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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.
are now on Flickr!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/34987572@N08/sets/72157613216592966/
There’s a review of AUP New Poets 3 by Cy Mathews in the latest Takahe. Having failed miserably to upload a copy, here are a couple of quotes:
”Wellington’s Janis Freegard stands out with the easy musicality of her poems and prose poems, amongst which are moments of quirky brilliance…”
“At times these narratives risk becoming a little cutesy in their quirky, mannered eccentricity, but for the most part they are very enjoyable…”
“…”The Continuing Adventures of Alice Spider” is an especially interesting experiment in serial prose poetry, for the most part realistic, but veering now and then into more surrealistic flights of fancy…”
Where a new year starts and ends is always a little arbitrary. I’m very happy to celebrate anyone’s idea of where that point is – be it Matariki, Chinese New Year, one’s own birthday or whenever. And it does give a great opportunity to reflect on what’s happened over the past twelve months and think about what we want out of the next.
I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions so much as compile a sort of “Statement of Intent” ie a (fairly short and simple) plan for the year with a set of realistic goals. Things like “finish third draft of novel” or “spend more time playing the ukulele*”. The key I think is to give yourself something to aim for – a challenge – without making it too unlikely (“win Booker prize” is only going lead to disappointment…)
Goals are, of course, reviewable over the year as circumstances change. And I like to have longer term plans: three year or five year plans, that can be a bit more aspirational (“learn to play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on ukulele” perhaps. Or perhaps not.)
I love to make lists (not shopping lists, though – I don’t like to feel constrained at the supermarket, preferring the freedom of putting things that take my fancy into the basket and forgetting whatever it was I went in for in the first place). One of the best things about a list is that sense of achievement and satisfaction you can get from crossing things off when you’ve done them. This is where I find it helpful to break goals down into small, manageable chunks. “Finish third draft of novel” can become “read the whole thing out loud to myself again”, “rewrite second half of chapter twelve”, “consider whether I really need character A” and so forth (“learn chords to ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’…”).
Friday is (generally) my writing day and usually I will make myself a list during the week so that when I get to Friday, I’m not sitting there wondering what to work on. It will have things like “finish goldfish poem” and “find a book about amphibians” on it. If I get to Friday and end up writing something for this blog instead, that’s fine. My list will still be there for Saturday or can be incorporated into next Friday’s or I can abandon it altogether if I think of something better. The point is, it’s good to have a plan. Knowing what you want to achieve is the first step towards achieving it.
This is my favourite time of the year: between summer solstice (winter, if you’re in the northern hemisphere) and my birthday in mid January. It feels like a sort of limbo time, tidying up last year’s leftovers and getting ready for the next great adventure. It feels full of promise and opportunity. And satisfaction that I can tick off a considerable portion of what was on last year’s list. Hey. Ho. Let’s Go!
* Peter bought me a new ukulele for Christmas – my old one has been inoperable for some years now, but I’d just like to point out that I was playing it (badly) many years before it became fashionable…
Neil was twenty when I met him, twenty-two when he died. Sometimes his hair was blond, sometimes green; often he had no hair at all. He had shaved eyebrows & wore black eye-liner under his eyes. Safety-pins adorned his ears. Whenever I saw him, he was smiling.
Neil wore black trousers & torn shirts. He made his own badges: ‘Drug-takers against the bomb’. Only once did I see him wearing shoes.
He often talked about killing himself, but the date kept changing so we didn’t take him too seriously. He planned to take something with him when he went, like the Auckland Central Police Station. He was wanted on charges of possession, shoplifting, protesting against the Springbok Tour. He wrote graffiti.
For a while, he travelled with others in an old bus. I’d see him sometimes at parties or pubs. I was in Barnacle Bill’s with a couple of friends once, looking for a guy who sold pills. When they asked Neil if he’d seen him, he pulled the guy’s suicide note out of his pocket. We didn’t stay long after that.
The second-to-last time I saw Neil, he’d come up from Stratford, where he’d been staying. He’d changed his name to Null. He wasn’t working or getting the dole & owned nothing but the clothes he was wearing. His black dog, Umbrella, was with him, hungry but uncomplaining. Neil was living off the cold pies & doughnuts he took from factory canteens at night. He didn’t spend too long in any one town.
The night I saw him, I was at a restaurant in Auckland with a group of friends – a farewell dinner for some-one leaving town. One of the group disappeared for a while & I went out to check he wasn’t throwing up in the gutter. I found him in a dark doorway, talking to Neil. The three of us went back into the restaurant & some-one ordered Neil some garlic bread. (We’d finished our meals; he hadn’t eaten.)
I saw him a few days later, in the quad at ’Varsity with Umbrella. We talked for a while. I never saw Neil again.
When I heard on the news some months later that a punk anarchist had blown himself to pieces at the Wanganui Computer Centre, I wondered. The name was released the next day: twenty-two year-old Neil Roberts from Stratford. It wasn’t a surprise, but it was still a shock. I listened to the details: his remains were scattered over 65 metres; an intact finger was found. A recent tattoo said: “This punk won’t see twenty-three. No future.” He left a graffito nearby: “We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity. Anarchy Peace Thinking.”
Days later, I read the newspapers in the local library. They described a polite, friendly person dressed in punk clothes, originally from Auckland, where his dog had now been sent. I had to face it. Neil was dead. Long live anarchy.
© Janis Freegard
(Neil Roberts died on 18 November 1982. I wrote this a couple of years later.)
