Showing posts with label bill manhire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bill manhire. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Tuesday Poem: Hotel Emergencies by Bill Manhire
I'm the hub editor this week - and I've chosen a chilling, thrilling recording of Bill Manhire reading Hotel Emergencies. Go here to hear... and find more wonderful poems in the sidebar chosen by Tuesday Poets.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Tuesday Poem: the asterisk machine by bill manhire (digital poem)
Go here.
____
I lived with bill's asterisks for at least a year after I downloaded his screen saver. There's something nonchalant at first about the flipping, disappearing, reappearing, waving crosses, but they soon come to seem regimented, formal, driven by some external pattern or command. Like soldiers on parade.
Then there's the asterisk, which at first seems unpredictable, a little flippant, playful even. But it's not that at all. If you look carefully, you'll see it stays in the same place: disappears behind the crosses, then reappears alternately. It seems exposed and then captive, and at the same time it is ineluctable.
Then there's the asterisk, which at first seems unpredictable, a little flippant, playful even. But it's not that at all. If you look carefully, you'll see it stays in the same place: disappears behind the crosses, then reappears alternately. It seems exposed and then captive, and at the same time it is ineluctable.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Feeling brave? The Best of the Best NZ Poems.
I bought this book the other day and am thrilled with it. Damien Wilkins' introduction is a delight, the poems are stunning examples of the best of NZ poetry taken from ten years of the Best NZ Poems website, and the write-ups at the back about the poet and the background of the chosen poem are fascinating.
There are old friends here e.g. Michele Amas' 'Daughter' and Andrew Johnson's 'The Sunflower', acquaintances I'm pleased to get to know better like James Brown's 'University Open Day', and complete strangers whose hands I've finally got to shake. I haven't, for example, engaged with Jenny Bornholdt's collection The Rocky Shore, and now know - after reading her unbelievable 'Fitter Turner' - I must. Anne Kennedy's 'Die die, live live' has reminded me to read more of this astonishing writer (more more). My hat is off to the editors for including poems that fill not just half a page (gems like Jennifer Compton's 'The Threepenny Kowhai Stamp Brooch') but seven pages, eight pages, nine pages ...
The Best of the Best NZ Poems is also simply an excellent book to pick up and hold and read, with its Faber-like cover, it's just-larger-than-the palm size, and open, clear layout. Reading it has been like swimming in the sea in Autumn - it's left me feeling fresh and vigorous, excited and brave.
Highly recommended.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Tuesday Poem: Nuptials by Bill Manhire
Take back your heart,
that tattooed star. Take back
take back: your this and that, your pale guitar.
Only my harmonica
knows who you are.
Take back the light on the water;
also the body, scar after scar.
There is a list of things -- the words
you might have said, etcetera --
long bridge and sky,
the single car,
each syllable and step, particular,
the near and far --
and oh, take back the traveller.
I have this paper music.
I have what remains.
I have what is muscular.
Light in your eyes, beloved,
like air in a mirror. Take back.
Take back. The bride is leaving America.
Only my harmonica
Knows who you are.
Bill Manhire was NZ's inaugural Poet Laureate, and has received the Prime Minister's Award for Poetry. He directs the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington - where I completed my novel The Blue - and has produced a number of collections of poetry.
Bill has been regarded for some time as a cool, ironic poet. He confesses to putting up 'lyrical foliage' when he writes - preferring privacy - but it is clear that the past two poetry collections have shifted into a warmer, more personal clearing. 'A man in a boat/rowing across the last half mile of twilight' is a line in one of the most moving poems ever about the death of a friend and being a New Zealander. It's called Opoutere.
Bill likes to take readers to that place where he believes poetry finds its true voice - not in the places we used to find it amongst lofty language and themes - but rather in the directness of music or casual conversation or a sign on the door of a hotel. Even at the very point where language peters out ...
The word 'etcetera' can make an appearance in Bill's poems and so do words like 'la la la'. He's not averse to rhyme, and there are often echoes of skipping rhymes, drinking songs and lullabies. Some of the poems in his latest collection The Victims of Lightning [VUP], where Nuptials can be found, are collaborations with composer Bill Meehan.
Bill's poetry has been called 'the anti-lyric lyric' and yet the truth is the banal is rendered significant (or at least provocative) - and sometimes moving and beautiful - because Bill hooks it and plays with it as one would a fish on a line: pulling it in, letting it out, pulling it in, until there it is on the deck beside you: brilliant and flapping. Or dead - with a mischievous look in its eye.
