Ian takes a brief detour from text-based presentation to talk to Ryan Van Winkle from the Poets House on the Scottish Poetry Library Podcast.
Head on over to Podomatic to have a listen, and get a preview of Ian's plans for the Laureateship. (Audio autoplays, 27 minutes)
I wrote this section of Shadow stands up in winter soon after we’d moved into our new place, which we liked because it had a big flowering tree outside on the street. How quickly we orient ourselves in new situations: the tree was one marker which I’d see in the foreground as I came home through the alleyway off Three Lamps into the car park behind the post office; another was the distant blue-green horizon of the Waitakere Ranges viewed from the Ponsonby ridge across the early evening glitter of house-lights beyond Westmere to Te Atatu. Stepping from our front door into Prosford Street and going in the opposite direction back towards the shops, it was the picture-framer across the road and the auto-repair business at the end of the street that became the markers of that journey.
I was re-reading Rimbaud’s poems and letters at the time, fascinated all over again by the tension between the letters and poems of that miracle year 1871 (‘Je est un autre’), and the letters he wrote from Africa after 1880. Though the tree, the view across to the ranges, the picture-framer, and the auto-repair business had become my memory markers, they were sometimes reoriented through Rimbaud’s words and that amazing ability he had to be other than himself, ‘un autre’, to be at once a subject and an object he observed, even a drunken, rudderless boat; and, in the letters written from Aden and Harar, to be the trader Rimbaud, that shrewd operator looking for the best price for coffee or guns, whose memories of the family home at Charleville must also have been filtered or reoriented somehow by the dusty red sunsets he observed with a mixture of venomous boredom and unquenchable hope.
When he watched his camel-train watering at an oasis, did he also see the ‘black, cold puddle’ where a small boy, ‘plein de tristesses’, launched his boat like a butterfly in May? Where does the present moment stop and a memory summoned by it begin to slide across that consciousness where self and other are not distinct? One chilly morning I saw Cartune Auto up the road from our place through the filter of a ‘memory’ derived from Rimbaud, but also through my own memory of swallows around the old battlements of Fez, and a cat sitting on top of a camel-load of goods just across the Syrian border in eastern Turkey. What present was Rimbaud in when, in his last delirious letter dictated to his sister Isabelle on 9 November 1891, the day before he died, he asked for ‘the prices of the services from Aphinar to Suez’ – when there’s nowhere called ‘Aphinar’ on the map?
And where was I, precisely, a couple of days ago, when Donna and I walked – ‘plein de tristesses’ – through the empty rooms of our lovely old house in Albany Avenue, Mount Victoria, Wellington, for the last time, and locked the door behind us? The rooms weren’t ever empty over more than twenty years, and the moment the door shut on them they began at once to be filled again with the voices I’d always heard there – in a place called something like ‘Aphinar’, perhaps, a place that doesn’t exist (but does); a moment at once melancholy and filled with the unstable, liberating happiness of change.
7
Khartoum is what I see first
when I step outside into
the street at the front of our
place, with a tree I’m starting
to remember, its shadow
was thickly matt in summer
but now sparse and transparent –
I look past its filigree
at a yellow battlement
scarified with texts and signs
that seem familiar, though the
swallows piercing a sunset
reddened with dust, the hoarse yells
of women beating carpets
flung across the sills of dark
windows, and the open gate
through which laden camels pass
(a cat perches on top of
bales of merchandise) – these I
don’t remember, yet they stand
up clearly in the morning
light where the green Link bus goes
swiftly past Cartune Auto
Service Centre ph 37
60268, its six
dark windows inscribed with texts,
its open warehouse door through
which a ute laden with tyres
enters the dark citadel
past the cat rolling in sun-
light on the footpath outside.
Last Wednesday I was up in the attic of the old house in Wellington where I’ve stashed boxes of stuff connected with writing. Some of it goes back a long time, to the late 1960s – earnestly labelled notebooks. I didn’t look at them. It was a bit like crossing the road to avoid someone you quite like but don’t want to have to talk to. Mostly, though, the boxes contain drafts of books that I kept because I thought I might want to come back to them and use bits that had been edited out. I never have. Now, their uselessness is a kind of comfort. No pressure!
