Book Launch alert – Dear Heart: 150 New Zealand Love Poems

Hooray, it’s time for another book launch! This time it’s the Christchurch launch of Dear Heart: 150 New Zealand Love Poems, which I blogged about back in September. Yes, I am one one-hundred-and-fiftieth of the book that has been the number one bestseller in the New Zealand Fiction lists for the past few weeks. Hooray again!

Editor Paula Green is flying down for the launch, and is in fact doing a bit of a tour of the centres launching the anthology – Wellington’s has been (I think), Auckland’s is not far away, then it’s Dunedin on June 12th and a final flourish in Christchurch on June 14th. We’re each reading our poem/s from the anthology, plus one other love poem from anywhere and anywhen. And because a celebration should be as wide-ranging as possible, a number of other Canterbury poets will also be joining us to read their favourite love poems. Books will be available for purchase, and contributors will be ready to sign copies. It’s going to be a lovely night. Come and join us!

When: 5. 30 pm, Thursday 14th June 2012
Where: Ed Hopper Café & Bar (formerly Technical Books)
The Windmill Centre, 184 Clarence St
Riccarton, Christchurch.

Armitage, Astronauts, and Archibald MacLeish

Oh lordy.

It was about this time last year that I started writing a poem based on another poem, with one eye towards finally having an entry for the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize (theme this year: gold). Last year my effort ballooned into the monster finally known as “Fare”, and swallowed three months of my life. (And missed the deadline for the comp by a laughable amount.) For the last fortnight I’ve been toying with a poem that started out in the final Reading for Writing class of last term. It was based on “The Patent”; Simon Armitage‘s lovely elegy for Michael Donaghy. The exercise involved taking the end words of each line and writing them down in reverse order, then using them to trigger a new poem. (Writing them down in reverse is a nifty trick to help break away from the original poem.)

So far, so good. Except it never ends that way. My first draft had an astronaut, bobbing about in space, looking back at the earth. I really liked where it was going,and the way it circled back on itself. Apart from everything else, it felt really good to be writing again. But then I got to wondering about what equipment, exactly, an astronaut used during a spacewalk. What attached them to the spaceship? What were the limitations? So I did what we all do these days: Googled.

Two weeks later …

Ok, not quite that bad. But I did get utterly engrossed in the story of the first spacewalk (or EVA) – this link will take you to the basic Wikipedia article on the first one, the Voskhod 2 mission, and this to the even more fascinating article by the man himself, Alexei Leonov, talking about what really happened, and the half dozen ways it almost went catastrophically wrong. (It really is worth reading.) My board got covered by notes and calculations and photographs and phrases. Way too much fun. And after a week of that, I realised that actually writing the poem had slipped down the list of priorities rather catastrophically. Sigh!

Anyway, I’m more or less back on track. Although I’ve lost another day’s worth of work to web-surfing images of earth from space, especially a group of images tagged “crescent earth” … isn’t this one gorgeous? (And we live here! Suck on that, Martians!) NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is an amazing website. Just don’t go there if you’ve only got a few minutes to spare …

Ahem. Anyway, I’ve finally managed to get a decently solid first draft down. Trying not to think about things like “is this poem necessary?” (yes, for the sake of my sanity and self-esteem) and “is this a really good poem?” (my response to that question is best transcribed using a random array of symbols). As for trying to fit all my research in … at one of my first residencies at Glamorgan, the guest writer was Des Barry, who had worked as a research assistant for Peter Carey when he was writing his Commonwealth Writers’ Prize-winning novel, Jack Maggs. I remember Des talking about spending months researching the details of how quill pens were made; which feathers were best, how they varied, how long they lasted, the inks, the paper, the whole business. And all this painstaking research came down to one sentence in the final book, which ran something like “He cut the quill to a 45 degree angle”. So really, my two weeks of absorption in side matters barely rates as a blip. Besides, as my mother always says, no knowledge is ever wasted.  Who knows when it will come in handy?

So where does Archibald MacLeish come into things? Easy. There’s a gorgeous poem of his called “You, Andrew Marvell”, (American poet Mark Strand wrote a lovely piece about it in The Weather of Words, and you can read the essay itself here – highly recommended!) supposedly written in response to Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”, although to me it feels more like a response to “To the Virgins, To Make the Most of Time”. Either way, it’s a very eerie and quite beautiful piece, and the first stanza just chimes perfectly with the mood of the poem I’m trying to write:

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

(For copyright reasons I won’t paste the whole thing in, but you can read it for yourself here.)

So that’s where I am at the moment. It’s a good place, as long as the writing continues.
I just have to try an avoid any further distrac—

Possibly app/licable?

(Sorry, couldn’t resist the pun.)

I came across an interesting review on Stuff the other day – it’s for an app called Write Or Die. The basic idea is simple: it nags you to write. You get to choose the target (number of words or elapsed time), and the punishment (ranging from gentle nudges to the altogether more alarming extreme of words you’ve already written deleting themselves if you stop or pause for too long). You can either have it as a downloaded desktop (or iPad/iPhone/etc app) for a fee, or use the free web-based version (although you then have to remember to copy it from the browser and paste it into a document of your own before you quite the browser … I can almost hear the screams of anguish).

