Antigone in Aotearoa: Interview with Kefala (O’Keefe edit)

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Hazel de Berg


Antigone Kefala | Sydney Morning Herald | 2015

Hazel de Berg’s recordings take place in the homes or work spaces of the subjects rather than a recording studio. This allows something of these places into the recording whether birdsong, traffic or an r&b song playing in the background. In the recordings, de Berg remains enigmatic, the ghostly presence operating the machine.

Kefala discusses her work as a poet, novelist and translator in this interview from 1974. New Zealand gets a look in however for the most part she is more interested in reinstating her European perspective and sensibility. The poem that Kefala reads was untitled at the time of recording but would become part of her sequence Thirsty Work. Kefala was also working in the publicity department of the Australia Council at the time and spends some of the discussion detailing her duties and the excitement and generative possibility grants from the newly incorporated organisation were making possible.

Interview with Antigone Kefala (O’Keefe remix)

Recorded on 23 April 1974 by Hazel de Berg.
2015 mix by Ella O’Keefe

‘Antigone Kefala interviewed by Hazel de Berg in the Hazel de Berg Collection’
Courtesy of the National Library of Australia, TRC 1/761
Special acknowledgement to Duncan Felton, NLA Oral History & Folklore Branch

Read more about Antigone Kefala at the Australian Poetry Library.

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Elena Gomez Interviews Kate Durbin

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Elena Gomez


Image of Kate Durbin by Emily Raw

Kate Durbin is an LA-based poet, performance artist and teacher. Her work often explores performances of gender, femininity, celebrity and labour. She has written books of poems, including her most recent, E! Entertainment, and her recent exhibitions include Body Anxiety, a collective and online show, as well as Cloud 9, for New Hive, in which she asked women what they did for money while recreating a live ‘sex cam’ performance of their responses. She is the writer-in-residency for the Queensland Poetry Festival in late August 2015. I’ve been interested in her work for a number of years now, and found her overall poetics a quite rigorous intellectual project that was also amusing, open and honest. I managed to catch Kate between her busy schedule to ask her a few questions about recent and upcoming work, faceless Birkin bags and The Hills.

Continue reading →

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Jessica Wilkinson Interviews Anna Jackson

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Jessica L Wilkinson


Image of Anna Jackson courtesy of Bellamys at Five

New Zealand poet and academic Anna Jackson’s presence easily fills a large room. At the Verse Biography: Truth or Beauty? conference in Wellington last November (of which Jackson was one of the three organisers), her enthusiasm for lively poetic discussion and debate is clear – abundant questions and wild tangents exhibit a mind tumbling with ideas bursting to be explored.

A similar inquisitiveness is evident in her poetic writing. I, Clodia and Other Portraits (Auckland University Press, 2014), launched during the three-day event, grapples at once with the classical and the contemporary, the dramatic and the humorous, the historical and the imaginary. Split in two, the first half follows the voice of Clodia Metelli, one-time lover of the poet Catullus and the inspiration for his celebrated love poems. The second half follows a ‘pretty photographer,’ drawn – almost against her will – towards the art of portraiture. The book inhabits the complex mindset of the artistic woman across time.

I, Clodia is Jackson’s sixth collection with Auckland University Press, preceded by The Long Road to Tea-Time (2000), The Pastoral Kitchen (2001), Catullus for Children (2003), The Gas Leak (2006) and Thicket (2011). Jackson’s themes are wide-ranging, though each collection showcases the poet’s wry wit and insight into everyday living, from domestic friction to meditations on motherhood, belonging and the games that we play. She discusses her new and previous works in the following interview, which took place beside some raucous teenagers in a harbour café in Wellington, prior to the conference.

Jessica Wilkinson: The title of your new book, I, Clodia and Other Portraits refers to the historical figure of Clodia Metelli, the ‘Lesbia’ of Latin poet Catullus’ love poems. Can you give us some background to this work and its significance to you as a poet?

Anna Jackson: I have been wanting to write this work for a long time. It always seemed to be a project that was waiting for someone to write. The poems by Catullus tell the one half of the story; it’s almost like reading one half of the dialogue. They are really dialogic poems – poems that are arguing, or haranguing, or imploring. So they’re telling a story, and it’s a story that’s in pieces; the poems are out of order. Any reader is always trying to piece it together into a narrative. I, Clodia gives you the missing half of the dialogue.

JW: What drew you to Clodia as a subject?

AJ: Well, two things, and they’re opposite in a way. On the one hand, it was because she’s the missing voice. But on the other hand, because such a sense of her is evoked by the responses (of Catullus). The quality of the conversation tells you so much about the relationship, that you almost know the person who would have entered into it in this way. It’s such a testing, contentious, playful relationship. A lot of the time, Catullus is making a joke that plays on a joke that she has already made. It’s a very intellectual relationship as well as being very erotic and passionate. And they’re very clever, his poems. They work on so many levels, and that’s a part of their relationship, too. They’re showing off to each other. I was aiming to meet this in my poems. It’s a tall order and it’s kind of impossible. Part of what made the project a little more possible for me to take on was the fact that I’m only ever intending to be a translator of poems for which we don’t have the original. I wasn’t going to try to write the poems in Latin, and most of the time a lot of the poems are not in meter, either. This is a contemporary, free verse version.

