Tuesday Poem: Shostakovich In America

Shostakovich in America

1959, November. The plumed De Soto
hammers on, freshman driver
burning up the plains.

Freedom! The Kappa Gamma Beta boys
can never catch him now. They're back east
in the studio, where Ormandy

shrugs and starts recording.
Dmitri has better things to do. This is
his jazz age, his lost weekend.

An upstate college, denuded branches
scrawled across the moon. He nestles
in a co-ed's bed. Dreams

drag him back to the Kremlin:
always the bottle of Georgian wine,
always the black telephone.

Dawn is coffee, hesitant smiles,
the wordless bond of night
knotting itself into language.

She is summer, America, forgetting.
"You were flailing your arms,"
she says. "Conducting."

He kisses, disentangles, turns the key.
His car roars over the siloed plains,
eastwards into the morning.


"Shostakovich in America" was originally published in Issue 11 of Bravado magazine, and is one of the poems I plan to include in my forthcoming collection Men Briefly Explained.

Dmitri Shostakovich did visit the USA in 1959, and did record with Eugene Ormandy. The rest is imagined.

Author, poet and blogger Mary McCallum has started an initiative called "Tuesday Poem" on her blog, and suggested that other poets do likewise - posting a poem, by themselves or anothr poet, each Tuesday. I'm not promising to post a poem every Tuesday, but it sounds like a good plan to me for those who can manage this. If that's you, then go for it - and check out Mary's blog for news of others who are doing so.

UPDATE: I had a pleasant surprise a day after this Tuesday Poem was published - an email from the editor of the world's only journal devoted to Dmitri Shostakovich, asking permission to reprint "Shostakovich in America" in the journal, which I was very happy to grant.

I'm beginning to come round to the Tuesday Poem way of thinking...

Ada Lovelace Day Post: Nancy Adams, Botanist and Botanical Artist

Today, Wednesday 24 March, is Ada Lovelace Day. Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.

Ada Lovelace, for those who don't know her, was the world's first computer programmer (true) and one half of a celebrated pair of crime-fighting superhero mathematicians (true in a less truthful way).

Ada Lovelace Day began in a celebration of women in technology, but has now broadened out to include female scientists as well. I'm glad it has, because this has allowed me to blog about a woman in science whose contribution has helped and inspired many New Zealanders in her chosen field - scientist and non-scientist alike.

Her name is Nancy Adams, she lived from 1926-2007 (see her obituary), and she was a botanist and botanical artist. As this excellent article about Nancy Adams in the Listener discusses, her magnum opus was her 1994 Seaweeds of New Zealand: An Illustrated Guide.

When I was studying Botany at Otago University in the late 1970s, though, I was mainly interested in New Zealand land plants. So I encountered Nancy Adams as the co-author and illustrator of (A.L.) Poole and Adams' Trees and Shrubs of New Zealand.

Previous books of this type may have had scientifically valuable illustrations, but they were completely unusable to identify plants in the wild. The great advantage of Trees and Shrubs of New Zealand was that the colour illustrations were perfect for actually identifying plants. Generations of botanists, amateur and professional, headed out into the back country (or into their gardens) with Poole & Adams.

I didn't end up with a Botany degree, but the highlight of the whole course for me was the plant identification that Nancy Adams made possible for me. It was not until later that I learned of the full range of her achievements. I'm pleased to draw attention to her life and work on Ada Lovelace Day.

No Mining In New Zealand's National Parks!

I have just finished watching a programme about the immense lengths to which dedicated people have gone to protect vulnerable populations of native birds in New Zealand. That effort is both awe-inspiring and humbling.

It's also a painful contrast with the National-led Government's plans to open up New Zealand's National Parks and other high-value conservation lands to mining.

The very fact that National launched these plans - as parts of their efforts to turn us into a tiny, ersatz Australia - shows that John Key's Government, quite apart from their lack of commitment to protecting our environment, has a lot to learn about political management.

