Spring reading
My spring highlights: Levitation for Beginners, Suzannah Dunn, a novel entirely from a child's point of view centred entirely on playground politics that somehow reads as an adult novel – which it is – right from the start; The World According to David Hockney, tiny fragments from his interviews, so a bit like poetry; Meander, Spiral, Explode, Jane Alison, a beautiful study of different narrative structures; The Chthonic Cycle, Una Cruikshank’s gorgeous collection of essays about so many peculiar interesting things, “galaxy-sweeping and microscopically specific” like the blurb says; Pictures and Tears, James Elkins, the book I've been most obsessed with lately, about the reasons people cry in front of art and why he, an art historian, doesn't; Practice, by Rosalind Brown, a perfectly shaped novel I really loved, the story of a day in the life of a student thinking about Shakespeare's sonnets, but also day-dreaming the most private day-dreams it is strange to be allowed to look in on; Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost, the best novel I've read all year I think, so richly detailed it is one of those stories where you feel suspended in someone else's life, and because it is set in Israel and the West Bank and is about Palestinians staging a performance of Hamlet it is also fiercely informative.
Our Struggle
Not everyone loves listening to people talking about Karl Ove Knausgaard or even talking about Knausgaard themselves but enough people do that there must be as many words spoken about Knausgaard over the course of this multi-episode podcast as written in all his published works. I especially loved the Torrey Peters episode, "Vanguard of the Supplicants."
Girl Rot!
I mean yes, but no. And anyway I am pretty sure I am too old for girl rotting. But Maya Field makes it sound awfully appealing, even if she does cast a keenly analytic eye on the phenomenon, in a completely brilliant essay on the Spinoff.
Some Winter Reading highlights
AUP New Poets 10, brilliant, fresh poetry by Tessa Keenen, romesh dissanayake and Sadie Lawrence; Unthinkable, Helen Thomson, stories of rare neurological conditions which together raise such interesting questions about what it is to be a person; Tarot, Jake Arthur's new collection of poems which can, he demonstrated, be used as a kind of fortune telling device; Hopurangi: Song Catcher, Robert Sullivan's collection of poems that follow the rhythms of the maramataka and also just the rhythms of a life with all its momentary interests and conversations; Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir, Shoji Morimoto, the adventures being a person who hires himself out (for free) to do nothing, except be present when the presence of someone is called for; The Warm Hands of Ghosts, Katherine Ardern, a truly uncanny, disquieting, but also romantic realist fantasy set in World War 1 on the front, in the trenches and the hospitals, and in dreams and visions; Heartless, H G Parry's brilliant prequel to J M Barrie's Peter Pan, as strange and twisted a masterpiece as she calls the original, wound up like clockwork; Val McDermid, Lady Macbeth, short and intense and visceral, a radical revisionary take on the story of Macbeth; Forms of Freedom, Dougal McNeill's brilliant reading of New Zealand literature through a Marxist vision that calls for a new kind of political reading and a new understanding of the value of the humanities.
Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries
I love this book so much I have invented a whole course on experimental life-writing so as to make people read it and talk about it with me! It is so funny the way the sentences are such recognisably diary sentences - what makes a diary sentence a diary sentence? (this will be the exam) - but the effect of the alphabeticisation is to turn diary sentences into something like poetry.
Mary Ruefle
I want to lecture exactly like this
On form
Jackson McCarthy, Vana Manasiadis, Amy Marguerite, Martin Porter and I answer John Geraets' question he put to us about how, as poets, we feel about form in poetry, what use we make of it and why: johngeraets.com/on-form-i/
John's own writing on form ("It is because time is a measure and gets stranded") is a new discovery of mine, and very exciting to read: johngeraets.com/form/
Tiny Ruins
I have been to some so lovely Tiny Ruins concerts - a fundraiser for Gaza in Auckland by Myers Park last November, this winter's magical solo concert in the Begonia House in Wellington. I love Hollie Fullbook's lyrics, the way they tell stories, the poetic images and patterns, and I love to hear her sing, in person, or, with a CD on, filling my house with Tiny Ruins music. Nobody ever feels old in the museum, nobody ever feels cold in the wintergarden, nobody ever feels tired, listening to Tiny Ruins.
My Brilliant Sister
This novel, by Amy Brown, is one of those beautiful, luminous works that you race back to the beginning of when you reach the end, needing to read it all over again for its patterning, having been so caught up in the lives of its characters the first time round. I felt like I could happily keep reading it forever.
Autumn reading highlights
Travellers to Unimaginable Lands, Dasha Kiper, about the effects of dementia not only on the patients but also on their caregivers and how hard it is to be reasonable within an unreasonable relationship; Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks, strange stories about the neurochemistry of musical appreciation; Cold Enough for Snow, Jessica Au's beautiful, spare, haunting novel about a woman travelling to Japan with her mother, almost all detail with little plot and little stated outright, but full of emotion all the more powerfully felt for being only implied and not explained; First Things, Harry Ricketts, vividly recalled "first things" from his childhood and youth, a brilliant organising principle carried out with more depth and digression than you might expect (if you didn't know Harry)How to Speak Whale, Tom Mustill's inspiring account of learning about animal languages and how to speak whale, full of intriguing facts, histories and encounters; Leigh Bardugo, The Familiar, her strangest, darkest novel yet. My full 2024 reading list can be found here.
