Jackie Kay – ‘What you can survive makes you stronger’

One of the highlights of the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 2013 for me has been discovering the work of British author Jackie Kay. How did I manage to live so long and not come across this woman? She is a multi-award winning poet, short story writer, memoirist and novelist. She writes for children. She’s also one of the most endearing, funny, exuberant people I have come across. When she walks in a room, the energy lifts. You can’t help but be drawn to her bright smile and her genuine warmth.

Jackie Kay’s writing contains the bittersweet wisdom of someone who’s faced big challenges in their life. She was born to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father then adopted by a white couple with Communist Party affiliations. In 1960s Glasgow this was unusual to say the least. This, together with her candid sexuality, means she’s faced prejudice from many quarters. Throughout it all, she’s stood by what she believes in. Jackie Kay is one amazing woman.

Her latest collection of short stories, Reality, Reality is brilliant. You’ve just got to read it. I bought it off the stand at the Festival and wolfed it down. The title story introduces a woman who performs daily cook-offs against imaginary competitors to the blinking red eye of her security alarm. At her session, Kay read from ‘Those are not my clothes’, a tragically funny story of an elderly woman in rest home. The author says she’s drawn to older women characters because their stories tend to disappear under the radar.

When I spoke to Jackie Kay, she told me she was on her way down to Christchurch on a kind of pilgrimage. Her adoptive parents met in Christchurch at the Coffee Pot above the Communist Party Bookshop. She was looking forward to finding the street they lived in which has apparently just been released from behind the Red Zone. In addition, her old neighbour from Glasgow is a psychologist and is now living in our fair city.

If you see Jackie, make her welcome. You’ll be very pleased you did.

 

Fleur Adcock returns to poetry and New Zealand: an interview

Fleur Adcock is a legend in New Zealand literary circles. She is one of our favourite poets and, although she has spent much of her life in England, her popularity is as strong as it ever was judging by the long queues at the book signing session.

For ten years Fleur Adcock didn’t write poetry. Instead she ’fell in love with facts and wanted to extract them and not deal with any of that airy fairy stuff you think up in your head.’ Her latest collection, Glass Wings, marks the end of this creative drought.

I was lucky enough to grab a few minutes of her time after her session.

Are you glad to be back on New Zealand soil?

I’m feeling rather overwhelmed at being back in New Zealand. I’ve been here for about five weeks so I’ve had time to get to know it again and get to know people again and remember how beautiful it is. Auckland is so beautiful – all the trees and the vegetation – and Wellington is kind of home so I do have those connections. Then I’m off again but this time I’m definitely going to come back sooner.

I really enjoyed your latest collection of poems, Glass Wings. Ancestry is an important theme running through your work?

Yes, it’s becoming more and more so in people’s lives but this happens as people get older. They start taking an interest in their ancestors. I often find when people say the kids aren’t interested, just wait twenty years. They’ll get around to it.

In the session you read your poem The Chiffonier which was published in 1986 and at the time hit a chord with many people who went out to buy The Listener especially to read this poem. It deals with the idea of rootlessness and being torn between places.

You realise you can’t substitute things for people but things are important too because they are symbolic of people. They remind us.

You spoke about the state of the libraries in England. Since the earthquakes in Christchurch, libraries have proved to be important places for people to come to. The thought that many libraries in England closing is quite frightening to me.

It is appalling. I suppose it will start creeping back again and they’ll realise what they’ve done. I think they’re trying to find substitutes and set up places in supermarkets and things but not in actual library buildings. These are often listed buildings, buildings that have been donated. There are so many other uses libraries can be put to. They can always extend their range and find ways of keeping them going - if they wish.

You said searching though the internet or on a computer is very different from searching for books in the library.

Just browsing you suddenly see an interesting looking volume down on the bottom shelf and you pick it up and you open it and it hits you with a new experience, a new realm to explore.

Did you enjoy being a librarian?

