listen up

A recording of Michele reading 'letter to dulcie jackson', from Mirabile Dictu and the third New Zealand Poets / The Laureate Series CD, is now available for your listening pleasure.

the book and the cd

 It’s done and (almost) dusted! The laureateship is finished (long live the laureateship) and in Wellington on Tuesday 30 June the book and the cd were launched in style at the National Library. Chris Szekely, head of the Alexander Turnbull Library, was MC for the evening, introducing Sam Elworthy, Auckland UP’s publisher and Ian Wedde, who launched Mirabile Dictu. Congratulations to Ian who is the just-announced 2009 University of Auckland / Creative NZ Writer in Residence at the Michael King Writers’ Centre.

Elizabeth Caffin, long-time director of Auckland UP and publisher of my books 1991 through 2005, then launched the third cd of New Zealand Poets / The Laureate Series, a selection of my work from Like This? (1988) to Mirabile Dictu. My thanks and admiration go to Robbie Duncan and Chris Price of Braeburn Studio for their dedication to the task of getting quality recordings from the difficult situation of a sight-impaired poet reading from a touch screen laptop. It seems to work, but only after much technical ingenuity on Robbie’s part.

The finale of the evening was a words and music performance by Robbie, Chris and I of ‘letter to dulcie jackson,’ my grudge poem about the frustrations of learning to touch type at the end of last year. I still don’t type fast or very well, but the poem is a lot of fun to perform, especially with the addition of musicians and Aesop, the talking keyboard on loan from the Foundation of the Blind. ‘letter to dulcie jackson’ is in Mirabile Dictu and on the cd.

letter to dulcie jackson

dulcie jackson is someone
I want to meet     she waits
at the close of lesson 15     undecided
about the quote on her alterations
which is higher than she expected
but even to talk about this
I have to leap ahead
or look at some of my fingers
how long will it take I wonder
to get it all together     dulcie
I wish I was there with you
we would lift a glass     a real glass
to those weird characters I met
along the way     the builders
with their bright blue bricks
the child who cut the cherry cake
and the burglars hiding
by the blackberry bushes      they are
so sweetly idiotic      they deliver
the vehicles carefully      dulcie
can you have a word with them please
we need q z x      the numerals
the commands and all the punctuation
dotted about the stalls at the village fair
this silky tie really is stylish
they say they study their salary
she yells as fiery tigers terrify her
dulcie     I have just one more thing
to say to you      !@#$%^&*()      !@#$%^&*()
cabbages in a row      grilled fish      or maybe
the tester tasting the fatal tarts
I am writing this with my eyes
closed      I am writing this
with my eyes xlosed      trying hard
to picture your face above
my belief that beef is the best buy
dad’s red leather shed in the suburbs
and some of the sillier circular saws
are you pretty      do you have
a soft heart      certainly your best
foot went west some time ago
I saw it making tracks with
one of the huge baboons we loosed
from the metropolitan library     see
what I mean      nothing is innocent
this year the dairy sells yeast
your vegetables were halfprice
at the market yesterday     I had
no o no n m p or w but they have
to be here so I skipped the dumb lamb
cucumber formalities and let them in
woo moon now poop mow noon moo
they have received their velvet jackets
my eyes are still closed      what
will happen when I remove
the slinky covers      dulcie will you be
all smiles and jiggles      waiting
impatiently for the poem of the universe
to begin its fevered song      the pitch
of the upright piano is almost
perfect      opulent purple poplin drifts
across the canopies of the bazaar
usually they live very active lives
he suggests a dull red rug at the hut
zebras and gazelles arrive with axes
zebras and gazelles arrive with bazookas
dulcie is your dirigible
capable of adequate evasive action

Images

James Fryer's cover design for Michele Leggott / The Laureate Series
Scenes from the launch: Ian Wedde, Michele, the performance

the book

Keely O’Shannessy’s cover design

A local launch for MIRABILE DICTU took place 24 June in the Devonport Library with around 140 people present. We kicked off with Selina Tusitala Marsh’s ‘Samoan Star-chant for Matariki’ in blackout with drum and drone backing. Then the lights came up on 23 children (ages 6 to 10) from Stanley Bay School who read their Matariki poems to the enthusiastic crowd.

Selina calls the stars

Some star poets from Stanley Bay

Then it was time to launch the book and Peter Simpson gave it a good shove out into the stream. His launch remarks are reproduced below (thanks Peter). The proceedings finished with a performance of ‘keep this book clean’ that included projections of the smoking-enhanced illustrations in our ancient family copy of The Story of Doctor Dolittle, an excerpt from home movies of Urenui days and a rousing singing by all of the first verse of Me He Manu Rere. It was a great night and thanks are due to the Michael King Centre, the Devonport Library Associates and the Devonport Community Coordinator Maire Vieth for their generous support and organisation.

AUP publisher Sam Elworthy introduces MIRABILE DICTU

Peter Simpson launches book #7

Peter Simpson’s launch speech, Devonport Public Library, 24 June 2009

It is a real pleasure to be invited to launch Mirabile Dictu, the seventh book by my friend and colleague Michele Leggott. Seven is an auspicious number, I believe; at least dwarves, samurai warriors and the seven brides for seven brothers seem to think so, and what poet isn’t into numerology. Writing poetry used to be described by (was it Keats?) as “lisping in numbers”, and I don’t imagine things have changed all that much. Poets like counting; always have, always will. Readers familiar with the previous six of Michele’s books, and I imagine that counts for many people here, might notice some subtle differences this time round. Her previous books, well five of them anyway—Journey to Portugal is a special case—all had a distinctive square format, and all are exactly the same size, obviously deliberate. What’s so good about square, then? Well for one thing, it allows poems to have long lines without curling over the edge, as for example in famous early poems like, “An Island” some of whose lines were all of 30 syllables long—three times as wide as a sonnet. And having gone square once, it was easy to stay square so that all the books lined up prettily in a row, like peas in a pod. But not this time. Mirabile Dictu is both taller and thinner than its brothers and sisters.The thing about poetry, as we all know, is that nothing happens by accident; every detail of word, phrase, line, page is a matter of choice; it’s there for a reason. And the new format of Mirabile Dictu is no exception. It’s there for a reason.

