laureate at work

posted by Michele

It’s term-time and Poetry off the Page is in full swing at the University of Auckland. Colleague Helen Sword and I co-convene the course, now in its fourth year and with a committed and enthusiastic 2008 enrolment. We started off in the rain, chalking poems on pavements around the university and documenting responses from passers-by. Then LOUNGE #1 debuted this year’s reading series at Old Government House with an enlivening mix of student readers and local poets. Also part of the line-up was Chris Price, the inaugural Michael King Centre/University of Auckland Literary Fellow.

Now the students are wrangling their webpage assignments and making digital transformations of a print poem of their choice. After the mid-semester break, we go into the University Library’s Special Collections to look at how poems move from manuscript to multimedia environments. The students will then assemble selections of archival material for presentation on the course website.

So we’ll be busy for a while yet. Here’s a webpage Helen and I made recently as the class was asked to consider ways of presenting digitally the famous variant lines in a poem by 19th century American Emily Dickinson. We started by getting the different versions down in chalk (sunny weather this time) before going on to talk about how they might appear in virtual space.

• Poetry off the Page at the University of Auckland
• LOUNGE readings and photos
• Chris Price, 2008 Michael King Cerntre/UoA Literary Fellow
• Emily Dickinson at Old Government House
  

Photo credits: Tim Page

photos from matahiwi and hastings

posted by Michele

Te Matau a Maui (The Hook of Maui), the wharenui at Matahiwi Marae with carved representations of Maui’s family on the paepae (forecourt)

Maui hooking Te Ika, the big fish of Aotearoa New Zealand

John Buck addresses manuhiri and tangata whenua at Matahiwi

Guests with Jacob Scott at Matahiwi

Penny Carnaby, National Librarian, and Hon Judith Tizard with the two tokotoko

Michele Leggott with matua tokotoko and Te Kikorangi, the blue stick


Jacob Scott and poets at the mouth of the Tukituki river

Pipi Café – poets and poetry-loving people

Same again, another table

Pipi Café – more poets

I Say Te Mata: Jack Ross at the Hawke’s Bay Opera House Assembly Room

I Say Te Mata: Selina Tusitala Marsh

I Say Te Mata: poets and tokotoko

matahiwi, hastings, te ahi tapu

posted by Michele

It was a big weekend, for everyone. Jack Ross has written about it here. Hawke’s Bay Today profiled the occasion and the local high school readers who were part of the 14-strong line-up for I Say Te Mata at the Hastings Opera House. Poets and librarians ate for free at Havelock’s Pipi Café (thanks guys). And Rowley Habib read his epic poem The Raw Men for video before we left on Sunday morning.

At the heart of it all were the two tokotoko made by Jacob Scott and presented by Ngati Kahungunu to the National Library. One of them, the matua tokotoko, is carved from black maire and lasered with designs that tell interrelated stories of sacred fire-making (te ahi tapu). It also contains literal means of making fire if you unscrew it and apply one part (hika) to a special groove (kaunoti) in the other. Jacob says he tested it there on the banks of the Tukituki; it works.

This stick, with its abalone and paua insets, has gone to Wellington and will be displayed in the National Library. Laureates will use it there, and everyone who picks it up should be able to feel its mana. It also commemorates the passing of Jacob Scott’s good friend Hone Tuwhare: deep in its interior is a Tuwhare poem.

The second tokotoko (and the seventh Jacob has made) is the one I will keep and treasure. It’s sky-blue, with laser-etched white-on-blue designs towards the top end surmounted by chased silver that references flames. Because it’s a converted pool cue, it also comes apart in four pieces which means I can take it travelling without setting off major security alerts in airports. There is plenty of tactile surface and it was fun watching people run their fingers over it, exploring and connecting up the design elements. Its stories have just begun.

It was a big weekend, for everyone. But perhaps the biggest thing of all was the gift of Jacob Scott’s deeply thought-out representations of creative process: serious, sparky, a challenge to make more fire. Thank you Jacob; it’s a lot to live up to.