Some of the time, yes. I got stuck in cataloguing for six or seven years in the Foreign Commonwealth Office and that was very depressing because we had to keep training new, young cataloguers and I was the only one who could do it until I  finally trained someone who really liked it and she took over. Then I went into the reference section and I could do research and the things I like doing now. Answering questions from readers who had written it. That’s what I like doing – finding things for people.

Are you writing poetry now?

Yes, well not at this moment. I haven’t written anything for the last month. It’s impossible because I never stop talking. I’m in the middle of a new sequence and I’ve been doing some research for that about my father’s early days in New Zealand as a teenager so when I get home, as I have to call it, I’ll get on with that.

You mentioned the term ‘reclusive’. Is it difficult for someone who loves to spend time quietly working on their own, to come out to writers festivals?

No, I like doing things like that as long as there’s a home to go back to in the end. As long as you don’t have to get back to the husband. I can’t deal with that. I can’t wake up in the morning and have someone around the house because a lot of my thoughts, my ideas and impulses occur when I’m fresh when I wake up in the morning. It just wouldn’t work if I had to converse over breakfast.

• Visit the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival website.
• Follow our Festival coverage on the blog.

 

Sylvie Simmons – Mr Cohen Revealed

Sylvie Simmons, rock music writer and biographer, was in conversation with Noelle McCarthy about her latest work, I’m your man- The life of Leonard Cohen.

Simmons was born in London and went to a privileged girls’ school in which she was trained to come out to the Colonies and teach us how to embroider and place the correct cutlery on the dinner table. The thought of this repulsed her so she wrote a long list of all the jobs she could think of and narrowed the list down to three:

• a spy (she rejected this idea because it would be ‘working for the man’),
• a BBC Anchorman (until she realised she didn’t have a penis)
• and a rock journalist.

She chose the latter and has gone on to become a world-renowned music biographer. As Noelle McCarthy said:

Sylvie Simmons’ books blow your mind. She doesn’t just write about people. She effects an introduction.

Leonard Cohen is currently receiving a ‘tsunami of love and attention’. It seems everyone everywhere is talking about him. In fact, throughout the Writer’s Festival we have heard Leonard’s dulcet tones over every loudspeaker in the venue so much so I’m beginning to feel if I hear ‘there’s a crack, a crack in everything’ one more time, I may just crack myself. He is touring, he has found happiness and ‘he wears a grin like an eight year old boy’.

Life wasn’t always so easy for the poet/singer/songwriter. In his younger years, Cohen suffered bouts of severe depression, shyness and perfectionism. He found performance very, very difficult. He says his depression wasn’t a matter of having the blues, it was ‘what can I do to get me through this day’.

Simmons spoke about Cohen’s love of women ‘horizontally and vertically’, his faith, his deep spirituality which drove him to spend five years in a monastery, his fascination with hypnotism and his love of his grandchild. Even within this short session, she breathed life into the legend of the artist. When she spoke I could see him standing in his kitchen, chewing up bread to feed to a baby bird that had fallen out of a nest in his garden.

Makes me want to go out and buy a blue raincoat.

• Sylvie is in action tonight in a sold out session – performing with Don McGlashan.
• Visit the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival website.
• Follow our Festival coverage on the blog.

 

“My subject is war…

…And the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.”

That quote from Wilfred Owen is on the monument to the war poets in Westminster Abbey. A line from Owen also provides the title for the 2010 book by Wellington author and academic Harry Ricketts - Strange meetings: the poets of the Great War.

Owen has always seemed the most tragic of the war poets, dying as he did just days before the end of the war. Is it true that his mother received the news of his death just as the bells were ringing to celebrate the Armistice?

The Great War has contined to provide the subject matter for some wonderful fiction, including the Regeneration trilogy by Pat Barker. The treatment of poet Siegfried Sassoon for shell shock  at Craiglockhart Hospital is one of the major themes of the novel, and Sassoon’s fictionalised autobiography, the Sherston trilogy,  is worth reading. Start with Memoirs of a fox hunting man.