Now, I haven’t spent the amount of time with the poems you’d need to analyse this carefully, but it’s obvious just flicking through the pages that Michele is favouring a shorter line. Take a look at the opening poem, “work for the living”; nearly all the lines are shorter than a pentameter and most are six or seven syllables: same with the last, “more like wellington every day”, and most of those in between. This is not exactly a new voice, but it’s a sign that Leggott is on the move, the lines tumble on top of one another, and into long juicy paragraphs, and further into page after page. None is a as short as a page, many are two, three, four, five, six, even eight pages long, and the pages pile up too. None of your 48 pages, 56 pages, or 62 pages of her first three books. You’d have to add those three together to get a book as big as this one. 154 pages, no less, the size of a novella. Clearly this is a woman who’s got a lot to say, and she wants to get on with it, briskly stepping it out line after line page after page.

Of course now that she carries the big blue stick, Te Kikorangi, of the poet laureateship, she can seize the occasion, command respect, order us to lend her our ears. I think this laureateship has been a benefit to Michele. I think it has given her confidence, a strong sense that words do matter, if we choose the best ones and put them down in their best order as she does, line after line page after page. I sense this new assurance in the poems, they know we are going to be all ears, hanging on every word, even if it takes three, five or eight pages to get to where it’s going. And speaking of coming and going, I’m struck by what a mobile collection this is. It’s always on the move—now up North, now down to Taranaki, or Hawke’s Bay, now in New Brighton, now in Rome, then Florence, then Venice, then back to more familiar parts: Rangitoto, Whatipu, Day’s Bay, Ohakune. The very first poem in the book is a car journey north, with a bunch of poets for company, heading for a funeral (Hone Tuwhare’s as it happens). The last poem in the book is also a journey by car and train, this time for a wedding among the olive groves. Two journeys—one north one south, one to a poet’s funeral, the other to a family wedding. Hey, this is not coincidental, this is deliberate, she planned it that way. And these two poems slyly introduce us to one of the big themes of this book, which we might describe as the family of poetry, and the poetry of families. We meet dozens of poets in this book; one whole poem is devoted to the north shore tribe, from Robin Hyde to Mary Stanley to Jack Ross, and heaps of others show up, John Newton, Bernadette Hall, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Rilke by the Spanish Steps in Rome and Ezra Pound on a gravestone in the cemetery Island of Venice. Poetry itself is never far from the topic of conversation, due no doubt to the challenges and opportunities of the big blue stick. And as for the poetry of families, that is present in this book in spades, as Michele searches family archives to put her mother and father and aunts and great aunts onto the page, often in their very own words, in a wonderfully moving series of poems.

Perhaps I could end with reference to just two more poems; The title poem “mirabile dictu”, and the one whose title is a translation of that phrase, “wonderful to relate”. The counters among you will not fail to notice that “mirabile dictu” is the third poem, while “wonderful to relate” is the third to last. Perhaps we can think of these two as the “Il Penseroso” and “L’Allegro” of John Milton’s pairing. “mirabile dictu” is a descent into darkness and blindness, loss and death, “looking into the eyes of my stone bird”; “wonderful to relate” by contrast, relays the miraculous discovery of what was lost, a daughter, and shows us a family ecstatically reunited in a wedding; a scene of comedy and fruitfulness like the end of a Shakespearean tragicomedy such as The Winter’s Tale. These two poems, the descent into a lonely world of darkness and despair; the entry into a scene of reunion and joy, establish the polarities between which this wonderful book moves, with its great richness of character and scene, and the tremendous verve of its language. It is a book worthy of a laureate: the big blue stick has spoken. Open your purses and buy!

Credits
MIRABILE DICTU cover courtsey of AUP
All photos by Maire Vieth

a few million more

David Eggleton and Michele at the Michael King Writers’ Centre, Devonport

A Million Poems for Matariki is rolling along north of the harbour bridge as schools in the Devonport/Belmont area get busy with posters, sharpies and pavement chalk. David Eggleton was at Belmont Intermediate last week firing up the poetry motors. He has been in Auckland since April as one of the Michael King Writers in Residence, working on a new book and reading all over the city.

Children at Devonport Primary School talking about Matariki

Asking the tokotoko for good words

On Friday 19 June David looked out the front door of the Writers’ Centre on Mt Victoria/Takarunga and saw below him around 200 chalk poems going onto the playground at Devonport Primary School. The weather continues crisp and clear so the poems are still there under bright solstitial sun and the stars of Matariki, now visible in the northeastern sky before dawn.

Devonport Primary poetry stars at work

Poem posters

Michele chalks a Matariki poem.

Photo credits: Marie Vieth

a million poems for matariki

Stanley Bay School poets with the laureate tokotoko.

How do you make a million poems for Matariki? Get the poets all around you onto the job, of course. We took blank posters to Stanley Bay Primary School yesterday and talked with every class about the Devonport Community project to get a sky-ful of poems around the neighbourhood June through July. The kids and their teachers were onto it. By 2.00 we had over 200 poster poems, and by 2.30 they were being chalked onto the playgrounds and walkways around the school. ‘Chalk your poem, then go and read it to ten other people,’ the teachers said. Parents and the local newspaper arrived to find the entire school buzzing with poems underfoot and in the air. Everyone was handed a piece of chalk and asked to join in. ‘Today our school is POEMY!’ said one of the poets with a huge grin.

Mary Margaret Slack dances with chalk poems

Michele listens to a Matariki poem.