JW: Given the concept of identifying or providing the absent perspective, would you describe your work as a feminist project?

AJ: I think I would describe myself as a feminist poet, but I see this project also as an act of reading Catullus. So it’s very far from replacing the male view with the story from a female perspective. The more feminist endeavour would really to be to translate some of the lesser known classical women poets, as Josephine Balmer has done. So I didn’t start with a feminist agenda. I, Clodia wouldn’t be the most strategic action to take, in that the woman’s voice is only fictional; it can’t really tell us anything about Roman women or give historical women a voice that has been lost.

Further, the poems take the form they do – tell the story they tell – in response to the poetry of Catullus. The relationship that is conceived is the relationship he sets out in his poetry – or at least, it is my reading of his conception of the relationship. It isn’t the traditional reading of the relationship, in which Clodia was unworthy of a love greater than she can understand. In my story, Clodia is an equal partner in the affair.

Whom shall I kiss now?

Whom shall I kiss, whose lips shall I bite now,
you ask, and I think of my little bird
and those vivid days you recall 
now as a sunk cost
in your accounting system…
Do you think I have nothing to do but wait lonely 
for you to return with your limping iambics
dropping your obduracy 
like a dead bird 
at my door?
Whom shall I love now?  
Whom shall I permit to visit? 
It seems we are occupied with the same questions.

JW: Do you see yourself in the character of Clodia?

AJ: I would have liked to have had that relationship that she had with Catullus. I do find that kind of bantering, testing, teasing relationship a lot of fun.

JW: Did you study Latin at school?

AJ: I did, but only for a couple of years, so my Latin is really not very good. And I did a little bit of Latin at University, but it was just an introductory course.

JW: In what ways, other than in the content of the work, does this work draw influence from the classics & Latin poetry?

AJ: Well, I read a lot of that poetry. I read the Catullus with a facing pages text (where the Latin is presented beside the translation), and I was reading the texts that Catullus himself refers to. Jason and Medea, Dido and Aeneas; these are stories he returns to again and again that clearly had a meaning for Catullus and Clodia in their relationship.

For reading the Latin, I used the facing pages texts, and I used the internet to look up words I wasn’t sure about, or for which I wanted an alternative reading. The internet was also helpful for hearing pronunciations of the Latin: on YouTube now, you can access readings of Catullus by Latin scholars, often with critical commentaries as well. It is interesting to learn about the differences in opinion about how the Latin should be read, between, for instance, those readers who are very strong on eliding syllables and others who don’t do that. But most importantly, you can hear how the meter sounded.

Latin meters are very hard to read on the page, partly because they are based on long syllables contrasted with short syllables, instead of the stressed syllables contrasting with unstressed syllables in English, but also because instead of repeating a single metrical foot – a pattern of iambs, or dactyls, or anapaests – they will repeat a line that can be made up of a combination of different metrical feet. So there is no regular repeated rhythm in a line. I couldn’t hear the rhythm in my head to write to, until I heard these YouTube renditions.

The hendecasyllabic metre that was so important to Catullus is one of these complicated metrical patterns, with a spondee or trochee, followed by a choriamb, and rounded off with two iambs and a final trailing unstressed syllable. Or, you can think of it as starting trochaically, then rocking over into iambs. I did write some of the poems in the meter. The poem at the midpoint of the sequence, in which Clodia finally breaks with Catullus, uses this Catullan metre against him. It also borrows from a passage in Euripides Medea, in which Jason attempts to justify to Medea his abandonment of her. One of the interesting things about the Catullus poems is how often when alluding to Greek mythology he puts himself in the position of the heroine/victim. Here we have Clodia putting Catullus in that role. I think the hendecasyllabic metre also gives the poem a rocking, wave-like quality that fits with the sea imagery. Here is an excerpt:

No rough verses

No rough verses, but like a surf-tossed sailor 
wielding wisely his gaff-rigged fore-and-aft sail, 
so shall I keep your favourite of Greek metres
to steer my way free of your storm of curses. 
What I owe you – these claims you make are madness – 
but to counter them one by one in order: 
first, consider, what we owe Aphrodite –
your voyage here, as plunder of my husband, 
your change of plans, your brother left unaided,
none of this can be laid as charges on me, 
all was fated, and I merely received you.
Oh, I loved you, and being loved by me did
you not take more than you could ever give me? 
Your ‘exile’ here – to live in Rome is living, 
I don’t see you, in thrall to me no longer,
rushing back to your farmhouse in Verona, or
setting sail to do business in Bithynia.
Had you stayed put, a poet of the provinces,
not one person would know your name – or care to.

JW: There’s a dead sparrow image on the cover that I recognise. Can you tell me a little bit about that and how the sparrow figures in Catullus and your poems?

AJ: Well, there are two Catullus poems with the sparrow – there’s the one where he wishes he were Lesbia/Clodia’s little sparrow that she allows to peck at her lips and climb on her shoulder and sit against her breast. Then there’s another, after the sparrow has died, which is a rather over-the-top elegiac lament for this bird. It has the little sparrow making its long, dark journey into the underworld.

