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."

Shadow Stands Up #15

It seems unintentionally appropriate as the coming days of feasting approach to remember how, when I lived in Jordan in the late 1960s, I noticed that people would touch a left-over bread crust to their lips and then place it on a wall where 'the birds' could find it.

Season’s greetings to all. What a year it’s been.

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15

There’s one of those early birds
in the (green now) tree outside
our bedroom window – you know
the kind, they get started in
the dark just when you think it’s
safe to try and dream again
but the dream’s gone already,
a transport hub was it, or
a place where people gathered
to hear the news, a battered
bus was leaving but waited
while the poet spoke on the
radio, the imbriqui
paused while the poet spoke,
and then the coffee was poured,
one of the weeping listeners
put his breakfast crust on
a low parapet by the
bus station so the birds could
make sure nothing was wasted –
was this what my early bird
was singing about in the
dark before dawn, or was it
a memory pretending
to be a dream I couldn’t
wake up from in time to go?

Young Knowledge on record

On Friday 26th October, in front of a screen on which was projected the extraordinary 1936 photograph by Spencer Digby of Iris Wilkinson – the poet who called herself Robin Hyde – five of us sat down to talk about a single poem of Hyde’s, ‘Young Knowledge’. A good-sized audience was there in Auckland Central Library’s whare wananga, including Hyde’s son, Derek Challis, and his wife Lynn.

All of us had particular interests in Hyde’s poem. Apart from Derek Challis seated in the audience, the two with the most obvious authority to talk about ‘Young Knowledge’ were Michele Leggott, editor of Hyde’s collected poems; and Mary Edmond-Paul, editor of Hyde’s autobiographical writings. Michele detailed the painstaking editorial work involved in assembling the poem from typescript pages whose coherence had been compromised; and locating it in the circumstances of Hyde’s life. At an early stage, then, we encountered the puzzle of what might appear to be two separate poems or at least two separate impulses spliced together; Michele argued for their coherence. So, by implication, did Mary, in terms of subjective or psychological coherence rather than manuscript evidence – though of course the text and its affects are not separate.

Though Iain Sharp modestly disclaimed any such direct connection with Hyde’s poem, he too had good credentials for talking about it. As the author of a superb illustrated biography of the explorer and artist Charles Heaphy, Iain was able to map the historical circumstances of the poem’s strange ‘turn’, the moment when its succession of intense, sometimes hallucinatory takes on what constitutes knowledge abruptly shifts to two historical moments and places in the nineteenth century. The first of these picks up and even cuts-and-pastes a fragment of Edward Markham’s account of settlers felling ship-building timber in Northland; and then relocates without transition to a place near the Arahura River on the South Island’s West Coast, visited by Heaphy in May 1846. Here, while looking for good arable land, the explorer seems to be ambushed by the poem at the moment he encounters a Maori community of ‘Greenstone people’ until then unknown to European settlers.

It’s at the moment of this encounter, at once vividly imagined by Hyde and factually documented in Heaphy’s journals (which Hyde had read close to the time she wrote the poem), as well as in a subsequently published magazine account, that Hyde’s poem releases its extraordinary burst of energy – its key moment of ‘mindfulness’, as Mary described it. Mindfulness is a concept used in modern clinical psychology since the 1970s, but related to much older Buddhist concepts of knowledge as acute awareness of and attention to the presentness of things, the present moment – sati in Pali, in Sanscrit smrti. Ranged against sati are the kinds of negative forces of anxiety and delusion with which Hyde was familiar.

Hyde was also familiar with ideas from Buddhism and translated them into her concept of ‘presentism’, which Mary referred to during the session. This interest was a factor in Hyde’s decision to travel to China in 1938. Her therapy under the enlightened ‘unselfish kindness’ of her psychiatrist Dr. Gilbert Tothill must have heightened her mindfulness of the ways those polarised conditions of acute perception and imaginative rhapsody sometimes complemented each other and sometimes clashed. The poem moves through strongly contrasted states of mind, sometimes blissful, at others filled with anger and despair, in strongly contrasting scenes and voices; so that the ‘Heaphy moment’, when it arrives in the narrative, has the impact of a dramatic crisis, the moment when the trajectory of the story pivots and changes direction, after which the voice or character of the poem is transformed, and moves or is impelled towards the closing resolution.

