A new Laureate

11

If I wanted to translate
silence I would have to be
deaf, to remember silence
I would have to recognise
its opposite, for instance
singing, a miracle, not
too much to ask I hope, and
why wouldn’t I hope, why not?

Shadow stands up, stanza 11

Nominations are open for the new Poet Laureate

Kia hiwa ra!
Kia hiwa ra!

It's time to find a new New Zealand Poet Laureate, for the 2013-2015 term.

As ever, we invite your nominations for the role. Tell us who you believe can best represent poets, poetry, and those who love it.

Nominees must have made an outstanding contribution to New Zealand poetry, and be an accomplished and highly regarded poet. They must also be a strong advocate for poetry, and be able to fulfil the public role required of a Poet Laureate, which includes engaging with a wide range of people and inspiring New Zealanders to read and write poetry.

Everything you need to know about the award and making a nomination

Download background and terms for the award (45KB, pdf)

Download the nomination form (35KB, pdf)

Nominations close on Monday 15 July, 2013.

The Lifeguard #7

Finally the poems in The Lifeguard (including the ‘Shadow Stands Up’ sequence) have left their uncertain drafts behind and entered the world for better or worse in the book published by Auckland University Press and launched on a drizzly Thursday evening last week at Alleluja Cafe on K Road in Auckland. Now what you will read below isn’t provisional any more.

At such moments I get postpartum blues. I don’t believe the book’s any good. I suspect that people who say they like it are being kind. Worse, I can’t work up the nerve to write something new. I tidy up my workplace. I go shopping but realise when I get home with it that my new shirt is wrong, wrong, wrong. I cook over-elaborate dinners for six when there are two of us at the table. I open another bottle of wine.

Fortunately, Alleluja Cafe has ways of making you get over it. Most Thursday evenings at about 5pm there’s a happily voluble conversation club that meets for coffee and snacks at tables pushed together down the street end. So the book launches take place in a comfortingly immersive babble of talk. Last year, Anne Kennedy’s wonderful book The Darling North was launched there without microphones for the speakers, who were inaudible to all but those craning forward in the front row. This year there were mikes, so the speakers could be heard, but within the cheerful ambient sound-scape of the conversation club and its clattering cups and plates. This enhanced the occasion’s sense of fun, even if only as the result of something like canned laughter at a stand-up comedy routine.

Then, there’s the grove of potted palms in the middle of the cafe. The book-launch snacks were on a table on one side of the palms, with most of the guests and access to the drinks. By accident, I ended up on the other side of the palms, with some members of my family and a couple of friends. Thus, I had no reason to suspect that people were being nice to me, since for the most part I couldn’t see or hear them.

However, I could see and hear the people who spoke at the launch: Sam Elworthy, Director at Auckland University Press; Chris Szekely, the Chief Librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library; and Anne Kennedy. Not far from Sam’s ebullient nexus are the press’s editor, Anna Hodge, its designer Katrina Duncan, its publicist Christine O’Brien, and its assistant editor Poppy Haynes. Close, too, is the book’s cover designer (and photographer) Philip Kelly. These people aren’t just nice, they ask hard questions, which is good for those blues. Chris Szekely represents the extraordinary institutional support provided by the National Library through its poet laureate programme and therefore to this book; within this span of support are two very special people: Peter Ireland, who is the always patient and courteous contact in Wellington; and Reuben Schrader, who looks after this blog. They’re not just being nice, either – they care. I am very lucky indeed to have worked with them all.

Then there’s Anne Kennedy, whose work I greatly admire and who agreed to say a few words about The Lifeguard. Anne’s writing is at once lucid and elusive – what she perceives with great clarity is likely to be a detail most of us will miss. Thus it was that she noticed there are quite a lot of bees in ‘The Lifeguard’ sequence of the book. I hadn’t noticed this, and (prompted by Anne) I’d like to be able to claim it connects somehow with Virgil’s Georgics IV and the story of the dying bees of Aristaeus... but I can claim no such thing. What happened, though, was that I later opened the book again for a quick look at the bees, and found I already felt better about the poems because there was stuff in them I didn’t know about – the stuff that comes from readers, not from me.

---

From ‘The Lifeguard’

7

A buzzing in the ears as if bees
were swarming in my thoughts

or as if my head had become
a clearing in the forest

filled with the never-too-late serenades
of cicadas at summer’s end

makes me long for the gritty obscurity
of the west’s waves

or the suave silence of eastern lagoons
through which pouting fish

mutely swim. On the other hand,
if I listen carefully enough

to the sound of my own listening,
I might eventually hear something.

