Tuesday Poem: All Together Now - A Digital Bridge for Auckland and Sydney

Kia Kotahi Rā: He Arawhata Ipurangi mō Tamaki Makau Rau me Poihākena         


In Auckland and in Sydney, in March and September last year, there were two poetry symposiums, and up online the nzepc (NZ Electronic Poetry Centre) built a DIGITAL BRIDGE between the two.

The site is PACKED WITH POEMS: text, video and audio from a stunning array of poets, and includes images and writings from the two meetings on either side of the Tasman.

The builders of this bridge appear to be NZEPC editors Michele Leggott and Brian Flaherty, Pam Brown and Martin Edmond. As they say on X-Factor - 'props' to you four. It's a stunning achievement. And what I love best is the fun everyone seems to be having!

I am especially in love with the poetry videos -- I was just thinking this week how we have too few of our NZ poets on film. Well here they are in full and glorious flight with the Aussies.

HERE it is. The videos here. Enjoy.

And another must-see Australian poet video is linked to from the Tuesday Poem hub - this time a performance poet posted by Australian Janet Jackson. This is poetry as you might not imagine it to be. Go and see.

Tuesday Poem: Oes and Spangs by Michele Leggott

A poem that has no beginning and no end ...

Click to view a digital treasure by former NZ Poet Laureate Michele Leggott, and Andrew Forsberg....

Leggott's sight is failing her so this magnificent language poet has been experimenting with digital poems.

Thanks to the NZ Electronic Poetry Centre. 

For more Tuesday Poems go here. I recommend Tuesday Poet Claire Beynon's blog especially - she has an interesting 'live' poem going on there, and she talks about how she and I got to meet finally after working on Tuesday Poem since March and reading each other's blogs for months before that. It really was terribly exciting. Still is.

lighter than the medium you walk on - cilla mcqueen is the new poet laureate

It's one of those days when there is poetry in the air. You hear of it being read out loud in broad daylight in a car park in Cuba Street, and later - as night closes in - you hear it aired in the large lit foyer of the National Library. And you find them gathered: poets who walk on water, poets nimble in the littoral, poets who hop with burnt feet on the sand, poets who sit on towels and watch the waves, poets who - I dunno - lick ice-creams?

Outgoing NZ Poet Laureate Michele Leggott is the car park reader it seems [TV3's resident poet Richard Langston caught her at it] - and she might have been standing near a fish shop. I'm not sure about that bit but it fits. She reads now at the National Library, 'Poetry is a crayfish or two packed in wood shavings flying home in a chilly box with my name on it...'

Then it's time for the announcement of the newest laureate, Cilla McQueen from Bluff, whose first meeting with a live poet was at a bus-stop. His name was James K Baxter. When she's called to accept the tokotoko of laureateship, there's a small bashful pause in proceedings. At last she steps from the crowd, quietly in a kilt, and takes the tokotoko and speaks to it: 'Bless you, Hone, I know you're in there somewhere.'

All around me the poets and others make sounds of the sea: yes, yes, Cilla McQueeeeeen. Richard Langston is standing next to me and 'yessing' along with the rest. He says that when he lived down south she was one of the big three of poetry along with Brian Turner and the late Hone Tuwhare, 'the three of them like Easter Island statues.'

McQueen reads a handful of poems then. One of the lines goes: 'poetry takes you apart, puts you back different', and another - about a lake - says, 'it is a matter of ensuring you are lighter than the medium you walk on'. Ah-ha! They do walk on water, then, or aspire to - insects in this case. Poets, too, perhaps - not only Leggott and McQueen and other kiwi lit-luminaries but the likes of Faber & Faber poet and former poetry editor, Christopher Reid. He's standing off to one side watching. We talk for a moment, him and I, about his friend Ted Hughes.

There's more poetry on Friday - stacks of it - everywhere. It's National Poetry Day. You might find Leggott in a car park somewhere down South if you're lucky, and you'll certainly find more poets in Cuba Street - this time in Cuba Mall as part of an all-day poetry marathon. If I had my way, I'd get to Unity's poetry readings at 12.30, Christopher Reid at the IIML in the afternoon and the launch of Tim Upperton's accomplished first collection A House on Fire at Palmerston North City Library at 7.

However, I might just have to stay working at Rona Books in Eastbourne and sell poetry instead. It does happen.