Because I’ve made my living precariously as a freelance writer for extended periods of time, there are lots of boxes irritably labelled 'projects'. Some of these 'projects' saw the light of day, many didn’t. I guess I kept the strike-outs for the same reason I kept drafts of books – in case they might be worth coming back to. They never are. This, too, is comforting. New ideas may not always be better, but they are always more optimistic.
There are boxes of things evasively labelled 'treasures'. One contained a sliding-lid pencil-case with funny hot-poker drawings on it that my son Carlos made when he was at primary school thirty years ago, the wooden mould-template for a car universal joint that Frank Stark gave me as a birthday present about as long ago as the pencil-case, and other objects about which floats a miasma of vague guilt – objects that should have been thrown out years ago but weren’t because I couldn’t bear to; and their close relatives, the objects that I wanted to throw out but knew I’d be cursed if I did (neither the pencil case nor the wooden mould template belong to either of these categories, though one is useless but interesting, while the other would be useful if I needed a pencil-case, but is in fact also useless but, in its case, emotionally beautiful).
There are boxes labelled 'family snaps' that I know will reveal weirdly scrambled narratives of time and place when I get around to looking into them, which, I swear, I will, some day, sooner or later.
Because we’re leaving, 'the kids' have cleared their boxes of junk out, and there are strange bare rectangles on top of the MDF flooring which are like the ghosts of evacuated secrets, which I suspect will haunt their hoarders for years to come, until they finally give up and toss the collections of beer-cans, munted hardware, and dysfunctional video cameras.
Boxes of tax returns, of long-ago-anachronistic exhibition pamphlets and catalogues, of 'research material' whose purposes have been gnawed into filigreed ruins by the industrious silverfish of the redundant. Boxes that I suspect (but am not going to check) contain things I was meant to do when I got time.
I imagine what a liberation it will be when I get up in the morning and the attic in my head will be full of a new day’s early morning sunshine and precious little else. But I also know this isn’t going to happen – not, at any rate, until the condition quaintly known as AD (suggestive of an immensely long time-span of memory) sets in, when the pencil case and the wooden universal joint will come into their own, since it won’t matter anymore whether they signify anything or nothing. For now, I furtively look for a place where they can stow away.
6
I get up early hoping
I’ll encounter the line drawn
under night time, the red streak
that bisects the shadow of
dawn standing up, horizon
of dark buildings in the east
whose windows begin to flash,
the gassy aquamarine
sky pouring itself into
the gaps between high-rise glass,
laser-streaks of gulls lit by
the afterburn of early
sunrise over there where hope
appears inevitable
and unwise, but worth getting
up early enough for, to
remember why you do this.
Last week we sold our big old house in Wellington. Everything in it will be moved out by the end of the year. We’d lived there for some twenty years by the time we left, and some of our kids as well as a grand-daughter went on living there when we came up to Auckland at the beginning of this year.
We kept a room in the house, and came and went most months. The first time I went back I realised it wasn’t my place any more, it was Mischa, Laura, and Bella’s; it was Penn’s, and Conrad’s. It was also in a way the place of people I didn’t know – they were there having dinner and greeted me politely, as if I was an unexpected guest; which I was. This was okay: the old place was doing a good job and had adapted to it quickly.
What was stranger was that the kids had installed a number of household rituals which I recognised as tribal, and which in the past they’d sometimes accepted with a certain amount of resignation. The big meal around the table that Carlos and I had made, for example, the extended family plus hangers-on. Now, they were dismayed and even culturally offended when I sometimes preferred to slip out and sit alone in a corner at Kazu, like an exhausted ethnologist needing a break from field-work.
In the house, I noticed those standard signs of family memory, such as the pencil marks on the door-frame marking off the startling growth of boys. The French doors at the back had been gnashed into strange contours by Vinnie, our Rhodesian ridgeback, when he was a lonely, locked-out pup. His bones are in the garden, along with those of several eccentric cats. I recognise some scrape marks on the floor, about which the less said the better; some scorch marks on the deck marking a crisis of oblivious hospitality; an olive tree gifted by our friend Abe when we first moved in against his advice (the place was a wreck); and the huge, ancient, sprawling taupata that has fed a million birds but which one neighbour wanted to fell.
