The poetry of fact

In an interview that marked the end of his tenure as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Sir Geoffrey Hill was asked what he wanted from contemporary poetry. He began – and ended – with a negative. 'I don't want it to be a sort of simpering drizzle. I really do want there to be some sense of order battling anarchy within the very structure of a poem. I think one of the most dreadful sounds in all of modern culture is what I will call the poetry recital chortle, and most contemporary poems seem to me to be written in order to arouse the desire of the listener to chuckle appreciatively.'

Michael Schmidt uses this quotation in his editorial introducing the new PN Review. My feelings about it are mixed. I understand the rather dour intellectual Hill’s dislike of poetry as entertainment/poets as stand-up comics, which I suspect lies behind it. My notion of poetry is, like Hill’s, one of (I will give it capitals) High Art, which of course does not exclude wit. But the gap between ‘funny’ and ‘witty’, between Johnny Depp and Johnny Donne, is a mile wide. ‘Performance poetry’ only matters when the Poetry (capitals again) survives the Performance and lives on the Page. So I can agree with Hill to that extent; but Hill’s own poetry is Hard Work. It has a Miltonic, Old Testament feel about it. You have to be in good intellectual shape to approach it – it requires that of you.

Milton’s God-obsession is comprehensible given the times and circumstances it springs from, and the state of knowledge at that time; but the same dour obsession in the 21st Century seems to me less explicable – in some moods, almost inexcusable. Charles Tomlinson (a poet I’m sure I did less than justice to in my last blog) says in an interview, ‘I happen to think, with Santayana, that “Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with fact.” It’s no longer possible [he goes on] to reinstate seventeenth century, basically medieval criteria of belief – criteria from times when it was virtually possible to believe anything.’

Temperamentally, then, I would prefer, not a less serious, but perhaps a lighter, touch than Hill’s; and intellectually, one that occupied the terrifying real universe science is revealing to us. It will be interesting to see what the new Professor, Simon Armitage, makes of the role. He has said he will try for ‘something a little more contemporary.’ And ‘I feel I’d like to bring things up to date.’

I have a distant interest in all this because a couple of Kiwis in Oxford last year, wanting to move the Professorship offshore for a change, had the idea of nominating me for the post. In the end they threw in their lot with the move to nominate the Nigerian Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka; and the chance of that nomination succeeding was probably effectively scuppered when famous British Melvin Bragg said publicly that Soyinka (my age) was ‘too old and too grand’. It’s a strange notion that one can be ‘too grand’ for Oxford’s chair of poetry, a seat occupied not too long ago by W.H. Auden, Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. I didn’t think I would be elected (too old, and not grand enough!) but I would have enjoyed the election process – and the job too, if it had come to me.

It will be interesting to see what Armitage (a pleasant person and talented poet) will make of it.

I will add a recent poem of my own here relevant to the discussion above about the God-obsession and its relevance or otherwise in the 21st century.

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The poetry of fact

On board Apollo 13

on their slingshot return

from the mission which failed to land them on

the moon,

oxygen diminishing

CO2 increasing

temperature dropping and

batteries failing

they had to get a precise

angle of re-entry.

 

Too steep and they would burn,

too fine, they would bounce off

earth’s envelope of air

and away into space for ever.

 

Prayer would not help

though by now the whole world –

the President

the Pope

the people in Times Square –

were praying.

 

To do the job

they needed Physics

and after the Physics,

Maths –

just numbers you could say

or an illustration

of how hard the hard facts can be,

how exacting

and necessary

and how beautiful

when you get them right.

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I was briefly in Wellington about my appointment as Laureate and ran into British academic and Mansfield specialist, Dr Gerri Kimber, on a winter visit from the U.K. and hard at work in the Turnbull Library on her biography of Mansfield’s early years. That evening I heard a very lively talk she gave at the Wellington City Gallery about the discovery she has made in the Newberry Library, Chicago, of a collection of 32 Mansfield poems, only 7 of them previously known – a discovery at once exciting and inconvenient. Dr Kimber is deviser and Series Editor of the Edinburgh University Press four volume Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, and the find is exciting because she considers these poems to be up with the very best Mansfield ever wrote. It is inconvenient, on the other hand, because Volume three has already appeared and is supposed to contain Mansfield’s complete poems and critical writing. So what is to be done with this collection of poems but stuff them in at the end of Volume four, Mansfield’s notebooks, currently being edited and annotated by Dr Kimber and Professor Claire Davison of the Sorbonne?

Katherine Mansfield at her work table, Villa Isola, Menton, France. Ref: 1/2-011985-F.

What makes the find special is that it appears Mansfield put the poems together in 1910 as a single collection and offered it (unsuccessfully) to a London publisher – after which it mysteriously vanished into a private collection. It has therefore a certain unity and coherence, and the freshness of Mansfield at that early stage in her career. Here is an example, showing, among much else, the influence of Russian literature that was so strong throughout her career:

In the swiftly moving sleigh
We sat curled up under the bear skin rugs
And talked of the dangers of life
The afternoon froze into twilight, profounder than night
The trees in the forest through which we passed
Were patterned like monstrous weeds on a lake of ice . .
You told me all your adventures
And though they were very terrible and violent
I could not help laughing, sometimes you ceased speaking
Turned to me with funny gravity
‘I just escaped being killed.’
Then our laughter rang over the snow
I told you of three wrecks I had been in
Of a fire – and the time I was all-but-drowned in a river . .
Ever faster galloped the horses
The moon rose, touching the fantastic land with her silver fingers
How eloquently we described our adventures!
But it was useless.
They flew into space on the wings of our laughter . .
Curled up under the bear skin rugs.
We drove – it seemed – through the foam that breaks over the world edge.
On the one great adventure
That held us in silence and gravity.

In the view of Dr Kimber and Professor Davison ’s these poems show Mansfield moving ‘away from the influence of Wilde and fin-de-siècle symbolism towards the more complex neo-romanticism and early modernism of continental Europe.’

I have always been slightly sceptical about Mansfield as a poet. The last time I offered an opinion on the subject was February 1990 when I reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement a selection of her poems edited by Vincent O’Sullivan. Here are two paragraphs of that review:

There have been half a dozen poems worthy of serious attention, and of those, two in particular have been rightly favoured by anthologists. One is the formal sonnet about the death of her brother in the First World War – a poem as tight, unflinching, strong and clear in its feeling as the best of Wilfred Owen. The other, ‘To Stanislaw Wyspianski’ is a romantic rhapsodic Whitmanesque piece in which Mansfield speaks out as a woman and a New Zealander, and in which one can see a talent not yet disciplined, but not yet curbed either.