The hum of longing seems to fade at last
into a kind of aural impasto,

thick and bland, without apparent surface
but also without depth.

Neither meniscus nor void, without perspective,
not flat and not profound,

without extent or distance, not able to be touched
and incapable of penetration,

not flattened so as to stack up the shoreline,
the sea, the salty spume, the sky,

but not tricked out as a mirrored infinity
or a beach-walk into the never-never,

neither free nor necessary,
not imaginary and not a law of nature,

not spirit, not matter, without colour
but not the whiteness of all colour,

not abstract, not phenomenal,
not even the kind of paradox

that would let me end this
hapless catalogue, not ‘a jar’

both round and empty that might make
the wilderness gather itself

around a hollow core of form – nothing like that,
nothing like ‘a long-legged fly’

walking lightly on water
as a metaphor for the mind

moving across the surface of silence,
nothing like that –

so what am I saying? That this may be
the sound of consciousness?

But how, then, to imagine the silence
of oblivion, a kind of oxymoron,

since there can be no silence
where its opposite doesn’t equally prevail,

the waterlogged yells of those
whose upraised arms

mark places where the frothing rip
drags forests of kelp

the direction of shipwrecks
whose phosphorescent ribs

flicker above their beds of black iron-sand,
or the hilarious shrieks

of revellers impacting
on the dawn-flushed harbour?

Yes, this could be the no-sound no-silence
of oblivion, but what

would I know? It’s the busy world
that sits outside my window

as if across a table
with wine and food on it.

Indifferent to the buzzing in my ears,
asking only that I listen and respond,

the world tells me stories:
That car whose windscreen glints across the bay

has a sad man in it. That yacht whose bow
pecks the wrinkled harbour

will still be tethered when
the next tide turns. The squawky sound

of talkback radio seems to come
from a patch of sunlight

or from the cat that basks there.
I want to call out to my lifeguards,

the one who watches my hope
flailing at the rip, the other

incurious as I loll in dismay:
Over here, guys. Find a seat. Fill a glass. Help

yourselves. Does anyone ever tell you how
lost we are without you?

It’s never too late, though
you’re not going to believe that.

Dave Kent

Dave Kent, one of the founding members of the Wellington Media Collective (WMC) which was active between 1978 and 1998, died on Saturday 27th April after a long illness that left his body paralysed but never his mind. I visited him at his home in Wellington a week before his death. He was no longer able to type on the iPad that had become his mode of conversation, but his wife Kathy used the iPad to make sentences from Dave’s minimal thumbs-up responses to spelling questions: vowel or consonant; a?e?i?o?u? – b?c?d?f?g? It was thus that Dave commented on his own appearance, which he compared to a wooden-faced Picasso figure. Given time, such conversations could have been the equivalent of slow-cooked dialogue, seasoned with humour. Sadly I didn’t have enough time for slow-cooking that day. Dave’s description of himself as ‘wooden-faced’ was pretty accurate, but didn’t tell the whole truth. A vestige of his lovely, self-deprecating smile was there, and many will remember it well.

My diary tells me that Saturday 27th April was Resistance Day in Slovenia and Freedom Day in Zambia. These anniversaries have only coincidental connections to the two decades of work by the Collective – and yet it would be hard to find a calendar of such dates that didn’t seem to spell out a slow-cooked statement about the kind of work and commitment WMC is known for; though its focus was local, its comprehension of the politics of engagement was international. When the exhibition of Collective work opened at the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington in October last year (Dave drove his wheelchair up the hill) one of the most striking items on display was a two-storey high banner list of WMC clients and causes; pretty much any cause worth fighting for over the 20 years of the Collective’s life was on that list. The book recording the Collective’s work, We Will Work With You: Wellington Media Collective 1978-1998, published by Victoria University Press in February 2013, was launched when the exhibition closed. Dave was there – he couldn’t drive his wheelchair up the hill this time, but he did sign many copies of the book, which was dedicated to him.

In the book a common theme emerges: the importance of Dave Kent not just as a gifted designer but as a mentor and conscience within the Collective. Though he never asserted or claimed a leadership role, he clearly had a leading influence, even if he preferred to lead ‘from behind’. I wasn’t a member of the Collective, nor one of its clients, but its presence encouraged and challenged me and a great many others, and I was lucky to have known Dave Kent as a friend whose modesty and conviction I admired.

Dave was also a poet, though his modesty meant this has remained a more or less secret activity. With the permission of Kathy, and their two children Kirstie and Eli, here is one of Dave’s poems. Dave was a golfer, and here he’s walking along a beach belting a golf-ball ahead of him with a seven iron. And those commas at the end of each line – each one reads like a whack. As with the driving range set up below the urupa at Ralph Hotere’s tangi, it seems appropriate to remember Dave this way. I’ve never had the golf bug, but there’s something about the flight of the ball, at once chancy and planned; and the combination of mindfulness or Buddhist sati, and its companion state, when the mind empties and rests.

