Spring reading
Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies, Leah Garces, a book full of good stories, effective activist tactics and strategies for creating allies, about animal rights but the strategies would be good for any activism; In the City of Love's Sleep, Lavinia Greenlaw, the book I have most loved reading this year perhaps, a book which has that touchstone feel that Suzannah Dunn's Commencing Our Descent and Jane Gardam's A Long Way From Verona have had for me, a beautifully pieced together extended story of a slow falling in love, or a slowness of action, a necessary slowness perhaps, balancing a sense of inevitability with an awareness of contingency and chance; Second Place, Rachel Cusk, an intriguing narrative which seems full of insights, despite the uncertain unreliability of the narrator, as if the insights are almost accidentally produced, or produced independently of how they guide her own behaviour; She's a Killer, Kirsten McDougall's brilliant novel set in an alarmingly-near-future climate change-altered society, billed as a thriller and it does become thrilling but is also about character and relationships and the ordinary strangenesses of living. (Complete list of spring and other reading here.)
Winter Reading
Winter reading highlights of 2021 include Molly McCully Brown's Places I've Taken My Body, detailed accounts of living with a body in pain, travelling as a writer, poetry and faith; Kay Ryan's, Synthesising Gravity, brilliant essays on poetry and on writing and on proximity and empty spaces; Whereabouts, by Jumpha Lahiri, originally written in Italian then translated by herself into English, and with a spareness to it that adds to the sense of resonance the everyday details have; Deborah Levy, Real Estate, the third and I think the best of the essay-memoirs, with some really good characters including the banana tree; The Betrayals, Bridget Collins, extends the world of Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, and again the game itself is quite comic to read about, because of the way the descriptions work by vaulting over the gaps in imagination about how the game actually works; Greta and Valdin, Rebecca K Reilly's completely glorious, gorgeous, funny, sharp, complicated novel in which everything is allowed to work out, and just as well beause you love all the characters so much; Recollections of my non-existence, Rebecca Solnit, hypnotically beautiful writing, about writing, and the way a life and a self can be built around writing, though also about gender, male violence and female vulnerability, annihilation and resilience; Dear Life, Karen Hitchcock, a powerfully felt argument against the rationing of hospital treatments for the elderly; Henning Mankell, Italian Shoes, a strange, bleak, dream-like novel about an eventual late-life flowering, written in a wonderfully spare style.
AUP New Poets 8
This new collection, with its beautiful pink cover, is now in bookshops and can be ordered online here. The three poets, Lily Holloway, Tru Paraha and Modi Deng, are all very different writers but all three write about beauty and darkness, memory and its traces, depths and distances, and all three write with an intense awareness of form and its possibilities. Within the collection are stars and asterisks, risk and trespasses, long-division problems and continental cornflakes, Scooby Doo, a farmer's headache, Cleopatra's vulva, thirty-six ice-plants, quite a lot of helium and even more glitter. The three poets are featured reading on New Zealand Poetry Shelf, which also hosts a review of the book.
Better off Read
I have been lying on my back a lot lately and it is very boring, except for when I listen to Pip Adam's podcasts in the Better off Read series. They are utterly brilliant. Pip is amazing (and I hear her voice when I write this, saying everyone else is amazing, her mind is blown).
Autumn reading
So many beautiful books I read this autumn. Amongst the very most haunting are: Where Reasons End, by Yiyun Li, a beautiful and terribly sad novel, and told almost all in dialogue; Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernadine Evaristo, a novel which tells such rich stories of women's lives, very simply, in small novel-like chapters, or novella-like chapters, that do build together into some larger picture; Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, sad like all Ishiguro's novels but sadness perhaps necessarily comes with love, and this is one of the sweetest novels about love, full of sunlight; Elena Ferrante's The Lying Life of Adults, perhaps the best ever account of the absolute necessity of giving in to desire, making the reader really want the wrong surrender even more than you want it resisted, so the novel's ending could not be more earned; My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Otessa Moshfegh, very funny, sometimes alarming, oddly optimistic, and for a book about sleeping, surprisingly gripping; This is Not a Pipe, a brilliantly strange and stimulating graphic novel by Tara Black; Naked Cinema, Sally Potter's detailed account of the work of directing, terrifically interesting about the work, and also just about how to live and how to be; and Danyl McLauchlan's Tranquillity and Ruin, essays on ethical altruism, meditation, living and thinking, with a balance between earnest inquiry and skepticism I found exactly right.
Summer reading
The highlight of my summer was reading Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, the loveliest, strangest, most elegant book I've ever read, but other highlights included The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy, beautifully structured in circles and loops and digressions and pathways through a time in a life; another book also about living in a capitalist society, Eula Biss's Having and Being Had, wonderful frank about her feelings and her finances; I also loved Emilie Pine’s essays, Notes to Self, Bill Hayes’s lockdown notes, How We Live Now, and In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado, a memoir in small pieces, each piece taking a different angle or perspective on a compelling story; Where Reason's End, Yiyun Li, a beautiful and terribly sad novel, told almost all in dialogue, or at least imaginary dialogue, with no less momentum because of that; A Month in Siena, by Hisham Matar, which I loved most of all for its sentences, and their carefully placed clauses; and finally another novel I loved almost as much as Piranesi, Jo Walton’s Or What You Will, even though like the main character (though not the narrator) I am sceptical about the blending of fictional and real worlds even within fiction itself – the narrator had a hard job winning me over but he was always going to, and oh how he did. (My reading list for 2021 so far continues here.)