Barker returned to the subject of the Great War in Life class and Toby’s room, both up to her usual standard.

A. S. Byatt’s The children’s book has Rupert Brooke (‘ the handsomest man in England’) as a bit player and ends with the return of the soldiers from the war. In a book of many fascinating (or irritating, depending on how you feel about staying on the subject,) digressions, Byatt’s listing of the names the soldiers gave to the trenches is among the most unusual.

Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong featured in the Big Read, which aimed to find Britain’s favourite book, and on Best British books 1980-2005. It’s sold a lot of copies, but it’s not one of my favourites; although Eddie Redmayne was in the T.V. series, which is a definite reason to watch it.

Do you have a favourite piece of fiction set in the Great War?

 

Auckland Writers and Readers Festival – a literary bubble bath

Only one month to go until I can plunge into the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival and immerse myself in four wonderful  book-filled days overflowing with author talks, workshops, book signings and gala events. Glorious! It will be like sinking into a literary bubble bath and I’m going to enjoy every minute of it.

This year I’m looking forward to seeing Anita Desai. I first came across this author back in the 80s when she wrote A Clear Light of Day and was moved by her deceptively simple story of a brother and sister in post-partition Dehli. Desai has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize three times. I’ve just read The Artist of Disappearance and it’s apparent the author has lost none of her skill. Her stories are insightful and her characters stay with me. I hope to interview her so keep checking the blog in May if you’d like to hear more about this talented writer.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon is also on my most-wanted-to-meet list. He has written a trilogy of novels around the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and his website list of favourite books is similar to mine so I feel we may be kindred spirits. He writes stories ‘in exchange for a penny, a smile or a tear, and a little of your time and attention’ in which he combines elements of the great nineteenth century novels he admires with twentieth century cinema, multimedia and popular motifs.

Kate Atkinson will be there. Need I say more!

Poet Fleur Adcock has released a new collection, Glass Wings. The poems explore themes of identity, memory and what it means to belong (or not). High Tide in the Garden and The Inner Harbour are favourites of mine. I’m really looking  forward to learning more about the woman who is one of New Zealand’s most influential poets.

I hope to find a few surprises at the Festival too. I like to go along to an event I know nothing about and learn something new. Last year I saw Chris Bourke talk about the Auckland music scene in the 1960s and now have a whole new appreciation of Kiwi jazz. This year I could explore live book valuing, war correspondence, or cricket. It’s the variety of the events on offer that makes the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival such a great occasion.

Twenty six days and counting down! I might even see you there.

 

Several New Zealand authors and one fan

Unless you have been hiding under a very mossy rock, you probably know it’s New Zealand Book Month. In honour of this, I have been pondering who it is I most enjoy out of our wealth of wonderful writers and why.

The way I decided to do this is with some personal experiences and then a quote or two:

Janet Frame: I cried when I first read about her time spent in ‘insane asylums’, and when I watched Angel at my Table. I recently did the pilgrimage to her home in Oamaru, and I sat in the car outside in the rain because we had missed the opening hours. I imagined her playing in the yard with her siblings… such a simple home for such a wondrous and complex mind.

…and I planted carrot seed that never came up, for the wind breathed a blow-away spell; the wind is warm, was warm and the days above burst un-heeded…

Hone Tuwhare: His lust for life, women, the land and just joy itself inspires me often and his passion for food I well understand.

My love is really iron when she cries and softer than a pound of butter when she kisses me…

Keri Hulme: She’s a polarising author, but The Bone People was wondrous for me, her use of words, description of the landscape and the people who lived in it were so evocative to me and when I travelled to the southern West Coast after that, it made all the more sense.

The wind has dropped. It is growing very dark. The shag line has gone back to Maukiekie, bird after bird beating forward in the wavering skein. The waves suck at the rocks and leave them reluctantly. We will come back ssssoooo… they hiss from the dark.