There’s the window I used to look out of when I was working in my room upstairs; another neighbour used to see me staring out of it, and would sometimes swish the drape across their kitchen window. But I wouldn’t even have seen them or their kids mucking about – I‘d have been looking at something else, something inside my head not inside their kitchen.
The old house is literally an archive – there are lines of boxes in the attic, along with kids’ stuff that will have to move on somewhere else. But now the house is beginning to resemble the place in my head, the one my former neighbours didn’t know about, a place I’ll be looking into with that not-here expression of someone moving memories into a kind of defile, at the end of which they will fall into patterns they may never have had when they were events that were taking place in the house, when we still lived there.
I imagine myself pulling down the blinds of the house we live in now, because that weird bugger over there is staring at me – who does he think he is?
A green Link bus goes past with
Sorry in lights on its fore-
head, windscreen-wipers dashing
tears from its face, the shadows
of empty seats on fogged-up
glass, and I am, too – sorry –
I’m sorry that life’s too short
and the memory of it
much shorter. Magnificent
obsession sale now on reads
the shop-front signage the next
unapologetic bus
passes not long afterwards
with my confused face looking
out through the wet, blurry glass,
messed up somehow, unable
to settle for sorrow or
jubilation – but then it’s
over, it’s gone, that moment
when I thought I’d remembered
something that reminded me
you just can’t hope to do that –
remember, I mean, too late,
when it’s too late to do that.
It was great to see some of the Mix and Mash entries, not just because some small shadows of my ‘Shadow Stands Up’ poem appeared there (though that was certainly interesting), but because they demonstrated what can happen now when the ancient practice of echoing or reworking existing texts (when did the ‘Homeric Hymns’ settle into the written form we know? When did the Mahabharata coalesce?) meets a contemporary practice of assemblage and collage in writing and art, and does so in an on-line environment. The John Ashbery metaphor of the poet riding a bike down a hill, unsure whether he or the bike is doing the propulsion, works here too – but without the material drag of the poem as mass, as pages in a book, somehow bearing all that effort of production beyond the poem itself. In an on-line environment, these cut-ups and re-assembles have a new kind of lightness that’s probably deceptive, though. I was very struck both by the deftness and lightness of Kate Waterhouse’s poem ‘Domus – home, dwelling’, and by the dense evidence of thought and work in it, and by its seriousness.
My first home, which I shared with
my twin brother David, was
our mother’s womb. This is the
first sentence of the book that’s
got me thinking about what
exactly memory does
and what time it does that in,
for example, when was I
‘I’ when I wrote that sentence,
was I in the time of the
tardy twin hanging back in
the warm, shady womb, or was
I out here in the cold light
of day, too late now to say
wait as Dave’s shadow stands up
and moves into the neither
here nor there we live in while
everything remarkable
in the world packs the foreground’s
augmented reality
that never lasts long enough.
Augmented reality
was what Donna talked about
on the way to lunch in the
food-court on Ponsonby Road
but I forgot all about
it when she next told me that
the mummified body of
an Egyptian princess had
been diagnosed with a heart
condition at forty years
of age despite a presumed
diet of vegetables,
fruit, and fish, pretty much what
we eat most of the time and
believe we're doing enough
thereby to earn a decent
stretch. Memory, though, what a
shadowy mystery that
is, how it mars the surface
of the present it then stands
up in, augmented, a dead
presence that should have lasted.
At the Albany campus of Massey University last Thursday I gave a talk about the differences - for me, writing them - between essays, fiction, and poetry. Of course they cross over each other all the time, but my basic distinction is that essays begin with a thesis and you think with it or against it, fiction begins with an imaginative situation and uses story-telling of one kind or another to see where that might go, whereas writing poetry is a bit like riding a bike down hill, there comes a point when you can't be sure if you're turning the pedals or if they're making your legs go round. (This is John Ashbery's idea - incidentally a favourite of Bill Manhire's as well, we talked about while we were snowed in at Dunedin a few weeks back.) It's at the point where you're not sure who's driving the thing that the excursion gets seriously interesting and enjoyable, and is probably going ok, though where exactly may not be obvious.