Now it is raining and the gutters at Stanley Bay School will be streaming with bright colour. But the poets will be planning more poster poems and taking blanks home for family and friends. Next week blank posters go into other local schools and will be handed out to community groups. In early July the poems will appear in shop windows, galleries, the library and the community house as Matariki gets under way. Here is the mission we have set ourselves:

When the stars of Matariki come over the northeastern horizon just before dawn early in June the old year ends and a new year is beginning. Is the star cluster bright and jewel-like in a clear sky or a hazy shimmer in the east? Look up or look into your imagination and tell us what Matariki looks like from where you stand in the world of light. We'd like to have a sky-ful of poems to read and put up around our community, so write a poem on this poster and be part of A Million Poems for Matariki!

View more photos in the Stanley Bay School's Matariki gallery

Photo credits: Maire Vieth

poetry phantoms

How do you make poems go places? Stick them up on billboards all over the country and (for good measure) in Nashville, Tennessee.

An initiative by poster company Phantom Billstickers puts poems by New Zealand and American poets on the streets as A1 posters. The first four posters were launched in Auckland 2 June by Tusiata Avia, James Milne (aka Lawrence Arabia) and Michele Leggott, who pasted the first copies of Tusiata’s poem ‘Cheek’ and James' 'The Kinds of Feelings that Happen on Summer Beaches' on a Phantom Billstickers site opposite Britomart in the CBD. Readings of both poems were improvised and there were poems and songs from the pavement by Michele Leggott, David Eggleton, Lisa Samuels, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Kelly Malone, John Adams, Tricia Hall, Otis Mace and others. Appreciative students from Poetry off the Page and the Masters of Creative Writing at the University of Auckland, and other audience members were then treated to kebabs on the pavement, courtesy of the Phanotms.

The posters will go up in 13 New Zealand cities and in Nashville, Tennessee, where the company is also active. The poems will change monthly and the project will run for six months. Phantoms Jamey Holloway and Jim Wilson are looking to promote emerging talent and say they will consider short poems emailed to poems@0800phantom.co.nz

Check out the June 2009 posters on nzepc.

Watch Poem Posters to the World video.

Images
Tusiata Avia’s poster poem ‘Cheek’ and James Milne’s ‘The Kinds of Feelings that Happen on Summer Beaches from nzepc

looking for the new laureate

Who should be the next New Zealand Poet Laureate? The National Library is inviting nominations as it begins the process of appointing a laureate whose term will begin in July 2009 and run for two years. Nominees will have made an outstanding contribution to New Zealand poetry and be an accomplished and highly regarded poet. They must also currently reside in New Zealand.

Have your say by filling in a nomination form and sending it to the National Library by 19 June 2009. You can find the nomination form and background information here.

Image
Michele and Chalk Poem, March 2009. Photo courtsey Tim Page.

Chris Price's book launch

Graham Beattie has blogged about the launch of Chris Price's new poetry collection The Blind Singer at the Gus Fisher Gallery, describing it as "a book launch like no other" he has attended.

Check out his piece here.

r.i.p. pearl 1994-2009

little eyes

two coffees to go
to Maungauika     above us
the golden bee of the sun
between us the basket     its blanket
and your sleeping head     little dog
you loved this hill     its spiral road
and the grass ghosts singing
in our ears     now you are still
and everything familiar is still
aching     except that black dot
on the horizon     no longer old
and free at last of the slow
obscenity lymphoma
delivered into your trusting body
last night you fell at my feet
and I knew it was over     little dog
you slept one last time
and then we woke you     one last time
there is much to say up here
on the hill     watching you
get further and further away
a frangipani blossom
and a white ginger flower
we will put you into the ground
between the avocado and the titoki
where you stuck your nose
every morning
into the leaves and snorted for joy
white ginger and frangipani
go with you     last things     a shot
of cat food and your head
in my hands     love uncloses your eyes
and you see clearly again     little dog
chasing the golden bee of the sun
yes     run over that valley
and chase the birds into the sky

Image: Michele and Pearl, January 2009.
Photo credit: Robbie Duncan

the dada lady of the sonnets

Shakespeare’s Sonnets are 400 years old this year and the Bard himself has reached his 23 April 2009 birthday/deathday. With poet and blogger Jack Ross, our Poetry off the Page students took sonnets, scissors, real and virtual glue to remix, blog and then perform some 21st century recensions in honour of WS. The Dada Lady of the Sonnets, a video record of the occasion, puts a new spin on an old mystery, and Jack presents the exercise in full at The Imaginary Museum. Happy 445th Birthday Bill!

Highbrow Sonnet – Blanks Inserted, by Matthew, Diane and Robin

Of with and remembrance before many, by Tricia and Alex

location collaboration performance

Chris Cole Catley, convenor of the recent North Shore Young Writers’ workshops for the Michael King Writers’ Centre, has kindly sent along photos taken during the final afternoon, when writers, chalk and Sunday strollers shared pavements around the library in Devonport.

The 5 April workshop had begun a couple of hours earlier, taking for its keywords location, collaboration and performance. Using each other as sounding boards, pairs of students started by carefully detailing their movements (actual or fictional) from waking that morning until walking into the writing workshop. The hubbub of voices then gave way to intent scratching of felt tips on A3 as everyone got their morning down on paper. More noise as partners read and responded to each other’s drafts, then a round-the-room reading followed by simultaneous rendition, everybody and everything all at once. There is something immensely satisfying about making a ruckus in a library. Well, in a library seminar room.

Part two of the exercise involved taking a page each of the Sunday newspaper and with the help of a partner’s stabbing finger, finding interesting fragments to insert between the lines of the personal text. POETRY IS NEWS was the title we gave to the juxtapositions of life and newsprint that ensued, and a massed rustling of newspaper was improvised between voices in the spirited reading of it. Some of the NEWS made it to the pavements outside, then it was up the hill for afternoon tea and farewells at the Michael King Centre.




Images

Top: Students (right) Augusta Connor and Melissa Low. Tutors (from left) Jo Emeney, Ros Ali, Michele Leggott and Chris Cole Catley. Photo credit: Martin Cole.