For the rest there is a great deal of charm, some examples of the Mansfield wit, and increasingly the sense of a physical decline which robs her poetry of its native vitality. At her best in prose or verse Mansfield has the ability to speak right out of the middle of the note. But her poems look increasingly bruised and defeated. The spring goes out of their step. In the end she is simply sorry for herself. She has every reason to be but it doesn’t make the best use of her talent.

So here is a reason to celebrate Dr Kimber’s discovery – a small collection of poems written by Mansfield before her skies began to fall on her, or at least at a time when she was strong enough to cope with the falling. But how do they stand up? The poem quoted above is a good example: it has youthful vitality, the warmth of human association, immediacy, a sense of fun. It’s like a lamb leaping in spring: it is not only natural to respond with pleasure – it’s inevitable, unavoidable. But lurking somewhere as I read and enjoy is the spoilsport (whispered) question: is it a poem?

It is the same question that lurks when one reads the poems of Janet Frame. There is the immediacy that comes with talent – both have enormous resources of that. But where is the form that distinguishes a poem from prose? This is a very complex question, because form does not have to mean rhyme, or measureable metres, or a count of syllables, or even a pattern that has ever been used before or since. Nonetheless one believes one has an instinct for it and knows it is there – or that it is not. And I note that I had written all this before checking what Allen Curnow says about ‘To Stanislaw Wyspianski’ and finding that, though admiring, and writing about it at some length, he describes it as ‘a half-poem’, and as ‘passionate stumbling prose (for it is barely verse)’.

Would it be fair to say that the recently discovered poem quoted above is charming and skilful but formless? And if I do tend towards that opinion, is mine only a male response – and anyway, does it matter? Maybe we should just take what we are offered and be grateful?

Let the conversation continue!

– C. K. Stead

Mont Sainte-Victoire

The inauguration as poet Laureate went off well, despite the fact that it was NZ Poetry Day and there were readings and book launches going on simultaneously elsewhere in town. A distinguished group of friends, fellow writers, and family, a warm and sociable Minister (Maggie Barry), and a venue (the Auckland Branch of the National Library) nicely prepared by the staff – my thanks to them all.

There was one thing I had intended to say in my speech and forgot, so I will say it here. Some years ago I chaired a session at the Wellington Writers’ Festival, an hour with the distinguished German poet Hans Magnus Enzensburger. Enzensburger was reflecting on the strangeness of the phenomenon of poetry, and said it was the only industry he could think of where the producers exceeded the consumers in number. What I meant to add to this remark was that this fact is a source of poetry’s strength: it can’t be commercialized, or corporatized. It’s one of the few areas of life in New Zealand at the moment not in danger of international ‘investment’. There’s no money in it, and it can’t go bust – which is one of the reasons it survives. So many are doing it, and will go on doing it, privately, even secretly, sometimes hopefully, often with no hope at all that anyone will be interested in what they write, or ever publish it. It’s a reflection of our fascination with language, human kind’s primary tool, and what distinguishes us on our planet. It’s why poetry flourishes during economic depressions, finds work for itself in times of war, goes underground and gains power there under political repression. There is something necessary about poetry, something mysterious, a force. It’s a minority art practiced by so many, even more written than read, but a constant.

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The British poet Charles Tomlinson died on 22 August aged 88. The following is from a memoir I am intermittently writing, this extract about my time as a PhD student on a scholarship from New Zealand at the University of Bristol, 1957-59, where my supervisor was Professor L.C. Knights, and Tomlinson was a member of the English Department:

Another visitor to the Department was the Canadian-born, American-by-adoption, critic Hugh Kenner, already a notable Eliot scholar. I don’t now remember much of his lecture but I remember his natty bow tie and mop of curly hair, and how his at first disconcerting speech (a consequence of deafness in childhood) contrasted with Lionel Knights’s smoothness and fluency introducing him; and yet how the keen intelligence and originality shone through. This was the man who made me aware I needed to know more about Ezra Pound, and who gave the idea of ‘Modernism’ an intellectual edge – made a puzzle and a challenge of it.

One purpose of Kenner’s Bristol visit was to cement his association with Charles Tomlinson, a junior lecturer in the Department, and the only British poet whose work Kenner felt was in tune with important things that were going on in American poetry. I can’t now quite disengage my present overview of Kenner from the much less I would have known about him then. He is author of one of the great books of twentieth century literary criticism, The Pound Era (1972) – great not only for its intelligence and scholarship but for liveliness, originality and readability. Yet Kenner can also seem at times a critic with quite extreme quirks and crankiness, prone to clever but absurd overstatement, like a brilliant drunk in full flight. But in that year he was giving Charles Tomlinson a start he might never otherwise have had, putting him in direct touch with American poets he admired, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, and persuading his own American publisher, McDowell Obolensky, to take Tomlinson’s collection of poems, Seeing is believing, which no publisher in England (Charles said he’d tried them all) would touch.

This was the time when the British poets of the Movement, in reaction against the flamboyance of Dylan Thomas, George Barker and the ‘new Romantics’ of the 1940s, were being defined and displayed in anthologies, from which Tomlinson had been excluded. Hell hath no fury like a poet shut out of a currently fashionable anthology, and Tomlinson was busy scourging the Movement in journals on either side of the Atlantic – in Poetry (Chicago), and in Essays in Criticism (Oxford) where he devoted no fewer than nine pages to the punishment of what he called ‘the Middlebrow Muse’. These reviews were followed up with the same message when he was given the chapter ‘Poetry Today’ to write for the distinctly Leavisite Pelican Guide to English Literature, Volume 7, edited by Boris Ford.

To me Tomlinson appeared as an interesting specimen of one kind of Englishness, a man whose father sometimes believed, and liked to claim, he was of Royal blood on the wrong side of the blanket, and that he had married beneath him in that his wife, the poet’s mother, had been a Leicestershire mill-girl. Tomlinson senior had lost his job as foreman in a factory that made jam-pots, but was expert at fishing in the canals – which must have made the Eliot lines especially redolent to the son when he first encountered them in ‘The Waste Land’:

While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck.

