So for all of you who would like to read the whole poem (especially those of you who have followed through its birth-pangs) and who don’t want to wait for the eventual arrival of Janus, I suggest you get yourself a copy. It’s a damn fine magazine, and always has heaps of interesting work by a range of NZ writers.

Some rather less good news: Salt Publishing, whose appeal for support I blogged about a couple of years ago, have just announced that they are no longer going to publish individual poetry collections, and intend to turn all their poetic focus to their annual anthology.

This is quite bad news, in lots of ways. Not least of which is that they always had a very international outlook, publishing poets from all over the world (including New Zealand). Hard to see anyone else doing quite so much to promote the international aspect of modern poetry.

Another awkward aspect is how this information was made public. I know a number of poets on their list, and word on the grapevine is that some found out about this by being alerted by others to the blog post about it, rather than being told personally by their publisher. Ok, Salt have always been big on their authors engaging with social media, but that’s still a pretty crappy way to be told that you’re not wanted anymore.

I appreciate that this is a really hard time to be trying to make a living from selling something as niche as poetry collections. (My own most recent royalty statement, for example, was a negative number.) (Ouch indeed.) And they’ve published a lot – over four hundred collections in thirteen years, apparently. But it’s quite a no-confidence gesture to ditch the individual in favour of the collective. To cap it all off, on the post page Chris Hamilton-Emery is quoted saying “There’s never been a better time for poets to write …”

Yep, just not to try and publish.

Yep, I think we’ve all been there.

Reading for Writing 1 – Playing Favourites
Saturday mornings, June 15th to July 13th 
Habgood Lounge, Lincoln Event Centre

A five week wallow in the work of some of my favourite unknown (or at least ‘not well known in NZ’) poets. Suitable for all levels, $45.

Poetry 101 – Introduction to Poetry
Thursday evenings, July 11th to August 22nd 
Fitzgerald Room, Lincoln Event Centre

What it says on the tin – a fun fortnightly class to introduce you to writing, reading, and enjoying poetry. Suitable for beginners, and anyone who would like to brush up their technical skills. Only 10 places available, $30.

Reading for Writing 2 – Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons
Saturday mornings, August 17th to September 14th 
Habgood Lounge, Lincoln Event Centre

A five week immersion in poems addressing the ‘Big Three’ subjects – love, death, and change. We’ll be looking at love poems, from the gentle to the distinctly erotic. Elegies of all sorts. And some of the kazillions (technical term) of ways people use poems to immortalize things – important things like wars and deaths and triumphs, and supposedly ‘unimportant’ things, like snooker players, laundry, and a local argument. Suitable for all levels, $45.

I’m also considering the possibility of offering some of these classes in an online version, depending on demand. (If that appeals to you, send me an email.)

Three workshops to help you make the most of the cold months.
What are you waiting for?

I love the stories people tell about how a certain line of poetry has stayed with them, how it has helped them or given them something to hold on to. And it’s different to the way you carry a whole poem. Even people who profess to hate poetry will usually have a line or two tucked away somewhere. In song writing it’s the whole idea of having a ‘hook’ – something that stays with the listener, something that catches their attention, and holds them long enough to consider the song as a whole. (And then the album, the T-Shirt, the mega-stadium-concert …) German has a word for this sort of thing: ‘Ohrwurm’, which translates literally to ‘ear-worm’. Don’t you love that?

But back to the world of poetry. Is that a way to measure the success of a piece, whether it is memorable as a whole, or only with one (or two) singing lines? Or, to turn the question around, is a poem with a single wonderful line a success, or a failure? Both? Neither? It depends?

I’m currently having a second go at reading Derek Walcott’s White Egrets, which won the 2011 TS Eliot Prize. It may be that I’m preoccupied with other things, but so far I’m finding it very hard to settle into. It’s almost a book-poem, or maybe a better description is a series (rather than sequence) of poems that tussle with his typical set of concerns.

Partly it’s because I keep remembering the whole Oxford Professorship scandal, and the various snippets of comments that he was alleged to have made. Given that background, it’s hard not to read lines like

Some friends, the few I have left

and

Sometimes the hills themselves disappear
like friends, slowly

(both from part iv of “White Egrets”) as being self-referential.

Then there’s

The pain is over, feathers close your eyelids, Oliver.
What a happy friend and what a fine wife!
Your death is like our friendship beginning over.

(from “7″ – emphasis mine) which makes for slightly uncomfortable (even creepy) reading. I know it’s a mistake to read too much autobiography into any poem, but still … There are a lot of references to women he has known (and lines like ‘grizzled satyr … they think: you’re too old to be / shaken by such a lissom young woman’ put the word squarely into the biblical sense). Walcott’s writing has always been quite luscious, and there are places where it frankly drips. And they do so very often involve women. I don’t really feel that the poems are misogynistic, so much as casually oblivious to everything outside the poem’s own frame of reference. A non-female example, from the end of the first part of “The Acacia Trees”:

… The new makers
of our history profit without guilt
and are, in fact prophets of a policy
that will make the island a mall, and he breakers
grin like waiters, like taxi drivers, these new plantations
by the sea; a slavery without chains, with no blood spilt—
just chain-link fences and signs, the new degradations.
I felt such freedom writing under the acacias.

I quite like the pun on profit / prophet, (although logically, can they be prophets of the thing they themselves are causing to happen?) and the section from ‘the breakers’ to ‘no blood spilt’ is amazing – insightful, deftly phrased, brilliant.But it loses power after that, when he wades in with the ‘by which I mean that these are’ penultimate line. But it’s the last line that had me put the book away for six months. Maybe it’s intended to be ironic – the concerns of the individual contrasting with the concerns of the wider community – but it’s hard not to also hear the thundering of a great ego, and the ringing it leaves in your ears drowns out the sad majesty of the previous lines. I think I almost preferred the exhibition of his libido.

Either way, I’ll persist with the book. Who knows, maybe it’ll grab me later. (Snigger on your own time, please.)

One thing that does stand out for me is how many poems have one really gorgeous line, but little else that holds my attention. (Yes, I know this may be a sign of my own deficiencies.) It makes them great for pillaging for my Reading for Writing exercises, but doesn’t really help me appreciate his work as a whole. Is it that these particular lines, being so good, throw the rest into somewhat unflattering relief? Or am I, in these cases,  salvaging the gold from the dross? (Exaggeration, but you get my drift.) To return to my original question: does the wonderful line help or hinder the poem as a whole? Or, rephrased in a way that will be familiar to the people who have been to one of my editing sessions – if you can’t bring the rest of the poem up to that level, are you better removing that line completely?

All our fathers and uncles
going off to war
like going down to the pub.

Whirled away like paper dolls
painstakingly cut from khaki
by little girls,

confetti men tumbling
into rice paddies, into names
like Kokoda and Nui Dat.

See them scatter into the twigs
into the puddles, the rivers
into the villages

folding up clouds of nightmares,
locking them away in a green
metal box with a yellow lid,

bivouacked in dust
in the corner of the loft
– I can hear them stirring.

In memory of Ian Harris (1946 – 1994)