AUP New Poets 10
I love this selection of poems by Tessa Keenan, romesh dissanayake and Sadie Lawrence, edited by Anne Kennedy. An abecedarian, an acrostic poem, an ode to an autism diagnosis, a coastal driveway song, buried teeth, rancid coconut oil, the enjoyment of watery things, a rich architecture of spine and ribcage, turmeric stains, the shadow of home...There is so much to love in this collection! An extract from the launch speech I gave at Unity Books can be read here.
Nine Girls, Stacy Gregg's new novel, for teenagers and older children and her best yet, funny and political and full of yearning and grief and very New Zealand stories.
Late summer reading highlights
The Other Bennet Sister, Janice Hadlow, the story of Mary Bennet, who is quite as absurd, as least to start with, as she is in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, but whose side we are on, in a book I hurried home to keep reading; Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine, a kind of braided novel, made up out of short stories but coming together in a really richly textured way; Fault Lines, Emily Itami, a novel about a woman in Tokyo having an affair, with a very vivid "voice" which is made up as much by what is seen and spoken of and how the narrative moves and the mind moves from one thing to another; The Performance, Claire Thomas, about a performance of a Beckett play through the eyes of three women, and so really more about audience than performance, and about the interior lives of the women watching; Deborah Levy, August Blue, a beautiful novel about a pianist not being able to play, and about memory and love, but what matters about it is how it is written, the particular way it moves from detail to explanation, from present to past.
Poetry's Possible Worlds
I think Lesley Wheeler loves poetry as much as I do, and I think I love this book as much as she might hope a reader would. The claim she makes is that reading poetry can be just as much an immersive experience as reading fiction - the exact opposite of my own thought on the matter - but I think the book demonstrates something even more interesting about reading poetry. Each chapter of the book is focused on a single poem and alternates sections of critical analysis (or, conversational observations of interesting ways the poem is working) with sections of memoir that look for the resonances each poem has for Wheeler in the associations she brings to it from her own life. Poem by poem, unfolding event by unfolding event, memory by memory, the book builds up a picture of how poetry can mean so much, how we live in relation to the literature we read and how we read in relation to the lives we are living. Even more than a novel, maybe, a poem needs to be lived with, returned to, remembered, and allowed to give rise to whatever thoughts, feelings, memories it might evoke.
Spring and summer reading highlights
Dani Yourukova's transporting, brilliant, funny, inventive Transposium, a symposium on love and gender; The Man Who Saw Everything, Deborah Levy, full of vivid details and unsettling, uncanny, shifts in time and understanding; Dina Nayeri, Who Gets Believed? : When the Truth Isn't Enough, a brilliant study of the systems in place to discredit the stories of, for instance, asylum seekers and sufferers in a mental health crisis; Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, about so much more than mistaken identity, providing incisive ways of thinking about almost everything: Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables, another perfect strange novel from one of my favourite writers, about living with a parrot; Irvin Yalom and Marilyn Yalom, A Matter of Life and Death, about Marilyn's death from cancer at age 87, told initially in alternating chapters then, after her death, by Irvin as he recounts his grieving The 100% Solution, Solomon Goldstein-Rose, a solution to climate change within the economic framework of late capitalism, so a green growth rather than a degrowth solution, but making some persuasive points and offering some hope; Monsters: A fan's dilemma, by Claire Dederer, about how to read (watch, listen to) work by artists whose immorality disturbs you even as the work enthralls you.
Winter reading highlights 2023
Spring! And here are the highlights from my winter reading: All the Beauty in the World, Patrick Bringley's memoir about working as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, about what it means to have time to look; Love and the Novel: Life after Reading, by Christina Lupton, thinking about love in her own life and thinking about how love is written about in novels; Joanna Cho, People Person, a lively, funny collection of conversations that are poems and poems that are conversational; Stephanie Burt, We Are Mermaids, poems about the other city beneath the city, the nephew who is a niece, the closet and the literal closet, the I within the You and the You that means Me; Richard Fisher, The Long View, on ritual, on generations, on time-based artworks and the problems with capitalist and even democratic social structures; Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, a brilliantly complex exploration of the ways in which mental health is understood and - truly - constructed by the ways we have of understanding it; Shrines of Gaiety, Kate Atkinson, somehow brutal and sentimental at the same time, and both in a good way; Eileen Myles's Afterglow (a dog memoir), which begins with the premise that her dog has hired a lawyer to sue her, but takes off in all kinds of directions, the way a dog might; Hex, Jenni Fagan, a dream-like short novella like a long poem; Saga, Hannah Mettner's brilliant new collection of poetry that combines the best of what essays can do with the resonance of dreams.
Megan Campbell
I love the precision of her paintings, but also what in poetry we would call the voice - how much the personality of the painter is conveyed in the execution, and it is everything about it, the brush strokes, the colour palette, the size of objects in relation to each other and in relation to the frame, the angles and lighting. The vision is what you call it when talking about a painter, the voice if a poet, but it is the same thing in a way neither word captures, because voice also involves how the poet sees the world, and the vision is the vision as the painter executes in on the canvas, not just what they see. Even the pace of the brushwork, how the painter moves as she paints, must come in to it.