Bottom: Back row from left at the Michael King Centre on Mt Victoria, Devonport: tutor Chris Cole Catley; Donna Chan, Glenfield College; Jenny Matthews, Takapuna Grammar; Augusta Connor, Kristin School; Melissa Low, Long Bay College; tutors Ros Ali and Jo Emeney; Lydia Warren, Northcote College; Liam Winter, Rosmini College; next row, guest tutor Michele Leggott; Leighton Watson, Rangitoto College; Alex Simmonds, International College; front row, Peter Yoo, Rosmini College; Kaitlyn Crabbe, Kristin School; front at left, Katie Carey, Rangitoto College. Photo credit: Martin Cole.

catching breath

It's been a busy couple of months finalising the manuscript of MIRABILE DICTU, the book of poems to be published 30 June by Auckland University Press. Here is the string of events which enlivened the process:

19 February Devonport Library Associates reading with local writers Helen Sword and Julia Brennan. I read 'keep this book clean,' a poem about an old library book that survives in my family, and reprised shore space.

26 February Houses by the Sea: Robin Hyde in Wellington, with Lydia Wevers and Derek Challis. I read from Hyde’s sequence 'The Beaches' and talked about some of the textual discoveries made about the poems when I was working on Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde. Listen to Helen Morse read ‘The Beaches’.

4 March launch for Michael Harlow's The Tram Conductor's Blue Cap at Parsons Bookshop, Auckland. Our Poetry off the Page students have now completed a digital translation of the title poem as a course assignment, which Michael has responded to with enthusiasm.

12 March launch for Selina Tusitala Marsh's Fast Talking PI at the Fale Pasifika, University of Auckland. The coordinator of Pasifika Poetry Web debuts her first collection with an accompanying CD of performance and music mixed and mastered by the redoubtable Tim Page.






14 March family wedding at Clearview Estate, Hawke's Bay, with a honeymoon in Mexico to follow.

20-22 March Creative Hastings Festival of Writers 2009 with Martin Edmond, Roger McDonald, Sarah Quigley, Karl Stead, Peter Wells, food writer Catherine Bell and wine writer John Saker. The matua tokotoko returned to home base and was passed around the Assembly Room again.




25 March MC for LOUNGE #6, 10 readers at Old Government House at the University of Auckland. LOUNGE features experienced writers alongside student writers, everyone reading five minutes for a free drink and an attentive audience.

27 March studio recording of 'peri poietikes / about poetry' for the BBC essay series A Laureate's Life, to be broadcast late April. The early morning-late evening link up to Bristol worked flawlessly, thanks again to Tim Page.

2 April MNZM investiture at Government House, Auckland for services to poetry.

5 April Poetry is News workshop for Michael King Centre Young Writers programme, Devonport. By the end of a fine Sunday afternoon there were chalk poems and young writers from North Shore schools on the pavements around the library.

6 April the liberty of parrots goes live in Best NZ Poems 2008, edited by James Brown.




Images, from top:

Michele & Selina Tusitala Marsh. Photo courtesy Godfrey Boehnke.

Selina reads from Fast Talking PI. Photo courtesy Godfrey Boehnke.

Martin Edmond, Michele Leggott and Mark Fryer with the matua tokotoko in Hastings. Photo courtesy Maggie Hall.

Michele in the clock tower, April 2008. Photo courtesy Tim Page.

wonderful to relate

We were in Hawke’s Bay last weekend for a family wedding, a year on from the big ceremony at Matahiwi and the presentation of Jacob Scott’s laureate sticks. So it was a blast to find out some months back that my Australian niece and her Kiwi boyfriend were planning to get married in Hawke’s Bay where his large family has its headquarters. We were happy indeed to gather at Clearview Estate, just down the road from Haumoana, for the wedding which brought people from far and wide and was a high-water mark for both families.

The matua tokotoko was along for the occasion and was passed from speaker to speaker at the reception. It seems clear that the more this and the other laureate sticks go hand to hand, the greater their mana becomes. The wedding speeches were eloquent and moving, and of course the groom’s father knew Jacob Scott and is a published poet himself. These are the things you find out at weddings.

My part in the speeches was to read a poem written a few weeks ago and soon to be the last-but-one component of the collection that will be published in late June as Mirabile Dictu. It’s fair to say that of many wonderful things that have happened in the course of the laureate year and a half, none is as wonderful as the story that brought us all to Clearview for Almitra and Joel’s wedding.

wonderful to relate

my brother leaves a message    call me
something has happened    is it an emergency
or terra incognita waving about in the trees
closer than anyone imagined    a daughter
he says when I call him back    I have a daughter
and she is twenty seven years old

this takes a bit of explaining    and when
he has I ask is there a photo    did you take
some photos    the files arrive as we talk
I open them and there she is    someone
who looks like all of us    and is most surely
herself    the stranger who is his daughter
our niece    and now eldest of five cousins
it takes a long time to work out
the delicate shapes that might be    and when
it is done    she comes to meet us
more photos more talk    we have given her
our grandmother’s rings    she gives us
the gift of herself    if we will have her

that part is easy    and now there’s
a wedding in the air    they will tie the knot
with his people and we will travel again
to Te Matau a Maui    this time
with everyone on board    and in a vineyard
at the far end of summer    with strangers
who have made us welcome    my brother
will give away his daughter    knowing
she has made us into something bigger
and more precious than anyone
could have imagined    she is herself
and she is one of us    for her
we will travel the miles to Haumoana
looking at the windy sea    thinking about
long ago family weddings and how this one
is adding its quota of surprises
and serendipity to the story we thought
we knew    mirabile dictu we say
wiping away a sneaky tear    such wonders
and everybody talking    we are here
with a million champagne bubbles
bursting miraculously against our lips
wish us well    we are going to a wedding


How the story circles: our grandparents were married in Woodville in 1924 and my father was born in Hastings a year later, so there is a family connection to the Bay that just got a whole lot stronger.

