posted by Michele
Graham Beattie has blogged about the launch of Chris Price's new poetry collection The Blind Singer at the Gus Fisher Gallery, describing it as "a book launch like no other" he has attended.
r.i.p. pearl 1994-2009
posted by Michele
little eyes
two coffees to go
to Maungauika above us
the golden bee of the sun
between us the basket its blanket
and your sleeping head little dog
you loved this hill its spiral road
and the grass ghosts singing
in our ears now you are still
and everything familiar is still
aching except that black dot
on the horizon no longer old
and free at last of the slow
obscenity lymphoma
delivered into your trusting body
last night you fell at my feet
and I knew it was over little dog
you slept one last time
and then we woke you one last time
there is much to say up here
on the hill watching you
get further and further away
a frangipani blossom
and a white ginger flower
we will put you into the ground
between the avocado and the titoki
where you stuck your nose
every morning
into the leaves and snorted for joy
white ginger and frangipani
go with you last things a shot
of cat food and your head
in my hands love uncloses your eyes
and you see clearly again little dog
chasing the golden bee of the sun
yes run over that valley
and chase the birds into the sky
Image: Michele and Pearl, January 2009.
Photo credit: Robbie Duncan
the dada lady of the sonnets
posted by Michele
Shakespeare’s Sonnets are 400 years old this year and the Bard himself has reached his 23 April 2009 birthday/deathday. With poet and blogger Jack Ross, our Poetry off the Page students took sonnets, scissors, real and virtual glue to remix, blog and then perform some 21st century recensions in honour of WS. The Dada Lady of the Sonnets, a video record of the occasion, puts a new spin on an old mystery, and Jack presents the exercise in full at The Imaginary Museum. Happy 445th Birthday Bill!
Highbrow Sonnet – Blanks Inserted, by Matthew, Diane and Robin
Of with and remembrance before many, by Tricia and Alex
location collaboration performance
posted by Michele
Chris Cole Catley, convenor of the recent North Shore Young Writers’ workshops for the Michael King Writers’ Centre, has kindly sent along photos taken during the final afternoon, when writers, chalk and Sunday strollers shared pavements around the library in Devonport.
The 5 April workshop had begun a couple of hours earlier, taking for its keywords location, collaboration and performance. Using each other as sounding boards, pairs of students started by carefully detailing their movements (actual or fictional) from waking that morning until walking into the writing workshop. The hubbub of voices then gave way to intent scratching of felt tips on A3 as everyone got their morning down on paper. More noise as partners read and responded to each other’s drafts, then a round-the-room reading followed by simultaneous rendition, everybody and everything all at once. There is something immensely satisfying about making a ruckus in a library. Well, in a library seminar room.
Part two of the exercise involved taking a page each of the Sunday newspaper and with the help of a partner’s stabbing finger, finding interesting fragments to insert between the lines of the personal text. POETRY IS NEWS was the title we gave to the juxtapositions of life and newsprint that ensued, and a massed rustling of newspaper was improvised between voices in the spirited reading of it. Some of the NEWS made it to the pavements outside, then it was up the hill for afternoon tea and farewells at the Michael King Centre.
Images
Top: Students (right) Augusta Connor and Melissa Low. Tutors (from left) Jo Emeney, Ros Ali, Michele Leggott and Chris Cole Catley. Photo credit: Martin Cole.
Bottom: Back row from left at the Michael King Centre on Mt Victoria, Devonport: tutor Chris Cole Catley; Donna Chan, Glenfield College; Jenny Matthews, Takapuna Grammar; Augusta Connor, Kristin School; Melissa Low, Long Bay College; tutors Ros Ali and Jo Emeney; Lydia Warren, Northcote College; Liam Winter, Rosmini College; next row, guest tutor Michele Leggott; Leighton Watson, Rangitoto College; Alex Simmonds, International College; front row, Peter Yoo, Rosmini College; Kaitlyn Crabbe, Kristin School; front at left, Katie Carey, Rangitoto College. Photo credit: Martin Cole.
catching breath
posted by Michele
It's been a busy couple of months finalising the manuscript of MIRABILE DICTU, the book of poems to be published 30 June by Auckland University Press. Here is the string of events which enlivened the process:
19 February Devonport Library Associates reading with local writers Helen Sword and Julia Brennan. I read 'keep this book clean,' a poem about an old library book that survives in my family, and reprised shore space.