Look! https://www.megancampbell.co.nz/index.html
Dorothea Lasky
Her essays were one of my autumn reading highlights and now I have found this poem Strange Humor to haunt as I read it over and over again (I will be its missing u).
Autumn reading
A Lack of Good Sons, Jake Arthur's sweet and dazzlingly inventive poetry collection, with beautifully placed exclamation marks, and all kinds of voices and perspectives taken up, with verve! Animal, Dorothea Lasky's nicely odd and constantly surprising essays on poetry and the shared imagination; Very Cold People, Sarah Manguso, an increasingly chilling novel in small vivid chapters, brilliantly evocative of childhood; Maurice, E M Forster, with that oddly awkward early twentieth century way of trying to get at hard to define states of mind through imagery, that doesn't quite work and yet is so moving in the attempt; We Spread, Iain Reid, a really quite wonderfully uncanny little novel set in a sinister aged care home; Jo Walton, Among Others, brilliantly working with the conventions of mid-twentieth century YA as well as the best Diana Wynne Jones-like fantasy; Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox, nicely all over the show; Elvia Wilk, Death by Landscape, essays all circling around environmental issues, the first, on girls turning into plants, I particularly loved, and the last, which is less about ecology and more about how to live and really about not knowing how to live; The Magician's Daughter, H.G. Parry's latest novel and my favourite so far, a beautifully constructed, sweet-natured yet scary enough story, a kind of take on The Tempest but far more benign, and with magic restored instead of given up at the end.
(Longer 2023 reading list here)
Claudia Jardine
To explain my passion for Claudia Jardine's brilliant, sexy, biting new collection of poetry Biter I only need to copy out a few of the opening lines from her Ode to Mons Pubis:
fatty tissue, edifice of overtures
joints, ligaments, bones, cartilage
dark turns to stars when I think about
the buttress of pubic symphysis
yes! paths of faery lights, yes! brambly wads
yes! tracks of calligraphic gastropods
yes! tender grasses, yes! boxed beds
clippings from a crooner’s greenhouse
topiary of the descent...
Yes also to Claudia Jardine's music, her ep North and also her cover versions of the White Stripes and the Beatles and others, which I listen to over and over and over, on her YouTube channel! Yes!
Summer reading
Highlights of my summer reading 2022-23 include We Begin in Gladness, by Craig Morgan Teicher, a beautiful study of how poets develop over the course of a career in poetry, looking at breakthroughs, influences, and endings; Geoff Dyer, The Last Days of Roger Federer (and other endings) - equally brilliant on the subject of reading books at different times of your life and on taking shampoo from hotels; On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck, by Nick Riggle, which I read because I was so interested in his theory of style, which turns out to be only only one element of a broader ethics of awesomeness which is about creating social openings; Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo, interesting to read alongside chapters from Donna Tartt's The Secret History which I was reading with my sister, a rather different kind of campus novel, both of them Extreme Campus, Bardugo's with magic; Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance, essay-like poems that collect sentences around a theme, an intriguing and possibly replicable way to work.
AUP New Poets 9
I love this collection of poems by Sarah Lawrence, harold coutts and Arielle Walker so much! Sarah Lawrence writes about people as time capsules and growing up as "a process of de-imagining" in poems full of glaring hunger, sparky conversation (sometimes - not usually - in perfect iambic pentameter) and everyday details like lint on the wine corks; harold coutts writes about romance and anguish, gender and its discontents, knives, swords and swabs, with dazzling flair and a bewitching vocabulary; Arielle Walker's poems follow rivers and return, again and again, to the sea, bringing together Māori and Gaelic pūrākau and offering flickering visions of a future that may leave us salt-drowned or may yet see us looking back and listening, finding possibilities not yet lost to us. The collection is reviewed here, harold and Arielle give readings here, and harold coutts writes about being an AUP New Poet here!
Spring reading
Highlights from my stormy spring reading include Either/Or, Elif Batuman's follow-up to The Idiot, a completely convincing portrayal of the thinking of early adulthood, at once utterly original and totally familiar, with a vulnerable but resilient heroine I would follow to the ends of the earth, in this case to Turkey; The Golden Enclavies, the final in the Scholomance trilogy by Naomi Novik, less realistic perhaps though quite a brilliant allegory for the monstrosity at the heart of the capitalist system and magnificently imagined in every detail; The Employees, a workplace novel, by Olga Ravn, a profoundly strange, sad, unsettling novel as a series of employee reports that are like prose poems, as they report dreams, capabilities, encounters with other workmates and the sensations experienced in their encounters with the "Objects" in a dystopian future from which they might be, at any point in time, uploaded or extinguished; Mount Sumptuous, Aidan Coleman, a poetry collection full of everyday details and literary references, shot through with little brilliances and with excellent endnotes; Jill Jones, The Curious Air, wonderfully unsettling and sometimes settling poems of divination, death and transcendance, as well as the everyday and the material, with well wrought forms and welcome repetitions and returns, and referencing Agnes Varda, Derek Jarman, and other passions of my own; and Jorie Graham, Runaway, because I am going through a Jorie Graham phase, for the dread she inspires, with her long, alarming, right-aligned lines.
Show Ponies!
I love it that poetry readings in Aotearoa now come with back-up vocals and an interpretative dance track. Freya Daly Sadgrove, the visionary ringleader, has long been an enthusiasm of mine as a poet and as an audience member, and every Show Ponies show she puts together dazzles me all over again.