Maurice Gee: I’m a big fan of  Salt – Hari and Pearl are great characters finding their way and themselves in a dystopian land.

She did not wake at the end of the dream. She slept more deeply. She did not remember or forget it. It stayed inside her. When she woke in the morning she was different, but she did not know why, or why the first thought she had was: I am Pearl.

Kate De Goldi: I love her style of writing and her vivid descriptions draw you into the lives of her characters. The 10 pm Question was shamefully on my list of must reads for years, and when I finally read it, I felt the guilt of someone who should know better.

For someone so hefty Alma was surprisingly light on her feet. The flesh around her middle and arms shook alarmingly when she bossa novaed; sweat gathered in the folds of her chins, and her breath came fast and rattling; but her feet tripped and darted as daintily as any slim-line ballerina.

Denis Glover:

The Magpies is such an iconic Kiwi poem, I wonder if we we almost don’t hear its beauty and craft anymore…

When Tom and Elizabeth took the farm
The bracken made their bed
and Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said

 

Poetry as public art: get your poem published on Victoria Street

A piece of Denis Glover’s poetry – currently on display at the “A Caxton Miscellany” Christchurch Art Gallery exhibition.

This just in – a chance to have your poem on a Christchurch street. Literally.

Your poem will need to reference some aspect of the history or use of Victoria Street and surrounds. It must be entered by 23 March 2013 and the commissioned poems will earn $1000.00 ex GST each. The following resources will help:

Victoria Street

• Photos of Victoria Street
• Heritage items on Victoria Street
• Information on the Victoria Clock Tower

Caxton Press

• Search our catalogue for Denis Glover and Caxton Press
• The Christchurch Art Gallery exhibition A Caxton Miscellany is currently on at Central Library Peterborough. We have some photos on Flickr.
• View a set of Caxton Press images on DigitalNZ

Supreme Court and Victoria Street bridge, Christchurch, Circa 1921

Here’s the official information:
Christchurch City Council (CCC) is embarking on a transitional programme for Victoria Street, Christchurch. As part of the programme, we are seeking to commission two poems for Victoria Street, including one from Ngāi Tahu writers.

Poems need to reference some aspect of the history or use of the street and adjacent areas. We are interested in telling the long and traditional commercial history of the street. The street has an auspicious association with literature. Poet Denis Glover co-founded The Caxton Press on Victoria Street in 1935, and the business still operates there today

We intend to paint the poems onto structures and surfaces in the street and this form of application will be considered when selecting work. Submitting poets and writers are encouraged therefore, to be mindful of the limitations in setting out works due to the method and potentially disjointed application of text.  Te reo Māori translation of texts is also of interest.

Selection
A knowledgeable panel will be convened to make the selection. The CCC Metropolitan Arts Advisor and project Landscape Architect will advise the panel.

Victoria Street 2013

Submission Requirements
Your submission must include:
•    an original poem for consideration and translation to English or Māori if available
•    arts curriculum (your previous poetry and writing credentials)
•    full contact details

Timing
Submissions must reach us no later than 23 March 2013.

Value of Commissions
$1000.00 ex GST for each poem

Copyright
This is a unique situation where Council is commissioning poetry as public art. In this instance we would seek to preserve the artists’ rights to the work (and to reproduce the work acknowledging the commission) and also seek to ensure Council’s rights as the commissioning agent to reproduce the work for promotional and recording purposes.

Longevity
Given the transitional nature of spaces and places in the central city, CCC cannot guarantee work will remain unaffected by any remedial work on the structures of surfaces to which the text is applied. We will seek to reinstate completed text on any affected surface as soon as is practicable or where suitable.

