New Zealand Poetry Society Newsletter July 2004 PO Box 5283 Lambton Quay New Zealand Poetry Society WELLINGTON Patrons Te Hunga Tito Ruri o Aotearoa Dame Fiona Kidman Vincent O’Sullivan With the Assistance of Creative NZ President Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa Gillian Cameron E-mail [email protected] ISSN 1176-6409 Website www.poetrysociety.org.nz ‘Forget the gym, weights, bars and springs F G Month’s Meeting for none of that is cheap. A new way you can get in shape is out there, t h Thursday July 15 8 p.m. crutching sheep.’ Turnbull House 11 Bowen Street (from The Ultimate Work-out) Wellington “There was energy and movement, creating its own music: Pat White ‘he paws open & Karori Wildlife Sanctuary Writers the bathroom door sneaks in belly low splatters my 2004 NZPS pot plants International Poetry Competition over the bath cuffs the carnations breaks the vase’ Reports & Prizewinners (from Hina) - and advice on how to live after quitting your job Thanks from the NZPS to our excellent judges Elizabeth ‘After tea we can go outside Smither, James Brown and Richard von Sturmer for their work this year. Some poets gained more than one place, but as always prune the roses with our our competition is blind – judges do not know the identity of the bare hands. poets. Eat the thorns.’ We are also grateful to the Asia 2000 Foundation for their (from Final Demand) support of our Haiku Junior section. - the palpable love of a street in Subdivision or just Onthejob pig Open Section dog. I revelled in the Butterfly House, Melbourne and worried about Annie: Elizabeth Smither judged this and there were 680 entries. Here is the judge’s report: ‘This is for my friend Annie I bruised on a roadside, denting her “First I’d like to say how much I enjoyed myself, was mortified red at having to narrow the entries down to a small number of winners, Allegro and crushing her exam hope.’ highly commended and commended. I’ve judged other competitions in near despair at finding something: this was most “I kept returning to the winner with its lovely sense of ritual on definitely the case. I suppose a judge should aim to flatter and not the hoof, making it as the poem makes itself; to the introverted and please but it is always true that the poems themselves decide. so deftly-assembled world of the undertaker; to the lingering image, “Allen Curnow claimed the way to test a poem was to give it a so like a photograph, of Robin Hyde and ‘the haunting weight of poke with a stick to see if it was alive. Very many of those that jonquils in her bare arms…’ were not place-getters were well and truly alive. “Thanks and congratulations to everyone who took part. And “The variety was great and the range wide and there was there is even a poem anticipating the awards ceremony: confidence. Years ago New Zealand poetry seemed full of depression and misunderstandings and suicidal notes-to-self. If this ‘Then the woman who won the competition competition were a political poll the man/woman alone gloom read a poem about another poetry evening. seems to have passed and we can observe, enjoy and laugh at And the guest poet comes on after the break ourselves: and we love her.’ (from Poetry Society) 1 New Zealand Poetry Society © July 2004 Newsletter Editor: Jenny Argante, [email protected] ph 07 576 3040 Commended Ernest Berry (Picton) “They should call this place Windwhistle” s t Philippa Christmas (UK) 1 Prize Growing Harvey Molloy (Wellington) Robin Fry (Lower Hutt) Diwali Astral flight nd 2 Prize Louis Heap (Auckland) Michael Harlow (Alexandria) Anger Goes West The Undertaking Vivienne Plumb (Wellington) 3 r d Prize The Geographics of Italia Helen Bascand (Christchurch) (Eketahuna) Robin Hyde:-Five photos & a poem Charline Pocock Driven Kerry Popplewell (Wellington) 1960: Margaret travels to Taupo Nicola Saker (Wellington) The Importance of Poetry in Place Names Highly Commended (in no particular order of merit) Lee Scanlon (Westport) My mate John Farnham Helen Bascand (Christchurch) from How to… 2: How to ride a bicycle Jane Tremewan (Wellington) The Hawk John Bird (Australia) Winter Mandarins Sue Wootton (Dunedin) Quiet Karisma Vala-Blackmore (Hamilton) Plantation Tour Nola Borrell (Normandale) Genealogy Glenda Fawkes (Otaki) Landscape with dogs Open Junior Section Bernard Gadd (Auckland) This was judged by James Brown and had 212 entries. In his the end of the snap shots judge’s report he said: Laurice Gilbert (Wellington) “What struck me most while reading the poems was the extent Audiology Report to which poetry is an exact science. It only takes one or two duff or unnecessary lines or words to spoil an otherwise successful poem. Michael Harlow (Alexandria) Last lines are particularly crucial: a good conclusion can give Translating