Winter reading
Some of the books I most liked reading over winter include Pure Colour, Sheila Heti's sweet and strange novel/fable;
Ruth Ozeki's, Timecode of a Face, a sort of extended experimental essay, an art project and a meditation, notes made while starting at her face for three hours, with essay/memoir/reflections interspersed with the notes; Happy Old Me, Hunter Davies' memoir about being old with detailed discussions of every decision he makes, such as what to have for lunch; Sorrow and Bliss, by Meg Mason, a novel I loved, I loved every character in it, whatever their flaws, and I loved the brilliant narrative control, the pacing, sometimes so surprising; The Ginger Child, Patrick Flanery, a compelling read from beginning to end, a memoir about the yearning to have a child, brilliant in its discussions of envy - the philosophy and politics of envy – while telling a story that ends sadly, disturbingly, in a way that must have been difficult to want to put into words; Nostalgia has ruined my life, by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, a novella in funny, bleak little prose poems, about everyday bleakness taken to an extreme level, with "thrillingly, unapologetically negative energy" as Ashleigh Young puts it.
Autumn reading
Autumn reading highlights included Tūnui/Comet, Robert Sullivan's new collection of poetry, which is at once expansive, lyrical and prosaic in the best sense of each word; Super Model Minority, Chris Tse’s third collection in what becomes a trilogy of books, opening the trilogy out to a view of the future and in doing so expanding the significance of the concerns – history, identity, romance – of the earlier two books too, in a way that is truly exhilarating; Entanglement, Bryan Walpert, a brilliant, compelling novel that becomes increasingly urgent as it nears its conclusion; Assembly, by Natasha Brown, a short, fierce novel written in small chapters, arriving at a confronting resolution, if it an be called a resolution, quite brilliant, and actually really exactly as the blurb describes it, as a cross between Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Claudia Rankine's Citizen, complete with house party; Three Rooms, a novel by Jo Hamya (in her twenties!) set in Oxford and London, captivating even though almost nothing happens, with sometimes quite strange writing that is original and beautiful because the strangeness clearly comes from the attempt at truly realistic, subjective description, and, above all, this majestic reading experience: Kurangaituku, by Whiti Hereaka, an extraordinary, rich, resonant strange and wonderful novel, the afterlife half of it like Dante but stranger and more compelling.
(Fuller reading list for 2022 here)
Autumn interviews
Actions and Travels has now come out accompanied by a small flurry of interviews, including this interview with Paula Green on NZ Poetry Shelf, a NZ Booklovers interview, a questionnaire with Good Books, an interview in the Listener with Mark Broatch, and a radio interview with Kim Hill. Amongst other things, I talk about quick reading hits and poetry readings that haunt you for years, about musical settings for Yeats' "Song of Wandering Aengus," about celebrating finishing the manuscript by talking about Jenny Offill with Pip Adam, about grittiness in poetry and welcoming discomfort, about forward slashes as the new line break and about the poet's superpowers of flight and invisibility.
Summer reading
I have read several books in several grassy nests over the summer but this has really been a summer of Knausgaard as I read his new novel concurrently with the novel he wrote before the great autofictional saga My Struggle, and nothing else I have been reading really comes close. I loved The Morning Star, which I thought magisterial, tremendously exciting at the same time as absolutely engrossingly readable, at least to me, in the way I find all his prose engrossingly readable, in its close attention to the smallest details of everyday life, combined, in this novel, with a tremendous metaphysical reach, which perhaps I was more alert to because of reading at the same time his second novel, A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven, which combines an imaginary biographical account of a Renaissance theologian, and the theological analysis of biblical passages, with what unfold into extended narratives of biblical stories that seem to become increasingly Norwegian in feel and which are brilliantly, powerfully, emotionally realised while remaining intensely strange. And then for many weeks I was also carrying around a tiny little book (so very portable) by Kim Adrian called Dear Knausgaard, which I resisted reading because although I selected it for its promise of a feminist critique, I didn't really want to read a feminist critique. But then I finally started reading it and was pretty soon almost as captivated by Kim Adrian as by Knausgaard, loving the interweaving of detail and analysis and reflection and narrative, loving the voice of the author which is pretty much to say loving the author herself, and loving her love for the books as well the precision of her critiques, loving also, perhaps most of all, the inclusion of conversations she has about the book with friends of her, in which she generally attributes the best insights about the books to her friends.
Actions and Travels: How Poetry Works
This is really a book of my enthusiasms in relation to poetry, a series of readings of poetry I like, arranged loosely to suggest some of the qualities I look for, or, at any rate, find, in the poems I have loved, qualities like resonance, simplicity, composition, ornamentation. The book is also a bit about the work poetry does in relation to politics, death and the afterlife, though there is surely more that could be said. You can read the poems even before you read the book, and then see how your readings compare with mine - all the poems discussed in the book can be found here.
Sargeson Fellowship
From February till June 2022 I am taking up the Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship which will give me a studio right in the centre of the city in which to write. I'm having a go at writing a sequel to The Bedmaking Competition, set twenty years later...Is this a good idea? You can read a draft of the first chapter here, and tell me what you think.
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."