There are exquisite images in his poems - look at that 'tattooed star' of a heart, and up against Opoutere there is a ladder that 'longs to be lifted'. And yes, there are hearts in his poems, more than you'd think, and often guitars, and moons and wrists and children ... always have been.
Thirty years ago, Bill was my tutor in one of his early under-grad creative writing classes. I will never forget a poem he published back then called Declining the Naked Horse. It made us laugh, we who lived in cold Aro St flats and debated oxymorons and knew our Coleridge from our Plath. We repeated Bill's poem in the Student Union cafe over hotdogs and chips. Was this a poem? Really? Really?
My friends studying law and medicine thought not - dismissed it as fakery: an equine Emperor's new clothes. Those of us who tapped away on typewriters composing imagistic confessional things in the middle of the night, went off excited and tried to write something like it. We failed of course. Who could beat a naked horse coming into the room?
Nuptials is published here with the permission of Bill Manhire. More of his poems here.
Click on the quill for more Tuesday Poems. Bill is 'double-posted' on the TP hub this week but there are stacks more poems in the live blog roll in the Tuesday Poem sidebar.
that tattooed star. Take back
take back: your this and that, your pale guitar.
Only my harmonica
knows who you are.
Take back the light on the water;
also the body, scar after scar.
There is a list of things -- the words
you might have said, etcetera --
long bridge and sky,
the single car,
each syllable and step, particular,
the near and far --
and oh, take back the traveller.
I have this paper music.
I have what remains.
I have what is muscular.
Light in your eyes, beloved,
like air in a mirror. Take back.
Take back. The bride is leaving America.
Only my harmonica
Knows who you are.
Bill Manhire was NZ's inaugural Poet Laureate, and has received the Prime Minister's Award for Poetry. He directs the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington - where I completed my novel The Blue - and has produced a number of collections of poetry.
Bill has been regarded for some time as a cool, ironic poet. He confesses to putting up 'lyrical foliage' when he writes - preferring privacy - but it is clear that the past two poetry collections have shifted into a warmer, more personal clearing. 'A man in a boat/rowing across the last half mile of twilight' is a line in one of the most moving poems ever about the death of a friend and being a New Zealander. It's called Opoutere.
Bill likes to take readers to that place where he believes poetry finds its true voice - not in the places we used to find it amongst lofty language and themes - but rather in the directness of music or casual conversation or a sign on the door of a hotel. Even at the very point where language peters out ...The word 'etcetera' can make an appearance in Bill's poems and so do words like 'la la la'. He's not averse to rhyme, and there are often echoes of skipping rhymes, drinking songs and lullabies. Some of the poems in his latest collection The Victims of Lightning [VUP], where Nuptials can be found, are collaborations with composer Bill Meehan.
Bill's poetry has been called 'the anti-lyric lyric' and yet the truth is the banal is rendered significant (or at least provocative) - and sometimes moving and beautiful - because Bill hooks it and plays with it as one would a fish on a line: pulling it in, letting it out, pulling it in, until there it is on the deck beside you: brilliant and flapping. Or dead - with a mischievous look in its eye.
There are exquisite images in his poems - look at that 'tattooed star' of a heart, and up against Opoutere there is a ladder that 'longs to be lifted'. And yes, there are hearts in his poems, more than you'd think, and often guitars, and moons and wrists and children ... always have been.
Thirty years ago, Bill was my tutor in one of his early under-grad creative writing classes. I will never forget a poem he published back then called Declining the Naked Horse. It made us laugh, we who lived in cold Aro St flats and debated oxymorons and knew our Coleridge from our Plath. We repeated Bill's poem in the Student Union cafe over hotdogs and chips. Was this a poem? Really? Really?
My friends studying law and medicine thought not - dismissed it as fakery: an equine Emperor's new clothes. Those of us who tapped away on typewriters composing imagistic confessional things in the middle of the night, went off excited and tried to write something like it. We failed of course. Who could beat a naked horse coming into the room?
Nuptials is published here with the permission of Bill Manhire. More of his poems here.
Click on the quill for more Tuesday Poems. Bill is 'double-posted' on the TP hub this week but there are stacks more poems in the live blog roll in the Tuesday Poem sidebar.
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