Images
Top; (left) Five cousins at Clearview, 14 March 2009, (right) Joel Watson and Almitra McQurade
Bottom: Henry Nelson Leggott & Janet Rintoul Elder, Woodville, 1924

Chalking with Mr Harlow and all

It was chalking day on campus last week as this year’s Poetry off the Page cohort fanned out with poems to put into public space. With them was Michael Harlow, 2009 Burns Fellow and holder of the inaugural Caselberg Residency, in Auckland for the launch of his new book, The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap (AUP). Student chalkers became Harlow ‘translators’ and were encouraged by Michael to co-sign the poem that went down outside the university library during the busiest part of the day. Elsewhere other chalking gangs were taking Harlow words up steps, across a road and around a parked bus. It was, said Michael, the best pre-launch a book of poems could hope for; and he finished the morning by taking requests from the class who by then had very close knowledge of some of his texts. Later we went to look at the range of poems that had made it to the pavements and were already wearing off under the tramp of feet.

The weather gods were kind to us this year and nobody had to watch their chalk poems vanish into gutters. Down by Old Government House digi-poet Helen Sword chalked graphics for her Stoneflower Path. And at the bottom of the OGH drive, hot and dishevelled but perfectly happy, I finished chalking a poem that traces the journey made by 24 year old William Leggott to Aotearoa in 1865.






Photo credits: Tim Page and POTP

Maggie Rainey-Smith on 'Houses by the sea'

Wellington writer & bookseller Maggie Rainey-Smith has blogged about last week's event at the National Library, 'Houses by the Sea – Celebrating Robin Hyde'.

You can read her post on Beattie's Book Blog.

Houses by the sea

The Alexander Turnbull Library has announced its acquisition of a major collection of Robin Hyde’s literary papers. To celebrate the occasion there will be a reception and reading at the National Library in Wellington on February 26 as per the invitation above.

'Houses by the Sea' is Hyde’s most famous sequence of poems and the title of the collection of her later poems published posthumously in 1952. The sequence explores her Wellington childhood and adolescence, looking back at the 1900s and 1910s from 1937-39 as Hyde prepared to leave New Zealand, then travelled through war-torn China and on to England where she died in August 1939. 'Houses by the Sea' travelled with her and was worked on in places as diverse as Hankow (now Wuhan) and Charles Brasch's Wiltshire cottage. Hyde was fully aware of the effect geographical distance was exerting on early memory, explaining in a letter to her family from Shanghai 2 May 1938:

N.Z. is my country beyond any possible mistake [. . .] I’d like to be home, in the back-yard among the black-eyed Susans, or in the front garden with the hose sprinkling – it'll be autumn now, and Wilton's Creek soft and smelling of wild mint and burning gorse. By whiles I have tried to write and link up a series of poems about our childhood places – Wellington – and like some of the results, though very fragmentary as yet. But in travelling, peace isn’t deep enough – if at all – for the writing of real poetry. For prose, however, it hasn’t been so bad, and I think the inarticulate blurred mass of Eastern noise, which is just enormous, is easier to stand because I can’t understand it – my mind isn’t hunting a thread here, a word there. (Challis and Rawlinson, The Book of Iris, p.531)

The prose from China became her last book, the travel memoir and anti-war polemic Dragon Rampant (1939). The poems, dazzling collages of image and memory, were already more than fragmentary when she wrote from Shanghai (she was always supercritical of her own work). By the time she was typing in the spring sunshine outside Bishop's Barn in April 1939, they had become the 20-page typescript from which the published sequence derives. That typescript is part of the vast treasury of manuscripts and photographs that has come to the Turnbull as part of the Derek Challis Papers. The collection is now available to researchers and interested readers of Hyde.



Image: RH writing at Bishop's Barn during her first visit as a guest of Charles Brasch, April 1939. From Derek Challis and Gloria Rawlinson, The Book of Iris: A Life of Robin Hyde (Auckland University Press, 2003)

Papers Past

A big hand for the folks at the National Library who are putting our newspapers online bit by bit, paper by paper. The project is called Papers Past and it means you can search in all kinds of ways for all kinds of things that made local news. Just before Christmas I found that The Timaru Herald had been put online, not a moment too soon for some tinkering with family history I was doing. When your ancestors don’t leave many clues, the papers have to fill in the gaps (see below, ‘family sightings on the mainland’).

It helps to have an oddly spelt name but even so there were more than 350 search results for leggott between 1873 and 1900 which is when the past stops. My arm was about to drop off coming through the 1890s when I arrived at the following story:

TOWN & COUNTRY.
Timaru Herald, 11 January 1898

Mr Leggott, quite an old identity of Timaru, has shown us a curiosity in the shape of copies of a newspaper, The Greyhound Chronicle, published in February, 1865. The ‘copy’ for the paper was written on the voyage of the ship Greyhound, and each MS. day's paper carefully bound, and on arrival at Christchurch the whole was printed and distributed among the passengers. The daily record is interesting reading, the short articles dealing with the voyage, the medical officer's report, astronomy, correspondence on various matters, poetry, humourous paragraphs, etc. Mr Leggott, who was a passenger by the ship, assures us that the paper was eagerly looked for, and helped time to pass very pleasantly.