My spring highlights: Levitation for Beginners, Suzannah Dunn, a novel entirely from a child's point of view centred entirely on playground politics that somehow reads as an adult novel – which it is – right from the start; The World According to David Hockney, tiny fragments from his interviews, so a bit like poetry; Meander, Spiral, Explode, Jane Alison, a beautiful study of different narrative structures; The Chthonic Cycle, Una Cruikshank’s gorgeous collection of essays about so many peculiar interesting things, “galaxy-sweeping and microscopically specific” like the blurb says; Pictures and Tears, James Elkins, the book I've been most obsessed with lately, about the reasons people cry in front of art and why he, an art historian, doesn't; Practice, by Rosalind Brown, a perfectly shaped novel I really loved, the story of a day in the life of a student thinking about Shakespeare's sonnets, but also day-dreaming the most private day-dreams it is strange to be allowed to look in on; Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost, the best novel I've read all year I think, so richly detailed it is one of those stories where you feel suspended in someone else's life, and because it is set in Israel and the West Bank and is about Palestinians staging a performance of Hamlet it is also fiercely informative.
Our Struggle
Not everyone loves listening to people talking about Karl Ove Knausgaard or even talking about Knausgaard themselves but enough people do that there must be as many words spoken about Knausgaard over the course of this multi-episode podcast as written in all his published works. I especially loved the Torrey Peters episode, "Vanguard of the Supplicants."
Girl Rot!
I mean yes, but no. And anyway I am pretty sure I am too old for girl rotting. But Maya Field makes it sound awfully appealing, even if she does cast a keenly analytic eye on the phenomenon, in a completely brilliant essay on the Spinoff.
Some Winter Reading highlights
AUP New Poets 10, brilliant, fresh poetry by Tessa Keenen, romesh dissanayake and Sadie Lawrence; Unthinkable, Helen Thomson, stories of rare neurological conditions which together raise such interesting questions about what it is to be a person; Tarot, Jake Arthur's new collection of poems which can, he demonstrated, be used as a kind of fortune telling device; Hopurangi: Song Catcher, Robert Sullivan's collection of poems that follow the rhythms of the maramataka and also just the rhythms of a life with all its momentary interests and conversations; Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir, Shoji Morimoto, the adventures being a person who hires himself out (for free) to do nothing, except be present when the presence of someone is called for; The Warm Hands of Ghosts, Katherine Ardern, a truly uncanny, disquieting, but also romantic realist fantasy set in World War 1 on the front, in the trenches and the hospitals, and in dreams and visions; Heartless, H G Parry's brilliant prequel to J M Barrie's Peter Pan, as strange and twisted a masterpiece as she calls the original, wound up like clockwork; Val McDermid, Lady Macbeth, short and intense and visceral, a radical revisionary take on the story of Macbeth; Forms of Freedom, Dougal McNeill's brilliant reading of New Zealand literature through a Marxist vision that calls for a new kind of political reading and a new understanding of the value of the humanities.
Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries
I love this book so much I have invented a whole course on experimental life-writing so as to make people read it and talk about it with me! It is so funny the way the sentences are such recognisably diary sentences - what makes a diary sentence a diary sentence? (this will be the exam) - but the effect of the alphabeticisation is to turn diary sentences into something like poetry.
Mary Ruefle
I want to lecture exactly like this
On form
Jackson McCarthy, Vana Manasiadis, Amy Marguerite, Martin Porter and I answer John Geraets' question he put to us about how, as poets, we feel about form in poetry, what use we make of it and why: johngeraets.com/on-form-i/
John's own writing on form ("It is because time is a measure and gets stranded") is a new discovery of mine, and very exciting to read: johngeraets.com/form/
Tiny Ruins
I have been to some so lovely Tiny Ruins concerts - a fundraiser for Gaza in Auckland by Myers Park last November, this winter's magical solo concert in the Begonia House in Wellington. I love Hollie Fullbook's lyrics, the way they tell stories, the poetic images and patterns, and I love to hear her sing, in person, or, with a CD on, filling my house with Tiny Ruins music. Nobody ever feels old in the museum, nobody ever feels cold in the wintergarden, nobody ever feels tired, listening to Tiny Ruins.
My Brilliant Sister
This novel, by Amy Brown, is one of those beautiful, luminous works that you race back to the beginning of when you reach the end, needing to read it all over again for its patterning, having been so caught up in the lives of its characters the first time round. I felt like I could happily keep reading it forever.
Autumn reading highlights
Travellers to Unimaginable Lands, Dasha Kiper, about the effects of dementia not only on the patients but also on their caregivers and how hard it is to be reasonable within an unreasonable relationship; Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks, strange stories about the neurochemistry of musical appreciation; Cold Enough for Snow, Jessica Au's beautiful, spare, haunting novel about a woman travelling to Japan with her mother, almost all detail with little plot and little stated outright, but full of emotion all the more powerfully felt for being only implied and not explained; First Things, Harry Ricketts, vividly recalled "first things" from his childhood and youth, a brilliant organising principle carried out with more depth and digression than you might expect (if you didn't know Harry)How to Speak Whale, Tom Mustill's inspiring account of learning about animal languages and how to speak whale, full of intriguing facts, histories and encounters; Leigh Bardugo, The Familiar, her strangest, darkest novel yet. My full 2024 reading list can be found here.