I am very, very tempted by it. Being the world-class procrastinator that I am. Of course you have to actually fire the programme up in the first place, so it doesn’t entirely replace the need for some sort of self-generated impetus. (Do I mean impetus? Quick check … yep, I do. Hooray!) (And did anyone else spot the nifty bit of self-distraction there?) And it wouldn’t work for the way I write poetry, which is almost completely longhand, and with a very large amount of the time spent staring off into the middle distance, tapping syllables on my knee (which can recognise iambic tetrameter all by itself now), and muttering all manner of ungodly things. All of which would fail to register as “writing in progress” as far as the programme was concerned.

BUT … I do write articles directly onto the computer. And haibun. And blog posts. And quite often my reviews. And I do have a real habit of just not quite managing to make myself sit down and start writing them. Yes, the revision takes quite a long time too. But it’s that initial hurdle of sitting down and writing something – anything! – that I can shape into the appropriate form later. (Admission – I usually have to print the thing out, and then scribble on the paper. Paperless Office? Only when I run out.) Even on the computer, I do still seem to be able to get that magical link between words unspooling themselves in front of me and some sort of insight that I certainly didn’t have before the words started flowing. So it can and does happen. So maybe Write Or Die will be something that can help me get some sort of writing routine re-established, even if only for the peripheral stuff. And maybe it could be something to get me off my backside and back into trying to write my PHdDFNisoP, or at least some sort of fiction. Maybe even NaNoWriMo? (Hah! This from the woman who still hasn’t finished 75% of the poems she started in NaPoWriMo three years ago!)

Anyone else tried anything of this sort?

Winter workshop 2012 – Dead Poets

I’ve managed to wangle some money from Creative Communities (thank you CCC!) to help defray the costs, so as long as I can get eight of you to confirm, I will be offering a winter Reading for Writing course based on (drumroll please) …

Yep, that’s right, Dead Poets. Or, to misquote Monty Python, poems by poets who have expired, ceased to be, quit this mortal coil, rung down the curtain and shuffled off to join the anthology eternal. I haven’t finalised the selections yet, but I’m planning to include some Paul Celan, maybe some Garcia Lorca, Akhmatova, Larkin, some Baxter or Curnow, heck, maybe even some Paterson. Not to mention Donaghy, Malloy, Porter (Dorothy as well as – or even instead of – Peter), and almost certainly some more of the immortal William Topaz McGonagall. (Unless I go to his feminine counterpart, the sweet singer of Michigan …)

Anyhow, the details:

Reading for Writing: Dead Poets
Saturdays, 10.30 am – 1.30 pm
June 2nd, 16th, 30th, and July 14th and 21st, 2012
(five weeks)
Sydenham Room
South Christchurch Library Learning Centre
Fee: $40
Limited to 18 places.
Closing date for enrolments: 1st June, 2012

I know the dates seem a bit erratic, but it was when I could get the room. It works out as four sessions a fortnight apart, and one final session one week later.

As usual, email me to enroll or if you have any questions. And if you’d like to download a copy of the flier for yourself (either to hand out to other people who might be interested, or to use to make a collage expressing your deep ambivalence towards the commodification of the arts in these dark and post-postmodern days …), click here.

Wellington, on a good day night

Back home again after a quick trip to Wellington, where I was the guest poet at the April NZPS meeting.

The whole thing takes place upstairs at the Thistle Inn, which is a gorgeous old building on Mulgrave St. All timber floors and branching corridors and rooms tucked around corners and down passageways. Apparently it’s the oldest pub in New Zealand, and was the favoured local watering hole of a gentleman by the name of Te Rauparaha …

Anyhow, the whole night was great fun. A good mix of styles at the open mic, including a couple of people who were popping their poetry performance cherry. And my reading seemed to go down quite well, although as usual I had prepared roughly three times as much material as I ended up using (what can I say? I waffle spontaneously. I know, I know – such things have bitten me on the bum more than once before. But I don’t think I managed to offend anyone this time …). The press of bodies meant that the room got quite warm (umm … from there being quite a few people present, and the windows being closed), so I didn’t even need my famous Red Coat. But it did mean that at the end of the whole thing I was feeling pretty knackered, and only had time to touch down on my seat before Laurice got me back up front for a Q & A session. Which took a few moments to happen (the questions, not me hauling myself back upright and up front again), as they always seem to do, but then became Quite Interesting indeed. I think I managed to answer them reasonably coherently.

So a huge thank you to the seemingly unstoppable Laurice Gilbert for organising, and to all you Wellingtonians (and others!) who came along – it was great catching up with old friends, and meeting new ones. And if the receptiveness of the audience is any indication of such things, it looks like the Wellington poetry scene is in good heart. Not to mention spirit, voice, and hands.