Starling
I have made so many wildly exciting discoveries from this literary journal which publishes writing from New Zealanders aged under 25. I am also fonder than I think I ought to be of actual starlings and specifically the ones that raise a family in the wall of our house between the fridge and the outdoors every spring without fail.
Spring reading
The books I most loved reading this spring were The Friend, Sigrid Nunez, one of the best books I've read all year with its combination of narrative and thinking, brevity and continuation; The Swimmers, Chloe Lane, absolutely brilliant and both moving and unsentimental, or sentimental in such a bracing, sharp way; Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, made up of small pieces but not at all incoherent; The Left-handed Booksellers of London, Garth Nix, I hope there might be a sequel; What are you going through, Sigrid Nunez, with truth I think as its core value, which is also true, I think, of Helen Garner’s The Spare Room, a more brutal take on almost the same story; Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet, a novel I loved and keep remembering like remembering a dream; Adam Grener, Improbability, Chance and the Nineteenth Century Novel, the kind of scholarship I love most with a complex but clearly worked out and surprising argument; A Deadly Education, the first of the Scholomance books by Naomi Novik, and now I am waiting for the next; Margaret Atwood, Hagseed, a retelling of the Tempest story, which I picked up by accident but then kept reading, loving the way it all worked out. And Wow, by Bill Manhire. (Complete 2020 reading list here.)
Elvira's creatures
Creatures on instagram to enjoy being distressed by, also on show, and for sale, as pictures, at Foodcourt Bookshop in Newtown, another enthusiasm of mine, and, as felted objects, on etsy here.
AUP New Poets 7
Poetry selections by Rhys Feeney, Ria Masae and Claudia Jardine are collected together in AUP New Poets 7. In this book you will find poetry about rewilding, Sulpicia, deep fried bananas, guinea-pigs, nylon eyelashes, brutalist architecture, loom weights, ie faitaga-wearing policemen, crushed biscuits and how to make toast. The poets read their poetry and talk about it here.
Winter reading nests
The reading highlight of the winter months was the Katherine Ardern trilogy that started with The Bear and the Nightingale and ended with “The Winter of the Witch,” set in medieval Russia and wintery even in the summer scenes; but I also loved the brilliant translations by Stephanie Burt in her collection After Callimachus; Angel Mage, by Garth Nix, another fantasy re-imagining an early Christianity as a form of magic, strange and compelling, and I liked its alternative past of gender equality; Our Life in the Forest, Marie Darrieusecq, a compelling dystopia and a breathless read, "My Gaggle," Paul Theroux's story of the death of his goose, Willy; and Jane Gardam, A Long Way From Verona - it might be about time to go on another Jane Gardam reading mission.
NZ Poetry Shelf
When New Zealand went into lockdown as COVID-19 started spreading through the country, Paula Green immediately began to think what she could do to support poets whose launches would be cancelled, and all through lockdown books were launched, speeches were posted, poems were read and audio-files presented on her NZ Poetry Shelf. For years this website has presented interviews, poems, reviews and critical discussions of New Zealand poetry, so that by now it is one of the most extraordinary collections of poetry resources in the world, as well as being a kind of virtual community centre for New Zealand poets many of whom know each other - and know Paula - through the website, even if they have never met.
I will be
is one of the loveliest, most soaring blogs I know, almost an extended poem, full of hilarity, wildness, sorrow and bravery, boldness and love, fleeting thoughts and sudden insights, it wakes me up every time I read it.
Autumn reading nests
I have a particular love of the summer reading nest, when temporary camps can be set up by creeks and in fields, but autumn nesting, moving from outside to inside, has its own charm. This autumn we were under lockdown so nesting took place mostly on the deck of the house, where the animals soon fell into a routine of tolerating each other in my presence, showing some interest in the books I was reading. Having photographed Maude and Mabel examining a book on magic in classical antiquity gives that book a special place in my autumn reading nest memories, but otherwise the books I remember most vividly from those days are The Word Pretty, short and brilliant essays by Elisa Gabbert; The Undying, by Anne Boyer; Specimen, by Madison Hamill; Head Girl, by Freya Daly Sadgrove, whose poetry has thrilled us for ages, and now is in a book; 2000 Feet Above Worry Level, by Eamonn Marra, like Fleabag but funnier; Weather, a novel by Jenny Offill, which I wanted to be writing myself, even while I was reading it; Lent, Jo Walton’s extraordinary reimagining of the Savonarola story as a story about demons and multiple lives; The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, H.G. Parry's funny and ingenious first novel about how to cope with a brother who can bring characters out of books; and Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie’s heartbreaking retelling of the Antigone story in contemporary Britain. I was also reading and rereading ransack, essa may ranapiri’s first collection of poetry, and the Terrance Hayes collection American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin, and poems from these collection, along with other poetry in print and on screen, also filled these days.