AUP New Poets 10
I love this selection of poems by Tessa Keenan, romesh dissanayake and Sadie Lawrence, edited by Anne Kennedy. An abecedarian, an acrostic poem, an ode to an autism diagnosis, a coastal driveway song, buried teeth, rancid coconut oil, the enjoyment of watery things, a rich architecture of spine and ribcage, turmeric stains, the shadow of home...There is so much to love in this collection! An extract from the launch speech I gave at Unity Books can be read here.
Nine Girls, Stacy Gregg's new novel, for teenagers and older children and her best yet, funny and political and full of yearning and grief and very New Zealand stories.
Late summer reading highlights
The Other Bennet Sister, Janice Hadlow, the story of Mary Bennet, who is quite as absurd, as least to start with, as she is in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, but whose side we are on, in a book I hurried home to keep reading; Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine, a kind of braided novel, made up out of short stories but coming together in a really richly textured way; Fault Lines, Emily Itami, a novel about a woman in Tokyo having an affair, with a very vivid "voice" which is made up as much by what is seen and spoken of and how the narrative moves and the mind moves from one thing to another; The Performance, Claire Thomas, about a performance of a Beckett play through the eyes of three women, and so really more about audience than performance, and about the interior lives of the women watching; Deborah Levy, August Blue, a beautiful novel about a pianist not being able to play, and about memory and love, but what matters about it is how it is written, the particular way it moves from detail to explanation, from present to past.
Poetry's Possible Worlds
I think Lesley Wheeler loves poetry as much as I do, and I think I love this book as much as she might hope a reader would. The claim she makes is that reading poetry can be just as much an immersive experience as reading fiction - the exact opposite of my own thought on the matter - but I think the book demonstrates something even more interesting about reading poetry. Each chapter of the book is focused on a single poem and alternates sections of critical analysis (or, conversational observations of interesting ways the poem is working) with sections of memoir that look for the resonances each poem has for Wheeler in the associations she brings to it from her own life. Poem by poem, unfolding event by unfolding event, memory by memory, the book builds up a picture of how poetry can mean so much, how we live in relation to the literature we read and how we read in relation to the lives we are living. Even more than a novel, maybe, a poem needs to be lived with, returned to, remembered, and allowed to give rise to whatever thoughts, feelings, memories it might evoke.
Spring and summer reading highlights
Dani Yourukova's transporting, brilliant, funny, inventive Transposium, a symposium on love and gender; The Man Who Saw Everything, Deborah Levy, full of vivid details and unsettling, uncanny, shifts in time and understanding; Dina Nayeri, Who Gets Believed? : When the Truth Isn't Enough, a brilliant study of the systems in place to discredit the stories of, for instance, asylum seekers and sufferers in a mental health crisis; Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, about so much more than mistaken identity, providing incisive ways of thinking about almost everything: Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables, another perfect strange novel from one of my favourite writers, about living with a parrot; Irvin Yalom and Marilyn Yalom, A Matter of Life and Death, about Marilyn's death from cancer at age 87, told initially in alternating chapters then, after her death, by Irvin as he recounts his grieving The 100% Solution, Solomon Goldstein-Rose, a solution to climate change within the economic framework of late capitalism, so a green growth rather than a degrowth solution, but making some persuasive points and offering some hope; Monsters: A fan's dilemma, by Claire Dederer, about how to read (watch, listen to) work by artists whose immorality disturbs you even as the work enthralls you.
Winter reading highlights 2023
Spring! And here are the highlights from my winter reading: All the Beauty in the World, Patrick Bringley's memoir about working as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, about what it means to have time to look; Love and the Novel: Life after Reading, by Christina Lupton, thinking about love in her own life and thinking about how love is written about in novels; Joanna Cho, People Person, a lively, funny collection of conversations that are poems and poems that are conversational; Stephanie Burt, We Are Mermaids, poems about the other city beneath the city, the nephew who is a niece, the closet and the literal closet, the I within the You and the You that means Me; Richard Fisher, The Long View, on ritual, on generations, on time-based artworks and the problems with capitalist and even democratic social structures; Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, a brilliantly complex exploration of the ways in which mental health is understood and - truly - constructed by the ways we have of understanding it; Shrines of Gaiety, Kate Atkinson, somehow brutal and sentimental at the same time, and both in a good way; Eileen Myles's Afterglow (a dog memoir), which begins with the premise that her dog has hired a lawyer to sue her, but takes off in all kinds of directions, the way a dog might; Hex, Jenni Fagan, a dream-like short novella like a long poem; Saga, Hannah Mettner's brilliant new collection of poetry that combines the best of what essays can do with the resonance of dreams.
Megan Campbell
I love the precision of her paintings, but also what in poetry we would call the voice - how much the personality of the painter is conveyed in the execution, and it is everything about it, the brush strokes, the colour palette, the size of objects in relation to each other and in relation to the frame, the angles and lighting. The vision is what you call it when talking about a painter, the voice if a poet, but it is the same thing in a way neither word captures, because voice also involves how the poet sees the world, and the vision is the vision as the painter executes in on the canvas, not just what they see. Even the pace of the brushwork, how the painter moves as she paints, must come in to it.
Look! https://www.megancampbell.co.nz/index.html
Dorothea Lasky
Her essays were one of my autumn reading highlights and now I have found this poem Strange Humor to haunt as I read it over and over again (I will be its missing u).