• Hawke’s Bay photos coming soon

• More about the tokotoko

• Hawke’s Bay Today laureate event profile 23 Feb 2008

• Jack Ross, Hooning around in Hawke’s Bay, I Say Te Mata

• Pipi Café and Poesy Bread

• Tim Page audio The Long Lunch, Fast Talking PI (with Selina Tusitala Marsh), Wild Light (with Michele Leggott)

laureates, locals and out of town poets in Hawkes Bay

posted by Michele

Drums are beating, email is running hot and phonecalls are criss-crossing the land as the folk at the National Library coordinate the first Laureate event for 2008 in Hawkes Bay. NatLib, Te Mata Estate Wines, Matahiwi Marae, Scott Design, Creative Hastings and the Hawkes Bay Opera House are all working towards Saturday 23 February when the new matua tokotoko (carved speaking stick) will be presented at Matahiwi Marae in a ceremony that will also honour the achievements of Hone Tuwhare. Laureate Elizabeth Smither will be there, as will a host of readers and speakers with words, stories and songs for Hone. This is Poetry at the Pa, Matahiwi-style, 10 am to 2 pm.

In the evening the focus shifts to the Opera House in Hastings for I Say Te Mata: Poets at the Assembly Room. Keith Thorsen and I will co-host, starting at 8 pm with a glass of Te Mata and processing through the line-up of poets in town for the event. Some young Hawkes Bay talent should give laureates and others a taste of the poetic future and we’re expecting to have a very good time indeed. Anyone left standing will be directed to Dancing on the Green, running till midnight at nearby Kohupatiki Marae.

So we’re fine-tuning our offerings and packing toothbrushes and sleeping bags here in Auckland in anticipation of the Great Poetic Hikoi to the Bay. Some are flying, others driving; but we’ll all be there as the action gets underway. Look, isn’t that the National Library bus pulling in from Wellington with a bunch of poetry-loving librarians hanging out the windows?

Remembering Hone Tuwhare

posted by Michele
Tributes, thoughts and memories of Hone Tuwhare are in the links and posts below. I will be adding more links and posts to this post as I receive them.

• Raewyn Alexander
  
• John Buck
  
• Glenn Colquhoun
• Riemke Ensing
• Lauris Edmond
• Murray Edmond
• Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
  
• Michele Leggott
• Renee Liang
• Mary Paul
  
• Brian Poitiki
  
• Jack Ross
• Iain Sharp
• Penny Somervaille
• Brian Turner

Brian Poitiki

posted by Michele

i can feel you making holes in the silence, rain
i can feel you making holes in my brain, hone
in my brain
hemi & ani are gone -
jean, harry & ron -
but i won't wait until you're gone to say
you're my old man, hone
you're my old man

(brian potiki, written 1980)

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

posted by Michele
Universal Hone

Well fuck it man
that’s the bucket well and truly
kicked (I was a lonely pisshead
on the rebound from Oz in the year
of 1970 I think it was when I bought
a copy of Come Rain Hail from
Peter Hooper that great West Coast
intellectual in his Albert Street Greymouth
shrine to Thoreau, Walden Books)! O

yes: you are the universal Hone
and you really are to blame
my kupu came from far away
no more

they came from here and there
Kaikohe, Karl Marx, old fishguts
Shakespeare and the Friday Flash, from
rhythms in your soul they flared
those karakia soused in jazz. Tekoteko
totem man, you handed me my tongue
and said ‘Let’s sing! Let’s put this hoha
country back in tune!’ My ticker thumps

to think of yours all done. Go have a feed
of mussels, man – you won. You won
the biggest raffle ever run: the Universal Hone.

16 January 2008
First published in the Press (Christchurch)

Jeffrey writes:
The day he died I found myself singing at the clothesline, ‘He's the Universal Hone and he really is to blame, my kupu come from far away no more...’ to the tune of Donovan's most-likely forgotten 60s ballad, ‘The Universal Soldier.’ What a brain.

That got me going – I'd been thinking how with Hone, a universe had just disappeared, the same thought I had when my mother died in 2005. The rest, the kick-off, was just me swearing my way into the house of death, I guess.

The reference, ‘my ticker thumps’ is from his poem to Baxter – ‘no more thump in the old ticker,’ which I quoted to Roger Steele on the day Mum died, when I rang to cancel a dinner in the Green Parrot.

I now have the dubious reputation as being the first person to get the word ‘fuck’ into the Press, and on the Obituary page at that. Hone would laugh at this distinction, I reckon. But as you will intuit, it's a splash of condensed emotion, not an attempt at obscenity – I knew kicking the bucket would follow right on.