The sparrow poems were translated a lot in the Renaissance – a Scottish version, for example, with the ‘wee poor birdy’. It was one of the things that, as a Renaissance poet, you put your hand up to do: another sparrow translation!

The sparrow gets picked up by other feminist writers writing back to Catullus. After I finished the project, I read Helen Dunmore’s novelisation of the Catullus story. She’s imagining what Catullus is thinking all the time. I really hated it. She builds up the sparrow in the book, suggesting that Clodia has such an obsessive love for the bird, which Catullus cannot complete with. One of the climactic turning points of the novel is where Catullus turns against this relationship, when Clodia beats up her maid servant for neglecting the bird in some way. It seems a laughable interpretation of the sparrow’s importance. The poems are not about the sparrow’s importance. They’re about his relationship with her. To take the elegy to the sparrow so seriously seems like such a misreading of the tone.

The sparrow in my sequence is not very important except as a prompt for poems that play out between the two people who are important to each other. I was pleased with it as a cover image, though. I think an image of one of the characters would suggest that act of novelisation I didn’t want to do. These are poems that don’t attempt to represent the real feelings of actual, historical people, only what might have been written, within a field of literature we do actually still have access to. We don’t know what they felt, but we know what they wrote. And one of the symbols they used was the sparrow – and it is a beautifully resonant symbol, and bird imagery does keep coming back into the poems throughout the sequence.

Pipiabat
              [used to chirp…]

Look at me, my tear-stained face,
my red eyes – is this what you came for?
It's not what you think.
So there are verses about me
circulating about the city – how could you
possibly imagine I, Clodia, would care? 
I might cry over your verses – 
tears of laughter – 
but these are real tears,
I'm grieving. 
Look at what was my little bird,
yesterday – this was 
somebody, closer to me than… 
you had better be leaving.
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3 Poems by Rogelio Guedea

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Kay Are


Image from Rogelio Guedea.

exile

i’m thinking about my feet, sometimes a country i don’t understand
dwelling on my hands, two islands,
on my knee, remote and lonely city,
i think about my shoulders or the nape of my neck, and my never,
on the distance from ear to ear,
the kilometres i must cross to arrive at my heart,
the towns along my back, my airports,
my railways, i dwell on my wintered lips,
autumn’s circles under my eyes, my inflexible skin
bound by four walls, watching the absent tropics,
mexican summers crumbled into fragments,
one shadow cast over the other.
i’m dwelling on my feet, sometimes a foreign land,
a plaza full of strangers, a tongue
that no one speaks, dwelling on my shoulders or my neck,
on my ears and my back,
i dwell on my skin, inflexible and foreign,
without papers,
invisible, barely a ghost.


exilio

pienso en mis pies que a veces son un país que no comprendo,
pienso en mis manos, dos islas,
en mi rodilla, una ciudad alejada y sola,
pienso en mis hombros o mi cuello, en mi nuca y en mi nunca,
en la distancia que hay entre mis orejas,
los kilómetros que necesito recorrer para llegar a mi corazón,
los pueblos de mi espalda, mis aeropuertos,
mis ferrocarriles, pienso en mis labios invernales,
mis ojeras de otoño, mi piel inflexible,
encerrada entre cuatro paredes, mirando el trópico ausente,
quebrados en pedacitos los veranos mexicanos,
una penumbra encima de la otra.
pienso en mis pies que a veces son una tierra extraña,
una plaza llena de gente desconocida, una lengua
que nadie habla, pienso en mis hombros o mi cuello,
en mis orejas y mi espalda,
pienso en mi piel inflexible, extranjera,
sin documentos de identidad,
invisible, apenas un fantasma.


mine field

how, they ask, can a poet live like this, carrying
inside an absent mother, a ruined house,
going about constructing tiny imaginary
castles or fabricating riddles like books
you didn’t ever read and that i wrote to please you/
it’s not the way, they say, for a poet to be free
of her, even if fleeing or thrown
from her, even if living in a far country, alien
as your hands are now, writing more books than the books i wrote
for you to someday read and not in order to win,
they say, fame and fortune, just to win your love’s battle, mother:
country to which I will someday never return.


campo minado

dicen que cómo puede vivir un poeta así llevando
dentro una madre ausente, una casa en ruinas,
caminando por las calle construyendo castillitos
imaginarios o armando rompecabezas como libros
que nunca leíste, y que escribí para agradarte/
dicen que un poeta así no se libra de ésta aunque huya o echen
de su país, ni aunque viva en otro país lejano, ajeno
como tus manos ya, escribiendo más libros que escribí
para que tú los leas algún día y no para ganar,
dicen, fama y fortuna, sino para ganar la batalla de tu amor, madre:
país al que volveré, jamás.


shoreless canto

poem born with bird’s light, this morning, here, within the compass of the
unforeseeable/
writing that doesn’t conspire against anyone
and founders even in that/
mightn’t they founder, those who love?
and those who don’t love, do they founder, too?

for light, read bird: this morning,
here/ but better to have said the impossible: cold water from the tap
that wets it, clement green of your eyes, a straight jacket
the indelible,

is it said, then? did it remain mid-ecstasy one night, woman bestride its words?