26 February Houses by the Sea: Robin Hyde in Wellington, with Lydia Wevers and Derek Challis. I read from Hyde’s sequence 'The Beaches' and talked about some of the textual discoveries made about the poems when I was working on Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde. Listen to Helen Morse read ‘The Beaches’.
4 March launch for Michael Harlow's The Tram Conductor's Blue Cap at Parsons Bookshop, Auckland. Our Poetry off the Page students have now completed a digital translation of the title poem as a course assignment, which Michael has responded to with enthusiasm.
12 March launch for Selina Tusitala Marsh's Fast Talking PI at the Fale Pasifika, University of Auckland. The coordinator of Pasifika Poetry Web debuts her first collection with an accompanying CD of performance and music mixed and mastered by the redoubtable Tim Page.
14 March family wedding at Clearview Estate, Hawke's Bay, with a honeymoon in Mexico to follow.
20-22 March Creative Hastings Festival of Writers 2009 with Martin Edmond, Roger McDonald, Sarah Quigley, Karl Stead, Peter Wells, food writer Catherine Bell and wine writer John Saker. The matua tokotoko returned to home base and was passed around the Assembly Room again.
25 March MC for LOUNGE #6, 10 readers at Old Government House at the University of Auckland. LOUNGE features experienced writers alongside student writers, everyone reading five minutes for a free drink and an attentive audience.
27 March studio recording of 'peri poietikes / about poetry' for the BBC essay series A Laureate's Life, to be broadcast late April. The early morning-late evening link up to Bristol worked flawlessly, thanks again to Tim Page.
2 April MNZM investiture at Government House, Auckland for services to poetry.
5 April Poetry is News workshop for Michael King Centre Young Writers programme, Devonport. By the end of a fine Sunday afternoon there were chalk poems and young writers from North Shore schools on the pavements around the library.
6 April the liberty of parrots goes live in Best NZ Poems 2008, edited by James Brown.
Images, from top:
Michele & Selina Tusitala Marsh. Photo courtesy Godfrey Boehnke.
Selina reads from Fast Talking PI. Photo courtesy Godfrey Boehnke.
Martin Edmond, Michele Leggott and Mark Fryer with the matua tokotoko in Hastings. Photo courtesy Maggie Hall.
Michele in the clock tower, April 2008. Photo courtesy Tim Page.
wonderful to relate
posted by Michele
We were in Hawke’s Bay last weekend for a family wedding, a year on from the big ceremony at Matahiwi and the presentation of Jacob Scott’s laureate sticks. So it was a blast to find out some months back that my Australian niece and her Kiwi boyfriend were planning to get married in Hawke’s Bay where his large family has its headquarters. We were happy indeed to gather at Clearview Estate, just down the road from Haumoana, for the wedding which brought people from far and wide and was a high-water mark for both families.
The matua tokotoko was along for the occasion and was passed from speaker to speaker at the reception. It seems clear that the more this and the other laureate sticks go hand to hand, the greater their mana becomes. The wedding speeches were eloquent and moving, and of course the groom’s father knew Jacob Scott and is a published poet himself. These are the things you find out at weddings.
My part in the speeches was to read a poem written a few weeks ago and soon to be the last-but-one component of the collection that will be published in late June as Mirabile Dictu. It’s fair to say that of many wonderful things that have happened in the course of the laureate year and a half, none is as wonderful as the story that brought us all to Clearview for Almitra and Joel’s wedding.
wonderful to relate
my brother leaves a message call me
something has happened is it an emergency
or terra incognita waving about in the trees
closer than anyone imagined a daughter
he says when I call him back I have a daughter
and she is twenty seven years old
this takes a bit of explaining and when
he has I ask is there a photo did you take
some photos the files arrive as we talk
I open them and there she is someone
who looks like all of us and is most surely
herself the stranger who is his daughter
our niece and now eldest of five cousins
it takes a long time to work out
the delicate shapes that might be and when
it is done she comes to meet us
more photos more talk we have given her
our grandmother’s rings she gives us
the gift of herself if we will have her
that part is easy and now there’s
a wedding in the air they will tie the knot
with his people and we will travel again
to Te Matau a Maui this time
with everyone on board and in a vineyard
at the far end of summer with strangers
who have made us welcome my brother
will give away his daughter knowing
she has made us into something bigger
and more precious than anyone
could have imagined she is herself
and she is one of us for her
we will travel the miles to Haumoana
looking at the windy sea thinking about
long ago family weddings and how this one
is adding its quota of surprises
and serendipity to the story we thought
we knew mirabile dictu we say
wiping away a sneaky tear such wonders
and everybody talking we are here
with a million champagne bubbles
bursting miraculously against our lips
wish us well we are going to a wedding
How the story circles: our grandparents were married in Woodville in 1924 and my father was born in Hastings a year later, so there is a family connection to the Bay that just got a whole lot stronger.
Images
Top; (left) Five cousins at Clearview, 14 March 2009, (right) Joel Watson and Almitra McQurade
Bottom: Henry Nelson Leggott & Janet Rintoul Elder, Woodville, 1924
Chalking with Mr Harlow and all
posted by Michele
It was chalking day on campus last week as this year’s Poetry off the Page cohort fanned out with poems to put into public space. With them was Michael Harlow, 2009 Burns Fellow and holder of the inaugural Caselberg Residency, in Auckland for the launch of his new book, The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap (AUP). Student chalkers became Harlow ‘translators’ and were encouraged by Michael to co-sign the poem that went down outside the university library during the busiest part of the day. Elsewhere other chalking gangs were taking Harlow words up steps, across a road and around a parked bus. It was, said Michael, the best pre-launch a book of poems could hope for; and he finished the morning by taking requests from the class who by then had very close knowledge of some of his texts. Later we went to look at the range of poems that had made it to the pavements and were already wearing off under the tramp of feet.
The weather gods were kind to us this year and nobody had to watch their chalk poems vanish into gutters. Down by Old Government House digi-poet Helen Sword chalked graphics for her Stoneflower Path. And at the bottom of the OGH drive, hot and dishevelled but perfectly happy, I finished chalking a poem that traces the journey made by 24 year old William Leggott to Aotearoa in 1865.
Photo credits: Tim Page and POTP
Maggie Rainey-Smith on 'Houses by the sea'
posted by Michele
Wellington writer & bookseller Maggie Rainey-Smith has blogged about last week's event at the National Library, 'Houses by the Sea – Celebrating Robin Hyde'.
You can read her post on Beattie's Book Blog.
Houses by the sea
posted by Michele
The Alexander Turnbull Library has announced its acquisition of a major collection of Robin Hyde’s literary papers. To celebrate the occasion there will be a reception and reading at the National Library in Wellington on February 26 as per the invitation above.
'Houses by the Sea' is Hyde’s most famous sequence of poems and the title of the collection of her later poems published posthumously in 1952. The sequence explores her Wellington childhood and adolescence, looking back at the 1900s and 1910s from 1937-39 as Hyde prepared to leave New Zealand, then travelled through war-torn China and on to England where she died in August 1939. 'Houses by the Sea' travelled with her and was worked on in places as diverse as Hankow (now Wuhan) and Charles Brasch's Wiltshire cottage. Hyde was fully aware of the effect geographical distance was exerting on early memory, explaining in a letter to her family from Shanghai 2 May 1938:
N.Z. is my country beyond any possible mistake [. . .] I’d like to be home, in the back-yard among the black-eyed Susans, or in the front garden with the hose sprinkling – it'll be autumn now, and Wilton's Creek soft and smelling of wild mint and burning gorse. By whiles I have tried to write and link up a series of poems about our childhood places – Wellington – and like some of the results, though very fragmentary as yet. But in travelling, peace isn’t deep enough – if at all – for the writing of real poetry. For prose, however, it hasn’t been so bad, and I think the inarticulate blurred mass of Eastern noise, which is just enormous, is easier to stand because I can’t understand it – my mind isn’t hunting a thread here, a word there. (Challis and Rawlinson, The Book of Iris, p.531)
The prose from China became her last book, the travel memoir and anti-war polemic Dragon Rampant (1939). The poems, dazzling collages of image and memory, were already more than fragmentary when she wrote from Shanghai (she was always supercritical of her own work). By the time she was typing in the spring sunshine outside Bishop's Barn in April 1939, they had become the 20-page typescript from which the published sequence derives. That typescript is part of the vast treasury of manuscripts and photographs that has come to the Turnbull as part of the Derek Challis Papers. The collection is now available to researchers and interested readers of Hyde.
Image: RH writing at Bishop's Barn during her first visit as a guest of Charles Brasch, April 1939. From Derek Challis and Gloria Rawlinson, The Book of Iris: A Life of Robin Hyde (Auckland University Press, 2003)
Papers Past
posted by Michele
A big hand for the folks at the National Library who are putting our newspapers online bit by bit, paper by paper. The project is called Papers Past and it means you can search in all kinds of ways for all kinds of things that made local news. Just before Christmas I found that The Timaru Herald had been put online, not a moment too soon for some tinkering with family history I was doing. When your ancestors don’t leave many clues, the papers have to fill in the gaps (see below, ‘family sightings on the mainland’).
It helps to have an oddly spelt name but even so there were more than 350 search results for leggott between 1873 and 1900 which is when the past stops. My arm was about to drop off coming through the 1890s when I arrived at the following story:
TOWN & COUNTRY.
Timaru Herald, 11 January 1898Mr Leggott, quite an old identity of Timaru, has shown us a curiosity in the shape of copies of a newspaper, The Greyhound Chronicle, published in February, 1865. The ‘copy’ for the paper was written on the voyage of the ship Greyhound, and each MS. day's paper carefully bound, and on arrival at Christchurch the whole was printed and distributed among the passengers. The daily record is interesting reading, the short articles dealing with the voyage, the medical officer's report, astronomy, correspondence on various matters, poetry, humourous paragraphs, etc. Mr Leggott, who was a passenger by the ship, assures us that the paper was eagerly looked for, and helped time to pass very pleasantly.
That’s William, who arrived as a 24 year old farm labourer from Lincolnshire, married 19 year old Catherine Thornton in 1868 and went on to have a family of 11 children. We knew about the Greyhound. We did not know about The Greyhound Chronicle. I searched the databases for a copy, and wonder of wonders, found just one, an ancient photocopy of the publication held by the Turnbull Library. Interlibrary loan has done its work and I am looking at a copy of a copy of the printed version of a handwritten ship’s newspaper that my great great grandfather read February through June 1865 as he made the one-way voyage from London to Lyttelton.
family sightings on the mainland
there was a lot of singing solos glees duets
recitations and a dialogue in character sometimes
an initial will show which one of them it was
with the unregistered dog the prize for conduct
the five shilling donation the worst competition score
they play cricket rounders and draughts they object
to religious instruction in state schools they join
the Loyal Lifeboat Lodge of Good Templars
the Blue Ribbon Army and the Band of Hope
they are drain layers dry salters road contractors
and they sing Strike Out the Top Line The Holy City
Come Unto Me All Ye That Labour And Are Heavy Laden
And I Will Give You Rest they address remarks on
How to Reach the Unconverted and Can God Furnish
a Table in the Wilderness they occupy chairs
and second motions they tender successfully
for local contracts and become identities
in the district one does jury duty
for an embezzlement trial one plays a B Flat Bass
they are surface men boot finishers consignees
of shipping from up and down the coast
a son comes second in the three legged race
a daughter is commended for her writing
every eligible name is on the suffrage roll
nobody volunteered for the Transvaal war
and they sing solos duets quartets it is never quiet
each morning they open their newspapers
and pick up where they left off
the news goes round and everybody knows
who has been uproariously applauded
who has been struck off the householders’ roll and why
who spoke at length or wished business
speedily disposed of who sang alto
in one of the pleasantly rendered vocal items
and who is in the conveyance
leaving Gabites’ corner at 1 o’clock sharp today
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