As a student at Cambridge Tomlinson had not been happy until, I think in his second year, Donald Davie became his tutor. Davie, who can’t have been many years older than his charge, was also a poet, alert to what was happening in the American poetry scene, a critic as readable as Kenner but less eccentric, and interested especially in the syntax of poetry which he characterized as ‘articulate energy’. He and Tomlinson formed a bond that lasted a lifetime.

After graduating, and teaching unhappily in a school in Camden Town, Tomlinson scored a post as private secretary to the British writer Percy Lubbock, then living in Italy, in Lerici; but he was dismissed after three weeks, probably, he thought, because his genteel employer found his flat Midlands ‘a’ vowel unacceptable. Lubbock, he said, believed even ‘ants’ should be pronounced ‘aunts’ – but he allowed Charles and his wife Brenda to stay on there in a villino adjoining the gardener’s cottage, thus giving the Tomlinson sensibility an Italian airing from which it never looked back. It was a region the couple were to return to often.

Tomlinson was seven years my senior and, though only a junior lecturer, was my senior also in status. We were amiably aware of one another without being close, and met regularly in graduate seminars, presided over by Knights and attended by most of the English Department staff. In 1958 he and Brenda had just moved to a rural location with the wonderfully English address of Brook Cottage, Ozleworth Bottom, Wotton-under-Edge. There was no phone, and never would be one. If a phone-call was necessary they climbed the hill to a pay-phone. Charles and Brenda had met while in their teens and were still married at his death 70 years later. The cottage was to remain their home. They would travel a great deal, but always come back to it. Their two daughters grew up there. Charles was also admired as a painter but I don’t recall that I ever saw any of his work.

Many years later, at a conference in Tubingen on poetry and regionalism, he and I would reminisce warmly about the L.C. Knights days in Bristol. By that time, I noticed, the Midlands accent was pretty-much gone, replaced (though perhaps not with absolute security) by what used to be called R.P. – received pronunciation – meaning ‘correct’. Knights had long since moved back to Cambridge, to the King Edward VII Chair, where F.R. Leavis, his old colleague and more famous contributor to the critical journal Scrutiny, who would probably have liked that eminent seat for himself, referred to him as ‘Professor Judas’. This Regius chair should have been the ultimate academic triumph for Knights but when I visited him there, and he walked me in Queen’s College gardens, and took me to lunch in the College, it was soon apparent he was not altogether happy. To Frank Kermode, who would succeed him there, he reported his dissatisfactions and remarked, ‘Oh for the road not taken!’. I have no idea what this alternative road might have been.

Tomlinson stayed on in the Bristol Department his whole working life, in the end I think occupying the Winterstoke professorship, the one Knights had held in the 1950s.

But in 1957 I was (perhaps without good reason, certainly without careful consideration) put off his poetry partly just by his manner in person, a look of depleted energy, in fact of such profound, unrelenting weariness, I felt if it was not an illness it had to be an affectation; and by something in the lines themselves – a kind of disengagement, as if the words had been chosen with immense care, but with a faint feeling of distaste.

To Charles Brasch I wrote that Seeing is Believing was probably a good collection, certainly displaying ‘a sharp visual perception driving a keen intelligence – but a little precious, a little gutless.’

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The extract ends there. I wish I could say the effect of Tomlinson’s death has been to make me recognize my error, but I have looked again at some of his poetry and find there’s a difference of temperament so absolute that my mind begins to shut off when I read him. Two critics I greatly admire, American Hugh Kenner and British Donald Davie, have told me I am wrong about Tomlinson. But where Davie finds in his work ‘an exquisitely accurate register of sense impressions’, I run up against what seems to me a wall of abstraction and effete discourse.

These are the critical conversations poetry constantly requires those of us who are serious about it to have – and there are no right answers, no final resolutions.

Try for yourself. Here are some lines by Tomlinson which Davie strongly recommends because, he says, they ‘insist upon the Otherness of the non-human world.’ Perhaps they do, and you will see what he means. They come from a poem called ‘Cézanne at Aix’, so I assume the mountain is Mont Sainte-Victoire, which Cézanne painted so often:

And the mountain: each day
Immobile like fruit. Unlike, also
–Because irreducible, because
Neither a component of the delicious
And therefore questionable,
Nor distracted (as the sitter)
By his own pose and, therefore,
Doubly to be questioned: it is not
Posed.  It is.  Untaught
Unalterable, a stone bridgehead
To that which is tangible
Because unfelt before. There
In its weathered weight
Its silence silences, a presence
Which does not present itself.

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Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanne, via Wikimedia Commons.

– C. K. Stead

Europe

Vince O’Sullivan’s final laureate blog was about his discovery of the poetry of Iain Lonie, and the launch of Lonie’s Collect Poems by University of Otago Press in Dunedin, and how good the poems were – so for the sake of continuity I will begin there. I knew Lonie many years ago and have a brief piece about him coming in a collection of essays, lectures, reviews and reminiscences to be published next year by Auckland University Press with the title Shelf Life. The piece in question is about my time as lecturer in English at the University of New England, N.S.W., where Lonie lectured in the Classics Department. The year was 1958 and it was my first academic job. Here it is:

Armidale fostered friendships of a strange kind, sometimes so intense they could seem, however briefly, like falling in love. One was with a young poet Iain Lonie, my exact contemporary, a New Zealander and Oxford graduate, lecturer in Classics, who translated Euripides’ Alcestis and persuaded me to put the choruses into semi-formal verse, which he didn’t feel he could do himself. He had a wife, Jean, and a number of children, but Kay and I saw little of them – only Iain himself; and I remember the three of us spending a long evening together which we enjoyed so much we were reluctant to end it. So in the small hours we walked him home from our flat to his, and then, still not ready to go our separate ways, he walked back with us, came in for another drink and more talk, after which we walked him home a second time as the first signs of daylight were just creeping into the cold sky.

Our version of Alcestis was performed by the University Players in the Armidale Town Hall, and later a version of it was broadcast by the A.B.C. [Two of these choruses survive in my Collected Poems, 1951-2006, pp 24, and 511.]

Iain was always uncertain about his poems, and slow in writing them, but his poetry mattered to him more than anything; and he wrote to me from Sydney, after getting an appointment there, to say that my encouragement had set him writing again. In the same letter he sent ten of the forty guineas the A.B.C. had paid for our play, money which he needed more than I did, and which was much more than my fair share of the work. But still he had little success with poems offered to literary journals. His first marriage foundered, and his second ended tragically with the sudden death of the new wife. He lived on for a few years after that, writing poems about grief and loss, and then in 1988 killed himself. His best book, Winter Walk at Morning, was published posthumously.