---

A walk spoiled

Seven ironing along,
The firm sand strand,
I scan the surf circus,
For a ray’s flag,
A beaching whale.
Treading the air,
Beak full,
A black-backed gull,
Cockles a casual eye at the ball,
Drops the pipi,
Follows it down.
Working the sand,
With their scarlet probes,
The oyster-catcher couples,
Gimlet eyed,
Watch the ball roll past,
And variously stalk away,
Shrill with disdain.
A successful strike,
High and straight.
A flowering puff,
Where it pockmarks the sand.
Another and another and,
I’ve driven over miles.
Punctuating the tracery,
Sharp and subtle,
Of lopers and interlopers,
Indigenous and invasive,
Recreationers and miscreants,
Walking talkers and debaucherers
Prey and predators,
Katipo and red-backs.
Between the firm,
Tide rummaged foreshore,
And the sparrow clouded,
Marram built dunes,
Lies a soft desert,
Densely littered with,
A bleached tangle,
Earth’s wrack,
Swept up by storm surges,
A chaotic and seductive decking,
Netting the coastline,
In a sand anchoring matrix,
As it idles westwards,
Narrowing the Ditch,
By centimetres a year,
Or quakes upward,
By metres rarely,
When our chief architect blinks.
Striking my way back,
Over the toes of the land,
A dark and green island,
Humps into view,
Swathed in vaporous trails,
Of death and retribution,
Shrill with songs,
Of waste and restoration.
Following a line of flight,
I see storm ghosts tramping,
Above the Tararua treeline,
Two friends holed in one,
By a wayward slice of winter.
The strand weaves,
Dark and shining,
Light and patterned,
Warping,
With a shuffling mosaic,
Of foaming sheets.
As they draw back,
Into the spouting maw,
Black iron blossoms and rains,
A two dimensional cloud chamber,
Of sparkling grains.
Spoiling a walk,
With an iron and ball,
Over the earth’s wild(e) floor,
I see so much more.

Shadow Stands Up #16

Today, some months after this poem was written, the windows of the picture-framer’s warehouse building ‘over the road from our place’ have new signage on them, announcing that the building’s for lease. The loading bay’s roller door grinds and clatters up every morning to reveal a dwindling pile of stuff advertised on an impromptu sign as ‘Garage Sale’. My guess is that the framer’s been there for a long time. He’s been there long enough to accumulate a lot of junk. His sign announcing reduced-price mirrors has been outside long enough to have developed a harsh, Mars-like surface. From time to time, people have walked out of the place gingerly carrying thickly wrapped parcels – restored and reframed artworks perhaps, or perhaps mirrors from the apparently inexhaustible supply within. What will replace the picture framer – or rather, who will replace him? And when he’s gone and the building and its once timelessly optimistic signage have been transformed, will we remember how he used to come out and stand in the sunshine on the footpath, looking up and down the street for the inevitable onrush of custom today, tomorrow, next week? And how long will we remember that?

---

16

The picture framer over
the road from our place comes out
in his sensible apron
and takes his signage inside –
it’s evening and the mirrors
he’s been offering at knock-
down prices ever since we
moved in have yet to depart
his inventory. Reflect
on this I do knowing I’m
seduced by the obvious
reflexivities at hand
but also by the sunsets
blazing from the racks inside
his dim shop whose restored gilt
frames and crisply mitred mats
are empty of the content
even the anonymous
passers-by could furnish if
they’d only glance sideways at
themselves burning behind the
window where the mirrors are.

Going Home

On Friday March 1st four poets met at Blenheim’s Millennium Gallery to talk about home, and to read poems that addressed, or asked, questions raised by this complex subject. Cliff Fell came over from Nelson with his partner Pammy; they were in time for a long talkative, preparatory lunch among the grape vines out at Rockferry, in a landscape that looked nothing like the nibbled pasture of my childhood. Dinah Hawken and her husband Bill also made it to lunch; they came over the hill from Waikawa Bay around from Picton, where I spent much of my childhood in a backwater that, then, had almost no houses, no marina, and a gravel road that petered out just past the boatshed where my grandfather’s clinker dinghy waited to be pushed to the water along manuka rollers. Cressida Bishop, the Director of the Millennium Gallery, also got to lunch; the gallery wasn’t there when I was a kid, but the Memorial Clock Tower was, just over the road, along with the floral clock, both of them structures of awe inspiring grandeur to my eyes in 1953, when the Queen visited and laid a wreath (I couldn’t see her). John Newton couldn’t make it to lunch as he was moving house (home) on Waiheke Island, but he tore through the door of the gallery with minutes to spare before the evening reading and would have been happy to see that copies of his marvellous new collection, Family Song Book, were for sale.