That’s William, who arrived as a 24 year old farm labourer from Lincolnshire, married 19 year old Catherine Thornton in 1868 and went on to have a family of 11 children. We knew about the Greyhound. We did not know about The Greyhound Chronicle. I searched the databases for a copy, and wonder of wonders, found just one, an ancient photocopy of the publication held by the Turnbull Library. Interlibrary loan has done its work and I am looking at a copy of a copy of the printed version of a handwritten ship’s newspaper that my great great grandfather read February through June 1865 as he made the one-way voyage from London to Lyttelton.

family sightings on the mainland

there was a lot of singing    solos glees duets
recitations and a dialogue in character    sometimes
an initial will show which one of them it was
with the unregistered dog the prize for conduct
the five shilling donation the worst competition score
they play cricket rounders and draughts    they object
to religious instruction in state schools    they join
the Loyal Lifeboat Lodge of Good Templars
the Blue Ribbon Army and the Band of Hope
they are drain layers dry salters road contractors
and they sing    Strike Out the Top Line    The Holy City
Come Unto Me All Ye That Labour And Are Heavy Laden
And I Will Give You Rest    they address remarks on
How to Reach the Unconverted and Can God Furnish
a Table in the Wilderness    they occupy chairs
and second motions    they tender successfully
for local contracts and become identities
in the district    one does jury duty
for an embezzlement trial    one plays a B Flat Bass
they are surface men boot finishers consignees
of shipping from up and down the coast
a son comes second in the three legged race
a daughter is commended for her writing
every eligible name is on the suffrage roll
nobody volunteered for the Transvaal war
and they sing    solos duets quartets    it is never quiet
each morning they open their newspapers
and pick up where they left off
the news goes round and everybody knows
who has been uproariously applauded
who has been struck off the householders’ roll and why
who spoke at length or wished business
speedily disposed of    who sang alto
in one of the pleasantly rendered vocal items
and who is in the conveyance
leaving Gabites’ corner at 1 o’clock sharp today

the tuwhare special

Hone Tuwhare went to Jerusalem in November 1972 to farewell his friend James K Baxter. He wrote what became a well-known poem about driving overnight to get to the tangi, picking up three young men along the way and putting time and place into context as the sun came up at Jerusalem that morning. The poem is called 'Heemi' (Deep River Talk: Collected Poems 96) and it ends:

Joy for the brother sun chesting over
the brim of the land, and for the three
young blokes flaked out in the back seat
who would make it now, knowing that they
were not called on to witness
some mysterious phenomenon of birth on
a dung-littered floor of a stable

but come simply to call
on a tired old mate in a tent
laid out in a box
with no money in the pocket
no fancy halo, no thump left in the old
ticker.

Several of the contributors to nzepc's e-journal ka mate ka ora #6, a Hone Tuwhare special issue, recall the poem in their own tributes to Tuwhare. Robert Sullivan has assembled the rich mix of critical essays, memoirs, poems and photographs just now launching in the September issue. Yes, it's late: there was a much bigger take-up than expected to kmko's call for Tuwhare material, but it's worth waiting for: 8 essays, 3 sets of archival photographs and 25 tributes plus an editorial by Sullivan and a poroporoaki (farewell) by Hana O'Regan called 'He tītī me te waihoka pōhutukawa / Mutton Birds and Red Wine'. Much to savour, much to ponder. Here's a gem from Jean McCormack, who married Tuwhare in 1949:

Calling the ex at seventy-nine

He's in the hospital
in Balclutha
eighty-two now
heart trouble, etc…

I'm reasonable,
high blood pressure
now under control
watery eyes when I go out
in the cold
but that's minor

Who is it he says..
Jean..
Who?
JEAN..
Who? Spell it!
Louder this time…J E A N…
Joan?
No! JEAN…
Jane?
NO! JEAN!

Oh! JUNE! JUNE! (delighted)
(Those names from the 1920s! But who is June, I wonder…
haven’t heard of that one..)

JEAN! YOUR CHILDREN’S MOTHER!

Oh, JEAN!

We talk for a while
as much as is possible,
he asks after the sons, the mokopuna..

He tires
says good-bye
but I hear no clicking off.
I hold the phone

Then I hear faintly, the quavery but
melodious voice..

My heart is sad and lonely, de da, de da, de daaa….

Image
Hone Tuwhare at Jerusalem, 1972
Photograph by William Farrimond

please put the poem back

There was a move recently at The NZ Listener to cut publication of the weekly poem which has appeared in that magazine for decades. It’s one of the few places that offer a substantial fee for a poem ($150 per acceptance) and the only NZ print publication to publish a poem 51 weeks in the year. For the past few years the Listener poem has also been archived online (here’s CK Stead’s elegy for editor Robin Dudding, written after a visit to the Michael King Centre on Mt Victoria in Devonport a few months ago).

Bookman Beattie has logged the uproar over the proposed cut here and it seems likely the Listener will reconsider its decision. Here’s my letter to the editor, dispatched yesterday. The readership figure is cited from the latest Nielsen Media Research National Readership Survey.

30 October 2008

Dear Listener editor/s

A lot of time and effort is put in by poets, publishers and readers to get poetry into public places. When poems reach the walls of galleries or cafes, the signboards of buses and trains or the surfaces of beaches and pavements, public response is positive and everyone is reminded that poems live in the world as well as on the page. So why has The Listener decided to discontinue its weekly poem, the one place in this country that prints a poem which reaches 286,000 potential readers every seven days? Cost? I wouldn’t think $150 per week (the current fee) is too high a price to pay for the preservation of an honourable tradition that tells us poetry engages hearts and minds wherever it goes. Please put the poem back.

shore space

Auckland’s North Shore is heavily populated with poets, past and present (it used to be a cheap place to live). So it seemed like an excellent opportunity to profile some of them during the launch of Shore Space, the North Shore City Council’s new arts portal, at the Bruce Mason Centre in Takapuna last night.

Robin Hyde spent most of 1937, her last year in New Zealand, living on the Shore in a series of baches in Castor Bay and Milford. It was a very difficult year but she got a lot of writing done before leaving for England in January 1938. Here she is, taking a bus ride from Devonport to Milford, finding diverse company along the way.