So far so good.
On August 4th I was handed the New Zealand Poet Laureate tokotoko in the company of my old friend Cilla McQueen and a gathering of friends, family, and the terrific people from the National Library. Then a crowd of us went and had a long, celebratory lunch. On Friday 12th I went to Dunedin for Ralph Hotere's 80th birthday celebrations and on Sunday joined Bill Manhire and David Eggleton for a poetry reading in Ralph's honour. A good time was had by all. On Friday 19th I went to Wellington for the launch of Peter Black's extraordinary book of photographs, I loved you the moment I saw you. More good times.
The following Friday it was back to Wellington for the launch of my novel The Catastrophe at Meow, followed by gigs from poet John Newton's band The Tenderizers and Damien Wilkins's The Close Readers. The good times were still very good but getting tiring. This Friday in Auckland is the launch of Haka at the Auckland Centre of the National Library of New Zealand, then up to Whangarei with Donna for the Northland Spring Book Fair on Saturday, she to talk and sign copies of her novel Surrender, me to give a poetry reading. I'm sure we'll have a good time. There's more to come - Going West Books and Writers Festival at Titirangi the following weekend, always an enjoyable event.
What I'm noticing is what began on August 4th. I'd have been at all the events this month, and would no doubt have enjoyed them just the same, and felt just as agreeably clobbered, but I've begun to be gently nudged into public view as a poet, and this will take a bit of getting used to. But in the spirit of good will I've encountered this month, taking my cue from the encouragement I've had, I'm posting another section of 'Shadow Stands Up', the sequence of poems I'd just begun to write when I heard about the Laureate award. Nudging it out into view.
Please don't squeeze me until I'm
yours reads the greengrocer's sign
on his ripe avocados
whose enticing location
in a tilted tray on the
footpath outside his shop says,
we live in a country of
ripe words, which is why the im-
print of memory may be
all that mars the surfaces
where the outlines of trees can
seem to rise up at any
time and become the shadows
of runners circling the park
a green Link bus goes past with
me in it, thinking, 'How can
I know what memory is
going to offer me unless
I can feel it's ready to?'
(The National Library warmly welcomes Ian Wedde to the position of New Zealand Poet Laureate. We think he’s going to do rather well.)
Mix and Mash has returned for its second year, offering big prizes and instant fame for the best remixes and mashups made with New Zealand content. Ian has kindly made his poem below, “Shadow Stands Up”, available for use in (or out of) the competition.
Shadow stands up under the
trees in Victoria Park
whose own filigree shadows lie
across matted russet leaves
on the sodden green turf that
the morning’s tai chi moves
barely mar – I see this from
the Link bus window as we
cross the intersection at
the bottom of the hill where
Kathmandu’s winter sale fails
to persuade me there’s much to
gain from any promise of
warmth other than what I get
when, while rain rattles against
the bedroom window at dawn,
I press my ear to the smooth
skin between Donna’s shoulder-
blades and hear, in the hollow
chamber where she’s making dream
words, a voice that’s not the
same as hers say eerily,
‘Shadow stands up.’ It’s morning.
This is a first hesitant draft of what may be the first poem in a sequence of poems I now plan to be writing over the Laureate term. For me it’s been a great coincidence, to get the news about the Laureateship at pretty much the same time I’d begun to think about this sequence, which at this early stage is called "Shadow Stands Up" – which could easily change.
At the moment I think its themes are to do with memory, first of all – how memory stitches time into patterns and narratives that can’t exist in rational ways – and also to do with ghosts. Enough said. I am breaking one of my own rules here, by showing a version of something I’ve only just begun to write. With luck and some persistence, what seems to be getting under way here will grow and change into something else that I can’t anticipate at this early stage.
- Ian
Thank you everyone who made a submission. Nominations for 2011-2013 are now closed.
Who should join the ranks of Cilla, Michele, and the other amazing New Zealand Poets Laureate? The National Library is inviting nominations as we start the appointment process. The next Laurate will hold the position from July 2011 to June 2013, as a representative of and advocate for poetry. Nominees will have made an outstanding contribution to New Zealand poetry and be an accomplished and highly regarded poet. They must also live in New Zealand.