Contacts for your submission
Enquiries should be directed to Kiri Jarden, Metropolitan Arts Advisor.
Email submissions are preferred to Kiri.Jarden@ccc.govt.nz

Telephone:
03 941 8635 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting            03 941 8635      end_of_the_skype_highlighting
Post:
Metropolitan Arts Advisor
Community Services
Christchurch City Council
PO Box 73016
Christchurch 8154

 

Poetry in performance this spring

I’ve signed up for emails from the Canterbury Poets Collective (CPC), and here is their latest news:

Canterbury Poets Collective (CPC) presents Poetry in Performance, 2012 Spring Season.

Open mike and guest readers. Wednesdays at 6.30 pm, audience vote for the Best Open Mic Poet.

3 October: Johanna Aitchison, Hagley Writers Institute
10 October: Elizabeth Smither, Emma Currie, Paul McGuigan
17 October:  Joan Fleming, Andy Coyle, Frankie McMillan
24 October: Louise Wallace, Sean Joyce, Marisa Cappetta
31 October: Brian Turner, Fiona Farrell, David Gregory
7 November: James McNaughton, Bernadette Hall, Rebecca Nash
14 November: Owen Marshall, Tusiata Avia, Joanna Preston
21 November: Best of the season’s open mic readers.

The venue is the very comfortable space at the CPIT Students Association (CPSA) Hall, 5 Madras Street.

 

Poetry for Lunch – Seven tantalising courses

The seven poets taking part in this lunchtime’s poetry session served up a veritable feast of words.  The readings were held at the YMCA in a room which proved to be an excellent venue. As chair Bernadette Hall told me, the intimate space was a positive change from large, impersonal lecture rooms which the poets were usually invited to speak in. The appreciative audience enjoyed the opportunity to listen to the work of some of New Zealand’s finest poets up close and personal.

It is always a challenge to review a group poetry reading and do the artists justice. This session was particularly difficult. The poets were all extremely gifted and their styles dissimilar.

Tusiata Avia started the session. Her bold, powerful poems resonate with me now. She’s a skilled performer and it is impossible to take your eyes off her once she starts to read.

Doc Drumheller followed with his unique brand of urban humour. His poem The Wunderbar rang true with all of us who spent our youth in the bar in Lyttelton. His palindromes pieced together from slogans he collects are fascinating.

Kerrin Sharpe read five poems, my favourite of which was Sewing the World. Kerrin teaches at the Hagley Writers’ Institute and her work appears in many New Zealand compilations.

David Eggleton, writer in residence at the University of Canterbury, gave a mesmerising performance. The Colour White and The Drift North are descriptive and insightful. It was a pleasure to see the poems performed as the rhythm of language in an essential feature of his work.

Siobhan Harvey‘s poetry focuses on migration and the issues faced by people who move from the familiar. Relativity is a theme that ties her work together. While Karen Zelas‘ gentle, reflective works gave the audience plenty of food for thought.

The charismatic Ben Brown finished the session. His is a natural born orator and I was so captivated I didn’t miss a word. Unfortunately, I did miss out on the two copies of his CD he had for sale. I’m hoping he will produce another one soon.

Check out New Zealand Poetry online at New Zealand Poetry, NZEPC or at Christchurch City Libraries.

 

Instant Poetry

In a perfect start for National Poetry Day, a cool new Gap Filler initiative kicked off this morning. Poetica: The Christchurch Urban poetry project launched Instant Poetry: On the wall of 614 Colombo Street Christchurch (Old Beggs music store) you can write your own instant poem or an existing poem on the Instant Poetry blackboard in the language of your choice.

Then take a picture of you and your poem (with translation if needed) and post it on the Poetica Facebook site. The poem that is “liked” the most will be painted permanently on this wall at the end of the first project.

This morning’s launch saw a crew of poets and supporters drinking tea and eating fruit toast and sharing poems. They were such a nice bunch of people I was inspired to get up and give it a go myself (read Robin Hyde’s Neon Lights).

Some read their own poems, others chose a favourite piece (we had James K. Baxter and Walt Whitman).

Here are some pics of poetry in action: