. Who the hell came up with that idea?

The Cylons are strict Monotheists -- they're very impatient with the pagan superstitions of the 12 colonies (the planets were named after thinly-disguised signs of the Zodiac: Tauron for Taurus, Geminon for Gemini etc.). The "gods" whom Starbuck and the others repeatedly invoke are an early version of the twelve Olympians: Zeus, Diana, Apollo, Athena and so on.

Liberal Humanism versus Islam? The Colonials are a pluralist society, very like contemporary America. The Cylons, on the other hand, are made of sterner stuff. Philosophy, for them, is to be taken seriously. The basic issue for them, as Sharon-the-Cylon explains to Adama at one point, is whether humanity deserves to survive. The jury's still out on that one, I'm afraid.

As for Iraq, the evidence is all there if you want to look for it: torture in Abu Ghraib prison, the lynch-mob mentality of the fleet's civilians, the primitive glee that Apollo and the others take in killing (they do have qualms when it comes to destroying their own ships -- but they fade pretty fast when the bullets start flying).

It's not a programme which propounds easy solutions, but there at times when the cowardly, compromised, half-schizophrenic Dr Gaius Baltar looks like the only sane one aboard. At least he enjoys basic human pleasures: booze, sex, cards. He's smart, too, if a little eccentric. Compare him to the drunken buffoon executive officer Colonel Tigh, and it's hard not to see the dichotomy between the red and blue states of the USA condensed into one simple proposition.

Start watching it. I think you'll find it's worth it. Who would have thought the American mainstream media could be so intelligently self-analytical?

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. ...

Orange Roughy Sold Out!

Yes, that's right - in under two weeks we've managed to sell nearly 150 books (not counting contributors' copies, National Libary copies, and a few other sundries). Only one shop stocks it (as far as we know) - Parson's Bookshop in Wellesley Street - but I suspect that their copies have already been sold on to libraries and special collections by now.

So I'm sorry if any of you particularly wanted a copy and were just waiting for payday. That is the way the cookie crumbles, though. I mean, how often do you get a line-up of authors like that, with a hand-screenprinted, individually coloured dustjacket, all for the bargain price of $25?

Never, that's when.

You can find further details about the launch on the Pania website here.

We're very happy - and very grateful to everyone who's helped with the project: our contributors (of course), my parents for volunteering their garden for the launch, Bronwyn's parents for selling so many copies, and all the rest of our intrepid sales-team (Greg, Sheryl and Fiona, I mean you ...)

This is Culture-Power at its best, I think.

[Michele Leggott launching Orange Roughy]


[Bronwyn reading out a message from Therese]


[Bronwyn & me outside the bach]


[A few of the "Orange Roughians"(l-r):
Emma Smith, Greg Lloyd, Anna Tozer, Mike & Margot Lloyd ...]


[Michael Steven in festive mood - Raewyn Alexander & June Ross behind him ...]

[photographs 1, 3 & 4 by June Ross / 2 & 5 by Greg Lloyd]

Ways of Getting to Work

[Jason Mecier, Patricia Highsmith]

Her favourite technique to ease herself into the right frame of mind for work was to sit on her bed surrounded by cigarettes, ashtray, matches, a mug of coffee, a doughnut and an accompanying saucer of sugar. She had to avoid any sense of discipline and make the act of writing as pleasurable as possible. Her position, she noted, would be almost foetal and, indeed, her intention was to create, she said, 'a womb of her own.'

Andrew Wilson, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. 2003 (London: Bloomsbury, 2004) p. 123.

My brother insists that no-one addresses him first thing in the morning, for fear of destroying his carefully-fostered aesthetic dream-state.

I don't go quite that far, but I do find that a lot of undisciplined playing around on the computer is required before I can really get down to doing anything. It's very important not to identify it as "work," I find.

What about the rest of you?



NB: This is in response to an interesting post of Martin Edmond's at Luca Antara.

This is what you do:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people: (soon ...)

Booklaunch on Sunday 9th March!

[Thérèse Lloyd - photograph by Greg Lloyd (July 2007)]

You are all most cordially invited to Pania Press's very first

BOOKLAUNCH

in the spacious back garden of

No. 6 Hastings Rd,
Mairangi Bay
North Shore City
Auckland

from 2 to 4 pm
on Sunday 9th March

All of you, that is, who wish to buy one or more copies of a sumptuous anthology of poems, pageworks & stories at the bargain price of $25, and (in the process) make a substantial donation to a very good cause.

The book is called:

Orange Roughy: Poems & Stories for Tazey

& includes contributions by the following writers and artists:

Martin Edmond
Graham Fletcher
Bernadette Hall
Michele Leggott
Bronwyn Lloyd
Thérèse Lloyd
Bill Manhire
Emma Neale
Susannah Poole
Tessa Rain
Richard Reeve
Jack Ross
Tracey Slaughter
Michael Steven
Damien Wilkins

I should stress that nobody involved in this project has taken a cent from it - all the proceeds, not just all the profits - are going to Thérèse in Iowa, so that's why we're anxious to sell as many of these fine books as possible.

If you can't make it to the launch, send money or a cheque to Pania HQ and we'll be happy to dispatch as many copies as you like of the book, post-free within NZ, for exactly the same price.

Orders can be made through the Pania website, either as a comment left on the site, or directly via our email address:

paniapress@hotmail.com

For further information, please follow the links above. Hope to see you on Sunday!

Hooning around Hawke's Bay

[I do have a bunch of photos I took of our little jaunt, but I must be one of the very few people still using an old-fashioned film camera, so you'll have to wait till I get the roll developed -- in the meantime, these black and white programme notes for the reading on Saturday night will have to do.]

