historic!

posted by Michele

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

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

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

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

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

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

posted by Michele
Life

This new
quiet life.

At the end of the day -

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

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

posted by Michele
Visiting Europe

We rush around and look at famous stuff.
Once in the Louvre, late afternoon with my six-year-old son,
— he has truly had enough — we meet the Mona Lisa.
It’s 1981. I lift him above the world’s admiring heads.
That lady, I say — we don’t know why she’s smiling.
What do you think she’s thinking about?
Money, he says.  Money.

Bill Manhire
First published in The Times Literary Supplement.

posted by Michele
The Way Is Is

That you love nature is easy to say
until you learn that unless you act accordingly
it will call you to account in the end.
                                                   That’s why
we’re required to make the connection
between the sound the wind makes
when it starts the leaves quivering
and the way the white canes of sunlight
line the spaces between the trees
on a summer’s morning.
                                   It’s a case
of working out what’s here
for the long haul
and if we want to be part of it.
It’s marvellous, abominable, confusing,
exultant: the way things are,
the way is is.

Brian Turner
From Footfall (Random/Godwit, 2005)

posted by Michele
Cole dresses his mother

Like Elizabeth I in the film with Helen Mirren
undergoing a gynaecological examination. The

sleeve of her dress comes off, a petticoat is yanked up
a bodice divided. So does dresser Cole, aged

two, assemble and bring to his mother who
has dressed him for 735 days, buttoning

his sleep suits, the necks of his T-shirts
with unknowable slogans, tying the tapes of

his track pants (size 3, leg length 30cms)
her bra, her jersey, her knickers, her jeans

not in the royal order. He hands the jersey
first and indicates she should lower her head

then the knickers, tiny and lace-edged,
the bra, wire-stiffened. He drags

a teddy from a drawer, an angora
bolero, sequin-edged. And she, laughing

like an hysterical queen – she can conceive
the august Elizabethan doctors say

she is found fertile still and can produce an heir –
bra over her shoulder – Cole has brought two –

jeans hastily pulled over knickers, undoing
his precedence – hugs him to her, her delight

who returns delight to her every day
in the reciprocity of mutual dressing.

Elizabeth Smither

posted by Michele
FROM poppies and plane trees

two nights ago we missed
a question about a cricket team
we called them the Immortals
they were the Invincibles    the difference
between undying and unconquerable
mori et vincere    we were close
but we were not perfect    the question
slipped between two possibilities
a good guess and much on our minds
the question of mortality
where we are going when we’re going
to the island between sea and sky
cerulean a word I liked a lot less
when I learned where the emphasis went

now we look ahead
from the deck where the sound of doves
carries through the trees    what
are their names    have they always
made this flight between possibilities
hanging on tight to a perch
that might be a globe or a prow
or the start of a seedhead that falls
whump onto the roof in autumn
we journey we are lost and found
over under behind around
preposition proposition no position
so clear as the conversation
of the department of conversation
on a day-trip forever to come

the soft red wine
with the beautiful name    big funnels
and two notes on a French horn
to clear a way through the sails
of the five o’clock races    a child
waving about in the tree-tops
the dog snoring under my feet
in one head is a winged victory
in one hand a stick that bounces chisels
filled with strangeness
we begin the simultaneous paths
scent of picked basil extending
delicately through a notebook
making for the front gate    heat
under salted water coming
to the boil    and the curious weight
of granite hollowed for a stone pestle
holding on tight to the world

Michele Leggott
Forthcoming in The Centre for NZ Studies Bulletin.

hand to hand: five laureates at the national library

posted by Michele
Poet laureates Jenny Bornholdt, Bill Manhire, Elizabeth Smither, Brian Turner and I are scheduled to gather at the National Library in Wellington on Monday 4 August to read and to honour the seven tokotoko (talking sticks) associated with the laureateship. Jacob Scott, who carved the tokotoko, and John Buck from Te Mata Estate will also speak.

Hone Tuwhare’s stick has been brought to Wellington for the occasion and CDs by Jenny Bornholdt and Bill Manhire will be launched. If the winter storms let up sufficiently to allow more than seagulls into Rongotai on Monday, a great night of poetry and stories about sticks is in store.

Free entry, all welcome.

Reception at 5.30 pm in the Main Foyer of the Library, followed by reading and launches 6 – 7.30 pm in the Ground Floor Reading Room. MC Kate Camp. Hosted by the National Library as part of IIML’s 2008 Writers on Mondays series.

Image:
Matua tokotoko of the New Zealand Poet Laureate Award
Artist: Jacob Manu Scott
Photography: Julia Brooke-White

poetry day and all

posted by Michele

Bob Orr at Poetry Central 08 (photo Renee Liang)

Congratulations to Janet Charman and Cold Snack, winners of the 2008 Montana Poetry Award announced as part of Poetry Day, Friday 18 July. Janet was reading with others at Lopdell House in Titirangi that evening to a packed house. Across town at Poetry Central 08 in the Auckland City Library we were launching Bob Orr’s Calypso and the third of Jack Ross and Jan Kemp’s CD/text anthologies, New NZ Poets in Performance. Great to hear Chris Price, John Pule, Therese Lloyd, Mark Pirie, Anna Jackson and Jack read from their own work and then for someone who wasn’t able to be present (Anne Kennedy, Robert Sullivan, Jenny Bornholdt, John Newton, Greg O’Brien and Olivia Macassey respectively).