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There is no time when I don’t have a poem lying about in notebook drafts or in my head, and I’m wondering whether the one below, which for the moment I’ve called ‘Europe’, works – or whether I have so reduced it (on the old economy principle that less is more) at too high a cost.

Europe

i

These are just shoes, but cast in iron
and set in concrete
marking the place where Jews were shot
so their bodies fell in the Danube
and were swept away.

ii

Lunch was a strong paté
of raw onions and chives
with a hint of garlic and mushroom –
delicious with bread rolls and ham
and a small side-bowl
of fetta in oil.

iii

There are weeds between the tracks
but the yellow tram to the Palace of Arts
where Wagner will be heard
is clean and quick.

iv

From the hill at night
in floodlit bridges and castle
and holy places
Budapest re-imagines
the old look of Empire.

v

Today
outside what was once
Party Headquarters
a weary summer square
known locally as
‘Dogshit Park’ remembers
‘the Martyrs of ’56.’

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PN Review is renewing its (always handsome) appearance and reaching out for new contributors, so I suggested that its editor, Michael Schmidt, should send me something about the journal’s interest in New Zealand poetry. PN by the way, stood for Poetry Nation – curiously nationalistic-sounding for a literary journal which has been notable, as its publisher, Carcanet, has been, for reaching out beyond Britain’s shores. PN Review has a website and anyone can subscribe there. Part of Schmidt’s reply is below:

Dear Karl

Very many thanks for the suggestions, and for mooting the possibility of a blog mention of PNR. I am happy to send images in this connection if you need them!

From a very early date PN Review has been a beacon of New Zealand writing in the UK. I think it must have been Donald Davie who first steered me towards Allen Curnow, and in the 1980s we published a lot of his poems as well as reviews of his work right into the new millennium. You have yourself been contributing poetry and prose since 1984 – eleven times -- and your work has been reviewed several times as well – which led on to Carcanet publishing your Collected Poems 1951-2006 in conjunction with AUP.

Robyn Marsack [New Zealand born, in charge of the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh] was my closest colleague during the later 1970s and into the 1980s, and she has remained a dear source of information and inspiration. We published at Carcanet Ian Wedde’s translations of Mahmoud Darwish – back in the earlyish 1970s I think it was. And through Robyn it must have been that Elizabeth Smither became a regular contributor for many years to the magazine. Robyn and Andrew Johnston edited TWENTY CONTEMPORARY NEW ZEALAND POETS for Carcanet.

Bill Manhire has contributed poetry and essays more often than any other New Zealander except Greg O’Brien. He is not a very prolific poet and I think most of his substantial poems have featured in our pages as they came into being.

Baxter swam into my ken thanks to an anthology by D.J. Enright (which also introduced me to A.D. Hope and Derek Walcott!) and I fell for him big time. He was dead, of course, but he has been something of a tutelary spirit, along with Australian Judith Wright, both of whom propose a poetics that I believe had some impact in the UK, not least in the development of a passion for ghazals among the middle generation... Baxter is a posthumous contributor. I always seem to get to Hiruharama when I go to NZ – both times! And last time I went swimming in the Wanganui with Greg O’Brien, John Dennison, a few icebergs and others.

Greg has played a generous part in the magazine’s development, taking us with him on his journeys around the world and sharing his prose, poetry and graphic work with us. He has provided the images for several covers.

Robyn was probably the route of access for contributors such as Dinah Hawken and Jenny Bornholdt, and either by myself or through Greg I came upon the work of John Dennison, our most recent New Zealander, whose work I love.

Not many UK magazines have been so attentive to the other side of the world as PNR, and NZ scores a lot higher than Australia in our pages...

That is a brief romp through the history of PN Review vis-à-vis New Zealand!

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A recent exchange:

Nigel & Heather

To C.K.Stead

Dear Karl,

I’m am writing on behalf of a poetry group I run in Nelson with a query about one of your poems, “The Rower” which has charmed but puzzled us. We wondered: why the three-lined structure of the verses, without matching the meaning of the words? I thought it was to snap the reader out of mindless reading – alerting them to the words in a fresh way – a la ee cummings. Another thought it was rhythmical like rowing.

Perhaps it’s both.

In a way it doesn’t really matter – it’s a cracker poem irrespective – but if there is a reason to why it is structured this way, and you can be arsed giving it, we’d really like to know.

Nosey bastards aren’t we?

All the best

Nigel Costley

C.K. Stead

To Nigel & Heather

Dear Nigel and Heather (& group)

‘The rower’ (I’m glad you like it – thank you) is a syllabic poem with a syllable count I’ve often used over the last decade or more – a tercet (3 line stanza) of exactly 13 syllables. Using syllabics breaks the dominance of the five-stress (or iambic pentameter) measure that otherwise tends to dominate the ear of a poet well educated in traditional English language poetry. I’ve used the 13 syllable tercet quite a lot, including in my novel My Name was Judas, where Judas is a poet and each chapter ends with a poem in that form.

I think counting syllables forces one to consider every word carefully and keep re-arranging the lines, so what emerges is tightly written and well-considered. Also the arbitrariness of the breaks (caused as much by the syllable count as by the meaning) forces the reader to read more attentively – it runs across the sense of the sentences and so keeps the reading alert.

The rest is just ‘talent’. You either have it in you to write well, or you don’t!

I hope this helps. Best wishes

Karl

– C. K. Stead

C.K. Stead is your new Poet Laureate

The National Library is thrilled to announce our selection of the New Zealand Poet Laureate for 2015-2017: C. K. Stead.

Photo by Marti Friedlander.

Christian Karlson Stead was born in Auckland in 1932. He began writing poetry while still at school, and publishing as a student. His awards for poetry have included the Jessie Mackay award, the New Zealand Book Award for poetry, the King’s Lynn Poetry prize, the Hippocrates Prize for poetry and Medicine, and the Sarah Broom prize. His Collected Poems 1951-2006 received a Montana Prize in 2009.

Thinking about the nature of poetry in the foreword to his Collected Poems, Stead wrote: ‘Language is what distinguishes us on our planet, and poetry pushes that everyday currency out into new territories of sense – sensory and semantic. I think of writing a poem as putting oneself in the moment at the moment.’