And already the poem is out of date: Sonja Yelich’s new collection Get Some (Auckland UP) was launched last week in Devonport and Stu Bagby had the first copies of Just Another Fantastic Anthology: Auckland in Poetry (Antediluvian Press) in the boot of his car last night. Watch that space!

shore space

Robin Hyde is getting off the ferry
weeping like Niobe   she's been to see
Work and Income and her case manager
is not enthusiastic about the novel
or the new poetry collection   her tears fell
like marrow fat peas as she crossed the harbour
but now the sun is mopping them up
she posts a letter to John A Lee telling him
she is not pregnant with a third child
and his government should do something
about the land grab going on at Orakei
then she catches the bus for Takapuna
and contemplates the shape of things to come
as it rattles along the waterfront

look there's the Fairburn house
but no Rex   he was sent to buy chops
for the family dinner and wandered off
to the Masonic   where the public bar
is critiquing the second draft of Dominion
Robin Hyde waves from the bus
the bar waves back   bring us yours
next time you’re down this way they call
she pats the typescript in her bag
a little book of dream and philosophy
something for everyone there
and here's Kevin Ireland with jaunty Sid
heading for the cricket pavilion
after a narrow escape from the fangs
of a neighbourhood fiend in Domain St
Sonja Yelich pulls alongside   honk honk
in a big car full of kids and books
caught your last one on National Radio
she calls   let me know if there’s anything
I can do   Robin Hyde perks up
as the bus swings past Narrow Neck
look at all those sailboats   surely one or two
hold world-class poets in the making
she likes the look of the bicycle lanes
on Lake Rd   she spots Frank Sargeson
ambling home to Esmonde Rd   hey Frank
let's get together next week at my place
the pale idea of Janet Frame floats
around the corner but this is not the moment
to compare notes on mental health
and anyway the bus is grinding past the lake
where Leigh and Susan Davis
are watching rowers and swans drift past
on a perfect map of the sky
isn’t that tony green tony green tony green
jogging by in lycra and an experimental hat?
Robin Hyde gets off the bus in Milford
and down the road comes Wystan Curnow
fresh from a swim at Castor Bay
with D'Arcy Cresswell and Sam Hunt
they've heard about the plan
to sail for England and are here to offer help
with packing when the time arrives
Robin Hyde is touched   guys that's awesome
she thanks them and they all walk up
the hill to Prospect Terrace
to meet the gang of people waiting there

it’s quite a scene   a small room
with large windows overlooking Rangitoto
John Yelash and Robin Dudding uncork the Lemora
Greville Texidor tangos past with Anna Kavan
Mary Stanley blows a kiss
to three boys trailing home with towels
and a typewriter thumps in the back room
where Kendrick Smithyman is putting
finishing touches to the masterpiece of the day
he hands out copies and everyone
offers comment so useful
he gets back on the job right away
Stu Bagby's asking for contributions
to Great New Zealand Sex Poems Volume II
Jan Kemp is arranging TV contracts
for those whose Collected Works have gone
platinum on international charts   yes platinum
Keith Sinclair's heart is in his mouth
be kind to one another, kiss a little
and here's Karl Stead fronting up
with the keys to a London flat   please I insist
the big pohutukawa at the gate
leans out over the iron roof   fantails hop
in a mesh of boughs   the typewriter thunders on
above the talk of poets living and dead
and suddenly Robin Hyde no longer minds
that the landlady wants her out
in time to catch the Christmas rentals
Kendrick look there's this new machine
I could take overseas   why don't you keep
my old clunker   she's bought
the tickets to go to England by way of China
Japan Russia Germany and France
the whole World War just waiting
to happen   and who knows
what will become of her novels her letters
and her poetry collections   one thing's
for sure   she would be pleased
this spring afternoon above the bays
where gorse and mangroves present
a united front and choko vines run wild
she would be pleased to see Jack Ross
and friends rolling in with a box of books
and a sausage sizzle to do a fundraiser
for a poet who has run out of cornflakes
on the other side of the world   Robin Hyde
is living on baked beans and disprins
soon she will leave the places we can see
and walk the seaward road that glistens
with disappearances   she waves her stick
in farewell as the sun goes down
on the blue and blissful bay   she finds a piece
of Exquisite Bond in the wilderness of paper
that is her boat   and starts to write

Image: Robin Hyde, 1936
Photographer: Spencer Digby
From Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde, Auckland University Press, 2003 

travelling tapa

Here’s Rachel Blau DuPlessis settling in at Durham, North Carolina, where she and partner Bob DuPlessis are visiting fellows for the North American academic year at the National Humanities Centre. Rachel is flagging the recent publication of Ron Silliman’s monumental work The Alphabet (U of Alabama P, September 2008), a long poem published serially over 30 years and appearing now in its full 26 parts. She’s also sitting under a beautiful piece of Tongan tapa that travelled from Auckland to Umbria in June when we went to stay for a few days with Rachel and Bob at their summer place in Italy. There it is (below) unrolled in full on the terrace.

It was at this point we learned that Bob is an authority on, among other things, the history of textile production in central Italy (what he doesn’t know about wool, linen and the farming of silkworms isn’t worth knowing). But the bark cloth from the Pacific, involving a different kind of mulberry tree, was new to him and to Rachel. We’re glad to see the tapa is still travelling and look forward to having the roving Americans in our part of the world. They’ve been to Australia twice and they’re keen to come here. Text and textiles could be the drawcard.




Images from top:

Rachel Blau DuPlessis with The Alphabet.
Photo credit: Bob DuPlessis

Rachel and Michele with tapa.
Photo credit: Mark Fryer

for the record

A catch-up on events and activities winter through spring:

5-7 July NZSA/CNZS conference in Florence, Italy, keynote presentation ‘Talking to the Future in the Mountains of the Star’ and presentation with Brian Flaherty of nzepc’s LOVE, WAR AND LAST THINGS: A Digital Bridge for Florence.

18 July Poetry Central at Auckland City Library, launching New NZ Poets in Performance and Bob Orr’s Calypso on Montana Poetry Day.

4 August Hand to Hand: Five Laureates at Writers on Mondays, reading with Jenny Bornholdt, Bill Manhire, Elizabeth Smither and Brian Turner at the National Library, Wellington.

13 August Chancellor’s Lecture ‘Resuming folding life’ at Massey University, Albany campus.

28 August Mollie: On the Track of the Ohakune Elephant 1957-2008, University of Auckland.

5-7 September The Press Christchurch Writers Festival, panel discussion with Bill Manhire, Bernadette Hall and Brian Turner.