Penny Somervaille

posted by Michele
Letter to a Dead Poet

Kia Ora Hone,

Do you remember the night we met?
In Grey Lynn? At Jan’s house in Cooper St?
You said to me that there was no point me keeping my poems in a box under the bed.
You come back here tomorrow, you said,
you bring your poems with you,
and you read them to me.

No-one disobeyed an order like that from you, Hone.

I brought my poems the next night, even though I wasn’t invited,
and I did read them to you.
You listened, you really listened, and
you said, read them again,
and you said, send them off to so-and-so, tell them I told you to,
tell them I said they must publish them.

Well, I didn’t do that, didn’t have that much courage.
But, Hone, you know, you started something for me,
it’s because of you that I’m doing all those papers at Uni,
it’s all your fault that I stand up and read places,
meet so many people I love.

For a few months I saw you around,
drove you down from Shirley’s place at Pakiri once,
discovered for myself the warmth and charm that drew us to you, made us laugh.
Made me feel I was more than I thought I could be.
Two or three years later,
after you moved to Kaka Pt,
I saw you again,
you didn’t remember me,
but
I will always remember you,
you are like the rain
I can feel you in the air.

Farewell Hone, Arohanui, Penny

Michele Leggott

posted by Michele
work for the living

one by one they come out
the piece of paper with the poem transcribed
at five in the morning and folded
into the driver’s pocket
another with the words of the song
the Yorkshireman doesn’t need
he’s brought cucumbers from his garden
she found puriri around the corner
I’m looking up the Latin for big flower
or maybe really big flower
and pulling it from the tree

too many funerals but the road
is clear to the north      the driver
puts his foot down
the words in his pocket speed
the conversation the weave of
bad singing bad hearing bad eyes
stopping only for a bad joke
across the road from the Hundertwasser
toilets      they call me mellow yellow
the tourist train rolls up the main street
someone takes a picture on a phone
stories flash by     Ruapekapeka Ohaeawai
Culloden the Spanish Armada
the wars the families deaths and clearances

at Te Kotahitanga we find him
whose words have brought us
to the north     wheear 'ast ta bin sin'
ah saw thee     he asks silently
did you clean up the shattered teacup
the milk spilling onto the floor?
the Lake Poet walks in trailing clouds
the Persian Ecstatic takes a spin
around the room and King James
does benison in both languages
body and soul     light and air
puriri grieves and the Really Big Flower
opens its lemon soap heart     Ephphatha!
the birds in the trees are suddenly uproarious
and then we hear rain outside

it’s gone by the time
we emerge and the van has him
safely on the road to Wharepaepae
we are slower getting up there
the carter on the horizon calls out
in the arms of the road     a translation
anyone might understand
replying to the voice in the wind
as the old lady opens her arms
and takes him into the earth

lost children
and talk that goes on into the night
around a table in a house on another hilltop
where an old friend pulls out the first book
and inside it another piece of paper
with a handwritten poem she reads
remembering where it came from
taking the path between that coast
and the travellers she is feeding tonight
the cucumbers went into the salad
more books more history more wine
the driver’s poem is unfolded
as a full moon gets up over the valley
A red libation to your good memory, friend.
There’s work yet, for the living.
in the morning a bird will call from the trees
visible invisible     riro she explains
to the man without a hat who knows
the song but can’t sing it now
to save his life     riro riro little stranger
the wars the deaths the clearances
one who intrudes into my shadow
I don’t recognise shadows     his face
a translation anyone might understand

John Buck, 21 January 2008

posted by Michele

The thing to remember about Hone is that he grew up first on the King James Bible and then on Shakespeare. So he heard that magnificent poetic language over and under and around his own ways into Polynesian storytelling and Polynesian song. He took the animism of the Maori world – everything in it is alive and has a voice – and he wrote that world, those voices, hearing as he went the echo and cadences of the classic English tradition. His poems sound so good, they’re wonderful to hear out loud, and not just because Hone was a wonderful reader of his own work. A poem like ‘Rain’ will still be around when we’ve forgotten almost everything else. It goes straight in, it’s everyone’s poem to learn and remember. My children’s children will be taught ‘Rain’ and I think Hone knew that. He knew very well what his poems could do: But if I / should not hear / smell or feel or see / you // you would still / define me / disperse me / wash over me / rain.