In John’s book, home territories radiate out from Robinhood Bay at the entrance to Port Underwood: back inland to what used to be called Beavertown (or ‘more/ fancifully still’, Beaver Station) – now Blenheim – in one direction, south from there to the Dashwood Pass and North Canterbury, or west through twists and turns through the Rai Valley to the Whangamoa Saddle, which my grandmother, Agnes Horne, was the first woman to drive a car over on the way to Nelson. We were all in our different ways trying to find that grid of locations, circumstances, memories, and relationships that located us in some way somewhere.

In Cliff’s case he was able to point out, from a perspective that had more to do with historical amusement than whakapapa or with what John characterises as ‘homesickness’, that his great-great grandfather Alfred Fell was responsible for surveying the town that would be called Blenheim, and named a disproportionate number of its streets after his children. Cliff came to New Zealand in 1997 and on visiting Blenheim for the first time may have found himself going along Francis Street, which his ancestor had originally called ‘Frances’ with an ‘e’ – but it was the ‘with-an-i’ version that I grew up in. Whenever I go to Blenheim I always try but can never find Francis Street at first. Then I adjust my scale, stop walking nostalgically towards the yellow Wither Hills, and there it is, so much closer to the centre of town than it seemed to be when I was a kid; and there is number 32, a slightly the worse for wear California bungalow, my childhood home.

Dinah Hawken says that for her, being at home is at once utterly tangible: ‘this room, this actual house – and garden, neighbourhood, coastline, town, country and world’. But also intangible: ‘the state of being at home with myself and with others’. I know what she means; after the reading, a woman my age came up and asked if I remembered her, Glenys. We used to play together. My answer had to be evasive to be truthful; no, I didn’t remember her or the startling escapades she then reminded me of; but yes I did remember, because the name and the place we were in again after sixty years were drawn towards each other without quite making meaningful contact: at once somehow tangible and intangible, incongruous and even comic, as in Cliff’s historical frame; and also melancholy, as in John’s sense of ‘homesickness’. We had a great night – interesting, funny, sad, simple, complicated.

The following day I caught an early flight up to Kaitaia, got a rental car and drove down to Ralph Hotere’s tangi at Mitimiti. There, it was said often over the three days before Ralph was laid to rest in the beautiful urupa on the hill above Matihetihe marae, that he had come home. On Sunday morning I walked up the next valley to Moetangi with Ralph’s brother Robin. This was where the family had lived when the kids were little. It’s hard to imagine a place more remote from the world Ralph would go on to be ‘at home’ in. What did it mean to say that he had come home? The answer was up the valley where no material trace of his childhood home remained aside from a stand of old self-propagating lilies, an incongruous flash of colour in the desiccated scrub – the place’s apparent emptiness was what made it feel right. The answer was also on the marae where hundreds of people came to welcome their relative or friend back; and it was also on the promontory below the urupa, where a driving range had been set up for those descending to the marae. You could choose one of Ralph’s favourite drivers and whack a golf ball out into the wide blue yonder across the beach.

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Recordings from Blenheim

Cliff Fell, Dinah Hawken, John Newton, and Ian Wedde read their own and others' work.

First half

• Cliff Fell
  (mp3: 17MB)
  
  
• Dinah Hawken
  (mp3: 18MB)
  
  
• John Newton
  (mp3: 19MB)
  
  
• Ian Wedde
  (mp3: 18MB)
  
  

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Second half

• Cliff Fell reads Ruth Stone and Frederick Seidel
  (mp3: 7MB)
  
  
• Dinah Hawken reads Rachel Bush
  (mp3: 4MB)
  
  
• John Newton reads Henry Lawson
  (mp3: 4MB)
  
  
• Ian Wedde reads Ted Berrigan
  (mp3: 7MB)
  
  

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Full recording

• Listen to the entire session
  (mp3: 112MB)
  
  

The Wreck of the Orpheus

On 7 February 1863 the steam corvette H.M.S. Orpheus, a warship carrying stores for Her Majesty’s ships on the New Zealand station, ran aground on sandbanks at the Manukau bar and went down with 189 out of 250 officers and men drowned. This disaster, the worst in New Zealand’s maritime history, is being commemorated at Whatipu this year. The organisers asked me to write a poem for the event. I’d been out at Whatipu with my son Carlos and grandson Sebo, and I thought about the shipwreck with this happy beach-day in mind – a remembrance of the sailors who lost their lives, a hope for Sebo’s safety; and also a homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s great poem The Wreck of the Deutschland (1876). Some of Hopkins’s rhythms and alliterations are echoed in my poem, and some of his most striking and terrifying lines are quoted in italics. My thanks to the organisers of the Orpheus commemoration, especially Lynton Diggle, for the opportunity to contribute.