Today I have returned to these two poems by Ash Davida Jane, and find myself loving them with a new fervour, perhaps because I have been planting wild stock seedlings I gathered from by the beach this morning, and planting trees as part of a local forest restoration project, or perhaps because I've been thinking about reading and identity-transformation, or perhaps just because they are such lovely poems that are lovelier every time you read them, but you have to start with the first time, so if you haven't already read them I invite you to get started!
The "Etherin," is a new poetic form I've just discovered, invented by Anthony Etherin. It is wildly difficult but his own Wavescape is beautiful - all three parts to it are completely perfect. The form requires two sonnets in iambic monometer, one with Shakespearean rhymes, one with Petrarchan, to join together to form a third sonnet, in iambic dimeter.
AUP New Poets 6 launched and launching!
The total lock-down of New Zealand to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus has meant our plans for a spectacular party have had to go on-line, and really, where could be more fabulous for a party than Paula Green's Poetry Shelf? This is going to be like one of those Great Gatsby-style parties that goes on for days and weeks, so whenever you read this I invite you to join us in launching the work of Ben Kemp, Vanessa Crofskey and Chris Stewart in AUP New Poets 6!
Opposites and cheating
So, black is the opposite of white, a dog is the opposite of a cat, and a geyser is the opposite of a waterfall, but what is the opposite of a gregarious scientist (Einstein), full of laughter? According to Jim Holt, it is a mathematician (Gödel), with “a morbid dread of being poisoned by refrigerator gases” (When Einstein Walked with Gödel). I used to think of Phoebe’s interest in opposites and my interest in cheating as being almost opposite interests, one purely formal, one social; one linguistic, one ethical; one Phoebe’s, one mine. But the opposite of cheating isn’t really complying, it is not playing the game at all. To cheat is to be implicated in, or even construct, a system of rules, a system that invents the idea of cheating as an opposite to playing by the rules, a necessary opposite to give the system meaning, a necessary opposite to keep every action within the fold. Do you think it would be cheating if you used booklet mode to print out this collection of opposites and cheating and made yourself a little book, sort of the opposite of a webpage?
Sestinas
I wouldn't really say I was enthusiastic about the sestina, but sometimes I have a compulsion to rise to a challenge, especially one as indirect as Ron Silliman's reply to Shanna Compton's list of new words added to the dictionary as a result of books she had written or edited. "Should be a sestina here," he wrote, but since there were thirteen words, I wrote two using twelve of them (the thirteenth word was panty). The gentrifier's reply was the second I wrote, using the words left over from my first attempt.
The exam script as art form
Occasionally an exam answer is almost a work of art, but I've done far better as a reader by asking students to write blog posts throughout the semester instead of assessing their understanding of the course with an end of semester exam. But I miss writing exam scripts, thinking of another angle that would allow students to make new connections between different texts, finding a quote that could be taken in several directions. Maybe not setting exams for students anymore can free up the exam script to exist purely as an art form.
Claudia Jardine, one of the young poets who is included in the forthcoming AUPNewPoets7 (coming out in August), has just published a brilliant version/response to Catullus 51, his lovely translation of Sappho 31, in Starling magazine. It's called "Stop Reading Catullus 51" but I won't.
Squares
I think in triangles and write in circles, but squares take me somewhere else altogether.
Summer reading nests
It took me a long time to get over the obsolescence of my nice Nokia phone which was only for sending texts and converted any other attempt at a message into squares, and for a long time I have lived without a phone at all which has a lot to be said for it. But I have finally come round to using the old i-phone I inherited from Simon which takes photos, and so I have been photographing my summer reading nests, such as this fine nest by a waterhole in a Rangataua creek I like to swim in. My summer reading: Helen Garner, Yellow Notebook, edited diary entries which together present a strangely fragmentary refracted sort of an autobiography; Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom, one of the eeriest, most disturbing short stories I have ever read, by Sylvia Plath; Animal Languages, by Eva Meijer, a wonderful compilation of stories about animal communication which takes all kinds of forms but always involves relationship; Helen Garner's collected stories; Sarah Paretsky's Shell Game; The Crying Book by Heather Christle, a kind of memoir in the form of tiny essays, free-floating paragraphs, adding up, also, to a kind of extended meditation on, if not quite a philosophy of, crying; Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokurczuk; and Leslie Jamison's lovely long-form essays in her latest collection, Make it Scream, Make it Burn. (A list of all the reading I can remember from 2019 can be read here and I'll have to start a 2020 list here.)
Turbine Kapohau Reading Room
I love this account by Elaine Webster in the new Turbine Kapohau of the shame of writing - "Perhaps the writing of it was the part that matters, not the part where others read it. Now I reject it, almost hate it, feel disgusted, compromised. What does the writing ask for? What does it do? Maybe worst of all, what does it make me?" She is quite brilliant too on the size of handbags and the hinterland of moments. I always love the Turbine Kapohau Reading Room. As Ash Davida Jane says in her own reading journal, " it’s an intimate and personal thing, somebody’s readings of and memories of the poems by a writer they love." And I was already liking reading about Louise Gluck when Mel Ansell's reading journal just got better: "I can’t be especially bothered with Glück today," she writes, "but I’ve got Anna Jackson’s Pasture and Flock here." The poet you read when you can't be especially bothered with Glück!