Nic Ascroft writing in Landfall concluded his review of Stead’s The Yellow Buoy, published in 2014, with this consideration of the poem "Why poetry?": ‘This lists all of the ways Stead uses poetry: to capture the beauty of a moment as perfectly as he can; to be honest; to find the truth in dreams; to allow a little lyricism; to probe the human condition and to consider suffering and death.’

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Why poetry?

To catch the cat’s
studied indifference,
her yawn and stretch in the sun.

To take what once was thought
and twice rejected
and refine it
until it is not what it was.

To recover the realm
between waking and sleep
where a dragon guards
the golden hoard
and a word marks the lizard’s dart
between is and
was.

Casual, effortless, elegant
to be the heron
climbing the air.

To give to the human order
a kinder face
a better shape.

To be and not
to be Hamlet beset
by slings and arrows.

To find a way back
to the bush stream
where small fish used to hang
in shafts of sunlight.

To get ahead of yourself
and accept the silence.

Poetry by Iain Lonie

During the recent Dunedin Writers Festival Otago University Press launched the large and handsome A Place To Go On From: The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie, edited by David Howard. Lonie, who worked in the Classics Department at Otago University, was an internationally respected medical historian, and died in Dunedin in 1988. My cover note for the volume touched briefly on my respect for his work:

I can’t imagine how we could over estimate just how much we owe to David Howard for this superb edition of Iain Lonie’s poems. Just as I, for one, can’t sidestep a certain shame at not realising until now how fine and important a writer Lonie was. He brought to his poetry the precision and clarity and intellectual force of a gifted classical scholar. He was patiently indifferent to passing fashions, with his own more enduring touchstones. And in a remarkable fidelity to the tides of his productive but troubled life, he wrote a body of poems on love and grief and the searing currents of remembrance that, in New Zealand writing, stands alone.

There’s so much more to be said about Lonie, and that is sure to be said now that this edition places him back among us. There’s a particular aptness too in my now being able to put a few of his poems on the National Library website. I began this laureate blog a couple of years ago with a poem of Allen Curnow’s, a tribute to the New Zealand poet who matters most to me. So how fitting that I end with the poet whose A Place To Go On From seems to me as significant as any single volume since Curnow’s own selected poems. As good a page as any to sign off on.

– Vincent O'Sullivan

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Iain Lonie.

Unattended crossing ahead

Some poems have no plan:
you simply have to be there to catch
the express when it whooshes through
and there’s no timetable.

Oh they’re not at all
like embroidery laid aside
taut in its drumlike frame
and awaiting a meditative hour.

Chance is all against them
they are unlikely as this love—
who knows when we’ll meet again?
And it’s not that we don’t want to—

but then the children, the grave demands
of time and place, our health even—
the years compacting around our roots—
perhaps it’ll always be like this?

Oh no, we say, we simply can’t!
seeing it all so clearly:
and yet we’re left breathless
standing here at the dusty crossing

while the red light bobs away
and the bell’s clang chokes in a country silence
thinking, I might have been on that train
thinking, it could have killed me.

Collection day

I have not had the heart
to throw out these shoes, and so they lie
still mud-caked, at the bottom of a tin trunk.

Shoes should stand in neat pairs, or be walked in.
These lying in their bent shapes are like fragments
a boy breaks out from the context of a cliff

and stores in a box along with other stones
coins, cartridge cases, and other things labelled
with days and places, their native magic forgotten.

Death comes to all of us, watery eyed
trailing his black plastic bag and wanting things:
I’ve seen whole shopsfull of cracked shoes, in their pairs.

But today, woken early, just before dawn
by rain flung hard against the side of the house
I am not thinking of all that: today

we are going to take that famous walk
along the cliffs where the difficult path
lies deep in cowdung between the iron gates

past the cottage abandoned to the sea’s encroachment
down the dene, and over the little bridge
then up again to the cliffs on the other side

where, if we are lucky, we shall just see
parting through the mist, the castle’s twin towers
far to the north, and unattainable.

Crusoe's canoe

for Elizabeth Smither

1

With Everyman his owne Shipwright in one hand
this rusted chisel in the other, I pick up
the principles as I go
                                           (I’m gouging a lot of trees)
We must start with detail
                                           (I’m wasting a lot of time)
A treenail’s made from trees, that’s why
it’s called a treenail. Or because it holds
trees together
                              (I get things half right).
First fashion your treenail: everything
is in the detail: for servants of the Lord
this holds in carnal matters: carpentry
child-begetting, the chapel’s business.
From one treenail another will come
from many treenails a floatable canoe

(I am making a sensible advancement).

2

But first you must
open your tree
up delicately
                          and trees
are close things
                          clinging
like one flesh, like
the firmaments
of earth and water
unwilling to be flayed
into dripping slabs.
                                        Think:
your chisel’s made
a new surface, displayed
its whiteness to the light.

The Lord’s work, that.
Or a butcher’s.

3

Do nothing for a bit: listen to the surf
and think hard about trees: how, left alone
they turn themselves into banana shapes, or how
they hold a man’s curve like a hammock, ride
the big winds without going under.
Think then of canoes, how stem and prow
hold themselves together like hands in prayer:
how they’ll always want to be
splaying themselves back into trees again
lying horizontal under the heavy sands

and sending up the green shoots vertical.

4

I see something of the art, it has more
of woman’s witchcraft than it has of detail
a thinking yourself into things. The art
is to take trees apart in so gentle a way
that they’ll hold themselves together for you
in a different shape, the living vessel
that bounces on the waves. It’s not about detail—
it’s more like prayer. You have to ask for the shape.
It’s more like love. You have to pity the tree.
It’s more like grief. You have to let things die
in their own gentle way

to sail off from the island.

Cover image: The Centurion’s Servant (1914), Stanley Spencer, oil on canvas, © Tate, London. Book designed and typeset by Damian Love.

Voices

Long after the sun had gone
three poets sat on, talking.

The first said:
though not a religious man
I see that wrong we do ourselves
and the earth, sometimes righted by a natural good.
What else is there worth speaking of?

The second said:
though not a religious man
I hear sometimes voices penned in things
claim utterance such as makes the light
ripple out eastward over folded hills.

The third said:
though not a religious man
I think that if I shouted loud enough
the sound would not travel out forever
but find some foreign shore to break against.

And darkness fell
in its silent wave upon
all choices right and wrong;
upon the cities and the hills
silence upon silence.

The house of childhood

I watched you walk along that mile of beach
to the house at the end of the beach

the home I’d pointed out, the house of childhood.
How well I remembered the garden, its grey stone wall
the stone rest in the garden, overlooking the sea.