John Key was still a political novice when he became Prime Minister. He showed his political inexperience when he took on the post of Minister of Tourism as his "play portfolio". He probably thought that this would give him equally good opportunities to travel around and open shiny facilities in beautiful places. Instead, it has landed him right in a brewing political storm.

See, the problem with being Minister of Tourism is that it makes you the public face of New Zealand's elaborate and costly "100% Pure", "Clean and Green" international image. New Zealand makes a lot of money from tourists: according to Tourism New Zealand,

International visitors contribute $8.3 billion to the economy each year, which accounts for 19.2% of export earnings. During 2006, 2.4 million international visitors arrived in New Zealand.

This means that keeping that Clean and Green image going, even if it is much more about appearance than reality, is a major priority of the Minister of Tourism.

So, how to enhance Clean and Green? How about … oh, I don't know … opening up National Parks and other areas of high conservation value to mining?

That bright idea was cooked up by Minister of Energy and Resources Gerry Brownlee and his mining industry mates. The plan is to let gold, and coal, and all sorts of other mining take part in our National Parks.

Despite Government promises of strict environmental controls, and claims that there might be $140 billion of minerals under the conservation estate, the history of the mining industry in New Zealand and elsewhere, teaches us that:

• Mining companies will try to avoid having environmental controls imposed on them. Where controls are imposed, they are often ignored or circumvented. Mines destroy the land, both directly (by digging it up) and indirectly (through tailings dams, pollution, building access roads – the list goes on).
• Mining companies often go bust, leaving the public (in this case, the grossly under-resourced Department of Conservation) to pay the tab for tens or hundreds of years of environmental remediation.
• Although mining jobs are well-paid, mining creates very few jobs.
• Even if $140 billion of minerals were to be extracted – itself wildly unlikely – only a very small percentage of that would end up in the public purse. Most of it would go into the pockets of a few private investors in New Zealand, and rather more from overseas.

Helen Clark, as Prime Minister, ran a tight ship, sometimes to the point of immobilization. John Key is the opposite. He lets Ministers run with their pet projects, and in this case, Gerry Brownlee has run into a whole heap of trouble.* The Nats took their mining proposals to focus groups and discovered, to their shock, that "middle New Zealand" didn't much like the idea of New Zealand's iconic public lands being dug up.

That forced John Key to pay attention to the political danger. Now, he's running around trying to downplay the issue.

When a Government starts to back down, that's the best time to ramp up the pressure on them. So if, like me, you believe that opening up National Parks and other areas of high conservation value to mining is irresponsible, short-sighted and ethically wrong, not to mention economically dubious, then here are some things you can do.

What You Can Do

Attend the protest if you're in Wellington (see the poster above for details).

Send John Key and relevant Ministers an e-card telling him our National Parks are too precious to mine: http://www.forestandbird.org.nz/our-national-parks-are-too-precious-mine

Email him directly and tell him the same thing: j.key@ministers.govt.nz. If you live outside New Zealand, email John Key and point out that tourists don't want to visit mine tailings.

Tell Gerry Brownlee where to get off: g.brownlee@ministers.govt.nz

In case you're thinking "yeah, right, all these messages will go straight into the trash" – in New Zealand, that's not true. I once worked in a Government department answering letters and emails from the public, and non-form messages did get read and responded to. (This means a personal email is more likely to get a reply than an e-card.) If you put your postal address in the email, you may even get a letter in response.

*A more Machiavellian view of John Key's behaviour is that, by letting Gerry Brownlee run the pro-mining campaign, he has handed a bumptious Minister a long length of rope, and then watched Gerry Brownlee use it to hang himself (in the political sense). But John Key would never do anything like that, would he? He has such a nice smile.

Writing Past Each Other? Literary Translation and Community

I was sent information about this conference by the organisers, who asked me to pass it on to people who may be interested - and what better place to do that than this blog? In particular, the organisers are keen to publicise the call for papers, which closes on 31 March.