20 September Poetry off the Page, presentation with Helen Sword at Going West literary festival in Titirangi.



Images:
Top: With Penny ('Crone Queen') Somervaille.
Bottom: Penny chalking
Photographs by Renee Liang.

the ohakune elephant

There’s an elephant buried in Ohakune. The locals know about it, and some of them were there in 1957 when Mollie, one of nine elephants touring with Bullen’s Circus, ate poisonous tutu and died. An account of her death appeared in the NZ Herald 18 December 1957 where Derek Challis, then a technician with the zoology department at the University of Auckland, read it and requested permission from the circus owner and government officials to remove the elephant’s skull for the university’s biology museum. Permission was given and Derek caught the train to Ohakune a couple of days later. With the help of locals Eric Fetzer and Peter Jenkins, the elephant was exhumed, the head cut off and cleaned then railed to Auckland where it was prepared for display as part of a teaching exhibit about elephant dentition. When the biology museum was disestablished in the mid 1990s, the dentition display disappeared.


Martin Edmond was a five year old living with his family in Ohakune at the time of the elephant’s death. Over the years he told the story to many people, without knowing exact details or that the head had been removed. When he started to research Bullem’s Circus last year, Australasian circus historians told him there was no record of an elephant death at Ohakune. But teacher and historian Merilyn George interviewed half a dozen residents who took her to the gravesite and were in no doubt about the circumstances of the poisoning.


It seemed time to tap institutional memory. I said I would ask after the skull and went over to the School of Biological Sciences earlier this year with photographer Tim Page. Fortunately, the biologists were able to locate the dentition display, locked away in a dark cupboard. But they knew nothing about the provenance of the two skulls it contained. We took a lot of photos and I sent two off to Martin in Sydney captioned: ‘Maybe this is Mollie?’


It was. She was upside down and minus her display stand, but she was there. The biologists contacted their retired colleague Joan Robb to get a positive identification. Joan described the bleached colour of the skull and a knife cut in the bone (Mollie was 13 when she died and her bones were relatively soft). Plans were put in place to bring Mollie out of the cupboard in time to coincide with Martin’s visit to Ohakune and Auckland at the end of August.


The upshot was Mollie and Friends: On the Track of the Ohakune Elephant, an afternoon of talks and readings in the Old Biology Building at the University of Auckland, 28 August 2008. It was an extraordinary event. Joan Robb spoke eloquently about the founding of the museum by Professor WF McGregor. Mandy Harper and Mary Sewell showed archival images of the Lippincott-designed building and its displays. Derek Challis and Peter Jenkins reconstructed the exhumation and decapitation with gripping detail. Martin and his sister Frances Edmond spoke about the circus tour and the impact of Mollie’s death on Ohakune. Some of our poetry students read the archived news reports. Tim and I retraced the trail that led to the discovery in the cupboard. Everyone trooped along the hallway to see Mollie now restored to daylight, and then Martin’s new book of poems, The Big O Revisited (Soapbox Press, 2008) was launched in the SBS foyer.


What next? Mollie’s skull is back on display in the Old Biology Building. Her unmarked grave in Ohakune is the subject of conversations about how to commemorate what happened and to connect up the parts of a story that begins in northern Thailand in 1947 with the sale to Stafford Bullen of not one but five baby elephants for shipping to Perth.



Photographer: Tim Page

historic!

It hasn’t happened before but it should happen again: the gathering of laureates in Wellington last week for Writers on Mondays was a landmark occasion. The National Library put out 270 seats and there were people standing shoulder to shoulder at the back as Chris Szekely and Kate Camp got the evening underway.

John Buck detailed the 2008 Te Mata wines we’d been putting away in the foyer beforehand (poetry for the palate). He then launched the two CDs (Bornholdt and Manhire) that inaugurate a series of spoken word recordings from Braeburn Studio/Jayrem Records. Jacob Scott brought the National Library’s tokotoko onstage and explained its design before handing it around for everyone to see and hold. He also introduced Hone Tuwhare’s tokotoko, the famous dipstick made from a piece of an old Te Mata wine press and now in the permanent collection of the Southland Museum in Gore.

Then the laureates were called one by one to give an account of their personal tokotoko before reading. My transformed pool cue (Te Kikorangi) was followed by Brian Turner’s hockey stick (yes, says Brian, it’s a functional walking stick that got him around after a hamstring injury). Jenny Bornholdt’s tokotoko features female symbols of nurture and growth that did not deter her children from using its carved grip as a makeshift gun (these sticks live in the world and take their chances). Elizabeth Smither’s elegant cane, surmounted by part of a Holden gearshift and a carved whale tooth, was next. The poet admitted she liked driving fast but left us to work out the tooth for ourselves. Finally Bill Manhire spoke about the gravitas of the sticks and their function of focusing concentration and eloquence. His tokotoko, the first of the Te Mata sticks, was made from a piece of that same wine press to commemorate Te Mata’s centenary and the inauguration of the laureateship in 1996. There’s a sizeable stone from the Tukituki river on top of it and Bill has become expert at wrangling the stick through airport security post 2001.

The poetry? A great pleasure to hear everyone read, and an audience to die for. Some of the poems that were read appear below, courtesy of the poets and their publishers.

• Jenny Bornholdt, Life
• Michele Leggott, (from) poppies and plane trees
• Bill Manhire, Visiting Europe
• Elizabeth Smither, Cole dresses his mother
• Brian Turner, The Way Is Is

Pictured from left: Brian Turner, Jenny Bornholdt, Bill Manhire, Michele Leggott, Elizabeth Smither. Photographer: Caroline Garratt. National Library of New Zealand

Life


This new
quiet life.

At the end of the day -

three lines
a cake
Peggy's son's
peas, Jane's damson
jam.


Jenny Bornholdt
From Mrs Winter’s Jump (Random/Godwit, 2007).