The long-awaited How to Live by Helen Rickerby has now been launched, by me! This dazzling collection includes "Notes on the Unsilent Woman" along with poems about forks and houses, Frankenstein's monster and George Eliot, working on the boundaries of poetry and the essay. You can read the launch speech here. And I love this interview with Helen, with brilliant interviewer Mark Amery: sample quotes: Mark, about reading How to Live: "I felt like running back and reading Middlemarch!" Helen (elsewhere in the interview): "Frankenstein is a nuts book."
AUP New Poets 5 launches a new series I am editing of the Auckland University Press New Poets collections, with poetry by Carolyn DeCarlo, Sophie van Waardenberg and Rebecca Hawkes. In this book you will find poems about transformation, beauty and hunger, childhood and coming of age, limpets, mangroves, avocados, the sickly liquid from a smashed and dribbly apple, a stale pie, an eviscerated bird, trilobites, giants, romance and desire... AUP New Poets 5 is reviewed by Paula Green here and an interview with Carolyn DeCarlo is presented here on Pip Adam's marvellous Better off Read podcast (another enthusiasm of mine!).
Translation is an ongoing enthusiasm. Simon Perris in his book on Euripides tries out an idea I find quite ravishing: “Dionysus is a god of identity transformation…Is it too fanciful, then, to see him as a god of translation, adaptation, and other modes of textual transformation?” I have been returning to translation myself with the need for a literal Catullus translation first leading me to work out my own, then to try working it into an English version of a Sapphic metre, then wondering how it would work if I figured Catullus as a waitress, then wondering how this would work as a sonnet, then, not wanting to write sonnets as such, playing around with the layout until, look, it is like stars in a starry sky! I am working my way through a series of YA sonnets taking off from the waitress ones, and then converting them all into starry sonnets spread out on the page, but also working my way through some literal translations, in and out of metres, of the poems Clodia writes back to. Writing in galliambics was fun.
Greg Kan's Under Glass and Sugar Magnolia Wilson's Because a Woman's Heart is Like a Needle at the Bottom of the Ocean
Two gorgeous collections of poetry I had the honour of launching. The launch speeches can be read here.
Helen Rickerby, about whom I've been enthusiastic for many reasons for many years, has, over the last few years, been writing the most extraordinary poetry bordering on the essay, taking on philosophy, thinking through the biggest questions. You can now read her brilliant, unsilent poem "The Unsilent Woman" on Turbine.
Megan Dunn
I have discovered the website of Tinderbox author Megan Dunn, and at the moment am particularly loving her essay on the Submerging Artist. "Your art is of its time, but it’s also of your time. We will all submerge" - oh, dark consolation!
The Bedmaking Competition was launched alongside the novella Swim by Avi Duckor-Jones at Unity Books, Wellington, 13 September, and TimeOut books, Mt Eden, Auckland, 15 September. The launch speeches can be read here.
Sam Duckor-Jones
I am currently enthusing about the poetry of Sam Duckor-Jones, whose poem "Sensitive Boys" is in a very wonderful free poetry pamphlet the excellent Victoria University Press celebrated Poetry Day with! Here is a typical picture of me in tiny-faced admiration of Sam Duckor-Jones reading his poetry (photo credit Verb Festival).
Clodia in Oxford
Thank you to Professor Stephen Harrison for organising a reading “I, Clodia,” at the Iannou Centre, Oxford, for a terrific audience of classical scholars.
The film Faces, Places (Visages, Villages) by Agnes Varda
For months I have been talking about this film which I loved every minute of, and which set off in me a great yearning to make enormous, public, collaborative art, or to enlarge poetry into some sort of street art event...Shall we?
You can read my poems in French, translated by Luc Arnault, here!
Reading list
I love the reading lists of Poetry Magazine, and the February list includes my favourite February reads - Elif Batuman's The Idiot, Elisa Gabbert's The Self Unstable, Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, and The Shepherd's Life by James Rebank, along with the reading lists of other New Zealand poets.
Chris Tse is a poet I've admired for a long time and his new book, He's So Masc, launched alongside Pasture and Flock at the Wellington Writers Festival, is beautiful, brave and brilliant, and Paula Green has posted a wonderful interview with him about the book on Poetry Shelf.
"Viewless Wings" by Mark Ford
This is currently (since November 2016) my favourite poem in the world, second perhaps only to the Keats nightingale ode from which it takes flight. You can read it in the LRB or here, and in Mark Ford's collection Enter, Fleeing (Faber and Faber)
Keely O'Shannessy
Keely O'Shannessy designed the beautiful cover of Pasture and Flock and has very generously allowed us to use the art to make this website beautiful too. Her own website offers an extraordinary showcase of brilliant books and gorgeously inventive design.
Maria McMillan who designed this website is a brilliant poet and Information Architect and very much a current and ongoing enthusiasm.
These terrific poems by Charlie Clark. I especially love the third poem down, "Pseudo-Martyr."
Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies, Leah Garces, a book full of good stories, effective activist tactics and strategies for creating allies, about animal rights but the strategies would be good for any activism; In the City of Love's Sleep, Lavinia Greenlaw, the book I have most loved reading this year perhaps, a book which has that touchstone feel that Suzannah Dunn's Commencing Our Descent and Jane Gardam's A Long Way From Verona have had for me, a beautifully pieced together extended story of a slow falling in love, or a slowness of action, a necessary slowness perhaps, balancing a sense of inevitability with an awareness of contingency and chance; Second Place, Rachel Cusk, an intriguing narrative which seems full of insights, despite the uncertain unreliability of the narrator, as if the insights are almost accidentally produced, or produced independently of how they guide her own behaviour; She's a Killer, Kirsten McDougall's brilliant novel set in an alarmingly-near-future climate change-altered society, billed as a thriller and it does become thrilling but is also about character and relationships and the ordinary strangenesses of living. (Complete list of spring and other reading here.)
Winter Reading
Winter reading highlights of 2021 include Molly McCully Brown's Places I've Taken My Body, detailed accounts of living with a body in pain, travelling as a writer, poetry and faith; Kay Ryan's, Synthesising Gravity, brilliant essays on poetry and on writing and on proximity and empty spaces; Whereabouts, by Jumpha Lahiri, originally written in Italian then translated by herself into English, and with a spareness to it that adds to the sense of resonance the everyday details have; Deborah Levy, Real Estate, the third and I think the best of the essay-memoirs, with some really good characters including the banana tree; The Betrayals, Bridget Collins, extends the world of Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, and again the game itself is quite comic to read about, because of the way the descriptions work by vaulting over the gaps in imagination about how the game actually works; Greta and Valdin, Rebecca K Reilly's completely glorious, gorgeous, funny, sharp, complicated novel in which everything is allowed to work out, and just as well beause you love all the characters so much; Recollections of my non-existence, Rebecca Solnit, hypnotically beautiful writing, about writing, and the way a life and a self can be built around writing, though also about gender, male violence and female vulnerability, annihilation and resilience; Dear Life, Karen Hitchcock, a powerfully felt argument against the rationing of hospital treatments for the elderly; Henning Mankell, Italian Shoes, a strange, bleak, dream-like novel about an eventual late-life flowering, written in a wonderfully spare style.
AUP New Poets 8
This new collection, with its beautiful pink cover, is now in bookshops and can be ordered online here. The three poets, Lily Holloway, Tru Paraha and Modi Deng, are all very different writers but all three write about beauty and darkness, memory and its traces, depths and distances, and all three write with an intense awareness of form and its possibilities. Within the collection are stars and asterisks, risk and trespasses, long-division problems and continental cornflakes, Scooby Doo, a farmer's headache, Cleopatra's vulva, thirty-six ice-plants, quite a lot of helium and even more glitter. The three poets are featured reading on New Zealand Poetry Shelf, which also hosts a review of the book.
Better off Read
I have been lying on my back a lot lately and it is very boring, except for when I listen to Pip Adam's podcasts in the Better off Read series. They are utterly brilliant. Pip is amazing (and I hear her voice when I write this, saying everyone else is amazing, her mind is blown).
Autumn reading
So many beautiful books I read this autumn. Amongst the very most haunting are: Where Reasons End, by Yiyun Li, a beautiful and terribly sad novel, and told almost all in dialogue; Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernadine Evaristo, a novel which tells such rich stories of women's lives, very simply, in small novel-like chapters, or novella-like chapters, that do build together into some larger picture; Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, sad like all Ishiguro's novels but sadness perhaps necessarily comes with love, and this is one of the sweetest novels about love, full of sunlight; Elena Ferrante's The Lying Life of Adults, perhaps the best ever account of the absolute necessity of giving in to desire, making the reader really want the wrong surrender even more than you want it resisted, so the novel's ending could not be more earned; My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Otessa Moshfegh, very funny, sometimes alarming, oddly optimistic, and for a book about sleeping, surprisingly gripping; This is Not a Pipe, a brilliantly strange and stimulating graphic novel by Tara Black; Naked Cinema, Sally Potter's detailed account of the work of directing, terrifically interesting about the work, and also just about how to live and how to be; and Danyl McLauchlan's Tranquillity and Ruin, essays on ethical altruism, meditation, living and thinking, with a balance between earnest inquiry and skepticism I found exactly right.
Summer reading
The highlight of my summer was reading Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, the loveliest, strangest, most elegant book I've ever read, but other highlights included The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy, beautifully structured in circles and loops and digressions and pathways through a time in a life; another book also about living in a capitalist society, Eula Biss's Having and Being Had, wonderful frank about her feelings and her finances; I also loved Emilie Pine’s essays, Notes to Self, Bill Hayes’s lockdown notes, How We Live Now, and In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado, a memoir in small pieces, each piece taking a different angle or perspective on a compelling story; Where Reason's End, Yiyun Li, a beautiful and terribly sad novel, told almost all in dialogue, or at least imaginary dialogue, with no less momentum because of that; A Month in Siena, by Hisham Matar, which I loved most of all for its sentences, and their carefully placed clauses; and finally another novel I loved almost as much as Piranesi, Jo Walton’s Or What You Will, even though like the main character (though not the narrator) I am sceptical about the blending of fictional and real worlds even within fiction itself – the narrator had a hard job winning me over but he was always going to, and oh how he did. (My reading list for 2021 so far continues here.)