As someone with an interest in the translation of poetry, I am especially interested in the sessions they are planning on poetry and translation, which are being organised by poet Chris Price:

As a special feature of the conference, we are also organising translation workshop sessions with noted New Zealand poets (participants should pre-register; details to come). There will also be an evening reading session.

Here is the full announcement. For other details, e.g. how to register, please check out the conference web site.

Writing Past Each Other? Literary Translation and Community International Conference in Literary Translation

Victoria University of Wellington
11-13 December 2010

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Lawrence Venuti
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Announcement and Call for Papers

Metge and Kinloch (Talking Past Each Other: Problems in Cross-Cultural Communication, 1978), explore the ways in which those from diverse backgrounds misread important cultural differences in everyday life.

At this conference we hope to explore how literary translation promotes awareness and appreciation of such differences, while simultaneously creating a sense of community across local and international boundaries, or how a lack of such exchange can contribute to the isolation of literary cultures: how is globalisation affecting international literary exchange? how might translation contribute more to literary communities?

While papers on how these issues are articulated in the Asia-Pacific region are especially welcome, we also encourage paper proposals on a wide range of topics related to practical and theoretical aspects of literary translation and covering cross-cultural linguistic interaction from across the globe. Panel proposals (3 to 4 speakers) are especially welcome. Conference papers are to be delivered in English, but may relate to any of the world's languages.

As a special feature of the conference, we are also organising translation workshop sessions with noted New Zealand poets (participants should pre-register; details to come). There will also be an evening reading session.

Please send abstracts (title of paper, name of presenter, 250 word outline and a short (50 word) bio-bibliographical note) by 31st March 2010 to NZCLT (at) vuw.ac.nz. We plan to publish selected papers from the conference in a refereed volume. Conference attendees wishing to have their papers published should submit them by 31st January 2011 for consideration.

Five Blogs I Like. Chapter 2: The Bloggening

Just over a month ago, I started an occasional series of blog posts under the heading "Five Blogs I Like". Now it's time for another instalment.

Janis Freegard's Weblog: Janis blogs about matters that generally relate to her very fine poetry and fiction. A recent article about Poetry and Gender in New Zealand Publishing was especially interesting.

Incidentally, Janis is the guest reader at the next Poetry Café in Wellington, on Sunday 21 March: 4pm – 6pm, Ballroom Cafe, cnr Adelaide Rd and Riddiford St, Newtown. It's great that Poetry Café has restarted in Wellington, and though I couldn't make the first session, I'm hoping to attend this one.

Joanna Preston: A Dark, Feathered Art: Joanna's poetry collection The Summer King won the 2008 Kathleen Grattan Award, and I interviewed her in 2009. Joanna's blog is frequently provocative. She says what she really thinks - a valuable service to other, more timid souls!

Harvey McQueen: Stoatspring: Harvey is a poet and educationalist whose blog, frequently updated, ranges across Harvey's long involvement in matters poetical, educational and political. I'm looking forward to the imminent release of Harvey's new collection, Goya Rules.

Jack Ross: The Imaginary Museum: Jack is a polymath: a poet, fiction writer, critic and academic with a head full of fascinating and provocative thoughts. His blog posts are mini-essays which range freely across the cultural landscape.

Reading The Maps: Like Jack Ross's blog in breadth of content, but different in tone, Reading the Maps is the work of a trio of bloggers who look at a range of cultural and political issues from a (mostly) non-dogmatic Marxist perspective. Always well-argued, often well-illustrated, and well worth reading.

So far, all the blogs I've highlighted have been from New Zealand. Next time, I'll speed bonny boat like a bird on the wing to foreign parts to investigate five examples of the bloggy goodness to be found there. And that wins the prize for most mangled metaphor hands down.

The New Zealand Poetry Society's 2010 International Poetry Competition

The New Zealand Poetry Society’s annual International Poetry Competition, Verse and Haiku, is under way, with Open and Junior Sections. The Junior Open and Junior Haiku sections are open to students who are 17 years of age or younger on 31st May 2010. Please visit our website at www.poetrysociety.org.nz for full competition details and to download the entry forms. Last year’s results, including winning poems and judges’ reports, are also on the website.