Tim Jones (author of Transported and various other books) has reviewed AUP New Poets 3 on his blog. If you’re interested, you can read it here:
http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/2008/10/book-review-aup-new-poets-3.html
Finally the day comes when a poem matures, announces it’s leaving home and sets off into the world to seek its fortune. Once I’ve waved goodbye, it’s hard to control what happens to them, but I like to check in now and then to see how they’re doing.
I was pleased to find one of my poems (“Three Hummingbirds”) on a photography and poetry website recently. Great! I thought. Until I realised someone had seen fit to change the title, remove the stanza numbers and delete the middle stanza altogether! Oh and my name was spelt incorrectly (but I’m used to that). I don’t believe it’s OK to change someone’s work in this way (and I expect it’s a breach of copyright). I chose that title for a reason, the stanza numbers are an integral part of the poem and the middle stanza provides a clear link between the other two. I’m following this up with the person whose site it is and hopefully can get it remedied. (If it gets fixed, I’ll put up a link.)
If you want to read the poem in its true and proper form, you can see it here on the Poetry NZ website: http://www.poetrynz.net/archives/issue-27/
The other thing I found on the net recently was the first review I’ve seen of AUP New Poets 3. It’s from Trevor Reeves in Southern Ocean Review and if you’re interested, you can read it here: http://www.arts.org.nz/rev49.htm I must say I’m impressed with Southern Ocean Review’ broad coverage of poetry published in New Zealand with short reviews of pretty much every poetry book there is, as far as I can see.
I was a little surprised to be described as a “fresh new voice from the Auckland region” given that I’ve spent the last 25 years in Wellington and most of my poems in the collection are set in Wellington – but I expect that was because Auckland University Press is the publisher. And I did live in Auckland for five years in my late teens, so I’m quite happy to be considered a JAFA. Trevor goes on to say my work “deals mainly with spiders” which is an interesting interpretation. To me, the Alice Spider character I write about has always been human, but I know some people see her as an actual spider.
Anyway, there we have it. Poems which now have a life of their own. All I can do is hover in the background. Like a spider.
(i)
There’s a small garden behind the kitchen, fringed with ceramic cows. The earth is rich with characters and concepts. You can dig them up with a trowel, like potatoes.
Poems, on the other hand, are plucked from the branches of a tall tree in the front yard. You need a ladder for the best ones (or a giraffe).
(ii)
Mostly they sneak up from behind and tap you on the shoulder when you’re thinking about something else.
(iii)
At the top of the rickety stairs, the dusty attic is filled with papers, tended by a solemn man. When you need an idea, he’ll hand you one wordlessly.
(iv)
There’s a service you can subscribe to – based in Estonia and recommended by Andres Ehin. Ideas are delivered weekly – dropped down the chimney by carrier pigeon.
(v)
You need the skill of holding your breath under water – dive down deep into the still lake. A wooden chest sits on the silty bottom. If you can open it (and only the chosen can), every idea you’ll ever need will be inside.
Janis Freegard
If you didn’t get a chance to attend this year’s Janet Frame Memorial Lecture at Te Papa, you can read it here http://www.authors.org.nz/images/JanetFrameLecture08.pdf There was also an extract in the Listener and it’s being discussed on Leafsalon here http://www.leafsalon.co.nz/archives/001172literature_for_the_literary.html#more
Greg O’Brien had some very interesting things to say about the difference between a writer (someone who writes) and an author (someone whose work is published) and cited Janet Frame as someone who retired at 65 from being an author (ie from being published) but continued throughout her life to be a writer. I like this distinction. I’ve always thought of writing as a verb: something I do, rather than an identity: “being a writer” (a noun, something a person is). It is the process or activity of writing that’s important. You only stop being a writer if you stop writing.
Greg also talked about the marketplace – he prefers to see literature as a laboratory. I particularly liked the following:
“Literature is not a track event. Everyone is not running in the same direction—nor should they be. If literature is a race then it is one where, when the starting gun is fired, the participants run off each in their own direction. It is only arts funders and prize-givers who line writers up on some invented racetrack, facing the same ribbon.”
This reminds me of the philosophers’ football match in a Monty Python sketch, where, as soon as the whistle blows, the philosophers wander off away from the ball, to contemplate it all.
A couple of days ago, at my poetry group, we were lamenting the limited range of poetry publishers in New Zealand relative to the seemingly vast numbers of poets seeking publication and the fact that some of our few publishers are booked up several years in advance or buried under huge piles of unread manuscripts (with frustratingly long response rates as a result). More small presses would be lovely, but poetry is hardly going to pay the mortgage. In the meantime, that track event continues, each of us meandering off in our own little directions, atomising our verbal structures (I was very chuffed to get a passing mention in Greg’s lecture). Here’s to the laboratory!
OK, this blog is so far totally self-indulgent, but I will endeavour to make it more interesting as I go along. In the meantime – I was interviewed by Lynn Freeman on the Arts on Sunday programme on National Radio today. It’s an interesting experience being interviewed. Usually, I probably take a bit of time to consider my answer before I give it, but when it’s radio and you can’t really have those great, long silences, you have to take more of a stream-of-consciousness approach and fill the gap with whatever inanity springs to mind. My friends say I didn’t do too badly, but then they’re a kind and forgiving bunch. Lynn was lovely and I did feel very at ease with her. But of course, I came away thinking of all those things I could have said, like, I don’t know, how I’m a great Lewis Carroll fan and have a tattoo of the Cheshire cat. If you’d like to listen to the interview, it’s on the Radio NZ website for the next 4 weeks – here http://www.radionz.co.nz/audio/national/art/writers_block_-_janis_freegard
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