for bird, read light:
and it’s singing.


un canto sin orillas

poema que va naciendo con la luz del pájaro, esta mañana, aquí, en el compás de lo
imprevisible/
escritura que no conspira contra nadie
y hasta en ello se equivoca/
¿se equivocan acaso los que aman?
¿también los que no aman se equivocan?

si ha dicho luz, ha dicho pájaro: esta mañana,
aquí/ pero mejor si ha dicho lo imposible: el agua fría del surtidor
que lo moja, el tierno verdor de tus ojos, una camisa de fuerza
lo imborrable,

¿lo ha dicho entonces? ¿se quedó en la mitad del éxtasis, con la mujer montada en sus
palabras, una noche?

si ha dicho pájaro, ha dicho luz:
y está cantando.

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Sally Evans Reviews Lisa Samuels x 2

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Sally Evans

Wild Dialectics by Lisa Samuels
Shearsman Books, 2012

Anti M by Lisa Samuels
Chax Press, 2013

Water, Lisa Samuels asserts in her 2010 manifesto for ‘archipelago poetics’, is ‘the unsettling undefined’: the tactile yet formless flow that both separates and joins groups of islands just as language separates and joins groups of selves.1 With her finely honed, comprehensive poetic and critical capacities, Samuels is a transcultural LangPo marvel – hiding in plain sight here in the wide wetness of the Pacific Ocean since relocating from the US to New Zealand in 2006. Continue reading →

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Brigid Magner Reviews Kerry Hines

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Brigid Magner

Young Country by Kerry Hines
Auckland University Press, 2014

The relationship between Australia and New Zealand has often been characterised as one of sibling rivalry, between an older and more established nation and a younger and less populous country. As the Honourable MP Phil Goff has commented, it contains ‘the closeness and the rivalries, the expectations and the tensions this implies.’1 To stretch the sibling metaphor further, it seems that the older sibling looms large in the younger sibling’s imagination but the interest is not always returned.

Continue reading →

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Review Short: Murray Edmond’s Then It Was Now Again: selected critical writing

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Julian Novitz

Then It Was Now Again: selected critical writing by Murray Edmond
Atuanui Press, 2014

The essays and reviews in this collection, all previously published, span roughly thirty years of New Zealand literary history, the earliest having been published in 1973 and the most recent from the late 2000s. With one or two exceptions, these pieces tend to focus either on New Zealand poetry or New Zealand theatre, and on the surface this might seem to limit the appeal of this collection to an international audience. Continue reading →

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Dead Man Modified: A Letter from Vienna

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Alice Miller


Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, 1936. Imagno/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
                                                                    W.H. Auden, in Memory of W.B. Yeats

Just around the block from Vienna’s State Opera, on the outside of a mustard coloured building, is a plaque noting that here – in diesem Haus – W.H. Auden died. He was staying here following a reading at the Palais Palffy, and sometime in the night, while someone else was eating or opening a window, the poet’s heart failed.

Joan Didion describes the kinds of people who keep private notebooks as ‘children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.’ Vienna feels like that kind of city: the kind that keeps a private notebook.

A hundred and twenty years ago, Vienna was one of the artistic and cultural capitals of the world. The list of locals is impressive, and regularly recited: Freud was here, Schönberg, Schnitzler, Zweig, Mahler, Wittgenstein. Because there were barriers to Jews studying and teaching in the universities, a café culture sprung up which was dedicated to perpetual education. Clive James has argued that a rare upside to the rampant anti-Semitism of the time was that the Jewish literati were not wasting their energy writing doctoral theses. Instead, the coffee shops hosted discussion across multiple disciplines, and ideas were exchanged, critiqued, and developed.

The Viennese writer Stefan Zweig – visible most recently as the inspiration for Wes Anderson’s Oscar-winning The Grand Budapest Hotel – described Vienna before the First World War. ‘No one,’ Zweig wrote, ‘thought of wars, of revolutions, or revolts. All that was radical, all violence, seemed impossible in an age of reason.’ Within the coffee shop culture, characters abounded; the writer Peter Altenberg wore sandals in the snow, had his mail delivered to a café, and spent a lot of time chasing underage girls; the masterful aphorist Karl Kraus pronounced that journalists ‘write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write’; and the independently wealthy Zweig served his guests liqueur scattered with flakes of gold leaf.

As we know, it didn’t last. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire entered the First World War, the Habsburgs’ grip was already loose, and four years later the empire – which at the time comprised 15 nations and over 50 million people – collapsed. On one night in 1918, Vienna went from being the capital of a massive empire, to the capital of a tiny European country stripped of mass, power and resources. (Today, the country remains relatively obscure; when I told people I was moving to Vienna, a surprising number asked if I could speak Italian, or if I had plans of becoming a gondolier).

In 1918, while Austria was suffering from the loss of its empire, the loss of the war, and inflation so crippling that a pair of shoelaces cost what would have once been the price of an entire shoe store, Zweig watched as thousands of unemployed people ‘shook their fists at the profiteers and foreigners in their luxurious cars who bought whole row of streets like a box of matches’. The industries that the empire had relied on were suddenly on foreign soil; ‘the railroads had become wrecked stumps, the State Bank received in place of its gold the gigantic burden of war debt.’ And the worst was still to come.