In the case of ‘Young Knowledge’, this crisis also seems to propel us into the present, and into an imagined scenario in which Heaphy decides not to reveal the whereabouts of this sanctuary, this unspoiled place, this Eden – but of course he does so in the end, as we know, because Hyde read his account of it, and we read hers.

Murray Edmond’s take on the poem suggests that it represents a new kind of historiography, a new way of knowing the past in the present; that a political or politicised poetics may provide the means by which poems become agents of ‘presentism’ and allow us to be mindful of the past now. In a sense, this poetics also resembles the concept of sati. It suggests that, whether the radical break in the poem at the Markham/Heaphy moment was wholly intentional, or partially the product of a fortuitous alignment of texts, its consequence is a moment of vivid knowledge, a heightened political consciousness of the impact of colonisation, and – implicitly – of its inevitable consequences in the present.

My thanks to the participants in this conversation for their marvellous contributions, and for their subsequent patient and tolerant help as I attempted to summarise what had been a fascinating and complex account of this extraordinary poem. And thanks, also, to the partners in this event: the National Library, Auckland Central Library, and the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) at Auckland University.

The recording of this session is made available here through the partnership with nzepc. If you’ve never visited this great resource, now’s your chance. And a special thanks to Tim Page, who expertly takes care of nzepc recordings, and who recorded this session on Robin Hyde’s ‘Young Knowledge’.

Introduction and Reading of Poem (15min)

Panellists' Commentaries (51min)

Discussion and Response (21min)

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Full recording (1hr 27min)

Shadow Stands Up #14

“Oh youth ... pass the bottle,” runs a refrain in Joseph Conrad’s great story Youth, in which an old, world-weary Marlow tells a table of friends the story of a defining experience in his youth, breaking his narrative from time to time to say, “Pass the bottle.” I’ve been fascinated by this story ever since I first read it, probably when I was about ten or eleven. My father loved Conrad’s stories, especially those like Youth and Typhoon that had tough old sea-dogs such as Captain MacWhirr in them. I think he also encouraged me to read them because they might be character-forming – they probably were, one way or another. Youth is filled with a mixture of droll nostalgia for the optimism of youth, and the world-weariness of age. Among the shadows that ‘stand up’ with us or even within us are our young selves. Mine was there with me one day when I walked past Victoria Park, remembering myself arriving in a dusty bus outside the old walls of the Moroccan city of Fez, in 1969. But being simultaneously young and older hasn’t driven me to drink yet, except in celebration – which includes raising a glass to my ‘old man’, Frederick Albert Wedde, an inveterate adventurer all his life.

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14

I’m back in a light jacket
walking past Victoria
Park without the heavy drape
of my winter coat and the
grey drape of the chilly sky
and he’s walking inside me,
two thirds my weight, the skinny
kid who called it a day in
1969 and went
to see the swallows at dusk
darting through the red-dusted
air above the battlements
of Fez – what is it that weighs
us down, not the adipose
illusion of wisdom, not
the gravity of habit,
not – his shadow stands up in-
side me, the light kid I was,
we walk along as one past
the personal trainers at
the park and their wards who want
to be forever young and
without heavy memories
of how different that was.

Young Knowledge

At Auckland Central Library, Friday 26 October, 5.30pm for 6pm start

A public conversation about Robin Hyde’s poem ‘Young Knowledge’ (1936?), with Murray Edmond, Michele Leggott, Mary Paul, Iain Sharp, and Ian Wedde.

Produced for the National Library of New Zealand’s series of events in the New Zealand Poet Laureate programme, in partnership with Auckland Central Library and the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc).

In 1936, the poet Robin Hyde travelled in the South Island, including parts of the West Coast explored by Charles Heaphy in 1846. Hyde wrote ‘Young Knowledge’ with the journals of Heaphy in mind. Her poem opens up an imaginative and political space between the stone memorial to the explorer in Nelson, and the pounamu of Arahura.

"It is a brilliant moment; the explorer refracted through his journal, standing between worlds and made over into poetry." Michele Leggott, from Introduction to Young Knowledge: The poems of Robin Hyde (Auckland University Press, 2003)

Murray Edmond is a poet, and has written about Hyde’s use of Charles Heaphy’s journal. Michele Leggott is a former New Zealand Poet Laureate, and the editor of Robin Hyde’s collected poems. Mary Paul is the editor of Your Unselfish Kindness (University of Otago Press, 2012), a critical edition of Robin Hyde’s autobiographical writings. Iain Sharp is a poet and the author of Heaphy (Auckland University Press, 2008), an illustrated biography of the explorer.