Starling
I have made so many wildly exciting discoveries from this literary journal which publishes writing from New Zealanders aged under 25. I am also fonder than I think I ought to be of actual starlings and specifically the ones that raise a family in the wall of our house between the fridge and the outdoors every spring without fail.
Spring reading
The books I most loved reading this spring were The Friend, Sigrid Nunez, one of the best books I've read all year with its combination of narrative and thinking, brevity and continuation; The Swimmers, Chloe Lane, absolutely brilliant and both moving and unsentimental, or sentimental in such a bracing, sharp way; Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, made up of small pieces but not at all incoherent; The Left-handed Booksellers of London, Garth Nix, I hope there might be a sequel; What are you going through, Sigrid Nunez, with truth I think as its core value, which is also true, I think, of Helen Garner’s The Spare Room, a more brutal take on almost the same story; Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet, a novel I loved and keep remembering like remembering a dream; Adam Grener, Improbability, Chance and the Nineteenth Century Novel, the kind of scholarship I love most with a complex but clearly worked out and surprising argument; A Deadly Education, the first of the Scholomance books by Naomi Novik, and now I am waiting for the next; Margaret Atwood, Hagseed, a retelling of the Tempest story, which I picked up by accident but then kept reading, loving the way it all worked out. And Wow, by Bill Manhire. (Complete 2020 reading list here.)
Elvira's creatures
Creatures on instagram to enjoy being distressed by, also on show, and for sale, as pictures, at Foodcourt Bookshop in Newtown, another enthusiasm of mine, and, as felted objects, on etsy here.
AUP New Poets 7
Poetry selections by Rhys Feeney, Ria Masae and Claudia Jardine are collected together in AUP New Poets 7. In this book you will find poetry about rewilding, Sulpicia, deep fried bananas, guinea-pigs, nylon eyelashes, brutalist architecture, loom weights, ie faitaga-wearing policemen, crushed biscuits and how to make toast. The poets read their poetry and talk about it here.
Winter reading nests
The reading highlight of the winter months was the Katherine Ardern trilogy that started with The Bear and the Nightingale and ended with “The Winter of the Witch,” set in medieval Russia and wintery even in the summer scenes; but I also loved the brilliant translations by Stephanie Burt in her collection After Callimachus; Angel Mage, by Garth Nix, another fantasy re-imagining an early Christianity as a form of magic, strange and compelling, and I liked its alternative past of gender equality; Our Life in the Forest, Marie Darrieusecq, a compelling dystopia and a breathless read, "My Gaggle," Paul Theroux's story of the death of his goose, Willy; and Jane Gardam, A Long Way From Verona - it might be about time to go on another Jane Gardam reading mission.
NZ Poetry Shelf
When New Zealand went into lockdown as COVID-19 started spreading through the country, Paula Green immediately began to think what she could do to support poets whose launches would be cancelled, and all through lockdown books were launched, speeches were posted, poems were read and audio-files presented on her NZ Poetry Shelf. For years this website has presented interviews, poems, reviews and critical discussions of New Zealand poetry, so that by now it is one of the most extraordinary collections of poetry resources in the world, as well as being a kind of virtual community centre for New Zealand poets many of whom know each other - and know Paula - through the website, even if they have never met.
I will be
is one of the loveliest, most soaring blogs I know, almost an extended poem, full of hilarity, wildness, sorrow and bravery, boldness and love, fleeting thoughts and sudden insights, it wakes me up every time I read it.
Autumn reading nests
I have a particular love of the summer reading nest, when temporary camps can be set up by creeks and in fields, but autumn nesting, moving from outside to inside, has its own charm. This autumn we were under lockdown so nesting took place mostly on the deck of the house, where the animals soon fell into a routine of tolerating each other in my presence, showing some interest in the books I was reading. Having photographed Maude and Mabel examining a book on magic in classical antiquity gives that book a special place in my autumn reading nest memories, but otherwise the books I remember most vividly from those days are The Word Pretty, short and brilliant essays by Elisa Gabbert; The Undying, by Anne Boyer; Specimen, by Madison Hamill; Head Girl, by Freya Daly Sadgrove, whose poetry has thrilled us for ages, and now is in a book; 2000 Feet Above Worry Level, by Eamonn Marra, like Fleabag but funnier; Weather, a novel by Jenny Offill, which I wanted to be writing myself, even while I was reading it; Lent, Jo Walton’s extraordinary reimagining of the Savonarola story as a story about demons and multiple lives; The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, H.G. Parry's funny and ingenious first novel about how to cope with a brother who can bring characters out of books; and Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie’s heartbreaking retelling of the Antigone story in contemporary Britain. I was also reading and rereading ransack, essa may ranapiri’s first collection of poetry, and the Terrance Hayes collection American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin, and poems from these collection, along with other poetry in print and on screen, also filled these days.