Narcissus considerable lift to a rather ordinary poem (e.g. Common Bond), just as a poor conclusion can greatly deflate, even destroy, an Jessica Le Bas (Nelson) otherwise fine poem. Many poems had excellent moments, but of mice and hawks were let down by lines or words that were predictable, clichéd, redundant, overly poetic (trying too hard to sound like poetry), Catherine Mair (Katikati) overly explaining or plain clunky. Preparing for death in a pitching aircraft “Poems that were purely descriptions, a common classroom 5,000 feet above Cape Cook exercise, often ended up wallowing in poetic clichés. Those poems that best avoided such pitfalls gained honourable mentions. Autumn John O’Connor (Christchurch) uses a highly original conceit; The Old Tree provides a series of Moonlit quay nice descriptions; Autumn Tree is well turned, if somewhat poetic, while Fire perhaps overdoes the descriptive language, but its Ralph Proops (Wellington) conceit is still strong. Descriptions are all very well, but poems that Precious Economies utilise descriptive language within a broader narrative or use it to show other things usually have more to offer. Sarah Quigley (Christchurch) “Centre-justification should simply be banned outright. This The football field computer-generated curse creates the illusion of a well-shaped poem, but actually ignores the sounds and rhythms of the lines and Sue Wootton (Dunedin) pays scant attention to the true shape and flow of a poem. Russian Song ¾ © New Zealand Poetry Society Editor: Jenny Argante [email protected] ph 07 576 3040 2 “ My Window, The Truth About… Panther (an excellent display of “But what I especially like about the poem is its mysterious regular rhyme and rhythm) and Autumn Tree all show admirable penultimate line. What is the ‘loud crackling beneath his feet’? attention to line-breaks. Leaves? But we know the old man is ‘standing silently’. The fact “There were less poems dealing with painful or disturbing that he is old and not moving might suggest that it is Death that subjects this year. Again, the common problem with such poems is approaches. The last line has a wonderful drifting quality that that they frequently slip into stock expressions of grief and anger. suspends the scene at just the right moment. And so the reader is Family Death and My Dad do have lines that could perhaps be cut left there too, wondering, their imagination trying to peer beyond or re-written, but on the whole the distress of each poem’s speaker the words for uneasy answers. is convincingly conveyed with, in the case of Family Death, numbed restraint and, in the case of My Dad, disturbing violence. “And so to the winning poem. As its title suggests , The Enormous Picture takes on some big themes. Yet in nice contrast to its confident, matter-of-fact tone, the poem provides more questions than answers. It opens with a fine image of falling through the sky, after which the difficult, abstract concepts take over. The lack of punctuation makes the first four lines, simple as they individually 1 s t Prize are, a challenge to connect. Falling ‘too fast’ (presumably toward death) is something to avoid, hence ‘we ask to stop’. But ‘yet’ in Ursula Gilbert-Potts (Onslow College, Wellington) the following line reminds us that stopping is synonymous with The Enormous Picture death, and in a life-affirming move asserts that ‘no-one truly wants to leave’. Thus we might sometimes want to stop falling ‘too fast’, 2 nd Prize but we don’t actually want to stop. Nevertheless the poem still links the desire ‘to stop’ to a desire for death, even if it immediately goes Daisy Lim (Homeschooled, Ohaupo) on to insist that this is a false desire. It therefore acknowledges that My Window there are times ‘when we fall too fast’ and ‘the sky is a boiling r d black smear’ that might cause us to wish we were dead. 3 Prize “The coda continues the poem’s compact grappling with Marcus Hildreth (Hereworth School, Havelock North) weighty issues. In the same strong tone we are told that ‘Death is Bald not a weakness’, which exhorts us not to underestimate the gravity of death or, perhaps, those times when it might seem like a preferable option. Given the previous line’s clear life-affirming message, it would have been perfectly logical for the poem to dismiss any desire for death as a weakness. But it appreciates the Highly Commended complexities of the issue; that suicidal tendencies are not so easily (in no particular order of merit) fobbed off as delusions of the weak and that everyone, even the strong, will eventually die. The final line springs a startlingly fresh Harriet Bowker (Cobham Intermediate School, Christchurch) view of the kind of afterlife we can expect, wherever we might end Common Bond up and however we have died.