Poetry & Gender in New Zealand Publishing

One of the things I do to entertain myself is make spreadsheets.  Some people may find this sad, but frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.  Recently I conducted an unscientific little survey of single-author poetry books published in New Zealand last year, looking at the websites of several New Zealand publishers (AUP, VUP, Steele Roberts, Seraph Press, Earl of Seacliffe Workshop, Cape Catley, Titus Books and OUP).  For each book, I noted whether the poet was male or female and whether he or she was a “new” poet (ie hadn’t had a volume of poetry published before).

 The list of publishers is not comprehensive and no doubt there are other books that ought to be in my spreadsheet.  Also, not all the publishers listed the year of publication on their website, so there may be one or two books on the list that properly belong in another year.  Still, I think I’ve got a reasonable sample.

 And I found the results rather interesting.  Of the 31 books I found, 18 (58%) were by women and 13 by men (42%).  New poets accounted for 11 of the books (35% of the total) – quite encouraging I thought.  And of these 11 new poets, 8 were women (73% of new poets) and 3 were men (27%).

 One of the reasons I embarked on this exercise was because I’d been looking at a recent anthology of Australian women’s poetry (Motherlode – looks great, by the way and thinking about similar British anthologies and wondering where the anthologies of women’s poetry in New Zealand were.  And I thought, maybe we don’t really need a separate anthology because female poets are getting published just as often as male poets here (not that I’m suggesting the Australian anthology was simply an exercise in affirmative action – I understand it was more about collecting poems concerning motherhood from a female perspective). 

 In any case, I thought I’d have a look to see if women were as likely as men to get published in New Zealand.  And it seems we are.  Last year, anyway, women were a little more likely to be published, especially amongst new poets. 

 Would I get the same results if I counted pages or words rather than volumes?  Possibly not.  The books by male poets included a James K Baxter selection and a substantial Vincent O’Sullivan collection, which could have tipped the balance the other way.  

 So what’s going on?  Is it that women are writing more poetry?  I’m not sure about that.  Open mic sessions, poetry slams and other poetry readings seem to draw respectable numbers of blokes on to the stage.  Poetry journals have no shortage of poems by male authors. 

 Is it that women more likely to put those books together and send them out in the first place?  Poetry-writing classes seem to be dominated by women, so maybe men and women are just taking a different approach to the whole enterprise.  (I’m generalising, I know). 

 It would be interesting to repeat the poetry book survey for, say, 1999 and 1989 and see if the gender balance has been shifting over time.  It would also be interesting to do the same thing for poetry published in other countries.  (I might even give that a go sometime). 

 Was 2009 an atypical year?  Will those percentages reverse in 2010?  I really couldn’t guess – but I’d love to know what others think.

What I was reading in 2009 Part 3

OK, with 2009 already a distant memory, here is part 3 of poetry books I read and enjoyed last year.  No doubt I’ve missed a few along the way, but here goes:

‘Firesprung‘ and ‘Keening with Spittal Tongues’ by Kathleen Kenny (Red Squirrel Press).  We saw Kathleen read at the South Shields  Museum last August and I really enjoyed hearing her poems.  You can read a couple on the Red Squirrel website.   http://www.redsquirrelpress.com/index.php?firesprung

‘Further Convictions Pending’ – Vincent O’Sullivan (VUP) – I confess I hadn’t read much of Vincent O’Sullivan before.  I won this in an NZ Book Council giveaway (thanks Book Council!) and am now on a very pleasant voyage of discovery.

‘The Song of Lunch’ (CB Editions) and ‘A Scattering’ (Arete Books) by Christopher Reid.  Christopher Reid read at Te Papa last year.  A Scattering is a sad, but beautiful book, about his grief at the death of his wife (more on that here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/6957867/Christopher-Reid-a-poet-who-was-inspired-by-grief.html)

Lighter and more fun (but still with its dark side) is The Song of Lunch, about a man who meets up for lunch with a former girlfriend but things don’t turn out as he imagined.

‘Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand’ (Interactive Press, edited by Mark Pirie and Tom Jones) – well I have to mention Voyagers, seeing as I’ve got a poem in it.  See here for more details and sample poems.  Lots of gems in this book.  One of my favourites is Vivienne Plumb’s The Last Day of the World which begins “That will be the day none of the eggs will cook.  There will be strange phenomena” .