Today I have returned to these two poems by Ash Davida Jane, and find myself loving them with a new fervour, perhaps because I have been planting wild stock seedlings I gathered from by the beach this morning, and planting trees as part of a local forest restoration project, or perhaps because I've been thinking about reading and identity-transformation, or perhaps just because they are such lovely poems that are lovelier every time you read them, but you have to start with the first time, so if you haven't already read them I invite you to get started!
The "Etherin," is a new poetic form I've just discovered, invented by Anthony Etherin. It is wildly difficult but his own Wavescape is beautiful - all three parts to it are completely perfect. The form requires two sonnets in iambic monometer, one with Shakespearean rhymes, one with Petrarchan, to join together to form a third sonnet, in iambic dimeter.
AUP New Poets 6 launched and launching!
The total lock-down of New Zealand to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus has meant our plans for a spectacular party have had to go on-line, and really, where could be more fabulous for a party than Paula Green's Poetry Shelf? This is going to be like one of those Great Gatsby-style parties that goes on for days and weeks, so whenever you read this I invite you to join us in launching the work of Ben Kemp, Vanessa Crofskey and Chris Stewart in AUP New Poets 6!
Opposites and cheating
So, black is the opposite of white, a dog is the opposite of a cat, and a geyser is the opposite of a waterfall, but what is the opposite of a gregarious scientist (Einstein), full of laughter? According to Jim Holt, it is a mathematician (Gödel), with “a morbid dread of being poisoned by refrigerator gases” (When Einstein Walked with Gödel). I used to think of Phoebe’s interest in opposites and my interest in cheating as being almost opposite interests, one purely formal, one social; one linguistic, one ethical; one Phoebe’s, one mine. But the opposite of cheating isn’t really complying, it is not playing the game at all. To cheat is to be implicated in, or even construct, a system of rules, a system that invents the idea of cheating as an opposite to playing by the rules, a necessary opposite to give the system meaning, a necessary opposite to keep every action within the fold. Do you think it would be cheating if you used booklet mode to print out this collection of opposites and cheating and made yourself a little book, sort of the opposite of a webpage?
Sestinas
I wouldn't really say I was enthusiastic about the sestina, but sometimes I have a compulsion to rise to a challenge, especially one as indirect as Ron Silliman's reply to Shanna Compton's list of new words added to the dictionary as a result of books she had written or edited. "Should be a sestina here," he wrote, but since there were thirteen words, I wrote two using twelve of them (the thirteenth word was panty). The gentrifier's reply was the second I wrote, using the words left over from my first attempt.
The exam script as art form
Occasionally an exam answer is almost a work of art, but I've done far better as a reader by asking students to write blog posts throughout the semester instead of assessing their understanding of the course with an end of semester exam. But I miss writing exam scripts, thinking of another angle that would allow students to make new connections between different texts, finding a quote that could be taken in several directions. Maybe not setting exams for students anymore can free up the exam script to exist purely as an art form.
Claudia Jardine, one of the young poets who is included in the forthcoming AUPNewPoets7 (coming out in August), has just published a brilliant version/response to Catullus 51, his lovely translation of Sappho 31, in Starling magazine. It's called "Stop Reading Catullus 51" but I won't.
Squares
I think in triangles and write in circles, but squares take me somewhere else altogether.
Summer reading nests
It took me a long time to get over the obsolescence of my nice Nokia phone which was only for sending texts and converted any other attempt at a message into squares, and for a long time I have lived without a phone at all which has a lot to be said for it. But I have finally come round to using the old i-phone I inherited from Simon which takes photos, and so I have been photographing my summer reading nests, such as this fine nest by a waterhole in a Rangataua creek I like to swim in. My summer reading: Helen Garner, Yellow Notebook, edited diary entries which together present a strangely fragmentary refracted sort of an autobiography; Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom, one of the eeriest, most disturbing short stories I have ever read, by Sylvia Plath; Animal Languages, by Eva Meijer, a wonderful compilation of stories about animal communication which takes all kinds of forms but always involves relationship; Helen Garner's collected stories; Sarah Paretsky's Shell Game; The Crying Book by Heather Christle, a kind of memoir in the form of tiny essays, free-floating paragraphs, adding up, also, to a kind of extended meditation on, if not quite a philosophy of, crying; Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokurczuk; and Leslie Jamison's lovely long-form essays in her latest collection, Make it Scream, Make it Burn. (A list of all the reading I can remember from 2019 can be read here and I'll have to start a 2020 list here.)
Turbine Kapohau Reading Room
I love this account by Elaine Webster in the new Turbine Kapohau of the shame of writing - "Perhaps the writing of it was the part that matters, not the part where others read it. Now I reject it, almost hate it, feel disgusted, compromised. What does the writing ask for? What does it do? Maybe worst of all, what does it make me?" She is quite brilliant too on the size of handbags and the hinterland of moments. I always love the Turbine Kapohau Reading Room. As Ash Davida Jane says in her own reading journal, " it’s an intimate and personal thing, somebody’s readings of and memories of the poems by a writer they love." And I was already liking reading about Louise Gluck when Mel Ansell's reading journal just got better: "I can’t be especially bothered with Glück today," she writes, "but I’ve got Anna Jackson’s Pasture and Flock here." The poet you read when you can't be especially bothered with Glück!