Entries must be received by 31 May 2010.

Prizes

Open: 1st - $500; 2nd - $250; 3rd - $100
Open Junior: 1st - $200
Primary/Intermediate: 1st runner-up - $100; 2nd runner-up - $50
Secondary: 1st runner-up - $100; 2nd runner-up - $50
Haiku: Top five haiku - $100 each, plus First Prize Winner receives the Jeanette Stace Memorial Prize of $150.
Haiku Junior: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Primary/Intermediate - $50 each; 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Secondary - $50 each

In addition, the writer of the haiku considered the best of the two sections receives the Jeanette Stace Memorial Prize of $100. All prizes are in New Zealand Dollars.

All winning and commended poems, along with other selected entries, will appear in the New Zealand Poetry Society’s annual anthology in November 2010, to be edited by Barbara Strang of Christchurch. It is not necessary to buy a copy of the anthology in order to have a poem included, as the selections are made blind (i.e. without identifying information).

This year’s judges are:

Vivienne Plumb (Auckland) – Open Verse
Tony Beyer (New Plymouth)– Open Haiku
Lynn Davidson (Nelson) – Junior Verse
Karen Peterson Butterworth (Manawatu) – Junior Haiku

Further enquiries can be directed to: Laurice Gilbert, The Competition Secretary, PO Box 5283, Wellington 6145, competition (at) poetrysociety.org.nz

New Order: Sections, Statistics And Sequencing A Collection

There are good things and bad things about being an author who works in more than one format. On the downside, it takes longer to get any individual project finished. But on the upside, when I'm feeling blocked on one piece of writing, I can always work on another.

This past week, having temporarily worn myself out on my novel revisions, I've been doing some more work on the poetry collection I'm putting together, which I'm calling Men Briefly Explained.

The sticking point, which it's taken me quite a while to resolve, is what order to put the poems in, and how (if at all) to divide them into sections. There may well be well-organised people out there who work out the order of their poetry collections, or short story collections, before they sit down to write a word - and I'd be interested to hear if you're one of them - but for me, the idea for a collection emerges from looking at what poetry I've been writing and what I think I'd like to focus on writing next.

I'm looking for two, partially contradictory, things when sequencing a poetry collection: a flow from one poem to the next, and some division points which allow poems with similarities to be grouped together. If possible, I like the overall shape of the collection to have some kind of arc, to suggest a narrative.

My original idea was to divide the manuscript into four sections (and, off the record and on a strictly "need to know" basis, these were I: Men In The Wild; II: Men in Love; III: Men Under Construction; IV: Men Overboard). But the more I looked at this division, the more unsatisfied I felt. Where was the flow, where was the arc?

So, after a lot of hemming and hawing over the section titles, I decided to start from scratch and re-sequence the whole thing, on the entirely unscientific basis of which poems felt like they belonged early, middle, and late in the collection. Within these, divisions emerged, rather like the points of a compass rose, so that poems acquired designations such as "early middle" and the even more problematic "early late". Then, put them all together, et voilà! A reordered poetry collection.

Now the love poems are up the front, followed by the "growing up" poems. The wild men, and indeed a number of the tame men, cluster around the middle of the collection, while the late period charts the long decline towards senescence, with occasional excursions to Haast. (I may still move the excursions to Haast.)

There's still plenty of work to do. Some of the poems, especially those previously published in literary magazines, are finished - I think; some are fairly stable, but still need some tidying up; while others are rough drafts with encouraging little notes to myself like "more stanazas here!" This instruction should probably be removed from the final version.

When it comes to the age of the poems, there's a bimodal distribution - almost half of them are three or more years old, and have had a fair crack at being submitted to literary magazines, while most of the other half have been written within the last few months. The poems in this latter half deserve their chance at individual glory too.

Somewhere down the track, I have a third short story collection in mind. Daringly, I've already come up with the theme and most of the story titles, if not the order. Whether this will encourage me to actually write the stories remains, as yet, unknown.