Shadow Stands Up #13

13

No shadows for a while now,
nothing standing up, only
a warning about the word
‘trill’ came to mind, then a man
silhouetted against the
sky-line behind the sand-dunes
at St Clair, then the poet
Baxter came to mind, then the
man silhouetted against
the gusty southern sky was
gone, in spite of everything
I didn’t ask of language
birds were ‘trilling’ in the bush
we walked through to get back to
the car parked above the kelp
by the cold salt water baths –
Baxter couldn’t help it, he
always saw more than was there,
always the shadows of things
for instance the swirling kelp
at St Clair wasn’t seaweed,
it was a goddesses’s hair
or some such, a kraken with
its arms around his neck. Me,
I’m back where I started, on
Jervois Road walking past the
Herne Bay Dental Centre whose
signage reassures me it’s
because my smile means so much.

'The Place of Poetry'

On Thursday 30 August, as part of the National Library’s Laureate programme, a poetry reading was organised in the wharewaka on Wellington’s waterfront. Its principal guest was Andrew Motion, who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009. In 2012 he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, a responsibility formerly shouldered by the American writer Bill Bryson. Andrew teaches poetry as Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, where one of the teaching themes is ‘the poetry of place’. The Wellington occasion, which included memorable readings by Bernadette Hall and Bill Manhire, had this theme in mind in its title, albeit in a tweaked form.

The title, ‘The Place of Poetry’, has a double meaning. Poetry is often associated with places; and it occupies a place in cultures and societies. Are these kinds of location related, and if so how?

Aboriginal song-lines, Horace’s Sabine farm, Wordsworth’s Lake District, Robert Burns’s Ayrshire, the burnt-off country of Blanche Baughan’s ‘Bush Section’, Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil, Pablo Neruda’s Chile, Judith Wright’s Australian ‘Blood Country’, Robin Hyde’s Island Bay, the Gallipoli of Paraire Tomoana’s ‘E pari rā’, Allen Curnow’s Lone Kauri Road, Kendrick Smithyman’s Tomarata, Mahmoud Darwish’s Galilee, the ‘my country’ of A.R. Ammons’s The Snow Poems, Ted Berrigan’s New York City, the place of exile in Bei Dao’s poems, the view from Jenny Bornholdt’s work-shed window, the ‘environs of the goat’ in Sophie Loizeau’s poems...

Some poems seem to have uttered their locations; those of us who know the poems find it hard to know the place without the poem. The experience of place mediated in this way recalls Georges Poulet’s description of reading, ‘I am a consciousness astonished by an existence which is not mine, but which I experience as though it were mine...’ And of course it’s in the place of language that the ‘astonished’ exchange of consciousness takes place.

This exchange can take many forms. A mountain that is one person’s geological feature may be uttered as another’s ancestor. An uttered landscape may ground a spirit of national resistance, a place where blood and language are spilled together. A poem may imbue a place with the vividness of the perpetual emigré’s fascinated gaze. It may become the topos around which an argument or idea is constructed. The poem may be recited over and over in order to call up a place that can no longer be lived in, or that can only be lived in through uttering or writing the poem. The poem may mark the place where whenua establishes an inseparable link between birth and earth. It may equally mark the place where language itself is the poem’s only location.

All these utterances lead to another sense in which poetry is placed: how and where is it placed in culture, what role and significance does it have? Is it an object of delectation in the literary salon, the anthem of popular uprising, the etherised patient of academic forensics, the repository of community memory, the lyric downloaded from iTunes, the challenge at a poetry slam? What kind of esteem does poetry command in the cultures of different societies? And how does this esteem – this cultural location – relate (or not) to that other meaning of ‘place’, to physical location? Mahmoud Darwish’s last public reading in Beirut early in 2008 filled a stadium with an estimated 25,000 people; in Bangladesh, the vast crowds that assemble at the Shaheed Minar on Language Martys’ Day every year on 21 February know by heart Kazi Nazrul Islam’s poem ‘Rebel’, a rallying-cry in the 1971 war of liberation. In these instances, the two ‘places’ of poetry appear almost indistinguishable; the ground you kiss is unimaginable without esteemed language.

My thanks to the poets who took part in ‘The Place of Poetry’, to the National Library for organising it, and to the audience that came along. I didn’t notice an outbreak of ground-kissing afterwards, but it was a great place to be on the night.