From Zweig’s house in Salzburg, you could stand on the terrace and look across into Germany, where on the other side of the valley, there was a house on the mountain. The owner of the house had lived many of his years in Vienna, painting watercolours of the Ringstraße’s famous buildings – he could stand for hours in front of the opera house, he said – and after twice failing to get into Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, finally left his beloved city for Munich in 1913. After fighting for the Germans in the First World War and spending time in prison, he eventually became Germany’s chancellor, and in 1938, he returned to invade his home country and begin World War II. The damage to Vienna’s intellectual culture, already profound, was complete. As a result of Hitler’s policies, two thirds of Vienna’s Jews were expelled and more than 65,000 were murdered in concentration camps.

Auden’s elegy for Yeats from 1939 reads: ‘In the nightmare of the dark/ All the dogs of Europe bark,/ And the living nations wait,/ Each sequestered in its hate’. My German Jewish grandmother left Germany, and moved as far away from Europe as she could, settling in New Zealand, where she forgot her native language. Even Stefan Zweig, a fierce optimist, lost hope. ‘Europe seemed to me,’ he wrote, ‘doomed to die by its own madness’. He and his wife moved to Brazil where they tried to rebuild their lives. In February 1942, even though it was clear that the Nazis could not win the war, they committed suicide.

Hitler’s 1938 ‘invasion’ of Austria had been of a curious kind: where many of the supposed victims came out of their houses to cheer on the invader and wave flags in welcome. After the war, the Allies declared that Austria had been Nazism’s ‘first victim’. In contrast to Germany, where attempts towards de-Nazification began as soon as the war was over, Austria, as supposed victim, did not confront its Nazi past until the 1980s.

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, visiting Vienna this month to speak at the national theatre, may have been trying to charm the locals when he suggested that it could well be time for a ‘second Vienna renaissance.’ Žižek, with his usual beguiling mix of wit, wisdom, and Hollywood references, said to the sold out Viennese audience, ‘120 years ago you were … like in Star Wars, the centre of the whole universe … everything was here.’

Since I moved to Vienna, I’ve heard half a dozen visiting academics and politicians announce, with varying degrees of conviction, that now Vienna is returning to the days when the city was a great artistic, intellectual capital. I can’t tell you whether these announcements are based on firm evidence, or if such hopeful claims have been made since the 1940s. In his 2007 Cultural Amnesia, Clive James said Vienna ‘feels empty now,’ and corrupted by ‘irreversible physic damage’. It’s certainly true that some of the old coffee houses seem to have lost their intellectual spirit, and have fallen into tourist territory.

The despair and grief of the twentieth century were for a long time denied or avoided; Vienna continued to celebrate Mozart, the height of empire, and the fin de siècle, skipping over the more recent century of horror and grief. This year’s Eurovision coverage traversed much of the same territory as Vienna’s usual tourism videos: Vienna’s beautiful buildings along the Ringstraße, the leafy Prater, the Spanish riding school. But there was no sign of the Flaktürme – the six giant concrete towers built by the Nazis and scattered through the city. In actuality, these Viennese buildings are just as iconic – one, now serving as a giant aquarium near the centre of town, has giant words splayed across it, as designed by the New York artist Lawrence Weiner, commissioned by the Vienna Festival in 1991. It reads Zerschmettert in Stücke im Frieden der Nacht (Smashed to pieces in the still of the night).

American poet Elizabeth Bishop’s famous villanelle ‘One Art’ shows us not only the disastrous nature of loss, but our desperate and futile attempts to control it. ‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master’ the poem insists, until the final stanza shows us the impossibility of mastery:

                                         … It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

That loss, the speaker knows – ‘(Write it!)’ – must be written, must be admitted.

Perhaps like the writer who is afflicted with loss, the tension of that loss translates into a kind of activity. A strength of present day Berlin is that loss and shame are in the air. The city always feels unfinished, raw. ‘(Write it!)’ it says, knowing that loss can never be unwritten, can only be written again and again. In Vienna, the young Viennese people I know far prefer the park with the giant Nazi flaktowers to the park where the emperor once rode around in his carriage.

This morning in a hipster coffee shop near where I live, on a street where the Austrians once welcomed Hitler’s motorcade, a woman sits by the window with a long-since-drunk coffee, and writes, slowly, in her notebook. Above her the high rafters are speckled with glimmery gold leaf, and she is taking her time. She consults the book beside her, which I peer at to get a closer look. It is Freud’s Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams). The dead’s words are modified in the guts of the living. I wonder what dreams she might be interpreting, what loss she’s trying to master.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , , ,

Recalling the Poet: Childhood Memories of Sam Hunt

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Meg Mundell

‘I’ve written road songs, river songs, wave songs, songs about mountains and plateaus … Place has always been important to me. People and places. It’s all about the consecration of people and place.’ – Sam Hunt

Sheep shit, rugby and poetry

In an awkward clash of cliché and fact, I grew up on a sheep farm in New Zealand, in a house owned by a former All Black. In this steep green place, where the melodic peals of bellbirds rang out from ferny valleys and the lambs shat in your gumboots if you left them out overnight, I met my first poet. His name is Sam Hunt, and I owe him an apology.