Bob’s new book is trenchant and full of delights. Try these (courtesy of Auckland UP):

Purple Octopus

I didn’t sail away because of Helen
she meant nothing to me in particular –
I had always found her vain
self centred and shallow.
Certainly she was beautiful
but no more so than any other Greek celebrity.
No I didn’t sail away because of Helen
as it happened she was just my great escape
away from my wife’s stony silences
from ploughing the poor soil of a rocky island
from mending nets ripped apart by sharks
from the small talk of fishermen
down at my local tavern –
that was the reason I sailed away.
thanks to our Greek drama queen Helen.
When she turned her face toward Troy
her nose like a beautiful rudder
altered the course of my life.
In her eyes there were peasant girls dancing
but when she smiled a viper slithered out of her lips –
to think that she gave birth to my twin epic poems.
I signed on with Odysseus
first as an AB and later on as bosun –
our spars made a forest all the way to the horizon.
As for Troy it was a plain of dust and death
best forgotten –
the retsina was so bad I took to lacing it with opium.
What a joke
we had to build a wooden horse as a weapon of mass destruction.
Drunk in a back street I was rolled for my last euro.
Blinded and left for dead after a battle
a veteran of that mad mid east adventure
in the guise of an old hag
I begged the long and lonely road home overland.
Sometimes in a village I would recite a poem for a salt sardine
and always in the back of my mind this crazy story getting bigger
like a purple octopus when it floats up to the surface.
This sharp beaked fair timbered well caulked deep sea epic.
I now sit bent in a dark question
by the salt violet Aegean.
A very old part of me sleeps beneath this pine.
A sadder and a wiser man
in the loom of these waves
I hear the living and the dead both speaking out of time.
Listen while I spin
this yarn
         thalassa.


An Orange Tree in Lebanon

I was not the burning girl in Vietnam
the ghostly child of starvation in Africa
neither was I the freedom fighter rotting in a field of sugar cane
in Nicaragua.
I was not buried in a mass grave in Bosnia
tortured in a stadium in Chile
neither was I impounded in a dog kennel in Cuba.
I was not beaten to death in a police cell in Soweto
and I was never shot beneath the innocence of an orange tree
in Lebanon.
Yet all these disappearances have happened in my time.
In the back streets of my soul
which is a country with no name
poppies always bloom beneath the wall of midnight.
Therefore I must call the girl in Vietnam my daughter
the child in Africa my son
the freedom fighter in Nicaragua I could have known as a brother.
In a mass grave in Bosnia I saw the face of my best friend
the woman tortured in a stadium in Chile could once have been my lover
the forgotten man held in a cage in Cuba my neighbour.
In Soweto the blood on a police cell wall
was the last painting of my sister.
In Lebanon the orange tree was the tree of my own garden.

love, war and last things

posted by Michele

       Now let’s talk.
       What city would you finally say we are?
       (Rachel Blau DuPlessis)

Where do we go when we enter a poem? what kind of space is poetic space, and who is there with us as we journey through it? These are some of the questions which prompted Brian Flaherty and I to assemble an array of poems and prose and make a digital bridge between here (Auckland, New Zealand) and there (Florence, Italy) for presentation at the 15th annual conference of the New Zealand Studies Association in Florence, 2-4 July 2008.

When we launch the site in Florence, a few hundred metres from the Ponte Vecchio, a roomful of people at the conference will become the first travellers on our bridge. They will choose which city (Auckland or Florence) to depart from, step into its digital grid and select a poet and a poem to travel with. The trip may include audio, text and/or visuals. The poet may be contemporary or historical, and the material relevant in a variety of ways to New Zealand connections with Italy. Our objective in Florence is to find out what happens as breathing travellers engage with digital presence. We called the project ‘Love, War and Last Things’ to accommodate the multiple foldings of time and space that might ensue.

When our first travellers reach the end of their trip, they will find themselves in the other city (Florence or Auckland) surrounded by more poets and poems for travelling back over the bridge. They (and those who come after them, logging into the site anywhere in the world) may continue crossing and recrossing digital space for as long as they wish. When travelling ceases and reading begins, there is a list of authors, titles and full texts to consult.

Who is on the bridge? We began by asking four poets with an established digital footprint and New Zealand or Italian connections for work that we might transform for presentation on the web. New Zealanders Paula Green and Jack Ross, who read and speak Italian, contributed recent texts and worked with us on their digital transformations. American Rachel Blau DuPlessis, who spends part of each year in Umbria, wrote a text in anticipation of her return visit to Australia for a poetry conference at almost the same time as ours. Nga Puhi writer Robert Sullivan who supervised the University of Hawai’i’s 2007 summer study programme in Florence contributed work from a sequence drafted there in his Tapa Notebook. That notebook joins the collection at the University of Auckland as another one goes to Rachel Blau DuPlessis ahead of her departure for Melbourne. Perhaps the crossing and recrossing of poetic trajectories will continue for a while yet.

’Love, War and Last Things’ is an nzepc feature and will go live 4 July 2008.

every bravery coming

posted by Michele

Photo Credit: Tim Page

At the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival last weekend Chris Price and I spent an hour hauling up material words from my writing and trying to see where the visualist left off and the poet began. We had all kinds of litter onstage: stencil-stamp valentines, a heart box, a ribbon text, old school lettering exercises. Then there were the beautiful objects: Tara McLeod’s poster size printing of ‘thé dansant,’ Bronwyn Lloyd’s prototype pop-up for ‘hello & goodbye,’ the Holloway Press edition of Journey to Portugal (Tara Mcleod again, with Gretchen Albrecht’s collages). It was a lot of fun and I am grateful to Chris for sending me back into old folders and dusty boxes to find things. We did make the leap to digital space but it’s the ballast of those big letters and shaped poems that seems most interesting now.

• Journey to Portugal (text) (Holloway Press)
• oes & spangs (Andrew Forsberg)
• An Hour with Michele Leggott