Autumn reading
A Lack of Good Sons, Jake Arthur's sweet and dazzlingly inventive poetry collection, with beautifully placed exclamation marks, and all kinds of voices and perspectives taken up, with verve! Animal, Dorothea Lasky's nicely odd and constantly surprising essays on poetry and the shared imagination; Very Cold People, Sarah Manguso, an increasingly chilling novel in small vivid chapters, brilliantly evocative of childhood; Maurice, E M Forster, with that oddly awkward early twentieth century way of trying to get at hard to define states of mind through imagery, that doesn't quite work and yet is so moving in the attempt; We Spread, Iain Reid, a really quite wonderfully uncanny little novel set in a sinister aged care home; Jo Walton, Among Others, brilliantly working with the conventions of mid-twentieth century YA as well as the best Diana Wynne Jones-like fantasy; Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox, nicely all over the show; Elvia Wilk, Death by Landscape, essays all circling around environmental issues, the first, on girls turning into plants, I particularly loved, and the last, which is less about ecology and more about how to live and really about not knowing how to live; The Magician's Daughter, H.G. Parry's latest novel and my favourite so far, a beautifully constructed, sweet-natured yet scary enough story, a kind of take on The Tempest but far more benign, and with magic restored instead of given up at the end.
(Longer 2023 reading list here)
Claudia Jardine
To explain my passion for Claudia Jardine's brilliant, sexy, biting new collection of poetry Biter I only need to copy out a few of the opening lines from her Ode to Mons Pubis:
fatty tissue, edifice of overtures
joints, ligaments, bones, cartilage
dark turns to stars when I think about
the buttress of pubic symphysis
yes! paths of faery lights, yes! brambly wads
yes! tracks of calligraphic gastropods
yes! tender grasses, yes! boxed beds
clippings from a crooner’s greenhouse
topiary of the descent...
Yes also to Claudia Jardine's music, her ep North and also her cover versions of the White Stripes and the Beatles and others, which I listen to over and over and over, on her YouTube channel! Yes!
Summer reading
Highlights of my summer reading 2022-23 include We Begin in Gladness, by Craig Morgan Teicher, a beautiful study of how poets develop over the course of a career in poetry, looking at breakthroughs, influences, and endings; Geoff Dyer, The Last Days of Roger Federer (and other endings) - equally brilliant on the subject of reading books at different times of your life and on taking shampoo from hotels; On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck, by Nick Riggle, which I read because I was so interested in his theory of style, which turns out to be only only one element of a broader ethics of awesomeness which is about creating social openings; Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo, interesting to read alongside chapters from Donna Tartt's The Secret History which I was reading with my sister, a rather different kind of campus novel, both of them Extreme Campus, Bardugo's with magic; Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance, essay-like poems that collect sentences around a theme, an intriguing and possibly replicable way to work.
AUP New Poets 9
I love this collection of poems by Sarah Lawrence, harold coutts and Arielle Walker so much! Sarah Lawrence writes about people as time capsules and growing up as "a process of de-imagining" in poems full of glaring hunger, sparky conversation (sometimes - not usually - in perfect iambic pentameter) and everyday details like lint on the wine corks; harold coutts writes about romance and anguish, gender and its discontents, knives, swords and swabs, with dazzling flair and a bewitching vocabulary; Arielle Walker's poems follow rivers and return, again and again, to the sea, bringing together Māori and Gaelic pūrākau and offering flickering visions of a future that may leave us salt-drowned or may yet see us looking back and listening, finding possibilities not yet lost to us. The collection is reviewed here, harold and Arielle give readings here, and harold coutts writes about being an AUP New Poet here!
Spring reading
Highlights from my stormy spring reading include Either/Or, Elif Batuman's follow-up to The Idiot, a completely convincing portrayal of the thinking of early adulthood, at once utterly original and totally familiar, with a vulnerable but resilient heroine I would follow to the ends of the earth, in this case to Turkey; The Golden Enclavies, the final in the Scholomance trilogy by Naomi Novik, less realistic perhaps though quite a brilliant allegory for the monstrosity at the heart of the capitalist system and magnificently imagined in every detail; The Employees, a workplace novel, by Olga Ravn, a profoundly strange, sad, unsettling novel as a series of employee reports that are like prose poems, as they report dreams, capabilities, encounters with other workmates and the sensations experienced in their encounters with the "Objects" in a dystopian future from which they might be, at any point in time, uploaded or extinguished; Mount Sumptuous, Aidan Coleman, a poetry collection full of everyday details and literary references, shot through with little brilliances and with excellent endnotes; Jill Jones, The Curious Air, wonderfully unsettling and sometimes settling poems of divination, death and transcendance, as well as the everyday and the material, with well wrought forms and welcome repetitions and returns, and referencing Agnes Varda, Derek Jarman, and other passions of my own; and Jorie Graham, Runaway, because I am going through a Jorie Graham phase, for the dread she inspires, with her long, alarming, right-aligned lines.
Show Ponies!
I love it that poetry readings in Aotearoa now come with back-up vocals and an interpretative dance track. Freya Daly Sadgrove, the visionary ringleader, has long been an enthusiasm of mine as a poet and as an audience member, and every Show Ponies show she puts together dazzles me all over again.