No Kiwi worth their salt doesn’t know Sam’s name. His exuberant live performances, fuelled by red wine and his own restless, fizzing energy, are the stuff of pub and schoolyard legend. Driving to school we’d often spot his unmistakable figure striding along the roadside: tall and thin, shock-headed and long-legged, clad rakishly in stovepipe jeans and flowing scarves, with his equally famous sheepdog Minstrel loping at his heels. As he wrote in ‘Lines for a New Year’, ‘A friend used to say / my dog and I / had the same way of walking, / especially walking away.’ When Minstrel died in 1988, it was the lead item on the evening TV news. The whole nation mourned that dog.

Minstrel was so perfect and bloody lovely. When he died I lost a very good friend. He always travelled with me, and rumour has it he often used to do the driving, especially after a show – although I can’t confirm that, I was too pissed! Hahaha. But he certainly got behind the wheel. He didn’t touch my booze, but he liked to get into the hooch, so I had to watch out for that.

By reputation Sam was kind-hearted, charismatic, cheeky, incorrigible. You could tell he was a poet just by looking at him, and my sister and I adored him from afar. The guy was pure rock ‘n’ roll. He called his poems ‘road songs’. They were taut and unpretentious, funny or sad, sprinkled with swear-words, and he wrote about places we knew and loved. The titles were mini-poems in themselves: ‘Bottle to Battle to Death’, ‘School Policy on Stickmen’, ‘Girl with Black Eye in Grocer’s Shop’. He’d often recite other poets’ works from memory.

If a poem moves you, you may grow to love it and become unable to live without it. I’ve got thousands of poems in my head, and I can’t forget them. I remember the ones I love, so I’ve always got them with me … My best poem? Tom and Alf. My two sons.

Back then, Sam lived in a boat-shed on Paremata Harbour, across the water from our house. New Zealand is a small place with a high eccentricity count, and it’s no big stretch for a poet and a rugby-playing farmer to be close pals. Sam was mates with our family friend and landlord, the ex-All Black Ken Gray, and the poet often rowed his boat across the harbour help paint Ken’s woolshed, do some hay-baling, or join his family for dinner – reciting poems, telling stories and puffing funny cigarettes, which Ken valiantly tried to explain away to his teenage kids.

Nosy little bastards

A nomadic type, and with scant room in his boatshed, Sam also stored a bunch of his belongings in the attic of the old barn behind our chook shed. Free to roam across thousands of acres, ride horses, have mud-fights, harass tadpoles or get stuck up trees, you’d think we’d have spent every day immersed in such wholesome outdoor pursuits. But that musty attic exerted a strange magnetic pull. Time and again we’d climb the rickety ladder up to poke around in the poet’s personal effects.

Up there, amongst the smell of wool grease and decades-old manure, we’d pore over Sam’s treasures: old typesets from his early print runs, a tiny bible with a mother-of-pearl cover, a smutty paperback in which sex-crazed satyrs and nymphs cavorted (this is not a man who shied away from carnal matters: Sam’s friend, fellow poet James K Baxter, once hailed Hunt in verse by rhyming his name with the epithet ‘oyster cunt’). There were postcards from Paris, letters from Baxter, drawings by the artist Robin White, books galore, and other precious mementoes (here I’ll grant the man some privacy). We spent whole afternoons up there, breathing in the dust of the poet’s life.

I did my first paid show when I was 17. It’s a lonely old occupation, being a lighthouse. It’s a fucking lonely existence, throwing out what light you can … It’s a precarious existence, but it all becomes worth it when you get to the show. A lovely audience, the venue packed out, and you get the most wonderful responses. It’s just incredible. Magical.

Children get away with things no adult would dare attempt, much less least admit to. Rummaging around in Sam’s stuff, we never felt we were doing anything wrong; in fact Ken told us we had Sam’s blessing, and my sister swears she had a conversation with the poet by the chook shed, during which he ‘gave’ her the entire contents of that attic. But today I feel a vague guilt over that ransacking, our nosy repeat perusal of a man’s personal belongings – a guilt compounded by the fact that I’m now telling you about them.

Protect your spark

Why were we so fascinated? What were we looking for? The answer, I suspect, is that most elusive of trace elements: Essence of Poet. I wanted to be like Sam – a wandering raconteur, a rebellious wordsmith, wearing waistcoats and drinking claret, loved and welcomed everywhere. I’d barely hit school when I said I wanted to be a writer. ‘But writers don’t make any money,’ said my dad, hoping to steer me toward a more sensible path.

I grew up to prove dad correct. But I also remember some alternate advice, this from Sam himself, dispensed during a dinner party at the Grays’ house. As we left, Sam put down his wine glass, took my eight-year-old hand, looked me in the eyes and said, in his low gravelly drawl: ‘Never let them steal your spark. Okay? Remember: never let them steal your spark!’