This, my last post, responds to a two-part visual essay by Peter Ireland, comprising images from the National Library's collection.
I am grateful to the National Library for their kind support and advice during my enjoyable and productive time as New Zealand Poet Laureate 2009-2011.
Cilla McQueen
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Reverse glove ripple over reflection geometries stretch turn signs,
heart image histories this day's wattle and daub, schist, seaward heading hero dazzle in shelter handmade translucent shadow long-leaved cygnet pendant,
Chrysalis carefully unmove woman brush-tip in winter mist and shady earth floor
roof door the walker boots. Be in house and a rushing dog eye soldier bush illegible ladder to and fro, rare grace parts quiet child knee rock in language time.
Rest easy silence - all silent foot of sea-creature spring shy, clean tree, whale, blue illuminated vellum. Rearranging space fluent or beginning inside noble tussock listening to larks, this calm.
Calm cannon's here war distance singular between a coast a journey a quiet tarn touch, untouch a hoof to water as window lilts a lady and her dog
Slide asterisk wind dunes sign hat
And return celestial glow warps love in it once more white taffeta wings.
Sea-creature foot water, cairn and hillside turning bent thin trunk to
prayer language dawn a graceful woman. Mountain crumble coal-fired
steam-powered rock crusher noise rhythmic slow exposures, flash flood -
So in paint language book on knee speak akin to balancing dancer speed
a picnic in spacetime - shifting travel above ice obelisk say and meaning all together struggles wind-blasted,
Views with reserve stained glass flowering light through.
Touch, untouch, a hoof to water tranquil tarn in caterpillar ripples leaving all brave lilts a lady in space between reflection store under listen talk arrows this way and that fleet tracking dog,
Thinks poised one bud opening precious qualities mirror wind gesture, peer down mantis pictogram at happy hour to view the ice dancer one open
Starry mist message slice on a gauze rubble-wreaker iron business -
might instead strange poetry -
caught in a word game, skin to hand signature.
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Day's narratives strung
on thought-lines
Supermarket to happy hour,
chrysalis to vista,
Each a step on a way
and a world of its own
Before and after
time stilled at shutter-fall.
References
1 Photographer: William Price
Premises of Green and Colebrook, Huntly, circa 1910
Ref: 1/2-001760-G
2 Photographer: Tesla Studios
Unidentified employee of (Wanganui Sign Company?) creating advertisement for ‘Wear Right’ gloves
Ref: 1/1-022322-F
3 Photographer; Samuel Heath Head
The French Mission visiting the Sign of the Kiwi, Christchurch, January 1919
Ref: 1/1-007521-G
4 Photographer unknown
Chinese miners with the Rev. Alexander Don, Tuapeka, circa 1900
McNeur Collection, Ref: 1/2-019148-F
5 Photographer: Gordon Burt
Bond Street, Wellington, 1956-1961
Ref: 1/2-037223-F
6 Photographer unknown
Interior of ‘The Talkeries’, business of Thomas Dwyer, Masterton, circa 1909
Ref: 1/2-043062-F
7 Photographer unknown
Display window of DIC, Wellington, 1944
Ref: 1/4-015034-F
8 Photographer unknown
Premises of J. Goodwin, Plumber (Upper Hutt?) circa 1912
Ref: 1/2-107542-F
9 Photographer unknown
Maori Battalion’s mobile canteen, WWII
Ref: 1/4-028490-F
10 Photographer unknown
Man painting a sign at entrance to Kilbirnie Stadium, Wellington, 1929
Ref: 1/4-032457
11 Photographer: Albert Percy Godber
Opening of the new Silverstream Fire Station, 1938