The Wreck of the Orpheus

From the summer beach my grandson Sebo sees
what he thinks are seagulls swarming and swirling out there
where the sea humps up across the lumpy horizon
but that’s not birds I tell him it’s waves breaking as wind and tide
shove seawater across shifting sand-shallows, gull-white water
chopping every-which way where the ghost-ship breaches
and breaks up at the bar, the silty river pouring into the bay
one way, the tide the other, sand-banks heaved sideways,
the tricky channel shifting across the sea-floor.
Man’s useless maps can’t stop them, stall them, make them stay.
Shifting sands tricked and trapped the Orpheus that day.

In a rock-pooled gut cutting the headland at low tide
Sebo finds broken, barnacled boat-timbers with rusted bolts,
splintered beams and bulk heads clustered with mussels,
and in the gale-battered cliff above, look! – a rock-faced giant
guarding the wreck, eyes and mouth wind-hollowed
for birds to nest in, a pastoral forehead ... but there was no shelter
for Orpheus
                          prey of the gales, of the bleak-about air, the breaker,
sway of the sea that storms and stars deliver, the goal
was a shoal, the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow,
the combs of a smother of sand and the inboard seas
run swirling and hawling, the rash smart sloggering brine.
One hundred and eighty-nine men dragged down to the shifting sand.

Sebo and I build bright-mica’d channels and sea walls
and watch the tide wash them away, and our footprints as well,
the gentle swell pushing sand up the beach
and sucking it back when the tide turns,
smooth-slicked shine of sea-glazed sand sun-baked, lifting
off then in dry whirlygigs, ghosts of shoals blowing away
into summer’s heat-haze, mirages of masts and shining sails
appearing and disappearing the length of the ship-wreck coast.

And other phantoms Sebo sees, surfers shimmy to shore
in the shimmer of sunshine, vague in the salty air,
and crash back under the rip-curl ... gone! Have they? Gone under?
But back up they bob, Sebo, look! – as I hope you always will,
and never know the shifting sands that drowned
poor Orpheus’ crew whom we standing here on hard ground
mourn and remember, and their brave brothers
who gave their lives to save them when all was lost.

NZ 6-seater: Ian curates a chapbook

Melbourne-based online poetry journal Cordite invited Ian to pull together an online chapbook (a pocket-sized book, rather like this Paradise lost, and paradise regain'd), populated by 6 voices of his choosing.

Ian introduced his selection by admitting

I faced the usual short list of questions we all try to avoid answering:

1. What do you mean, ‘local’?
2. What do you mean, ‘Pacific’?
3. Can I invite my friends?

Friends were scrambled, and poems by Selina Tusitala March, Anne Kennedy, Michele Leggot, Murray Edmond, John Newton, and Sam Sampson corralled.

Read the chapbook's chapters on Cordite, along with Ian's delightful introductions of his fellow poets.

The Poem in the World: Katie Carey

More from the students of the Poetry off the Page programme at the University of Auckland, who took stanzas of Ian's 'Shadow Stands Up' into the world.

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'Shadow Stands Up' on the Link Bus at Rush Hour

Katie Carey

Our part of the poem was stanza 9 and stanza 10.

Discovery

The poem 'Shadow Stands Up', by Ian Wedde, discusses the notion of what daily life is, and how it can be both ordinary and beautiful at the same time. Our group was given the ninth and tenth stanzas, and we decided to work around the idea of ‘Distribution,’ inspired by the phrase:

the back of the post office
where I tap in secret
code on the keypad, unlock
our box, and lo! A gift for
the first day of spring, two books...

From this phrase, we each devised our own way of getting the stanzas out into the wider community, perhaps to those who might not ordinarily experience poetry. We decided to set out into our own communities in order to get the stanzas out as far and wide as possible, and to all have a postage element to our strategy.

I chose to focus more on the tenth stanza, while keeping this idea of distribution. Where the ninth stanza is firmly stated in ordinary, daily life, the tenth is more whimsical, lending itself more to the imagination with lines such as "historical tide that flows" and "rainbows of effluent hope / swirling in the same spring-time." From this, I found the idea of discovery. In terms of 'the package,' discovery is a vital part of the experience; opening to a thing which may bring surprise or despair. This unknown element sits well with the idea of the whimsy which is demonstrated in the tenth stanza.