‘On the Eve of Never Departing’  by Richard von Sturmer (Titus Books).  Not a poetry book (more of a memoir), but his language is so lyrical and beautiful, I thought I’d sneak it in.  There’s an account of the launch here: http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2009/09/titus-turns-twenty-one.html  I remember seeing Richard and his partner performing as the Humanimals in Auckland back in the early eighties and being terribly impressed.

 Also not a poetry book per se is Sam Hunt’s ‘Backroads’ (Craig Potton Publishing) which Peter got me for Christmas – again it’s a memoir, but with lots of great poems (other people’s – like James K Baxter’s - as well as his own) and great photos.

 Peter also gave me Glenn Colquhoun’s latest: ‘North South’ (Steele Roberts) – with illustrations by Nigel Brown, a tale of Celtic gods and goddesses meeting their Māori counterparts.  http://steeleroberts.co.nz/books/isbn/9781877448638

So – that was 2009.  Here’s wishing everyone a poetic 2010!

What I’ve been reading in 2009 Part 2

Here are some more of the poetry books that found their way into my collection during 2009 (by which I mean I either bought them myself or someone bought them for me – I don’t want anyone imagining I procured them by nefarious means…).  I may have left some books out – it’s all a bit of a blur.  And there are other very interesting-looking collections that were published during the year that I haven’t quite got to yet (like Harvey Molloy’s ‘Moonshot‘. Jessica le Bas’ ‘Walking to Africa’, Michele Leggott’s ‘Mirabile Dictu’ and Selina Tusitala Marsh’s ‘Fast Talking PI‘).

This is a list, rather than a bunch of reviews, because when I try to review something I struggle to get past ‘I liked it’, ‘I didn’t like it’ or ‘I liked it a lot’.  You can assume the following are books I liked, really liked or really, really liked.

‘Shields Sketches’ (Hub Editions), ‘No More Hiroshimas’ (Spokesman Books) and ‘Marsden Bay’ (Red Squirrel Press) by James Kirkup, whom I blogged about in November

‘In Person: 30 Poets’ edited by Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books) – a wonderful DVD book (six hours of poets reading their own poems + a book containing all the poems) featuring great poets like Fleur Adcock, Maura Dooley, Selima Hill, Jackie Kay, Adrian Mitchell, Yang Lian and Benjamin Zephaniah.

‘Earth Shattering: ecopoems’ also edited by Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books) – poems about environmental destruction, climate change, species extinction and so forth, but not all gloomy.  Poets range from Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wordsworth to contemporary poets such as Denise Levertov, Oodgeroo and Susan Griffin.

‘Skin Hunger’ by David Lyndon Brown (Titus Books) – poems about love, sex and death. Here’s an extract from “Icarus Reflects”:

“Look, it’s me

as a courtesan,

lagged in feathers

in a long lobby,

pitied and feared

for my mordant quips

and eloquent tailoring.”

‘A Book of Luminous Things’ edited by Czeslaw Milosz – this one’s been around a while, but I’ve only just got to it and it’s just as the title suggests.  It includes work by many classical Chinese poets, as well as modern American and European poets.

to be continued…

Happy Solstice

Neil Roberts Day Fireworks - Fleur took the photo

What I’ve been reading in 2009 Part 1

I’ve read a lot of poetry over 2009.  Here are some of the books that have made their way into my collection and enriched my year (in no particular order): 

‘Africa: Kabbo, Mantis and the Porcupine’s Daughter’ by Alistair Paterson (Puriri Press) – a long poem that explores humanity’s African origins.  Click here for a useful review by Terry Locke). 

Here’s an extract from ‘Africa’: 

*
They’re alive
            our ancestors are alive 

they live through us & yet
         there’s a sense in which 

what’s happened seems
         never to have happened 

in which thinking about it
          what’s gone, what’s over
is like looking at a church
        examining it (the church) 

from a distance, admiring
        the lift & luft of the spire…” 

‘The Rocky  Shore’ by Jenny Bornholdt (Victoria University Press) – long autobiographical poems, which sparked an interesting discussion about what constitutes poetry between Iain Sharp (writing in Landfall) and Joanna Preston (on her blog).  Personally, I take a pretty liberal view regarding what is and isn’t poetry.  (I wrote about this last year. http://janisfreegard.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/poem-is-a-poem-is-a-poem/ )   I’m more interested in whether it’s writing that I enjoy (and I always enjoy Jenny Bornholdt’s).  

