broadsheet new new zealand poetry Issue No. 11, May 2013 Editor: Mark Pirie THE NIGHT PRESS WELLINGTON / 1 Contents copyright 2013, in the names of the individual contributors Published by The Night Press Cover photo of Cameron La Follette by source unknown, reproduced with permission of Cameron broadsheet is published twice a year in May and November Subscriptions to: The Editor Flat 4C/19 Cottleville Terrace Thorndon Wellington 6011 Aotearoa / New Zealand http://broadsheetnz.wordpress.com Cost per year $12.00 for 2 issues. Cheques payable to: HeadworX ISSN 1178-7805 (Print) ISSN 1178-7813 (Online) Please Note: At this stage no submissions will be read. The poems included are solicited by the editor. All submissions will be returned. Thank you. 2 / Contents PREFACE / 5 RICHARD BERENGARTEN / 6 TONY BEYER / 9 ZARAH BUTCHER-MCGUNNIGLE / 10 JOHN DENNISON / 12 MICHAEL DUFFETT / 14 O E HUGO / 16 CAMERON LA FOLLETTE / 18 LAURA MORRIS / 27 ERIHAPETI MURCHIE / 30 JOHN OCONNOR / 32 MARK PIRIE / 34 P V REEVES / 37 ESSAY FEATURE / 39 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS / 40 / 3 Acknowledgements Erihapeti Murchies poems first appeared (from unpublished papers) in Dr Michael OLearys bookWednesdays Women (Silver Owl Press, Paekakariki, 2012). OLearys book is based on his Victoria University of Wellington, N.Z., Womens Studies Department, PhD thesis, Social and Literary Constraints on Women Writers in New Zealand: 1945-1970. Richard Berengartens sonnets are from a work in progress titled Notness. This title is an anagram of the word sonnets. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors and publishers of the following collection and newspapers where the poems in this issue first appeared: O E Hugo: Trees appeared in the Otago Witness, 10 October 1889, and Home of the Para Fern was in the Otago Witness, 24 March 1898. Cameron La Follette: All poems are taken from Camerons collection Salmon Guardian (Original Books: Wellington, 2012). 4 / Preface This issue features the poetry of the North American poet Cameron La Follette. Its an honour to include her work in broadsheet. I first published Camerons poetry in an issue of Poetry Notes, the first Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa newsletter in Autumn 2010. Cameron co-founded the Classic Poetry Group in her hometown of Salem, Oregon. She had an interest in English-language classic poetry, and through her own researches discovered Australian and New Zealand poetry. She became the Australia and New Zealand editor for RPO (Representative Poetry Online), which is a project of the University of Toronto, in hopes of making the classic poetry of those two countries more available to North Americans. Both Niel Wright and I continue to help Cameron with her research in this area. Niel then started archiving Camerons own poetry in New Zealand in A4 hand-made books, which he deposited into the Alexander Turnbull Library at the National Library of New Zealand. The project when complete will run to 1,300 of Camerons poems, a unique archive for the Turnbull Library to have in Wellington. Cameron has been writing poetry since childhood, but dedicated herself to it upon returning to Oregon from New York in 2001, after sixteen years there. In New York she worked as a writer and legal researcher while studying first for her Law degree, and then for a Masters degree in Psychology. Back in Oregon, she now works for a nonprofit organization as an environmental advocate protecting Oregons coast. In 2006 one book of her poetry was published by a small press in Oregon. La Follettes poetry is lyrical, passionate, classical and traditional in approach centred around nature and wildlife themes and with classical mythology and spirituality at her core. In this mode, Camerons work is impressive and her overall oeuvre is building up to being quite significant. Elsewhere in this issue is new work by Richard Berengarten, the renowned UK poet, along with work by Michael Duffett, of California. Its great to feature poets who havent appeared previously in broadsheet. The work of talented writers like Pearlie Reeves, the late Erihapeti Murchie, John Dennison, Laura Morris and Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle appears for the first time. As well, O E Hugo, a poet I came across quite recently in the Otago Witness newspaper from the 19th century also appears. Hugo is another of New Zealands long forgotten poets who rewards rediscovery. Mark Pirie Wellington, May 2013 / 5 Richard Berengarten S I E S T A Where does your skin, or mine, begin or end? Stilled in the wake of