Great advice. I wish I’d followed it more often. But occasionally, when spark-stealers have lurked in my life, Sam’s words have returned to me. So along with that overdue apology, I also owe him thanks. I track down his mobile number … then hesitate. Who wants to be a pest from the past?

Five gunshots from humanity

It’s no accident that Hunt now lives in New Zealand’s remote far north. He’s been declared a national icon, and strangers stop him in the street to tell him their life stories. Today when not touring he cherishes his privacy, the peace and isolation of the Kiwi hinterland. He quantified his ideal domestic distance in a poem written for his younger son, with whom he lives: ‘Alive, Alf, to live / clear of any city / live more than five / gunshots from humanity’. Background noise, to Hunt’s mind, has a way of drowning out good poems.

I need a lot of solitude and silence to work. I’m not saying you have to be in particular state for a poem to happen, but if there’s a lot of noise, if you’re constantly surrounded by distractions, there’s more chance of missing it. A poem is an incredibly elusive thing – I mean a lyric poem, the kind of poem where you’re not so much creating it as having it given to you. When you think, where the fuck did that come from? Like waking from a dream.

Mid-winter, 2015: the signal bounces across the Tasman, lights on its target. Hunt picks up. The voice is the same, the wit quick and cheeky. He’s just home from a sell-out national tour to promote his new album, The 9th, a musical collaboration with David Kilgour and the Heavy 8’s. He has no idea who I am, and is at first politely wary. But he soon warms up. ‘Any friend of the Grays is a friend of mine,’ he says.

Working with musicians suits him. Despite having twenty-odd books under his belt, Hunt has the theatrical gene, and his poems are rhythmic things, born to be read aloud. It gets lonesome, too, being a poet touring solo: ‘I love DK (Kilgour) and the band. They’re like my younger brothers, they look after me. Musically, they surround me and work off me. To have such fucking superb company, both onstage and off, is a total pleasure and a gift.’

The new album is a corker – by turns lush, raucous, evocative and atmospheric, Hunt’s husky voice chanting the poems, backed by jangly guitars. It was recorded live, over four days in a Dunedin pub. Along with Hunt’s originals, it includes poems by Baxter, Yeats, and Hungarian poet Attila Jozsef.

Music can take a poem to places it mightn’t normally get to. Once all poems were songs. Then the printing press was invented and poems suddenly got crucified, nailed to the fucking page. And kept nailed there by academics who earn a living asking questions like ‘What is a poem? What is the poet saying?’ University English departments are some of the greatest butchers in the sense of killing poetry, taking it away from people, making it difficult, some sort of elite thing … I’m interested in poems – good poems – but I’m not interested in ‘poetry’.

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4 Artworks by Matt Arbuckle

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Matt Arbuckle


Billy Cart | oil on board | 240 x 240cm

Matt Arbuckle’s work explores a dialog between the construction and deconstruction of a painting. The narrative is one of space and perspective, where planes and illusion of depth are the topic for discourse, rather than direct representation. The viewer is therefore denied obvious footholds for interpretation, encouraging the experience to be dictated by an individual’s visual sensation and perception. The foundation of these paintings is the concept of accessibility for all. The blatant and at times aggressive marks encourage the experience of these paintings to not be over conceptualised, but rather a celebration of painting for paintings sake.

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Alters; Aspects from La Trobe Track, Karekare (after Anita Heiss)

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Rachel Fenton

In terms of the image I’ve produced for ‘I don’t hate you, but …’ I thought a lot about the poem’s call for the reader to be self-reflective, to observe, and in particular to preach.

The stylised pōhutukawa symbolises Māori spirituality corrupted by colonial missionaries, the branches redolent of leaded church windows in reference to The Tree of Jesse from Autun Cathedral. Other artworks that inspired me were William Blake’s Hell Canto III, and John William Waterhouse’s Echo and Narcissus.

The scenes are taken from Auckland, including Karekare, the setting for many of Allen Curnow’s poems. A reference to Curnow’s ‘Spectacular Blossom’ was suggested by Robert Sullivan.

The colours, too, are symbolic: pinks for Australia’s soil and the displacement of indigenous peoples; red references both the St George flag and, with blue, my local surf life-saving club uniform. Surf life-saving slogans include ‘Between the Flags’ and ‘In it for Life’, relevant because sport is another kind of accepted ongoing crusade, but Surf Life Saving is a redeemable sport in the sense it functions to save lives rather than merely promote combat skills, having therefore the potential to teach other sports how not behave like the former British Empire.

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Te Aro 17 & 19 (after David Beach)

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Tim Bollinger

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Certain Trace Elements Remain (after Marty Hiatt)

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Draw

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‘Oki fa’a kama Samoa moni lou ulu / Cut your hair like a true Samoan boy’ and ‘White Sunday’

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Siliga David Setoga


Siliga David Setoga | Oki fa’a kama Samoa moni lou ulu / Cut your hair like a true Samoan boy | 2015
Photograph: Setoga Setoga II | Barber: Maligi Junior Evile

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Drowning in Viscera (d) (after Marty Hiatt)

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Draw

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Pembroke and Charm of a Bivalve Chanteys (after Duncan Hose)

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Tim Danko

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To Change the World: Baxter As the Eternal Reader

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Nigel Brown


Nigel Brown | Reading with Couple | 2002 | acrylic on paper | 300mm x 210mm

It is difficult to paint from a grounded meaning, and for me the search has been intuitive. Both my father and I were deeply influenced by James K Baxter (1926-1972).The experience of being read poetry ‘that handled ideas like bombs’ was a kind of conversion. For over forty years Baxter has appeared in my work as the immortal hairy man dispensing a poetic that might cure the world. While that sounds religious, it is also just the spiritual urge lurking in archetypes, in our organic indigenous cultures, and in the abandoned Romanticism before our Modernist immersion and climate changing technocracy.