I decided to deliver the tenth verse through a 'message in a bottle' kind of way, in order to solidify both the imaginative qualities of the poem and the static norm. The message in a bottle was once used as a way to communicate by both the British Navy in the sixteenth century and in World War Two. However, this piece of history also inspired several pieces of art, such as Edgar Allen Poe’s 'M.S. Found in a Bottle', and the Police’s hit, 'Message in a Bottle'. This blend of scientific fact and poetry made me think of the article written by Peter Forbes, where he says how both poetry and science complement each other, both in large and small ways. He also comments on how these two different concepts can be combined in one human being - such as Leonardo Da Vinci. He is a man who is placed within an everyday society, who single-handedly possesses the perfect blend of art and science.

I find the idea of a normal man holding something overworldly and mythical inspiring, and this helped my thinking in how I was to construct the bottle itself. I found myself layering both whimsy and reality upon one another; the whimsy of the written poem is printed on the static societal paper, enclosed in the familiar norm of the beer bottle, which itself is enshrouded in this mythical notion of the 'message in a bottle.' I think that this has created a complex conversation as to how the 'discovery' element operates. Although the receiver is finding a 'normal' item, he is also discovering the imagination enclosed, and vice versa.

I chose everyday beer bottles (Corona and Hagan) and inserted a small paper version of the tenth stanza. Because I was to be planting these bottles at the beach, I decided only to use the tenth stanza, as this has direct connections with water and land. Lines such as "the grass / beside the water" made me think immediately of Rothesay Bay beach, where the water is lined with a bed of grass. To enforce the idea of 'distribution' and the notion of postage and parcels, I dressed the bottle up in societal constructions, such as the labels "For You" and "Love Ian Wedde," and the twine bow at the top of the necks.

I placed the bottles on a table, on a bench and in the sand of the actual beach, and waited. I watched as a boy picked up the bottle and read the paper inside. He frowned, and gave a small smile (which I hopefully didn’t imagine) and captured this moment of discovery with my camera. He sat reading it for a while, before placing the poem inside his pocket and walking away.

I feel like our distribution of Ian Wedde’s poem was successful. Getting poetry out into the wider community is important in terms of the longevity of 'the poem,' and I am glad to have done what I could to help.

Bibliography

Forbes, Peter. 'Science and Poetry: greatness in little.' Nature 434 (17 Mar 2005): 320-323.

Wedde Ian, Shadow Stands Up. 1-10. NZ Poet Laureate. Aug 2011-May 2012.

Biography

Katie Carey has just completed her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Auckland, majoring in both English and Drama. She is currently working on a play called The Uncertainty Principal, which will be performed early in 2013 as part of the Auckland Fringe Festival. Past this the future is somewhat uncertain, yet poetry will most definitely be an integral part of life to come.

The Poem in the World: Sam Goodchild and Chesney McDonald

More from the students of the Poetry off the Page programme at the University of Auckland, who took stanzas of Ian's 'Shadow Stands Up' into the world.

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'Shadow Stands Up' on the Link Bus at Rush Hour

Sam Goodchild and Chesney McDonald

Our part of the poem was stanza 1 and stanza 2.

Taking the poem into the community

'Shadow Stands Up' is a poem that has many allusions to memory, surfaces, reflections, depths and text. In the first two stanzas fragments of aurality, visuality and memory create a narrative that has punctuated areas of heightened response to the world that the poet inhabits, much like the alighting of people at bus stops - images mix and merge. This apparent movement and lingering is part of the essence of the poem, it reflects the process of its creation as disparate entries through the medium in which it was first published - the NZ Poet Laureate blog. The stanzas are posted there in between other bits and pieces of Ian Wedde’s musings and so on its first reading on the site it isn’t possible to interact with the poem without picking up other chunks of text and therefore experience. To take these stanzas out into the community we - Phoebe, Tara, Chesney and I, decided to give a public performance of them on the oft mentioned green link bus in the afternoon rush hour past Victoria Park. The poem which was originally embedded on the (digital) page and whilst there, Charles Bernstein would say, remains soundless and inert, was to be heard by being vocalised. In this instance a performance for the community on the bus and at the same time it was going to be recorded and digitally archived on the Poetry off the Page website.