storms we woke and spurred, my borders, lying next to yours, float blurred among these waves we failed to tire or spend. Through hand-clasp, elbow-crook, hip-fold, knee-bend, you wrapped me ín you as our passions stirred (and through each others passions, more incurred). And still our bodies merge. Our beings blend. What shall be said then (rich loss? faint tristesse?) when what we know is this calm tenderness? Now, as we sleep-wake, cool net curtains let kind breeze in from this sunny afternoon. Relishing this, well shower, go out soon. A P P R O A C H M E N O T The cavern where the dreamer sleeps enclosed by panes of consciousness is made of stuff permeable to eternities. Enough of limitations grammars have imposed on waves of seeing, traced on haze and seeming. Approach me not. An elseness in me wakes out of this body, outside all the walls where distance and horizons shed their skin and everything and nothing tumble in, past ordering, past patterning, past scheming. The bond, appearance, stretches taut and breaks all contraries that differentiate, and I, whatever I was, cannot wait. A burned moon rises, and a black sun falls. 6 / A N O M A L O U S P H E N O M E N A Anomalous phenomena, though strained through test and rétest, arent attuned to give hoped-for results. Rather, being engrained fast in resistance, their prerogative appears to be to baffle, block, occlude, refuse to open intervening valves and, as it were, deliberately, exclude the curious watcher from the things themselves. But should the watcher once stop watching and let focal points lie fallow till they blur, then things, without support, or helping hand, may of their own accord begin to stir. So could it be that things themselves have eyes enabling them to take us by surprise? H E N C E I N T O S U C H N E S S Adieu donc, chants de cuivre Baudelaire Hence into suchness if such suchness be available for purchase, hire, rent, theft. Thrift calls, suspecting magnanimity of pouring, overbrimming, through the cleft that gives on such horizons, such broad vistas, self-loss (and even loss of selfs desire) record as flak through terminal transistors. Blue dream? White noise? Mere background hum? Pale fire? Not to be bought? Not known? Is there no rent quite high enough to pay the asking price suchness demands be dissipated spent on entering where this nows non-paradise (accreting notness as our instants live), gets made, unmade, recursive, iterative? / 7 I N S O M N I A C P R E S E N C E To wake up, and to be being wide awake are different. The first calls dawn, arising, a first sun pouring light across the lake, a light for seeing through, not analysing. Night, past and gone, a drowned wreck fast capsizing under the ghosthood of its foamless wake, gives way, itself away, all compromising, and brittle vials of dark expand and break. But I dream of a being that cant sleep whose constant state is steadily aware of all that is and can be, anywhere. Insomniac presence, missing you, I weep, denied in thought-knots as I watch and keep calling for you, on you, who are not there. M O O N O V E R S E A Times when joys so full I feel I could burst when in fact I does burst: explodes in thous- ands of connecting splinters, the way those moonflecks there spill, ripple tide-wide waves. Best then never swell to encompass this beast (many-faced) identity. Rather with these phantasms, let all fail, flake, fly. Since all withers eventually, why flinch, fluster, flail, wail, boast? Catch joys rather in their moments of disappearing into únthinking, únthought, thoughts entire notness past fellow feeling, past fearing, of falling apart, past loss, past past desire, and never mind that melting or those searing blue and yellow flames melting in black fire. 8 / Tony Beyer D E A T H S C E N E S I N N I N E T E E N T H C E N T U R Y N O V E L S with age Ive come to prefer them even to floggings duels and burials at sea first the long sweaty torpor the shudders and chills the family waits clutching damp handkerchiefs or gritting teeth against the bulbous handle of a cane some may weep some may turn to face the drawn curtains convinced the light will never come again a sudden irruption of vitality frequently accompanied by insight into lifes undeserved reputation for generosity or the black vacuum of despair then the seizure dark blood from the corner of the mouth eyes staring up at the ceiling as if they can just make out God / 9 Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle From A U T O B I O G R A P H Y O F A M A R G U E R I T E It is not even a story. Every day I have to cross a bridge.