ruby cabinet tray5
Something else that is alive
For some time now I have wondered why write, instead of letting poems disperse, unrecorded. At first, I thought to answer that here (spoiler: I can’t). Having unearthed and reburied so many responses that you may have thought I was underwater, I leave this unpolished; fragmentary rather than faceted.
Some of what other people’s poetry gives to life is easier to define: the apperception of all that it attempts, liminally, to sound—the unreachable exteriority of stars,[i] the unfathomable interiority of wells;[ii] closer, the indivisible hereness of rain.[iii] But these are borrowed metaphors. In reaching for them, I remind myself of certain caddisfly larvae in the creek, who armour themselves in leaves and bark.
Poetry—whoever writes it—does some of my thinking for me. Phenomenologically, emotionally, even conceptually at times, and also ethically (‘I write because I have found you: I write in order to find you’).[iv] This is most visible when absent: my disability community’s hunger for artistic representation is not just a desire to be ‘seen’ (by someone other than Kafka); it’s because it is unbearable to do all of our thinking—or our being—alone.
But fundamentally, to me what poetry gives is not a promise of utility, or beauty, or transcendence. If you were to ask what it is that makes me love another person, the reason cannot be contained in any list I could make in response, however glib, however earnest. David Suzuki describes how the earth’s air is 1% argon, an inert gas not utilized in the respiration of living things; thus the same atoms we breathe in, today, have for centuries entered the bodies of countless others.[v] So, too, have syllables, thoughts, words, cries. It is in this manner, perhaps, that poetry is akin to breathing. For now, I continue.
olivia macassey akeake & waikiekie streams / hātea river
o
Let’s talk about death
VENDOR’s overall aesthetic and approach is ‘resourcefulness’, which speaks to the Asian/Tauiwi migrant and diasporic experience, the working class narrative, to boredom and imagination, to creativity and restriction, to making the most out of the least. Amongst many other threads, VENDOR goes into what it means for our forebears to set up shop to survive, and what it means for us now to set up shop in the name of art.
jeff chen lim chhour / 184 karangahape road
o
Mind the gap
But what these paradoxes show is that we could not possibly have an adequate representation of our language, period.
- bas van fraassen
Whatever it may set out to do, poetry doesn’t resolve anything. The claim that it can is spurious. Reality itself is spurious, always looked at from either too close or too far away. It is entirely a proliferation of focal possibilities. Poetry explores the synonym pair of insufficiency and surfeit in existence’s rule. It’s quite a big deal.
I place an ‘e’ on the table and ask Arthur what is this? It’s the most used of the five vowels, he rightly answers. Does it have intrinsic merit? No, he says, except maybe as a sound or a visual sign. So what’s it good for? It goes into words to make meaning. Fair enough, I continue, so how much meaning does the letter contribute to individual words or larger compositions? Rhetorical question!—none, of course. So, meaning in language is based on an inherent lack of meaning in its most basic constituents? Maybe so, unless we consider them a residuum or trace: letters retain their shape and element of sound, even as they disappear into words.
When Curnow says the best poems’ ‘essence, whatever their essence, will elude you’; when Dallas in the poem ‘Overcast’ bemoans ‘a child’s ball spinning on a wave’; when geraets eulogises ‘pleasurables I spy’ and Anna Jackson ‘bits of me that have travelled / not even me’; when Yourukova quizzes ‘shifts in the random’ and asks ‘is it enough to love the absence of certainty?’—these utterances, placed alongside the certitude of essa may ranapiri’s they ‘will write until they die’, echo in unison that the latch on the door to poetic statement never holds firm. We cannot be held entirely out or in and so we straddle the unsayable and unsaid. Yet insufficiency (the ‘not yet’) is our life means: this is the ruby poetry enunciates without finality.
john geraets riverside / whangārei
o
Why i write
because i have spiders in my ears
and your touch scratches the shell of my soul
and the light’s too white
and i’m sweating cold
smashed up against the glass
oh heaving machinery, snakes in the ladders
all my parts in disarray they bicker
i glower and glow
out of sorts sort it out go inside
then go inside
then go the whole way in
there’s a voice too acid to speak
eats a hole in the container
and then the floor, right through the earth
there’s a turn of the eye onto itself
makes me dizzy till i make it here
the words as close as lids closing
in the organ of poetry
is a watcher that watches
itself watching
purely because it finds it interesting
meaning drips, i wring out letters
that wouldn't have existed in this order
unless i made a time and space
to put a fist down my own throat
to see what’s in here
i write to smooth my brain out
fix my fixating
regulate the eternal spasms of feelings
to get off the ground for a minute
and bang into the edges of myself
and i write
because it's hard to keep coming back
because it’s so easy the words write themselves
it’s a relief, wakes up my deeper senses
the rich shadows of my dreams
coruscating
because if i can crack open the door
something steps through
always a stranger
and there’s no other way to know
who
and because i like it
gathers me into one piece
even a few minutes can inflate
a bubble of air to breathe inside
all day, all night
this is why i write
stephanie will christie kirikiriroa
o
A hot air balloon trip through my teenage years
≤ 1953: My parents were avid library users. From them learnt how to love books, discovered Blake & Bach through what was around the house, learnt how to play Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring on a harmonica, sang We Three Kings of Orient Are in a nativity play.
1953: Shortwave radio. The Voice of America (the beginning of one part of a duality; the other part started with the Vietnam war). Willis Conover at 11 p.m. local time. The opening theme Duke Ellington’s Orchestra playing A Train. Clunked Chords. Deelyeeda. Deelyeeda. You……..must take the A Train.
1954: A lengthy project for English class. I wrote about jazz.
1955: After after-school rugby practice, on my way out heard music coming from the school assemby hall. Went investigating. Found the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich rehearsing for a concert to be held in the hall that night. Listened until he broke for dinner. Got home late. Overwhelmed.
≥1955: No one—or hardly anyone—played jazz cello. So learnt classical bass instead. Started playing in the school orchestra. Arco. Leaned towards jazz. Pizzicato.
1956/1957: Met some like-minded souls loosely connected with the University Jazz Club though few of them were actually at the University. Started playing bass with them. Geoff Murphy on trumpet, Bruno Lawrence on drums. Public performances solely at a Karori church youth club, Sunday afternoons, during the electrical blackouts that were commonplace for the time.
1958: University. Jazz Club concerts. Professor Frederick Page who called me ‘that jazz musician’ & who, when he ran across me in the University corridors, would haul me off to his office where he would sit at the piano & play Bach to me. Played bass at the local Polish Association’s New Year’s Eve Ball. My first professional gig.
1959: Jazz Club concert at the Wellington Teachers’ College. Performed The Pied Bopper of Harlem, a prose piece about a Charlie Parker character who came along & blew everybody away. Didn’t play bass for that item, but was backed by the musicians I usually played with.
9/1959: Wrote my first poem, Lizard, on my mother’s Remington typewriter.
mark young hokitika / home hill
o
notes
[i] Paz, O. ‘Hermandad’, Arbol Adentro / A Tree Within (New Directions, 1987).
[ii] Heaney, S. ‘Personal helicon’, Selected Poems 1966–1987 (Faber & Faber, 1990). I’m indebted to R. Kozain for drawing my attention to this poem.
[iii] Tuwhare, H. ‘Rain’, Come Rain Hail (U. Otago, 1970).
[iv] Me, in ‘Do poetry communities matter to you?’, NZ Poetry Shelf (Feb. 2020).
[v] Suzuki, D. The Sacred Balance (Greystone Books, 2007).