I read the first stanza of the poem and Tara the second on a moving green link bus whilst it was recorded by Chesney and Phoebe who had mounted a transparency of the stanzas on the bus window to create worded shadows during the ride. The words would be silhouetted, reflected and projected on the inside of the bus. I was positioned at the front of the bus whilst Tara was towards the aft. Two readers were chosen in two different places to enhance an effect that the poem was both being derived from the community and being given back to it. The performance was to 'ameliorate a state of poverty [of public poetry] and provide for the needs of those who were without' as described as part of the gift economy (Joel Harrison).

The performance competed with the noise of traffic and the sound of the bus’ engine, and though every effort was made to deliver a clear performance it may well have been fragmentary for some of the audience. Sound bouncing off the hard windows with the added noise of traffic, as well as the jerking of the breaks required me to hold up my body against the prevailing velocity, creating the potential for the words to get squeezed out forcefully or fade in the humdrum just as chalk words faded away under the weather and underfoot in our earlier poetry on the pavement assignment - creating unintended partial readings from the disparate fragments. The bus too is an iconic representative of the city, a location where "we undergo connections and disconnections" with a mass of conflicting experiences (Paula Green). The performance highlights the transience and temporality of communities we form on a bus. The articulation of the poem at that time and place highlighted the shared geography of the city with all its diverse states of mind focused on the sense of place and community, giving a snap shot of the mind of a commuter’s experience of what appears to be the mundane bus ride and to my mind and hopefully others reminded us that we all inhabit these little worlds, cocooned by our thoughts and memories even in such a public place. Reading the poem in that time and place added "another semantic layer to the poem’s multiformity" its untotalisability, because "to perform... is to recompose it, to change it, to move it" and to be heard it must be sounded (Bernstein). Hopefully the community heard.

Bibliography

Bernstein, Charles. 'Close Listening.' Introduction to Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (Oxford UP, 1998). Rpt. Electronic Poetry Center, SUNY Buffalo.

Paula Green, 'Curating the city.' Poetry on the Pavement 2005. nzepc feature.

Harrison, Joel. 'Web poetics and the gift economy.' Ka Mate Ka Ora: A NZ Journal of Poetry and Poetics 2 (July 2006).

Wedde, Ian. "Shadow Stands Up", "Shadow Stands Up #2", and "Shadow Stands Up #5". New Zealand Poet Laureate.

Biography

Sam Goodchild is a recent graduate of the University of Auckland in Geology, Biology and English. He has a keen interest in the natural world and how we humans fit into it and create our own spaces. The way we convey our experiences in the world is highly modified by language-hence my interest in English. Poetry and literature in particular provide an avenue to explore the continuum of our existence by their reflexivity.

Chesney McDonald is in the process of completing his final year at the University of Auckland, studying English and Film, Television and Media Studies. After University Chesney will be diving head first into the working world and writing for film and theatre.

The Poem in the World: Phoebe Watt

Ian Wedde visited Poetry off the Page students at the University of Auckland in September 2012 to talk about his role as NZ Poet Laureate and to read the first ten sections of his evolving poem 'Shadow Stands Up'. Later the 21 students formed up in groups to devise strategies for taking stanzas of Ian’s poem into a community of their choice. They spread out across the city, documenting their performances and distributions for upload to the course website as their final assignment for the semester.

Ian’s poem appeared in neighbourhood letterboxes, on the Link bus, on wine bottles in a local Glengarry store. It went to a city pub quiz, to Poetry Live at the Thirsty Dog in K Road, to Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Fictionpress and Tumblr sites. It morphed through an email chain and it went to the beach in a beer bottle. Our students report that getting poetry into public places is (yes!) demanding but ultimately satisfying work, full of unexpected challenges and moments of sublime serendipity (the commuters who pulled out their phones to video the performers being videoed on the bus...).

We are proud to present a selection of work from the assignment, and we wish to thank Ian again for the generous use of his poem.

Michele Leggott and Helen Sword,

Convenors, English 347 Poetry off the Page at the University of Auckland.

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'Shadow Stands Up' on the Link Bus at Rush Hour

Phoebe Watt

Our part of the poem was stanza 1 and stanza 2.

Taking the poem into the community

When, in August 2011, Ian Wedde introduced in "hesitant draft form" these first two stanzas of his tentatively named sequence, Shadow Stands Up, he indicated that, thematically at least, the poem would be preoccupied with 'memory'; specifically, "how memory stitches time into patterns and narratives that can’t exist in rational ways". This theme of memory is subtly conjured by the imagery contained within these early stanzas, whose references to 'shadows', 'dreams', 'imprints', and 'outlines' seemingly denote the memories or residues of more tangible things. It occurs that the poem’s Link bus is the literal vehicle whereby these things are 'stitched' (or, perhaps more appropriately, 'linked') into a more rational narrative. It was, therefore, this same Link bus journey that my group sought to reproduce in taking the poem into the community.

As mapped out in my exhibit (comprised of seven photos and a video, all taken in-transit and attached as hotspots to the streets they depict), our Link bus moved us along Victoria Street and past Victoria Park — locations made all the more familiar to us by their presences in the poem. Travelling this route was thus comparable to travelling through the poem as a reader, with both activities evoking Alan Brunton’s work on walking, wandering, and the conception of poetry. In Remarks on the Future of Poetry, Brunton refers to the "intoxication [that] comes over those who wander through the streets", and, subsequently, the way a text grows "step by step as the poet walks". Although the sense of 'wandering' in Shadow Stands Up seems, at least in the opening stanzas, less to do with the feet than with the mind, it arises that Brunton’s sentiments are largely transferable to this more philosophical wandering that Wedde seems to specialise in. Having blogged about his tendency to always be 'looking at something in [his] head', it is unsurprising that Wedde’s poem is pervaded by the concept of interiority. The decision to simulate Wedde’s daily commute between Three Lamps and the University of Auckland would, we hoped, allow us into the interior spaces of both poet and poem, making our dissemination of it all the more meaningful.

The 'main event' of our dissemination strategy was exactly that—making the text, in the words of Alan Brunton, an 'event' through performance. As a kind of antithesis to this 'spectacle', however, we felt it was important to pay homage to the poem’s introspectiveness. We printed the poem onto an A4 transparency sheet and adhered it to the Link bus window, so that commuters such as the man featured in the 'Victoria Street West' photo were permitted a more intimate engagement with the text which, conveniently, served also as a lens through which the text’s landmarks could be viewed. Additionally, the use of the transparency was a reference to the ghostly presences that, according to Wedde, constitute another of the poem’s motifs. Levitating in the window of the bus, the 'ghost' of Wedde’s poem flitted around the city while my attempts to capture it in motion (see Victoria Street, Albert Street, and Britomart photos) produced only indistinct, ghostly blurs. It interested me to see that in both the 'Victoria Street' and 'Customs Street' photos the figures outside the bus were also reduced to ghostly blurs, and this caused me to consider how I too might be perceived as ghostly by those on the outside, looking in. At this point, I was drawn to a tension between two lines of the poem — "I see this from the Link bus window", whose 'I' implies a grounding in reality, and "a Link bus goes past with me in it", whose estranged, omniscient tone seems more suggestive of an out-of-body experience. This tension struck me as a version of the poem’s contrasting of tangible items with memories, shadows, and ghosts. In a larger sense though, I took it to represent the active/passive binary inherent in the text as a whole — a binary which was at the forefront of our minds when we took the poem out into the community.

As already implied via my exhibit and its emphasis on mapping and navigation, our means of taking the poem out into the community was inspired by the poem's very specific relationship to place. In Hannah's exegesis, she refers to the group's decision to "keep the poem within its established environment", this environment being, once again, the blocks between Three Lamps and the University. Echoing an idea of my own, Hannah addresses the importance of staying true to the poem's sense of 'the local'; as a matter of necessity, however, the poem was taken beyond its 'locale' of the Three Lamps area, traveling with me on my route home to Parnell after the group itself parted ways. Eerily, just like the voice in Stanza Two's "hollow chamber", I soon found myself to be the only passenger in the bus' "hollow chamber", and I documented this with the Beach Road photo captioning my image with the relevant line from the poem as was consistent with the rest of my exhibit. To me, this "eerie" experience epitomised, more than any other aspect of our 'performance', the senses of interiority and introspectiveness that we, as a group, had tried to evoke for the community. It was a shame, I thought, that this experience could not possibly have been staged for an entire bus full of commuters. Nothing, however, could take my moment from me.

Bibliography

Brunton, Alan. "Remarks on the Future of Poetry". NZEPC.

Wedde, Ian. "Shadow Stands Up", "Shadow Stands Up #2", and "Shadow Stands Up #5". New Zealand Poet Laureate.

Biography

Phoebe Watt is about to start the final semester of her BA, having majored in English and minored in Writing Studies. Upon completion of her degree she wants to study English at postgraduate level, the plan being to begin a BA(Hons) in mid-2013. Currently she is working on a research project entitled 'Frank Sargeson: Portrait of a Reader,' which she became involved with via the University’s Summer Research Scholarship programme.

Phoebe writes: "In 2011 I took Ian Wedde’s stage two English paper ‘Writing Selves’, and it remains one of the most memorable courses I have taken at university. It was a privilege to work with his poem ‘Shadow Stands Up’ as part of Poetry Off the Page."