Winter reading
Some of the books I most liked reading over winter include Pure Colour, Sheila Heti's sweet and strange novel/fable;
Ruth Ozeki's, Timecode of a Face, a sort of extended experimental essay, an art project and a meditation, notes made while starting at her face for three hours, with essay/memoir/reflections interspersed with the notes; Happy Old Me, Hunter Davies' memoir about being old with detailed discussions of every decision he makes, such as what to have for lunch; Sorrow and Bliss, by Meg Mason, a novel I loved, I loved every character in it, whatever their flaws, and I loved the brilliant narrative control, the pacing, sometimes so surprising; The Ginger Child, Patrick Flanery, a compelling read from beginning to end, a memoir about the yearning to have a child, brilliant in its discussions of envy - the philosophy and politics of envy – while telling a story that ends sadly, disturbingly, in a way that must have been difficult to want to put into words; Nostalgia has ruined my life, by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, a novella in funny, bleak little prose poems, about everyday bleakness taken to an extreme level, with "thrillingly, unapologetically negative energy" as Ashleigh Young puts it.
Autumn reading
Autumn reading highlights included Tūnui/Comet, Robert Sullivan's new collection of poetry, which is at once expansive, lyrical and prosaic in the best sense of each word; Super Model Minority, Chris Tse’s third collection in what becomes a trilogy of books, opening the trilogy out to a view of the future and in doing so expanding the significance of the concerns – history, identity, romance – of the earlier two books too, in a way that is truly exhilarating; Entanglement, Bryan Walpert, a brilliant, compelling novel that becomes increasingly urgent as it nears its conclusion; Assembly, by Natasha Brown, a short, fierce novel written in small chapters, arriving at a confronting resolution, if it an be called a resolution, quite brilliant, and actually really exactly as the blurb describes it, as a cross between Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Claudia Rankine's Citizen, complete with house party; Three Rooms, a novel by Jo Hamya (in her twenties!) set in Oxford and London, captivating even though almost nothing happens, with sometimes quite strange writing that is original and beautiful because the strangeness clearly comes from the attempt at truly realistic, subjective description, and, above all, this majestic reading experience: Kurangaituku, by Whiti Hereaka, an extraordinary, rich, resonant strange and wonderful novel, the afterlife half of it like Dante but stranger and more compelling.
(Fuller reading list for 2022 here)
Autumn interviews
Actions and Travels has now come out accompanied by a small flurry of interviews, including this interview with Paula Green on NZ Poetry Shelf, a NZ Booklovers interview, a questionnaire with Good Books, an interview in the Listener with Mark Broatch, and a radio interview with Kim Hill. Amongst other things, I talk about quick reading hits and poetry readings that haunt you for years, about musical settings for Yeats' "Song of Wandering Aengus," about celebrating finishing the manuscript by talking about Jenny Offill with Pip Adam, about grittiness in poetry and welcoming discomfort, about forward slashes as the new line break and about the poet's superpowers of flight and invisibility.
Summer reading
I have read several books in several grassy nests over the summer but this has really been a summer of Knausgaard as I read his new novel concurrently with the novel he wrote before the great autofictional saga My Struggle, and nothing else I have been reading really comes close. I loved The Morning Star, which I thought magisterial, tremendously exciting at the same time as absolutely engrossingly readable, at least to me, in the way I find all his prose engrossingly readable, in its close attention to the smallest details of everyday life, combined, in this novel, with a tremendous metaphysical reach, which perhaps I was more alert to because of reading at the same time his second novel, A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven, which combines an imaginary biographical account of a Renaissance theologian, and the theological analysis of biblical passages, with what unfold into extended narratives of biblical stories that seem to become increasingly Norwegian in feel and which are brilliantly, powerfully, emotionally realised while remaining intensely strange. And then for many weeks I was also carrying around a tiny little book (so very portable) by Kim Adrian called Dear Knausgaard, which I resisted reading because although I selected it for its promise of a feminist critique, I didn't really want to read a feminist critique. But then I finally started reading it and was pretty soon almost as captivated by Kim Adrian as by Knausgaard, loving the interweaving of detail and analysis and reflection and narrative, loving the voice of the author which is pretty much to say loving the author herself, and loving her love for the books as well the precision of her critiques, loving also, perhaps most of all, the inclusion of conversations she has about the book with friends of her, in which she generally attributes the best insights about the books to her friends.
Actions and Travels: How Poetry Works
This is really a book of my enthusiasms in relation to poetry, a series of readings of poetry I like, arranged loosely to suggest some of the qualities I look for, or, at any rate, find, in the poems I have loved, qualities like resonance, simplicity, composition, ornamentation. The book is also a bit about the work poetry does in relation to politics, death and the afterlife, though there is surely more that could be said. You can read the poems even before you read the book, and then see how your readings compare with mine - all the poems discussed in the book can be found here.
Sargeson Fellowship
From February till June 2022 I am taking up the Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship which will give me a studio right in the centre of the city in which to write. I'm having a go at writing a sequel to The Bedmaking Competition, set twenty years later...Is this a good idea? You can read a draft of the first chapter here, and tell me what you think.
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."
“Some say cavalry, some say footsoldiers are the most / beautiful, I say oh, cavalry, I know / what you mean!"