The long-awaited How to Live by Helen Rickerby has now been launched, by me! This dazzling collection includes "Notes on the Unsilent Woman" along with poems about forks and houses, Frankenstein's monster and George Eliot, working on the boundaries of poetry and the essay. You can read the launch speech here. And I love this interview with Helen, with brilliant interviewer Mark Amery: sample quotes: Mark, about reading How to Live: "I felt like running back and reading Middlemarch!" Helen (elsewhere in the interview): "Frankenstein is a nuts book."
AUP New Poets 5 launches a new series I am editing of the Auckland University Press New Poets collections, with poetry by Carolyn DeCarlo, Sophie van Waardenberg and Rebecca Hawkes. In this book you will find poems about transformation, beauty and hunger, childhood and coming of age, limpets, mangroves, avocados, the sickly liquid from a smashed and dribbly apple, a stale pie, an eviscerated bird, trilobites, giants, romance and desire... AUP New Poets 5 is reviewed by Paula Green here and an interview with Carolyn DeCarlo is presented here on Pip Adam's marvellous Better off Read podcast (another enthusiasm of mine!).
Translation is an ongoing enthusiasm. Simon Perris in his book on Euripides tries out an idea I find quite ravishing: “Dionysus is a god of identity transformation…Is it too fanciful, then, to see him as a god of translation, adaptation, and other modes of textual transformation?” I have been returning to translation myself with the need for a literal Catullus translation first leading me to work out my own, then to try working it into an English version of a Sapphic metre, then wondering how it would work if I figured Catullus as a waitress, then wondering how this would work as a sonnet, then, not wanting to write sonnets as such, playing around with the layout until, look, it is like stars in a starry sky! I am working my way through a series of YA sonnets taking off from the waitress ones, and then converting them all into starry sonnets spread out on the page, but also working my way through some literal translations, in and out of metres, of the poems Clodia writes back to. Writing in galliambics was fun.
Greg Kan's Under Glass and Sugar Magnolia Wilson's Because a Woman's Heart is Like a Needle at the Bottom of the Ocean
Two gorgeous collections of poetry I had the honour of launching. The launch speeches can be read here.
Helen Rickerby, about whom I've been enthusiastic for many reasons for many years, has, over the last few years, been writing the most extraordinary poetry bordering on the essay, taking on philosophy, thinking through the biggest questions. You can now read her brilliant, unsilent poem "The Unsilent Woman" on Turbine.
Megan Dunn
I have discovered the website of Tinderbox author Megan Dunn, and at the moment am particularly loving her essay on the Submerging Artist. "Your art is of its time, but it’s also of your time. We will all submerge" - oh, dark consolation!
The Bedmaking Competition was launched alongside the novella Swim by Avi Duckor-Jones at Unity Books, Wellington, 13 September, and TimeOut books, Mt Eden, Auckland, 15 September. The launch speeches can be read here.
Sam Duckor-Jones
I am currently enthusing about the poetry of Sam Duckor-Jones, whose poem "Sensitive Boys" is in a very wonderful free poetry pamphlet the excellent Victoria University Press celebrated Poetry Day with! Here is a typical picture of me in tiny-faced admiration of Sam Duckor-Jones reading his poetry (photo credit Verb Festival).
Clodia in Oxford
Thank you to Professor Stephen Harrison for organising a reading “I, Clodia,” at the Iannou Centre, Oxford, for a terrific audience of classical scholars.
The film Faces, Places (Visages, Villages) by Agnes Varda
For months I have been talking about this film which I loved every minute of, and which set off in me a great yearning to make enormous, public, collaborative art, or to enlarge poetry into some sort of street art event...Shall we?
You can read my poems in French, translated by Luc Arnault, here!
Reading list
I love the reading lists of Poetry Magazine, and the February list includes my favourite February reads - Elif Batuman's The Idiot, Elisa Gabbert's The Self Unstable, Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, and The Shepherd's Life by James Rebank, along with the reading lists of other New Zealand poets.
Chris Tse is a poet I've admired for a long time and his new book, He's So Masc, launched alongside Pasture and Flock at the Wellington Writers Festival, is beautiful, brave and brilliant, and Paula Green has posted a wonderful interview with him about the book on Poetry Shelf.
"Viewless Wings" by Mark Ford
This is currently (since November 2016) my favourite poem in the world, second perhaps only to the Keats nightingale ode from which it takes flight. You can read it in the LRB or here, and in Mark Ford's collection Enter, Fleeing (Faber and Faber)
Keely O'Shannessy
Keely O'Shannessy designed the beautiful cover of Pasture and Flock and has very generously allowed us to use the art to make this website beautiful too. Her own website offers an extraordinary showcase of brilliant books and gorgeously inventive design.
Maria McMillan who designed this website is a brilliant poet and Information Architect and very much a current and ongoing enthusiasm.
These terrific poems by Charlie Clark. I especially love the third poem down, "Pseudo-Martyr."
“Some say cavalry, some say footsoldiers are the most / beautiful, I say oh, cavalry, I know / what you mean!"