And so you set off bravely, to walk that mile
staggering now and then in the sand that ran to you until
the sun blazed overhead, to the right the sea shimmered
I watched you walking that mile, your figure grew smaller and smaller.

Out of the sea’s shimmer came the faint crying
of voices subdued by the sea and the view.
I remembered the stone rest, the thyme scent of the garden
and beyond the stone wall, the sea splashing in the evening.

I pointed all this out to you, this house of my childhood
and watched you set off towards it, staggering slightly
not looking back, growing smaller and smaller
until you passed into the sand, into the stone wall

and under the garden, the earth of the garden, under the sea.

---

The National Library thanks Otago University Press for their assistance in the preparation of this blog post.

Poetry by Rhian Gallagher

When Rhian Gallagher returned from almost two decades out of the country, and won the NZ Post Award in 2011, it seemed to me that there was a perceptible addition to what went on in our poetry. Here was a freshly attentive linguistic edge, a direct sensual intensity, a focus and gutsiness in writing of memory and regret, that seemed just that bit different from what any other writer here was doing. One reviewer called her poems ‘assiduously polished’, another picked up on ‘the visceral strength of her language’. What I admired then I find there again to admire in these unpublished poems. I’m glad my almost last laureate blog becomes the forum to display them.

– Vincent O’Sullivan

Photo courtesy of Rhian Gallagher.

A Haunt that the Thistledown Bore

Seacliff

It was a warm wind day,
no one was at home in the asylum,
the thistledown woke from its dream

shocked by the electric sun
the armour plate of leaves turned gray

out of those ragged grave clothes
the feathery lightness rose,

emerged through broken crowns
like breathless children.

*     *     *     *

A faint depression in the land,
blurred with the years,
where the misery mansion stood –

four and a half million bricks, one hundred and sixty foot tower.

Those who were sent or came
lost their names at the gate.

The voiceless ones among us
as if the earth gave them away
and whatever was left became air.

*     *     *     *

Above the walls and the bars and the slips

all afternoon the thistledown flew
hatching like a thousand butterflies,
each with a small ghost face.

The wings and the seed, how life
makes a start and an end,
how souls depart

some held on to a friend
or huddled in groups on briar,
some floated free alone

above the walls, above the bars and the slips.

Note: Misery Mansion is taken from the book title Misery Mansion: Grim Tales of New Zealand Asylums by Arthur Sainsbury (self published 1946)

An Age of Windows

London

I’d left the clarity behind, the blue,
the startling light exchanged for days
that felt like versions of the night
when autumn blew and winter
drew its blanketing across the rooflines.

First east then west then north again,
a sort of bedsit crawl. The streets to ask
is this home, here or here?
London stretched the other side of any wall,
it was the sea that Shelley heard,
fierce, aquatic London.

Those houses were in disarray, each room
with small repair: the windows gave
damp green, the foxes making fight and play,
the gaps of sky, the chimney stacks.
To learn there was an animal of light
rearranging shadows, a single tree

with all of aching autumn in display.
Gulls gathered on the bricked-in shore
to lift away and leave their flight-lines on the air.
Where dwelling dwelt, inside to out,
I’m numbered by the windows I have known.

Learning to Read

Your friends go forward
writing stories. Sunlight
sails through the chalk dust.
This is your timeless time. The alphabet
lives on the blackboard’s brow
– each letter has a big brother
or a big sister.

Miss Breen can see
there’s some far place in you.
Fantail stutters from the window tree.
You stand beside the island of her desk.
Your friends are busy;
even the tadpoles are working themselves
out and into frogs.

You can’t tell what you see
– the words are shapes
and the schoolroom’s paused.
Bright crayoned houses
pinned to the wall; the piano that waits
to be woken with a touch.
All of the doors that will open.

Her finger steers
crossing the page – you tilt
your voice in reply; through your held back days
you are her echo.
The smell of Miss Breen. The story
is everything.

Small Bird Without a Sky

She flew in through an open door
or some gap that I can’t see
and now a life in danger
– small bird without a sky.

Corralled inside the corridor
she flutters to a pane
that falsifies the world,
                      the tree, the cloud.
The walls she has no map for.

Free her, shoo her...
how she claims me
– bright beaded eye, feather unto skin
creature to creature –
this rapid, rapid beating.

The City

The city had a breath, inlaid a glaze on pavements
deepening the features of old stone. The buildings
recreating from their daylight face
beams and haloes
melded with the currents. A busker
and the bird-like note of flute, a beggar
held a card for you to read;
and from the bridge a scent of distance,
Big Ben tolled, gulls gathered up their shadows
across the shiny plane, each long chime
beat towards a headline.

The hovering of crane shafts, a pleading
outstretched hand, the city with an ache
and moving at a sprawl; that decade that you knew
marchers snaked along the Strand,
a violent blue: Thatcher’s wars,
the bloody Poll Tax, too many bomb scares.
All that news leaching into pores of stone,
became another chapter in the air. The city
peeling and re-peeling like the plane trees
casting skin, hunting with their roots
through layered clay.

You walked and walked
inside the never-ending winter¬ – your destination
in delay to ripple with a crowd and then another
as if the night were pushing from below,
with a sequence of small nudges, anticipation gained
and flowered into Soho; pouting boys and boys
in leather, where a hidden river flowed,
below the street, strobes cast a rainbow
on the floor that mixed the beat –
‘Native Love’, ‘It’s a Sin’ and ‘The Hills of Kathmandu’
– you could be a stranger or a friend,
a body making heat till 4am.

Now and then you went to Heaven*;
it was the prelude that you loved
and after love the night bus
staged its crawl across the city;
the Hackney estate you called home,
your keys cocked in your palm.

Note: Heaven is a gay nightclub in London

The Wahine Storm

Let out of school early
we cut through the paddocks for home
and the wind came, it grew
like an animal, our voices drowned in the roar,
clods flew up from their bed,
the little ones got scared.
We tried to keep our heads above the air,
a sheep lorry went past on a lean
then my dad swooped in from nowhere
pulling me out of the wind, ‘thank God’ he said.

*     *     *     *

The wind kept coming for more, the shed roof
sailed over the lawn, everywhere was drag and claw,
it felt like our house might surrender.
Our faces made strange in candlelight,
the transistor voice was our centre, the ferry
was the size of a street. ‘These night prayers,’
mum said, ‘are given up for the rescue’.
But wasn’t God steering the storm?
A horn blew, a judder, behind the window
where I lay, chilled by the air waves.
The sea would never be the same
                                 and the people, the people.

His Parting Gift

I wheel you into the garden and the sunlit air
beyond the glass where day on day your stare is cast.
A gap between the trees, there are the mountains,
the horizon sleeps against your knees.

*     *     *     *

The birds about us jest at spring
but what of it is reaching you? Memory gone,
your talk’s away, amplifies remembering in me
till the garden is the one before
– long rows you stooped and tended.

Your work is done – who loved to dance
and taught us how to make food grow.
In your bent and buckled hands
you show the difference of life.

*     *     *     *

Out to sea in a sea of air –
who’s provider? Am I the elder?
– every breath becomes a flower,
I prattle like a girl beside your chair.

*     *     *     *

A vigil kept across the night, what matters most
we hardly know – oblivion, the outmost zone –
you’re being fetched without a thing in hand.

The ships of all your life are passing
and there are stars to see you out, to toil and dance
upon the decks. You were a child
                                                       though we forget.

Poetry by Peter Belton

W.H. Auden’s ‘Musee des beaux Arts’ is probably the best known poem that takes a painting as its starting point, much as Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ imagines a painting that sparks a fiction. The Australian poet Peter Steele wrote a fine book that drew on a visual gallery, and of course Peter Porter wrote several splendid poems that come into that category rather forbiddingly described in literary dictionaries as ‘ekphrasis’. As far as I know, such poems are thin on the ground in New Zealand writing, with Hone Tuwhare’s poem about a Ralph Hotere painting certainly the best known. More recently, Anna Jackson has a good one that takes off from Browning’s Duchess. But what a delight then to come across Peter Belton’s ‘Talking with Painters’, an on-going series written by a practising artist and teacher at the Southern Institute of Technology in Invercargill. Some of these will be published later in the year, but in the meantime a coup to offer a number of them here on the Laureate blog, as well as some of Peter’s images. I was struck by the imaginative flair and range of their engaging with artists as well as their works, and by how deftly an informed eye is so at home with the challenges of another craft.

– Vincent O'Sullivan

---

Rembrandt’s Mirror

All said and done, they left the bankrupt with only a
mirror which shattered anyway through his distraction
collapsing hours spent in half-light before a window of white canvas
into a stare. So much time to think.

Thick with the dusty stuff of pigment let him paint
an inch thick; for we must come to this. Saskia with blood in
her mouth. Geertje’s exhausted eyes puzzled with weeping and
Hendrickje lifting her shift; lowering her eyes.

Stand Tapies against the wall and shoot him

Would he be the Master of Analogy through simulation?
Must he, needs be, create yet another allusion without irony
or reflection to the timeless wall?

Blood sticks to walls and bullet strikes suck punches like offended mouths.
Strike me with stuff. Scratch me artfully. Pastry bits onto me.
Beyond reflection? Maybe.

Peter Belton, My Shadow before the Torrent (2013), Mixed oil media on board, 770 x 900mm

De Kooning

The hand slips, mind.
Does glimpsing slip the eye?
Words fail on our lips.
Do we sense the lie?
Do we hear then? Do blind men see?
Or has all meaning passed us by?

The Curator sings his lament

an elegy to holding and keeping

Is a palimpsest a sideways swipe at being again?
An erasure of impression with another, another?

A sideways swipe after the fact when folding follows
collapse into messiness; abjected, altered, muted?

Another footfall becomes a sediment to be peeled, revealed
and, bye and bye, a gouge to bleed by.

Embed the press of palimpsest; straw into lead Mr. Kiefer
and lay your weary impressions edge to edge.

Peter Belton, Sunset: Foveaux Coast (2014), Mixed oil media and Livingstone marl on board, 900 x1100mm

no title and no thing

So everything signifies and Kurt Schwitters lugs his valise
laden to the next trainstop. Ambleside from Hanover.
Handover hands thick with worrying paste and patches.
Tickets from Neverwas to Maybe and Stumbledown
revealed in the small nervousness of torchlight.

On Kitaj’s Suicide

Kitaj hunted by the Jew
within and over his shoulder
watching the crackling air.
Behind.

Kitaj hunted no rest for bodies
over there, beside his shoulder
burdened with pointy fear.
Behind.

Kitaj - just behind us now
slipped his burden from shoulder
to shoulder. Our shoulders
stand. Behind.

Peter Belton, Prospecting (2015), Mixed oil media and Livingstone marl on board, 770 x 900mm

How might it be? (for Johannes Vermeer)

Spinoza, the lens grinder shaved pixels from his looking glass;
bending refractions in order to magnify.
It was, as his friend the painter noted, about selection
so that we might reflect upon our seeing
more clearly: pearls of light to be discovered dancing
in the tapestry of the moment.

A Light Bright Beach

Drawing across my eyes,
dexter and sinister switching
so like a white horse’s tail
to keep the moment away;
and voices rolled
into the wash of stones.

Peter Belton, Flying Man (2010), Oil media with encaustic, 300 x 600mm

1914: An Old Photograph from Berlin

Death Maiden.
I see you wave.
Your hand in his arm
to arm his smile.
Compliant, bemused boy
short stepping not so sure of
the weight of rifle
upon his shoulder.

Tode Madchen.
Your face gripped thin
lipped with resolve your eyes
away out there.
It is an old photograph. Flat toned and
airless he marches a
plucked flower button-
holed to his heart.

Death Maiden.
Your blouse so white.
There are holes; perforations in your
lace like a file of bullet strikes
about to poppy froth.
He marches. He is a frozen moment.
Her white arm upraised;
shot clean with holes.

Call for nominations

Kia hiwa ra!
Kia hiwa ra!

The National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa is seeking nominations for the New Zealand Poet Laureate Award.

Poetry is a quintessential part of New Zealand art and culture, and through the New Zealand Poet Laureate Award the government acknowledges the value that New Zealanders place on poetry as a part of our national identity.

The Chief Librarian of the Alexander Turnbull Library will appoint the New Zealand Poet Laureate after reviewing nominations and seeking advice from the New Zealand Poet Laureate Advisory Group.

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.

• Download the nomination form (docx, 55KB)
• Download the background information (docx, 57KB)

Nominations close on Monday, 6 July.

Candidates must currently reside in New Zealand.

The term of appointment for the next Poet Laureate will run until 30 June 2017.