The real unsung heroes of the whole affair, I reckon, were Tim Page and Mark Fryer, who did all the actual driving. Most of us travelled down in an (alleged) eleven-seater minibus, which actually had a bit of trouble accommodating nine + assorted baggage (including tripods, cameras, sound equipment etc.)

Then on the way back up to Auckland there was Michele's new staff to fit in behind the two front seats. It looks exactly like a pool cue. In fact it is (originally, at any rate) a pool cue. It's a lovely sky-blue, with some paua and silver at the top, and lots of white tracery of Michele-oriented imagery around the shaft.

Jacob Scott is a very contemporary artist, despite operating in such a traditional context. His murals in the marae wharekai were breathtaking visions of life in the Hawke's Bay over the past century or so. His previous laureate staffs have included (we were told) a hockey stick for Brian Turner, and a dipstick for measuring the level of winecasks for Hone. The pool cue fitted like a glove, in other words.

The Matua staff, which will now be housed in the National Library, has a firestick motif. In fact it is a firestick, though I'd hate to have to use it to produce a spark. It does, nevertheless, screw apart and could be used to provide friction if necessary. It'll be doing a bit of snuggling up to each new laureate staff in turn, apparently.

There were many highlights. Michele's moving speech after the long powhiri of welcome, where she told the assembled company how obnoxious we'd been on the drive down, and how she was going to be keeping us in line with her new stick on the way back. Not me, mind you. I was very good. I can't say the same for any of the others.

Then there was the evening reading in the massive Hawke's Bay Opera House. When I heard we were going to be in a side-room rather than the main auditorium, I had in mind something like a dusty old office in the Memorial Settlers' Hall. It was a massive ballroom! Full of tables! When we first saw it at the rehearsal on Friday night, we thought it must still be set up for a mega-wedding reception. Not so. It was set up for us. 180 people seated around huge banqueting tables.

What an audience! They laughed, they cried -- they came up and asked for autographs ... One of the real masterstrokes was the idea of asking some local secondary school students, winners of a poetry competition to read with us. I have to say that there are going to be some broken hearts when that quartet move away to the big city. And their poetry was pretty good, too.

Sorry, that sounds sarky. But the thing is, you don't really expect that much on these occasions. Just a polite clap for some piece of doggerel. But these were real poems -- by accomplished young writers. More amazingly still, they all stood up, read two poems, and sat down. That's the only reason the evening finished more or less on time. The rest of us were far less disciplined. No, they really blew me away. Come up and study writing at Massey Albany, guys -- don't let those people at Vic lure you away.



The discussion of Michele's winged words got so extravagant (and non-specific) at times, that I suspect she wondered if anyone present had ever actually read any of her books. We were able to reassure her that everybody on Matahiwi marae -- where we stayed for two nights -- was speaking from knowledge.

On the night we arrived Murray Edmond spoke for us, and his speech included a reading of a recent poem of Michele's. I guess I'm giving the game away a bit, but he prefaced it by saying that not only was it a wonderful poem (it was), but that Michele was pretty wonderful too ("though I'd never admit it to her face"). Sorry, Murray, I've blown your cover. And, yes, you're right -- Michele is pretty wonderful.

When we left we presented our hosts - now friends - at the marae with a kete of books, our books, to stay behind and be used there. I don't think any of us had anticipated that parting would be so emotional. They really took us to their hearts, and I thank them again from the bottom of mine.

Oh, and last but not least, Pipi Cafe, Havelock North, deserves all the puffs it can get for feeding a bunch of hungry poets for free, on the most sumptuous pizzas I've tasted for many a long day. Their "poesy" bread, with a little poetry postcard tucked into each packet, is well worth checking out. We were late, too, and had to take off in a hurry, so I think it's a tribute to their efficiency as well as their kindness that everyone was fed in time ...

I could go on -- the visit to Jacob's house, the swim in the lagoon, the photo-stop by Pania of the Reed, filming Rowley Habib -- but maybe that's enough for now. The people of the Hawke's Bay certainly made a bunch of Aucklanders feel more than welcome last weekend.

When's the next roadtrip?

I say Te Mata

Yes, it's that time again! Poetry junkets are in the air. Here's the nzepc crew setting off for Stewart Island in Easter 2006. This year Michele Leggott, our new Poet Laureate, is taking a busload of poets down to Hawke's Bay for a powhiri and presentation of her Tokotoko carved poet's staff at Matawihi marae. This will be followed by a reading at the Hawke's Bay Opera House on Saturday night (23rd February: 8 pm. If that information makes you feel curious, then you should definitely come along).

I must confess that it's the roadtrip aspect that appeals to me most. After all, term starts on Monday, and there won't be any more fun after that till Easter at the earliest. The readings should be good, though (even if that Stewart Island crowd pictured below looks a little restive -- they don't know that they're about to experience the epic intensities of my "Zen and the Art of America's Next Top Model" poem).



So here's the (planned) list of readers on Saturday night (everyone's promised to keep to five minutes each, so it'll be short, sharp and very disciplined):

MCs: John Buck & Penny Carnaby

1. Elizabeth Smither
2. Rowley Habib
3. Nic Harry
4. Jessie Macnell
5. Paula Green
6. Jack Ross
7. Keith Thorsen

- break-

8. Selina Tusitala Marsh
9. Brian Flaherty
10. Sue Mun Huang
11. Sonya Clark
12. Helen Sword
13. Murray Edmond
14. Michele Leggott

And as for that "Te Mata" pun ... I guess the idea is that this is a kind of changing of the guard between the five Te Mata Vineyard Poet Laureates and the new National Library-funded Laureates. The same kind of thing happened in America, as I understand it, when the rather unglamorously-labelled "Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress" became the "Poet Laureate of the United States." I think we can all drink to that -- in Te Mata sauvignon blanc, preferably.

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 ...)