The bliss of Mansfield

“What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe?...”  Katherine Mansfield.

Mansfield fan, scholar and poet, Elizabeth Welsh reports on the recent Katherine Mansfield symposium in Melbourne, and explains how reading the passage above aged 14 sent her in pursuit of the provocative, elusive, brilliant Mansfield. Her enthusiasm is, quite frankly, infectious. And the paper she delivered? ‘Mansfield’s ellipses as phenomenological markers of time’. You've got to be a fan...


She begins her report:

As a scholar, enthusiast and society member I was recently fortunate enough to attend Katherine Mansfield, the ‘Underworld’ and the ‘Blooms Berries’Symposium held in the UNESCO city of literature, Melbourne.  I was there to present a paper and to soak up all things Mansfield.  Having spent the last five years immersed in Mansfield studies I was in my element. ... more here at Morph magazine.

Elizabeth is our latest Tuesday Poet, too, by the way. You can catch her poetry here. 


And another enthusiast enthuses on the symposium .... this time it's my mate Maggie Rainey-Smith - a near-neighbour, novelist and Mansfield fan who lives within a stone's throw of Mansfield's family bach in Days Bay, Wellington. I guess where Elizabeth's report is 'in the... mind of', Maggie's is 'in the footsteps of':  

First, as I wandered down the wide pavements of Melbourne where the fat autumn leaves lay undisturbed, I marvelled at the difference and also the similarities between Wellington (birthplace of KM) and Melbourne, where the Symposium was being held.   I don’t think Katherine ever visited Melbourne, but it occurred to me that she would have loved it (as it is now), so stylish, cultural, and definitely a place to find a classy tea shop.  more on Beattie's Bookblog. 

Tuesday Poem: Mulling it over

 Mulling it over

   by Maggie Rainey-Smith

Cinnamon cardamom

                     almonds and wasps                      

plump imported raisins

Uncle’s aluminium pan

 the sunlight is thinner    

   Maria who is Greek is fasting 

                  orange peel floats                  

in the dark pool of wine

        I add sugar and schnapps   watch the liquid almost boil   ladle it into warm mugs

        we breathe in the alcohol   swat the wasps   remember the last Good Friday and one

       before             marvel at the yeasty buns          suck the sticky glaze from our fingers

           lift the pale crosses to our lips         knowing that Judas will betray Jesus   that  Pilate

           will wash his hands     that Veronica will wipe his face   a soldier will lance his side

           that he will chat to a couple of thieves just before he  dies                      but

drunk  on  nostalgia 

ripe  in our  loss

it  is  the  triumph

 of  the empty tomb

we  most  admire 

and   raise  our  

 hot mugs of wine

with relief,  glad

Thanks Maggie. Other bloggers are joining me in posting a Tuesday Poem this week [note this list is regularly updated]. The result is a rather wonderful online 'open mike' session or an informal poetry 'journal'. 


UPDATE [tuesday night]: I had a perfect 5 minutes this morning reading the Tuesday Poems and marvelling at the talent of poets Tim Jones, Harvey Molloy,  Claire Beynon, poet and publisher of poems Helen Rickerby, and author of 'Fifi Verses the World' Fifi Colston.   

South Island poets Penelope Todd and Paradoxical Cat joined us with a poem mid-way through the day, and Kay Cooke  slid her poem in three hours before midnight. I only discovered two overseas poets had posted: Premium T   and Vespersparrow today!

You'll also always find a poem on NZ Poet Laureate Cilla McQueen's blog. She's writing an astonishing poem in instalments  called Serial using images from the National Library. A new instalment is published every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. 


For my past Tuesday Poems see top right tab on the blog. 

Test-tube writing or messy sex?

'I do believe that pure literature created in the laboratory is a
vital part of a writing culture, but at the same time it's not necessarily better than that made through messy sex between the writer and the marketplace.'

This was part of a comment I made on the NZ lit blog Leafsalon a few days ago in response to a thought-provoking post by guest-blogger Maggie Rainey-Smith (author of About Turns and Turbulence.) It's a discussion on the conundrum voiced so well by 10CC (pictured here I hope):

'Art for Art's sake or Money for God's sake?'

Maggie compares Greg O’Brien’s Janet Frame Memorial Lecture delivered this month and a talk given by Sophie Hamley, an Australian literary agent. (Note, if you missed it, Greg's speech can be downloaded at the link above. It's worth reading. As one of our few Renaissance men - he's an artist, poet, essayist, art-writer, editor, illustrator, curator, philosopher - his erudite and elastic thinking is always an adventure.)


Here's some of Maggie's post:

'Greg talked about the ‘laboratory’ versus the marketplace. His lecture was all about the idea that the art of writing and being a writer is separate from that of being a published author. He quoted Roland Barthes in saying ‘the author performs a function, the writer an activity’....

... In contrast, Sophie Hamley was the guest speaker at the NZSA/Book Council/NZ Bookmonth-sponsored event. It was an international exchange – a literary luncheon if you will. Sophie is young, professional, savvy and most definitely passionate about writers and their publishers. She explained the difference between writer and author – the idea that if you want your work published and read, you need to understand what it is to be an author.'

Interesting stuff. First up in the comments is 'Islander' aka Keri Hulme:

'Maggie, this is a wonderfully thought-provoking post.I've been wrestling with the writer/author dichotomy for a couple of decades.I am a writer (I've been one since I was 7 and pasted together my first written work.) I am an author (I have 7 published books)…but what an author is supposed to be & do is now determined by market-driven factors with which I am not at all comfortable ....'

Other comments come courtesy of 'Kingi' 'Chris H' 'Unthank' and Greg O'B himself. Here's some of my take on it:

'Greg's speech is inspiring I think because it is a call to remind us to aim for brilliance, to take risks, to be 'absurdly ambitious' and to pursue writing for its own sake. He says: 'far better that writers aim for largeness of vision, dynamism and risk, and then fall short…' He was talking about writing awards there, but the comment applies as much to the 'marketplace'...

... My novel (The Blue) is a novel written with publishing in mind. For a while there it was a crazy hybrid of poetry and prose with a nebulous plot. I believe thinking of it as something I wanted published placed demands on it which made it better.

I think anything benefits from having demands made on it (people included) therwise they can be come self-centred and ingrowing and often irrelevant. Literature is partly about having a readership (as someone else commented here) because then a relationship between writer and reader is established and the work becomes something else again.

I do believe that pure literature created in the laboratory is a vital part of a writing culture, but at the same time it's not necessarily better than that made through messy sex between the writer and the marketplace.'

Comments welcome here, or go to Leafsalon and add to the discussion over there. Or if you'd rather, go to Youtube and watch 10CC in 1975 in the tightest flares I've seen in a long time. The final quote on this post can come from them:

Gimme your body gimme your mind
Open your heart pull down the blind
Gimme your love gimme it all
Gimme in the kitchen gimme in the hall

Which ties it all up rather neatly, really.