‘Moose Beetle Swallow’ by Estonian surrealist poet Andres Ehin (Southword Editions) – beautifully translated by Irish poet Patrick Cotter (see Patrick Cotter’s website).  There’s a review here from Penniless Press.  One thing I found very interesting about this collection was how the translations differ from other translations of the same poems.  Consider this opening extract of ‘To be a Dog Apartment’ http://elm.einst.ee/issue/17/poetry-andres-ehin/ 

“to be a dog-apartment with three barking rooms
with a snout-bathroom
where one tap dribbles cold
and the other hot slobber” 

and Patrick Cotter’s version: 

“Imagine an apartment made of dog
three rooms of bark, a bathroom of snout

 the cold tap dribbles, the hot tap slobbers” 

Both are great, but each paints a very different picture. 

 

 ‘Making Music’ by Patrick Cotter (Three Spires Press).  Quirky, fun in that dark way, full of angels. 

‘Nearest and Dearest’ by Mary Cresswell (Steele Roberts) – poems full of satire and humour. (I interviewed Mary on this blog). 

‘My Iron Spine’ by Helen Rickerby (Headworx).  Includes very entertaining poems about Katherine Mansfield, Joan of Arc, Emily Dickinson and other famous women. 

‘through windows’ by Susana Lei’ataua (Steele Roberts).  I saw Susana perform this as a one-woman show at Bats a few years ago.  It’s based on her time in New York and has the sounds of the subway running through it: 

                                    “I am a train 

tearing through neighbourhoods 

this and that 

this and that 

this and that 

side of the state line.” 

(to be continued…and apologies for the spacing – I just can’t get it to work) 

Things to do that aren’t writing

I’ve been making jewellery.  On Thursday evenings at Inverlochy house in Aro Valley with jeweller Sue Shore.  Unfortunately, the course is finished now, but I hope to do more next year.  Last week, I made a pair of copper spaceship earrings, and the week before I made silver earrings, heating strips of silver until the surface melted into folds.  Polished up in the tumbler, they ended up looking a little like leather, I think.  It’s been enormous fun – all the hammering and soldering and sawing – a good antidote to sitting in front of a computer all day.

Here are the little ships, floating in space, and celebrating the fact the Voyagers science fiction poetry book made it into the Listener’s Top 100 books for the year.

Home

 

I always knew I was home because of the china ducks on the wall.  I bought them in the mid-eighties, from a second hand shop in Wellington, near the Manners St Post Office. The first thing I did in a new flat was to nail them up – in the lounge, if the flatmates were amenable, or in my own room if they weren’t. 

 The next thing I did was reassemble my bed.  The wire base had to be reconnected with its solid wooden headboard and footboard by means of a spanner.  This made me feel like an independent woman.  A woman who could do anything.  I could, for example, move heavy furniture around the room by bracing my feet against the wall and pushing things with my back.

 And I would set up my record player and play ‘Colossal Youth’, the Young Marble Giants’ only album (though there have been CD reissues and live versions since). 

 Eventually, I gave the ducks away, but found I missed them.  When I bought my house, the place Peter and I live in now, I bought the house a present – three china seagulls.  They fly up the living room wall, telling me I’m home.

James Kirkup

While I was in South Shields (in the North-East of England) in August, I was lucky enough to attend a memorial reading of James Kirkup’s poetry at the local museum.  James Kirkup was a prominent British poet who was born in South Shields in 1918 and died earlier this year.  My interest in him was sparked by my friend Jean, who sent me a book of his poems after noticing we were both born in South Shields.

James Kirkup wrote dozens of poetry collections, several volumes of autobiography, plays, haiku, tanka and many translations.  He was the UK’s first poet-in-residence at an academic institution (at Leeds University in 1950) and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.  He held numerous awards, including the Atlantic Award for Literature from the Rockefeller Foundation, the P.E.N. Club Prize for Poetry, the Scott-Moncrieff Prize for Translation and the Japan Festival Foundation Award. 

James Kirkup lived in Japan for many years, but spent the last part of his life in Andorra.  He was a conscientious objector during the second world war and one of his collections is titled ‘No More Hiroshimas’.  In “Not Cricket”, he writes about those experiences:

 

“I, too, remember brutal overseers

In the labour camps of Britain, men

Who could only relish power

If they could degrade, mock, punish

 

With violence as sad as any commandant’s

With anger that reveals the heart of war.”

and in “White Shadows”, he commemorates a man “annihilated in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima” who left only his white shadow:

 “Your shade – poor forked human creature – fled

Like a mist of dew on morning glories.  Your breath

Evaporated, taken away, lost soul, before

You even had time to scream.  Your shade was white.”