Ref: 1/4-038919-G
12 Photographer: Evening Post
Sign asking for ‘Silence’, Brass Band competition, Wellington Town Hall, 23 April 1951
Ref: 114/283/04-G
13 Photographer: George Kaye
Street sign in Taranto,Italy, November 1943
Ref: DA-04493-F
14 Photographer: George Kaye
Signs, including the diamond sign of the New Zealand Division, near Rimini, Italy, 16 September 1944
Ref: DA-06654
15 David at Prayer
Leaf from 15th century Book of Hours, Eastern France, circa 1460
Ref: MSR-02-F108R
16 Photographer: Max Oettli
From series of photographs of Dunedin, Wellington, and Auckland, 1967-1971
Ref: PADL-000145
17 Photographer unknown
View of Pahiatua, showing the ‘Club hotel’, circa 1910
Ref: PAColl-5671-24
18 Photographer unknown
Premises of RH Wyche, Shoemaker, Wellington, Date unknown
Ref: PAColl-6001-51
19 Photographer: Steffano Webb
Public telephone box, Christchurch, with Cathedral in background, August 1912
Ref: 1/1-004088
20 Photographer: Steffano Webb
Mansfield’s monumental mason’s yard, Christchurch, circa 1910
Ref: 1/1-004356-G
21 Photographer: William Archer Price
A stall at trade fair (Auckland?) with promotional stand for ‘Neopost’, 1930
Ref: 1/2-000266-G
22 Photographer: Evening Post
Two butchers outside Roseveare & Son, Wellington, 8 March 1951
Ref: 114/266/09-G
23 Photographer: Free Lance (magazine)
Manawatu Automobile Association road sign, 1955
Ref: PAColl-7171-35
24 Photographer unknown
Levin Rally Hall, date unknown
Ref: PAColl-6388-02
25 Photographer: Thelma Kent
Monarch butterfly chrysalis on a swan plant, circa 1930
Ref: 1/4-003592-G
26 Photographer: Thelma Kent
Flowering cactus, circa 1920
Ref: 1/4-003659-G
27 Photographer: Thelma Kent
Ice skater, Lake Tekapo, 1938
Ref: 1/2-009527-F
28 Photographer: Thelma Kent
Rees Valley, Otago, circa 1939
Ref: 1/2-009689-F
29 Photographer: Thelma Kent
Steam shovel excavating a cliff face, location unknown, circa 1939
Ref: 1/2-010277-F
30 Photographer: William Williams
Lydia Williams in doorway of house, Carlyle Street, Napier, circa 1880
Ref: 1/1-025645-G
31 Photographer: William Williams
Figurehead of the ship ‘Northumberland’, location unknown, circa 1880
Ref: 1/1-025693-G
32 Photographer: William Williams
Dunedin Telegraph Office, 1893
Ref: 1/1-025835-G
33 Photographer: William Williams
Taieri River, Otago, circa 1890
Ref: 1/1-025866-G
34 Photographer: William Williams
Man making walking sticks, Leith Valley, Dunedin, circa 1899
Ref: 1/2-140223-G
35 Photographer: William Williams
Gun emplacement, Fort Balance, Wellington, circa 1884
Ref: 1/2-140344-G
36 Photographer: William Williams
Shotover River, Otago, 1890
Ref: 1/2-140459
37 Photographer: William Williams
Obelisk and group at Green’s Point, Akaroa, circa 1910
Ref: 1/2-140545-G
38 Photographer: William Williams
Near Highcliff, Otago Peninsula, Dunedin, 23 September, 1894
Ref: 1/2-140629-G
39 Photographer: William Williams
Lydia Williams with stereoscope and cards
Ref: 1/2-141215-G
40 Photographer: William Williams
Cabbage tree in fog, Port Hills, Canterbury, 1938
Ref: PA11-147-003
41 Photographer: William Williams
Picnic, Leith stream, Dunedin, circa 1893
Ref: PA11-160-01
42 Photographer: Thelma Kent
Photomicrograph of a section through a Virginia creeper, circa 1930
Ref: PAColl-3052-21-01
43 Photographer: Thelma Kent
Dead tree, circa 1930
Ref: PAColl-3052-02-04
44 Photographer: Thelma Kent
Log attached to cable, Aorere River, circa 1930
Ref: PAColl-3052-01-07
45 Photographer: William Williams
Couple looking down on Lake Wakatipu from summit of Mount Alfred, December 1893
Ref: PA11-159-02