Postscript: It's Cilla - more from the NZ Poet Laureate site.

Mirabile Dictu

Reviewed this marvellous book of poetry this morning on National Radio. Here's the link.

If you don't want to listen, here are my notes tidied up and joined into sensible sentences...

This is Michele Leggott's 7th book. She is the inaugural NZ Poet Laureate [2007-9] and has just finished her term. She is losing her sight to retinitis pigmentosa. She has spoken movingly of this in her previous collection AS FAR AS I CAN SEE: "I give what is left of the light of my eyes, I have fallen out of a clear sky."

Mirabile Dictu is a year in the life of the Laureate. She wrote a poem a week. At 154 pages, her AUP publisher pointed out it is the same length as a novella. Some poems are as long as eight pages. He says that as Poet Laureate she's gained confidence and knows now she has our attention.

BLINDNESS: The poems capture the darkening world of Michele Leggott and show how she copes: learns to touch type, uses a white stick, deals with grief, travels around NZ and to Italy, tracks the history of her family – joins with family and friends in funerals/weddings/feasts. And writes poems.

POETIC EMPORIUM [from the Greek emporos – a journey]: This is how Michele Leggott describes this collection. It starts with a bunch of poets heading to Hone Tuwhare’s funeral and ends with a wedding. A host of other poets are hauled in by name along the way. There are literal journeys and then the poet's interior journey from light to darkness and then back to another kind of vision.

The poems overlap, breathe on each other, are linked by themes and images [the sky, birds, water, singing.] There is a development through the collection from the early despair of the title poem Mirabile Dictu - "only now/has my hand found the stones/I could add to the smooth interior /of my despair" – to the final poems which are lightened/enlightened and show her rediscovery of the miraculous including Wonderful to Relate [Mirabile Dictu translated] which is about a family reunited at the wedding.

In between there is the "breathing world" which is lit by "flashes of brilliance" and the fire/ahi of poetry and inspiration. "Not a white stick but a sky", she says. The sky to Leggott is light and inspiration and beauty and the miraculous and is embodied in the sky-blue tokotoko which she carries as Laureate.

‘here is the light/here is the darkness/look between them and sing/for we are the breathing world’

FINDING POEMS: they are in pockets, tucked inside books, ‘sometimes you meet the title/walking home and the first lines/present themselves at the corner …’ Leggott follows a trail into the university clock tower to track down two elephant skulls and writes a poem about them. There are snatches of language everywhere, and her delight in the history of words : in one poem, people look for vegetables while she looks for the latin word for "really big flower".

TE KIKORANGI: this is the name of Leggott's exquisite sky-blue Tokotoko [here they both are on the left]. An engraved pool cue, its power is an important part of this collection. It features as a CUE to write, an INSPIRATION [its name means the sky] and a PROD: in one wonderfully humorous poem reminiscent of Tuwhare, the stick tells her to write a poem and then goes "back to cooking up/a feed of mussels from Kawhia."

Leggott doesn't use punctuation, instead the lines have gaps which act like the breath in before the rush of words out. These poems have beauty and humour, they sing and rage, they are full of the serendipity and miraculousness of life. Read them and marvel.

G-g-g-glorious

The NZ Poet Laureate website has a great write up on Michele Leggott's addition to the wonderful laureate series and the launch of her collection of poetry Mirabile Dictu which I talked about two posts ago. I am gnashing my teeth even more now having seen how wonderful the launch was because I missed it due to circumstances beyond my control.


Gnash. Gnash. Gnash.


But my good humour [and my teeth] have been restored somewhat by news that my friend Fifi Colston is about to launch her new book for children. It's called Glory, it's published by Scholastic and will be launched at the Storylines Festival.


I know a number of young Fifi fans who'll be rushing to read this book including my daughter Issy who's at the front of the photo with Fifi at the launch of her previous children's novel, Janie Olive, in 2005. Now that was a fabulous event I did make it to - there were young chefs, firefighters and bottles of bubbly...

Stranger than fiction

It's one of those mornings when you wake up and hear something on the radio stranger than fiction. And it makes your brain race - imagining the girl, the falling, the feelings she'll have about being the only one, the reaction of those that waited for her, the sort of life she'll have now ... this girl who lived.