I use text in my work and always value associations with poets. Of course, Baxter was much more than a poet; in his work social injustice and ‘love not much valued’ push you creatively away from mere aesthetics. However, whatever the more clumsy aspects of his personal ‘search,’ his crafting held it all together remarkably. Just as Baxter disembodies into the ‘poetic eternal’ – separating from the earthly specifics of a life – so too may a painter embrace the freedom to evolve symbols with expanding boundaries.

Even in times of confusing disconnectedness I believe simplicities can be found. This approach is not a matter of ‘finding’ priests and dogmas, but one of more involvement with the timeless human ‘situation’. So when people gather for a Baxter reading, the words spoken lead a basic tribal urge – they are the words of someone who has travelled mentally, a master of chant. They form an alarm that calls for less indifference and more sensitivity.

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VCR

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Carl Walsh

I wasn’t sure it would still
work
the VCR
its postbox
mouth stuffed with a Wombles
video my daughter had fed it
until it jammed
now plugged
into power again gears whir
noisy but effective
my son
fascinated with old technology
is piling up tapes
until I find
a video
with my dad on it
wishing he was not introverted
shying away from the camera
but an extrovert
so I could see
him properly
or hear him again

what I can see shows an old man
cancer already found
and removed
ready to spring back
gears whirring
my son finds this boring
a man
he’s never met
can we put another video on dad?

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How I Cut My Nails

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Tapeshwar Prasad

How I cut and file
My longer nails
The beloved of birth until death
as,
you always grow
to witness
all my pale hues;
The life
in seasoned pain and
gleam of crawling joy

All wedding rings pass through you
All pain remain your silent witness
Still,
Neither you beat a word
Nor you echoes thy pain

How lovingly must I groom and
file your pain
as,
you fall down lifeless
with invisible ooze:
The blood of my heart

My own never care
And I never cared to wipe my eyes
Dear my nail

Still longer shadow linger
To swaddle thy warmth
in a piece of velvety calm

Adieu,adieu
Dear my nail!
That which cul
Grows my shadows tall

How I cut and file
My longer nails …

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Mt Frederick

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Ben Walter

there is a passage in
the lee, the lees
of the sun;
the poor
are said to be generous.
we’re holding out our feet.

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you

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Peter O'Mara

i) each calibration is winter

ii) and you walk into my hand

iii) like a tenant


iv) eye & word alone.

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Yellow Chevrons

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Stephen Oliver
An old story. Our hero wakes up disoriented in a strange and unfamiliar land. Rock strewn, treeless. He is amnesiac; expulsion from Eden is false memory. The Ruskinesque, quartz blaze of a fallen rock. Into his field of vision float half erased memories. The plank-hulled ship stretched upon the leek-green sea, for instance. Though how did he get here? Balloon cheeked clouds puff powdery gusts from every quarter. The ship tilts toward its destiny, sails pot-belled and proud. An empire in red shading and black lines spell out emptiness. A clutch of miniscule palm trees lean toward the coast. A few towns and oases marked out phonetically in copperplate promise little. Inland remains largely terra incognita, a persistent rumour. He observes a lizard, frozen beneath his shadow, its back patterned with yellow chevrons. This reminds him of ship’s anchors. The map fades off, borderless, into obscurity. The horizon swings on its boom in one slow arc either side of the perpendicular. The emissary has not yet returned with news from the ant-headed people. At best, trade routes remain speculative. Twilight is the texture of wickerwork all around him. Soon the stars.

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Young Mick Jagger

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Kylie Beach

Young Mick Jagger-looking guy
crossing the road, you cut
the most self-assured line
I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some.

Fringe on sunglasses, denim on
denim – you almost had me off
my bus and running down the street
for a second look at you.

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Tears in the Symphony

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Brentley Frazer

I feel like a terrible thespian
or maybe a great comedian
playing a retarded character,
like Freddy Benson.

Other-days
I feel like that guy who shot himself
during The Watchmen, like an octopus
in a tank of lobsters. Your lips when

kissed that afternoon, silky, salty and
cold, parted like a cut jellyfish on
an overcast shoreline. Poverty, chastity
obedience, enclosure. I had a dream.

Watching a nun fall off a bicycle on the
banks of the Seine … but it’s like watching
a .gif and after my laughter subsides
I find myself fascinated with the
paralinguistics of the way her ankles bend
as she hits the stair-rail. It’s like Springsteen’s
Dancer in The Dark, you know, up against
yourself, tongue kissing your
shadow with reckless abandon.

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