 Another collection, ‘The Body Servant’, contains a sequence of poems about parts of the body:

 “CHEST

Box, barrel, bastion

of the heart and lungs,

rigid with side-

winding ribs, yet

accordion-pleated,

bagpipes, bellows of bone

breathing like the sea…”

James Kirkup was gay and the publication of one of his poems in Britain’s Gay News in 1976 led to Britain’s last successful prosecution for blasphemy.  Amazingly, it is still banned in Britain today.  If you want to read it, you can find it here http://www.annoy.com/history/doc.html?DocumentID=100045, but the poet would probably rather be remembered for such poems as “A Correct Compassion” (dedicated to Mr. Philip Allison, after watching him perform a Mistral Stenosis Valvulotomy in the General Infirmary in Leeds), which begins:
“Cleanly, sir, you went to the core of the matter.
Using the purest kind of wit, a balance of belief and art,
You with a curious nervous elegance laid bare
The root of life, and put your finger on its beating heart.”

The memorial reading I attended was organised by Red Squirrel Press, who published one of Kirkup’s collections (Marsden Bay) recently and who have a reprint of one of his other books coming out soon.  At another Red Squirrel Press event, publisher Sheila Wakefield kindly pointed us to some places where we’d be likely to see red squirrels – fast being edged out of their habitat by the American grey squirrels (though I gather this is as much about diseases as it is about competition) – but alas, they proved elusive on our searches.  Next time, maybe. 

More about James Kirkup and Red Squirrel Press here: http://www.redsquirrelpress.com/index.php?marsden

and a nice painting of him here:

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/spcoll/leedspoetry/kirkup.htm

Voyagers – the tour

The Voyagers science fiction poetry anthology is being launched around New Zealand this month. A list of dates and readers (shamelessly copied from Tim Jones’ blog) follows. I will be reading a poem from the book at the Wellington Central Library on Monday 19 October 2009 and at Paraparaumu Library on Tuesday 20 October. The book’s received a great review in the latest Listener (10-16 October) – good to see it’s making a splash, as editors Mark Pirie and Tim Jones had quite a journey getting it published.

There are all sorts of notable Kiwi poets in the book – Fleur Adcock, Kevin Ireland, Fiona Kidman, Alistair Campbell, Meg Campbell, Alistair Paterson, David Eggleton – I could go on. Have a browse in your local bookshop, go to a reading, write some yourself!

Voyagers Tour Events: Venues and Readers

Dunedin Public Library, 14 Oct, 5:30 pm. Join Sue Wootton, James Dignan, Tim Jones, David Karena-Holmes and IP Director Dr David Reiter to kick off the national tour of Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand.

Dunedin, Circadian Rhythm Café, 15 Oct, 7 pm. Our event here will feature Sue Wootton, Jenny Powell, James Dignan, David Eggleton, David Karena-Holmes, Tim Jones and David Reiter.

Christchurch, Madras Café, 16 Oct, 5 pm, with Owen Marshall, James Norcliffe, David Gregory, Tim Jones and David Reiter

Wellington Central Library, 19 Oct, 5:30 pm, with Janis
Freegard, Robin Fry, Helen Rickerby (tbc), Jack Perkins, Rachel McAlpine, Michael O’Leary, Marilyn Duckworth, Tim Jones, Mark Pirie and David Reiter

Kapiti Coast, Paraparaumu Library, 20 Oct, 5:30 pm for 6 pm,
featuring Puri Alvarez, Nic Hill, Helen Rickerby, Michael O’Leary, Janis Freegard and David Reiter

Hamilton, TBC, 21 Oct

Auckland Central Library, 22 Oct, 5.30pm, , with Raewyn Alexander, Jacqueline Ottaway, Iain Sharp, Michael Morrissey, Anna Rugis, Alastair Paterson, Iain Britton, Thomas Mitchell, Janet Charman and David Reiter

Devonport, 24 Oct, 6:30 pm, Depot Arts Space, with Iain Britton, Alistair Paterson, Andrew Fagan, Janet Charman, Anna Rugis, Thomas
Mitchell and David Reiter.

Iceland

Everyone should go to Iceland. I’m trying to think of a synonym for cool. But, you know. That’s just how it is.

Left to right: an ice lagoon (glacier melting because of underground magma), a cafe we really liked in Reykjavik, shark meat drying at the shark museum