On a more selfish note, I missed the launch of the Poet Laureate Michele Leggott's new book Mirabile Dictu last night [something at my daughter's school I had to sort...] And I am furious about it because Leggott's events are magical word-blown events that should not be missed. Her book is astonishing as always. I review it in a couple of weeks on Radio NZ's Nine to Noon. Here's an extract that [strangely in the way of poetry - which is in itself stranger than fiction] echoes the start of this post:

cyclones have names earthquakes

numbers and in the carnage

of zeros stretching from ocean to sky

one bird falls to earth

A livid laureate - Duffy's first poem

Carol Duffy is the first female UK poet laureate in the job's 341-year history and already she's caused a stir with her first official poem Politics .

The poem is about the issue of political expenses which is raging in the UK. The Guardian says Duffy, who was appointed last month, has written 'a powerful, passionate commentary on the corrosiveness of politics on politicians and the ruinous effect on idealism.'

Go Carol Duffy! More here. Meanwhile, NZ has a female poet laureate at the moment - the wondrous Michele Leggott who is about to leave the annually-appointed position to allow another to step up.

Here's a poem of NZ laureates and an earlier blog post on Michele's work .

Eating my words

This gorgeous thing is a word cloud of my novel The Blue. The sound you can hear is my words being eaten. Only yesterday I suggested Rachael King's new hobby was a little bizarre, but a brief squizz at Wordle and I was smitten. Within seconds it had eaten the whole manuscript of The Blue and burped up this (click on it for a fuller picture.)

It's like one of those Michele Leggott poems which you make your own way around - anything goes and, strangely, any variation works. In this case, whatever combination and shapes the words make expresses appositely what's in The Blue.

I love
Ed and Friar with said in between butting into a vertical Lilian,
and
air mother see men water,
and
whale moment,
and
boy looking need another still sea.

I could spend hours analysing it (surely it's the shape of an island, or perhaps a whale?) I'm surprised about three things at this early stage: why none of the whaling terms or equipment etc are mentioned e.g. 'harpoon', why 'chicken' isn't there and neither is 'Arapawa Island'. Or maybe they are, I just can't see them yet.

Sorry, Rachael (pardon me while I swallow). I'd love to see the word cloud of The Sound of Butterflies.

Our Poet Laureate: every bravery coming

"Do you see me? I am falling out of a blue sky where my days were as dancers in a maze, sure-footed and smiling . . .
Then a pair of taxis went head to head in a distant country so suddenly I didn’t see the difference but it was a wide white threshold. When I couldn’t thread a needle, when I could no longer see the faces of my children or trim their nails, when the colour of money disappeared (and I bare-headed in the midday sun) then falling began and I cried out against it. . .
. . .There is a way, I said, but this is only the first gate. I give what is left of the light of my eyes, I have fallen out of a clear sky. "
from Michele Leggott's poetry collection As Far as I can See (AUP 1999. )



Leggott is the first NZ Poet Laureate (before that they were called Te Mata Laureates). She has a blue tekoteko to prove it. She is rapidly losing her eyesight to the condition called retinitis pigmentosa but she continues to write and to rage.

Her poetry is a visceral rush or a feather falling, it's the 'ear' in heart and the gaps between words where people fall. If you'd only gone to her presentation at the Auckland Writers Festival, and nothing else, you'd have still left satisfied. When Leggott talks you can feel poems in the air whispering, screaming, laughing, there for the plucking. She has to print them out in extra large font now and reads standing. There is still nothing to prepare the listener for the shock of the poem quoted at the start of this post. That final line: 'I have fallen out of a clear sky.'


Audacious? Leggott invented the word. She's written poems that have circumnavigated an art gallery, turned in circles, been tucked into boxes and pop-up books. With her sight dimming she's turning to a more digital mode of expression. Now her words can actually move. On the Auckland stage she showed us a heart box she'd made years before with a felt heart inside it: heartfelt.

And pictured here a piece she made for Valentine's Day once with, she said, all that needed to be said about love: 'Every bravery coming stars love's heartfelt red.' For more on her try Poet Andrew Johnston's Landfall review and the Poet Laureate website where Leggott talks about her projects and the Auckland festival.

And here's one of those digital poems.

I have owned Leggott's collection Milk & Honey for a while now, I bought As Far as I can See in Auckland. I try and read it every day to be reminded of the excitement and energy and courage of words.