Please send your nomination to Eva.Weber@dia.govt.nz.

Email is preferred, but you can also mail your nomination to:

Alexander Turnbull Library
Attention New Zealand Poet Laureate Award
PO Box 12349
Wellington

Enquiries about the New Zealand Poet Laureate Award can be sent to Peter.Ireland@dia.govt.nz.

Persecuted poets worldwide

Last week, as we celebrated International Poetry Day, PEN International posted this less celebratory but essential reading.

Commemorating the Armenian Genocide

Among the numerous commemorative events and publications for Gallipoli, it is easy to overlook that other centenary, the genocide of the 'Armenian tragedy'. As well as much else, it was also a 'cultural cleansing', and many writers and artists were among the victims. I'm very grateful to David Howard for putting together this blog, honouring Armenian poetry, and reminding us of what we often don't remember when 'Remembrance' is selective.

– Vincent O'Sullivan

Armenians are marched to a nearby prison in Mezireh by armed Turkish soldiers. April 1915. From the diary of Maria Jacobsen.

It is a century since the governing party of the Ottoman Empire, the Committee of Union and Progress, initiated the Armenian Genocide. Inspired by an ideology, Pan-Turianism, that promoted an exclusively Turkish empire stretching from Anatolia to Central Asia, the ‘Young Turks’ directed the machinery of the state against its Armenian citizens; abductions, murders, and forced marches into exile reduced the Armenian population from 2,133,190 (1914) to around 387,800 (1922). In parts of Western Anatolia Armenians were not allowed to speak their own language except when reciting prayers. It is an exaggeration to claim that the four poems below, in translations by Diana Der-Hovanessian, are akin to prayers, however they may serve a similar purpose: to say, ‘We are still here, waiting to be heard.’

All translations are by Diana Der-Hovanessian and are used by permission

– David Howard

Missak Medzarents (1886-1908)

With an ear trained by the folk poetry of his native Western Armenia, Medzarents is regarded (with Vaclav Derian) as the most musical of Armenian poets. Diana Der-Hovanessian translates his work ‘with trepidation and admiration.’ Like Derian, he died early from tuberculosis.

My death

(the children talk to each other about it)

– Now they pass by the village spring.
– Now they pass by the vineyard.
– Now they’re at the graveyard.
– Now they bury him.
– Now the blessing is read. Does he hear it?
– No. He hears nothing.
– Now he doesn’t see either.
– Now he no longer can swallow his spit.
– Now he can’t shout.
– Now he crumbles to nothing.
– Now they come back.
– Now he’s left alone.
– Now he’ll never come back again.
– Now he’ll never come back again.
– Now he’ll never come back again.

(1907)

Daniel Varoujan (1884-1915)

In 1914 Varoujan co-founded the literary group Mehian to promote ‘the Armenian spirit’. As a cultural leader he was one of the first to be deported on Red Sunday, 24 April 1915; after a forced march, he was murdered on 26 August 1915.

Coming home

We’re coming home tonight, singing together,
coming home by white moonlight.
Oh village houses, oh you village houses
wake up all the dogs
in all the yards.
wake up all the wells and fountains
and let them bubble up to fill our pitchers.
We’ve brought home flowers,
flowers for the holidays. And we’re singing.
We come singing of love.
We’re coming by the mountain road,
houses, oh, you houses.
Open the gates now as the oxen
horns push them in.
Let the ovens’ smoke rise
to mingle with the blue smoke
of the roofs.
And you young wives of the houses,
you shy “harser” with new baby boys,
bring milk in blue, clay pitchers.
we’re coming home.

(published 1921)

Vahan Derian (1885-1920)

Derian was born in an Armenian village that is now part of Georgia. An early friend of Maxim Gorky, with whom he edited an anthology of Armenian literature, after the Russian revolution he led the Armenian sector. In 1918 he accompanied Trotsky to the conference at Brest-Litovsk. Two years later he died of tuberculosis.

My work was light and full of humor

My work was light and full of humor.
It was my life that was so hard,
unwieldy, silent, helpless,
homeless, wandering and bleak.

My soul in its bright fever reached
out to a boundless world.
My art was bright; my deep faith jovial.
It was my life that was dark.

(1919)

Vahan Tekeyan (1878-1948)

Vahan Tekeyan was travelling abroad when his colleagues were seized. Experiencing survivor guilt, through poetry he tried to make a spiritual home while exiled in Egypt, where he was politically active as a newspaper editor, teacher, and social worker.

‘The evil done to us by man and by you, God, will be forgotten and not mentioned again when we can sing and love, unchained as free men.’

To the Armenian nation

I know it. Only too well. You don’t need this.
But here, again, I give myself to you,
page by page. Forgive this useless gift.
What can you do with poems? They are not food.

Let the adolescent write himself out. That’s allowed.
But what about the grown man who insists
on stringing lines and meters to hang
on them the dark lanterns of his heart?

I know you don’t expect anything, you never have.
Except the unexpressable tribulation
of your children staying yours.

But take these away. To discard. To forget –
these pieces of a heart, worn out
with the burden of burdening you.

(1925)

---

Worldwide reading in commemoration of the 100th anniversary

The international literature festival berlin (ilb) and the Lepsiushaus Potsdam are calling for a worldwide reading on 21 April 2015 – the day that marks 100 years since the beginning of the Armenian Genocide.

Several hundred Armenian intellectuals – poets, musicians, parliamentary representatives and members of the clergy – were arrested in Constantinople (today Istanbul) on 24 April 1915, and deported to the Turkish interior where most of them were murdered. It was the start of a crime against humanity. The extermination of the Armenians during World War One was the first systematically planned and executed genocide of modern times.

A great number of Armenian voices were silenced in 1915 and in the years thereafter. Since then, others have become loud and have spoken out against forgetting, among them an increasing number of voices from the democratic Turkish civil society. In remembrance of the victims and in association with the demand for international recognition of the genocide, we are calling for a worldwide reading on 21 April 2015, with literary texts from Armenian authors, among them Varujan Vosganian, Zabel Yesayan, Siamanto, Daniel Varujan, Krikor Zohrab, Rupen Sevag, Komitas, Yeghishe Charents, William Saroyan, Hovhannes Shiraz, Paruyr Sevak, Hakop Mntsuri, Silva Kaputikian and Hrant Dink.

– Lepsiushaus Potsdam

More information about the venues and times of the worldwide reading (German)